(Part 32 of “The Misfits” series)
Rishi didn’t have a proper explanation for it. Travel by artifact was still too novel an experience to have enough of a sample size. People went in, lived lives in different eras, for different amounts of time, and then returned to their own native time where their absence was relatively short. Rishi and Nilius had been applying as many mathematical approaches as they could conjure to predict how long a life would last when a person went in, but based on the trips taken so far, the durations seemed random. It wasn’t a problem, per se, but it would have been nice to be able to predict how long they might have to sit outside the artifacts waiting for their friends to return from their journeys.
This time, though, the remaining crew didn’t have to wait long. It was a matter of hours. They hadn’t even made any meaningful progress bringing in an anchor rock to tether the Yankee-Chaos to before they heard a loud, repetitive coughing come over comms, followed by an anguished cry. It sounded like a woman’s voice.
“Carolina? Is that you?” Rishi asked.
“Oh, God,” Carolina Dreeson’s voice came back.
She was still coughing and struggling to speak.
She didn’t say anything discernable in the following moments, but it seemed as though she was crying, mumbling incoherently, before stating definitively, “He killed me.”
“Okay, Carolina,” Rishi answered. “You’re all right now. You’re back. The Y-C is about two hours out, but Kristoff is going to come get you. He’s sitting right outside. Just sit tight and try to breathe. Everything’s fine.”
“Everything’s fine,” Carolina’s voice returned. “Sure.”
A long audible sigh could be heard over the line before Carolina went silent again.
Fieldstone and Ren were sitting at the atrium table aboard the Yankee-Chaos listening.
“Sounds like that went great,” Ren stated. “Spat her out almost as fast as Draya.”
Fieldstone looked back with a blank expression even she couldn’t read into. “Fickle things those artifacts,” Fields said.
Ren probed with a look, but Fieldstone’s eyes revealed nothing. He still hadn’t spoken to the crew yet about his missing time on their journey to the past, not even to her, except to say that he was still processing it, running over it again and again in his mind to make sense of the experience.
When the time was right, he assured them, he’d tell them everything. Ren hoped, that with the others away on the Iophan mission, Fieldstone would have time to process his own journey inside the artifact thoroughly. She wanted to know as much as any of them, having shared so much of the ordeal together.
It was what she didn’t know about Fieldstone’s experience that troubled her, the silence of his eyes. She didn’t remember those eyes being so distant, even when they hadn’t been hers to love.
Draya was with Kristoff aboard the Cannon, parked just outside the artifact. She wasn’t going back inside one of those things. Never again. Kristoff told Draya that was fine as he got suited up to meet Carolina himself. They’d overheard Rishi on comms, so they knew it was time to head inside the great scepter-shaped cylinder hidden within that isolated asteroid. Theirs were the only two ships out here, weeks under FTL from any populated system of the outer Letters.
The entire prospect had sounded like an impossible adventure of epic proportions when Rishi informed them all of the existence of these artifacts. There hadn’t been the smallest fraction of Draya’s mind that told her to say no. How could she? The opportunity to travel through time, to live another life, to experience the universe from an entirely new perspective in another era?
In retrospect, Draya couldn’t say they didn’t warn her. The number of times Rishi and Burch had told them that they were powerful mechanisms, these artifacts—it had to have been at least twelve times in that initial meeting. She’d thought she’d been prepared. She knew it wasn’t a game. But, she’d thought, she was going with Fieldstone back to Etterus—his planet, his girl, under his protection. But that artifact had other ideas.
The terror she’d endured over the brief several days she was on that alien world in the body of that petrified child—she had no words for that. And then she returned to wait and process the experience alone, only to have Ren and Fieldstone return weeks later, and then the news that those two had lived a life together. She’d been through breakups before, but to have to pretend to be okay with their relationship while those two went through the courtesy of trying not to rub her nose in it. The whole situation was tough to swallow.
Draya chose to sit aboard the Cannon with Kristoff while the others fetched a rock for the Yankee-Chaos to tether off with. She didn’t know Kristoff Mikkel at all except by reputation—that of a smart, loyal friend with a kind heart. She knew she could sure use one of those.
