Aetherbound

by E. K. Johnston

  “How?” she said. “How do they know?”

  “I told them,” said Dr. Morunt. “Your family knows because I told them.”

  If Fisher could have stood, he might have done murder. Ned bolted upright on the table only to immediately collapse again as Fisher struggled to his knees. By then Pendt was already facing off against the doctor, and it was her fight.

  “Why?” she said.

  “They told me I could have my sister back,” he said. “They let me buy Sylvie, and I answered all of the questions they asked.”

  “I hope you didn’t pay too much,” Pendt said, her voice dead as the void. “She’s not worth anything to them anymore. You’ve been fleeced.”

  Ned was sitting up now, tearing at his IV, but Pendt stopped him. Fisher hauled himself up and turned to the doctor.

  “Tell us everything you know,” he said.

  “They wanted to know how powerful Pendt was,” Morunt said. “They asked how she was operating the station, and I told them about the foetus. That’s when they got really interested. They asked if you had designed the baby, and I said no, but that you probably could if you had enough calories. That’s when they decided to buy you. I said the station would never give you up, that you were married of all things, and they couldn’t take you. I guess the Hegemony decided to work around its own laws for you.”

  “I’m flattered,” Pendt said. “They want a baby, I suppose? A very specific one?”

  “Yes,” Morunt said. “I had assumed they wanted a fleet of captains with good star-sense, but Ned’s report of a wild Well makes me think the Hegemony is aiming a bit farther.”

  “They can’t,” Fisher said as understanding dawned.

  “They can,” Pendt whispered. “They can give me all the calories I need and hold me down while they do the implantation. I’ve seen my aunt do it before—his sister helped. She’d definitely do it again. They’ll show me the pattern I’m meant to mimic, and give me a time frame, and then they’ll launch me. And either I’ll die—”

  “Or the Maritech Net will catch you,” Fisher finished. “And the Stavengers will have a foothold in that solar system again.”

  One of the sensors affixed to Ned’s chest beeped, and Dr. Morunt moved to take it off him.

  “Don’t touch me,” Ned said, tearing it off himself.

  “Dr. Morunt, you have my sympathy,” Fisher said. “I don’t know what I would have done if the Hegemony had offered me my parents. You will take your sister and you will go to Katla. I don’t care where you go after that, but neither of you will be welcome on Brannick Station ever again.”

  “Thank you,” Morunt said. He turned. “Pendt, I—”

  She looked at him as cold as the void.

  “I understand the difference between survival and cruelty,” she said. He bowed his head. “Get out.”

  Morunt fled, leaving the three of them in the medical bay. Pendt put her hands over her face and took a deep breath. She blew it out hard.

  “I need to process this, so try to control yourself even if I say something you don’t like,” she said to Fisher.

  He nodded. Ned did too.

  “Worst-case scenario,” Pendt said, “they take me. The station is fine, because Ned is here.”

  “Unacceptable,” said Fisher. He caught himself. “Sorry, keep going.”

  “Brannick becomes the jump point for Maritech, just like the old empire wanted,” Pendt continued. “You probably make a good amount of money. Human trafficking definitely increases—”

  “Over my dead body,” Ned burst out. “I mean, again, I guess. Please, continue.”

  “You can’t hide me,” Pendt said. “There’s nowhere I can go. My aunt won’t care if taking me off the station endangers it. They think Ned’s in prison, so they’re probably counting on Brannick dying, and then they’ll just . . . repopulate it. Probably with soldiers.”

  “None of this is making me feel better,” Fisher said.

  “I can’t run, I can’t hide,” Pendt said. “All of the best outcomes require my death.”

  “What?” This time both boys interrupted her together.

  “Brannick still has Ned, so it’s fine,” Pendt said. “The Stavengers never get a foothold in Maritech, so that’s fine. My family is bankrupted, and to be honest I don’t fucking care. But all of those things only happen when I’m dead.”

  “We can’t just tell them you’re dead,” Fisher said. “They wouldn’t believe a medical certificate or only our word. They’d need a body. The whole station would have to believe it.”

  Pendt took a long moment to think about it. There was a way. It was risky and it relied on other people choosing to help them. Pendt remembered the slow drip of an IV and years of whispered, clandestine instruction. She remembered the warning, given in enough time for her to save up the calories she would need to get off the ship and disappear into the crowd.

  “The captain trusts her Dr. Morunt,” Pendt said. “But she was always as good to me as she could be. And we know they’ll have her with them. If she’s the one to confirm my death, they’ll believe her.”

  “One, that is a huge amount of trust to put in someone whose brother just betrayed you,” Ned said, “and, two, none of that solves the part where you seem determined to die.”

  “You didn’t stay dead,” Pendt pointed out. “We have some time. We might be able to come up with something by the time they get here.”

  “I think we should keep my return quiet,” Ned said. He was uncharacteristically serious. “I’m happy to be the backup chromosome, but I am not going to stay here when all of this is over.”

  “What are you talking about?” Fisher said. “We just got you back.”