Nobody expected Carolina would be back as fast as she was. Draya had the feeling that Carolina’s adventure inside this artifact couldn’t have been much more pleasant than her own. Her sudden return and tone were certainly indicators.
“I have her now,” Kristoff reported when he pinged. “We’re on our way out to the ship, Draya.”
“All right,” she replied. “I’ll have the door open.”
In the brief time she’d been aboard, she hadn’t had a proper look around Verona’s ship. Cannon was such a nice little yacht that Draya almost felt improper putting her handprints on the table. Now, though, remembering her own emotions on her return, flying her way out the dark corridors of the artifact, she had a sense that Carolina would need some consolation. She began to search through the cabinets around the midship. Draya didn’t have to go far before she found what she was looking for. There were a few bottles, as well as a rack with a line of zero-G shot glasses. She filled a pair of glasses with the nicest-looking bottle there, as well as a fresh water jug for the returning Captain. She didn’t know whether Kristoff would want to join.
Carolina looked about as grim as Draya had figured when she boarded.
“Rough trip, Captain?” Draya asked her.
Carolina just shook her head. Draya gently floated the shooter over Carolina’s way.
“It’s what I wanted most when I got back,” she declared.
“Mind reader,” Carolina replied.
“Here’s to our own lives.”
Draya looked up at Kristoff to inquire whether he’d like to join them. Kristoff Mikkel merely shook his head subtly.
“To our own lives,” Carolina echoed, her bright eyes welling up with tears.
They both drank.
“Oh, my God, what is this?” Draya exclaimed upon tasting the spirit.
Carolina exhaled. “That is the most perfect whisky I’ve ever tasted.”
“Where did you take that from, Draya?” Kristoff asked her.
“From Verona’s side cabinet there,” she answered, pointing. “The thin bottle, the tall one. It looked good.”
Kristoff put his nose in the side cabinet to confirm his suspicions. “Shit. That’s Burch’s wood-aged whisky.”
“I thought it must’ve been a wizard thing,” Draya replied.
“Burch won it from the Rexes in the mech-fights. Best not to drink it all on him.”
“Join us for one more, Kristoff,” Carolina said. “Burch won’t mind. I could use the help relaxing.”
“That bad a trip, huh?” Draya asked.
“The best part of it, I think, was the end of it. Feels like just a moment ago before I got here. It’s so strange. But I was in this other life, failing, and I was losing myself. And then I woke up in the darkness, in this park in Xenia, surrounded by the others. And then my own bodyguard murdered me.”
There was a long silence as Kristoff finished filling up the final shooter, tossing it to Carolina. He himself turned and floated over to the table to sit with them. He flashed both young women a pair of sympathetic eyes.
“To our own lives,” he repeated. “The lives we were born to live.”
“Amen,” came the emphatic response from Draya.
The three of them toasted and drank in unison.
There was no thought for stealth so far out from the Lettered Systems. The artifact was in an obscure, dim system with a distant brown dwarf at its center, and even if that star had been bright, the crew of the Yankee-Chaos were decades, if not centuries, from the light of their actions reaching anyone who, by chance, might choose to set their sights on such a vacant part of the cosmic abyss.
Tethering the ships on rocks of similar mass was an oft-used technique for creating artificial gravity during long stops, but it wasn’t something a ship would do if they had any cause to be discreet. Out here, though, no one believed discretion would be necessary.
Carolina’s unexpected return proved an ominous sign. None of their compatriots had escaped the trip into an artifact without a deep emotional impression lingering on their psyche, and Carolina wasn’t the first to retreat deep into introspection. She spent her first several days back almost in complete isolation. She couldn’t hide from Rishi, though.
“As much as I try not to impose, Captain. I do see everything aboard the ship,” Rishi told her one evening as Carolina lay in her rack, sleepless. “I think you should see Ren about the trauma. Or, you can talk it through with me if you like, in the strictest confidence, of course.”
“I’m still processing,” Carolina replied. “I do believe the challenge of that particular journey can come to something meaningful, but it’s hard to get over how it ended.”
“However you prefer to process, just know that we’re here if you need us, Carolina. You should get some sleep, though, and Ren can help you with that.”
Carolina struggled through a few more sleepless nights before finally relenting and visiting the doctor. She didn’t like the idea of needing help to do something as natural as sleep, but Ren immediately reminded her how unnatural an event her brain had just gone through.
“We’ll start with the herbal solution before going any farther,” Ren assured her. “Plants can do some amazing things for the brain.”
It took several more days and dozens of pouches of herbal teas before she felt like she was sleeping well again, but as the sense of normalcy began to slowly creep back to her consciousness, Carolina began to rest a bit more soundly. The fact that there was nothing to do but wait wasn’t helping morale aboard the two ships either, though.
Carolina did confirm that the others—or at least three of the others—had made it safely to Iophos. And given the average life expectancy and the youth of their host bodies, a long wait for their return was a reasonable assumption. Everyone settled in.
By week four, Draya and Kristoff began to spend some time visiting the Yankee-Chaos. The sting of the breakup was slowly fading with time, and the sight of Ren and Fieldstone together felt less personal, less stinging for Draya, who always understood it never was personal—fates and artifacts proving equally cruel and capricious. On that front, she and Carolina and Kristoff had exchanged their stories, the harsh and the heartfelt, and as they did, they couldn’t help but brace for what tragic tales might follow with their friends when they did all finally return.
Rotation after rotation, days elapsed, both ships spinning around their respective space rocks, the crew expected that the only possible interruption in the monotony would be the return of their traveling friends.
Carolina was in the midst of a nightmare, one of many since her own return, when Rishi pinged her cabin, slowly bringing up the noise level and the lights to wake her as gently as possible.
She exhaled and squinted, then drew a deep breath as she woke.
“Sorry to disturb you, Carolina,” Rishi stated. “I need you on the deck please.”
“Who’s back?”
“None of our party just yet. We have a contact.”
“A contact? My father’s ship again?”
“Best come see for yourself.”
By the time she got to the deck, Carolina was convinced it must have been Nilius, possibly with Burch and Omar.
“I have a visual now,” Rishi announced as Carolina arrived. “They’re running dark it would seem.”
Rishi’s android shell was seated in the first officer’s seat, turning to meet eyes with Carolina as she entered and sat as well.
“Who’s running dark?” Carolina squinted, looking at the dim outline of the vessel magnified on the floatscreen above the front panel. “What the hell ship is that?”
“I don’t have it in mine or the Yankee-Chaos’s inventory,” Rishi replied. “I was hoping you’d know who it was.”
Carolina shook her head. “It’s not Burch?”
“He and Omar aren’t back yet. Plus, there’s no reason for anyone we know to not jump right beside our ship. Our people all know where we are. This ship seems like they jumped to the system. And they’re scanning it. It’s only a matter of time before they see us.”
“Too late to hide behind the artifact, I suppose?” Carolina replied. “Tactical assessment?”
“It’s more of a stealth cruiser, not a military vessel, non-commercial ....” Rishi seemed to pause. “Annnd ... found us.”
“Pinging?”
Rishi nodded.
“What the hell?” Carolina mumbled under her breath before directing Rishi to put up a visual.
The man who appeared simply stated in a deep gravelly tone, “We’re several minutes out from you on delay. We have no ill intent, Captain Dreeson. Jumping in closer. I always prefer a conversation to an exchange of messages. Please excuse the close approach.”
“I know that voice,” Carolina stated as the ship vanished from the floatscreen, “but I can’t quite place it.”
Rishi gave them an ETA of five minutes before the other ship would arrive within real-time comms range. About three minutes into the wait, Carolina asked Rishi to play back the message again. Then she shook her head.
“You know?” Rishi asked her.
“Unbelievable,” she replied, shaking her head. “What the hell could he want?”
Rishi gazed over at her, asking the obvious question with a look.
“The assassin,” Carolina replied. “I’m almost certain.”
Another minute later, when the ship jumped in close and pinged again, Carolina responded before the speaker even had time to greet them.