  “I know,” Ned said. “But the people who helped me get out of prison are still back there, suffering. They helped me as a last-gasp attempt to do something good. I can’t . . . stay here. I have to go back. I might be more useful to the rebellion dead than I was when I was alive.”

  Fisher thought his head might explode, and once again, Pendt’s cool thinking prevailed.

  “We’ll solve that problem when we get to it,” Pendt said. “Our priority right now has to be faking my death. I wish we could ask Morunt for help, but we can’t trust him. We do, however, have complete access to his office until Dulcie lifts the lockdown, so I think we should take advantage of it.”

  Fisher got on the communications channel with Dulcie, who was beside herself by this point, and relayed a short version of what had been decided: Ned’s return was a secret; Pendt’s family was bad news. She was instructed to give them another two hours of lockdown before she let the citizens go back to their usual routines.

  Pendt scrolled through Morunt’s files as Fisher and Dulcie talked, with Ned reading over her shoulder.

  “Just get on that terminal and find me anything about hearts or breathing rate or, I don’t know, brain atrophy,” she said.

  “None of those sound like fun,” he said, moving to start the task.

  “Neither does being impregnated and shoved through a wormhole so that the heirs of a dying empire can fulfill their ancestors’ wildest colonial wet dreams,” Pendt said. “Frankly, I think death is preferable, but I don’t want it. I like living.”

  “You like Fisher,” Ned said. Pendt did not deny it. “That’s good. I like that you have each other.”

  “I’m sorry I’m not, like, normal at being a wife,” Pendt said.

  “Normal’s overrated,” Ned said. “And anyway, I’m a rebel, remember? I’m against normal on principle.”

  “All right, Dulcie’s going to buy us some time,” Fisher said, coming over to where they were working. “But I want us to be back in the apartment well before the lockdown is over. If someone spots Ned, we’re going to have to answer a lot of questions, and I don’t think we have time for that.”


  The three of them scanned datafiles for another hour, adding things to Pendt’s datapad they thought might be helpful. Finally, Fisher declared it was time to leave. They made their way back to the apartment, the colonnade ghostly quiet around them. For the first time, Brannick Station felt more like a battlefield than anything else, and Pendt wasn’t going to stop until she had won back her home.

  25.

  AFTER THREE DAYS OF reading, Pendt decided she knew more about the human body than she’d ever wanted to.

  “This is why I work with plants,” she groused as Ned brought her orange juice and toast. The boys were knocking back cups of stimulant, but Pendt didn’t drink anything stronger than mint tea.

  “I am kind of grossed out,” Ned said. “Like, I knew that people died, but I didn’t know there were so many options.”

  “There aren’t, really,” Fisher said. “Most traumas result in death by heart attack.”

  “I hate you,” Ned said, and pressed his face into a pillow.

  “Maybe we’re coming at this backwards,” Pendt said. “We’re focusing on ways to die, but maybe we should be looking at ways to resuscitate me.”

  “I don’t want to actually kill you,” Fisher said. “I thought we were just going to get you really, really close.”

  “We haven’t found a way to do that yet,” Pendt said. “So maybe it would be easier to just get it over with and focus on bringing me back.”

  “Well, it’s not like you’ve died before and can tell us,” Ned said. “I’ve only died for paperwork. Fisher’s never even come close.”

  “I did come close,” Pendt said. “When I was little and regrew my fingernail? I almost died. I had spent too many calories, and they had to bring me back. There was time enough for them to debate if they should, and then Dr. Morunt was allowed to start the IV line.”

  “How does that help us?” Fisher asked.

  “Have you ever used more calories than you have to tap the æther?” Pendt asked. Both boys shook their heads. “Start looking for that in the research. Any kind of mage, but search for people who used up too much magic and fell into a coma as a result.”

  Neither of them protested. The new search parameters brought up a bunch of stuff they’d already read, so it took them a while to sift through it again.

  “I might have something,” said Pendt after a couple of hours. “This is a theory of what happened when the old Stavenger Empire made the gene-locks. The æther was dying or dead at the time, so they needed every mage they could get their hands on. Most of them died, but some apparently survived.”

  She sent the article to their datapads, and they read it as quickly as they could.

  “Pendt, this is fringe science at best,” Fisher said. “There are only four sources, and three of them are by the same author.”

  “It’s the best thing we have,” Pendt countered.

  “Please explain it to me like I’ve recently almost died of void exposure,” Ned requested. Pendt smiled at him. He was working as hard as the rest of them, and he was still exhausted.

  “The mages who didn’t die went into comas,” Pendt said. “And most of them never woke up. But the ones who were tended to medically did. If treatment was started immediately, their chances increased.”

  “There’s no point in faking your death if we have to treat you immediately,” Fisher argued. “They’ll notice.”

  “Let me think,” Pendt said. She stared at Ned. “There was no body at Ned’s funeral, but if there had been, what would we have done with it?”

  “I would have been embalmed,” Ned said. “And then they would have laid me out in the colonnade for a week or so, so that anyone who wanted to pay respects, could. Embalming is a sign of respect. If they froze me, for example, I could be recycled. But about all you can do with an embalmed body is bounce it off the Well when the funeral’s done and send it into space forever.”

  “That’s a little bit gruesome,” Pendt said.

  “What does your family do?” Ned countered.

  “You don’t want to know,” Pendt told him.

  “None of this solves the problem of you being DEAD!” Fisher roared suddenly. “Why am I the only person who is bothered by that?”

  “We’re all bothered, Fisher,” Pendt said. “I show it by getting very calculating and your brother shows it with inappropriate humour.”

  Fisher laughed darkly.

  “All right,” Pendt said. “I expend a lot of calories on the æther. You hook me up to embalming fluid immediately. We can alter the formula so that it’s more of a restorative than a preservative but keep it very low grade. My family comes to view my body, and you tell them that the embalming is for station tradition. Dr. Morunt confirms my death. The Harland leaves. You bring me back. Ned and I are both legally dead and start over.”

  “I hate it,” Fisher said.

  “I know,” Pendt said.

  “What about the foetus?” Ned asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Pendt said. “There’s a lot of risk in this plan, for both of us.”

  “You are our priority, with Ned here,” Fisher said. Ned agreed. “We will focus on saving you.”

  “All right,” Pendt said. “What do you think I should use the æther for?”

  “What?” Fisher said.

  “Well, if I’m going to do a lot of magic, it might as well be on something useful,” Pendt said. “I’m not just going to turn all the grain in hydroponics purple. It’ll have to be something huge.”

  The three of them sat in the lounge, raking through their dreams for anything they could think of that might be big enough.

  “You could change Fisher.” Ned sounded hesitant, like he was voicing something he knew wasn’t quite right, but that someone had to say. “You could give him the chromosome he needs to run the station by himself.”

  Fisher didn’t say anything.

  “You know it’s never made a difference to me, in terms of who you are,” Ned said. “But . . . would it make you happy?”

  “I don’t know,” Fisher said.

  “He is happy,” Pendt said. She blinked several times, and her eyes flashed. “He is already happy. He knows who he is, and he has made a place for himself. It’s not fair to ask him to change.”

  “We asked you to change,” Fisher said. “You said yourself, you didn’t want to be a mother yet, and yet you made yourself one for us.”

  “For the station,” Pendt said. “The station needed me.”

  “And it doesn’t need Fisher?” Ned said.

  “It has Fisher,” Pendt said.

  “Why is this upsetting you so much?” Fisher asked. “You’re allowed to take risks and make sacrifices, but I’m not?”

  “Because you shouldn’t have to change!” Pendt said. “You’re perfect the way you are. The universe has pushed me around my entire life, always playing the card that makes me trust its cold calculus and choose against my feelings, but I won’t. Not this far. I will not change the person I love because some long-dead despot thought that one chromosome was easier to control than another.”

  If words could have lit the æther on fire, she’d have been burning.

  “You . . . love me?” said Fisher.

  “I—” Pendt’s voice failed her.

  “You two are adorable.” Ned clapped his hands. “I’m so glad I died and brought you together.”

  “Shut up,” said Fisher.

  “The fact remains,” Pendt said, “I won’t change you, or anyone else for that matter, to make you into a key to fit a lock that was forced upon us. I’d rather change—”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Fisher,” she said, the galaxy open to her every bidding. “Where is the gene-lock?”

  * * *

  • • •

  It took them several hours to find it. At first, they pored o
ver blueprints of the station until they realized that the entire point of hiding something was to take it off the plans. They tried looking for gaps, then spaces, where something magical might fit.

  “It has to be a physical thing,” Pendt said. “Or it would have stopped working when the rest of the Stavenger magic did. Like the Net and Well, it’s an actual object and they put æther on top of it. If we find it, we might be able to manipulate it the same way.”

  “I don’t think Brannick genes are going to get you into the Brannick gene-lock,” Ned said. “That wouldn’t be very secure.”

  “No,” Pendt said. “But I don’t need a key. I’m going to change the lock itself.”

  Eventually Fisher had to reach out with his own æther connection, the electricity magic he rarely had call to use. With the blueprints as a guide, he followed the ebb and flow of power on the station until he found a place with a lot of power for no reason.

  “That must be it,” Ned said. It was a small cabinet in one of the mechanical bays. Power fluctuations were fairly regular there, as things were charged or shorted out during the repair process. That’s why no one had ever noticed. Pendt could walk right up to the lock and lay her hands on it, if she wanted.

  “What will happen when you break it?” Fisher asked.

  “I’m not going to break it,” Pendt said. “Mostly because we don’t know what will happen. I can’t exactly experiment with a station full of people. But I can change it. I can tie it to the Brannick DNA without using the Y chromosome for control. It sounds small, but it’s going to be the biggest thing I’ve ever tried to do.”

  “I believe you,” said Fisher. “And after?”

  “After, you and Ned will both be able to work the Net and Well,” Pendt said. “And so will I, if the foetus and I both survive the effort.”

  “We’re going to do everything we can,” Ned said.

  “I appreciate that,” Pendt said. “I’m going to start calculating how many calories I’ll need to consume, both before and after. I should be able to figure out the numbers, but there’s a slight amount of chance involved here. It might not work, or there might be complications.”