“I never got a chance to thank you properly for reaching out before,” she stated. “I don’t even know your name, sir.”
“I don’t usually make it a practice to announce myself formally. That’s not a custom in my line of work, Captain. I’m sure you’ll understand, given the company you keep.”
Carolina couldn’t help but smile. “Well, sir. It’s a funny corner of the galaxy to mysteriously bump into a fellow traveler. I can’t help but think it’s not a chance meeting.”
“No. I’ve come to collect on a debt, if you’ll permit, Captain Dreeson.”
“Oh, I see. I was under the impression that your actions at Ash-Vedal were of mutual interest and that your contacting us at Nix was more of a courtesy than a contract. In the same spirit of courtesy, though, sir, I’ll hear you out.”
“You mistake me, Captain Dreeson. The debt is not yours. Though I would appreciate it if you allowed me a word with your doctor.”
“She owes you a debt?”
The assassin nodded.
“I wasn’t aware.”
The killer shrugged.
“All right,” Carolina said. “Standby, please. We’re running on LCT. It’s the middle of the night and she’s sleeping.”
“Of course,” the assassin replied. “It is an urgent matter, though. The sooner the better.”
“Understood,” Carolina stated, gesturing for Rishi to close the channel.
“Shall I wake Ren?” Rishi asked.
“Quietly,” Carolina answered. “No sense in waking anyone else at this hour.”
A few minutes later, when a bleary-eyed Ren stepped onto the flight deck, she looked at the screen doubtfully when Carolina had Rishi pull up a still of the killer’s unforgettable face.
“Your friend from Nix, Ren,” Carolina said. “He wants to talk to you.”
“What the hell does he want?”
“Apparently, he’s under the impression that you owe him a debt of some kind.”
Ren shook her head at the screen and then closed her eyes. “I’m not dreaming this, am I? This has to be some kind of—OWWW! Carolina!”
Ren slapped at the hand that had just pinched her thigh. Her eyes opened wider.
“Are you awake, Doctor?” Carolina asked.
“Yes. Open the channel,” Ren declared. “And don’t pinch me again. Gawd.”
That menacing face she’d hoped she’d never see again was staring back at her once more.
“Sorry to disturb your sleep, Doctor Ren,” the assassin said, seemingly genuinely. “When we last met, I asked you a question. Do you recall it?”
“Uhm. I’m sorry. I don’t. As you said, the middle of the night.”
“I asked you if you would do me a favor when called upon to do so. You said yes. I’ve come to collect.”
Ren looked perplexed. “Okay, so how can I help you? Uhm, also bearing in mind that I did take an oath that pretty much runs in the exact opposite direction ... meaning no disrespect to you or your business, sir.”
“Believe it or not, I understand the importance of having a code, Doctor. To violate it? I wouldn’t ask any such thing of you. I’m in need of your skills. It’s quite urgent. Another day and I’m not sure ...” The assassin shook his head.
Ren looked over at Carolina. They both exchanged a wide-eyed look of uncertainty. It was difficult to tell whether the killer’s grim visage was his normal bearing or a product of his current predicament.
“You have a medical bay on your ship,” the assassin stated as though it was half a question. “I know the model. It’s an intermediate LSS troop transporter, primarily for ops teams. You have a decent surgery aboard, and I looked up your whole crew after Ash-Vedal. I’ve seen your CV, Renata Schorr. I know you’re a gifted surgeon. The only question is whether you’re willing to hold to your word this night.”
“Standby please a minute,” Carolina stated.
“Of course, Captain,” the assassin replied, before narrowing his eyes a bit. “As I mentioned before, though, the situation is urgent.”
Carolina nodded before shutting the channel.
“Ren, what the hell? What did you tell this guy?”
“I don’t know. He had his hands around my throat. I thought he was going to kill me. I have no idea what I said to him.”
“Well, what do we do now?”
“How the hell should I know, Carolina? I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. I mean, we can’t exactly turn him away now, can we? I don’t think he’d take that well.”
“And, if I may interject,” Rishi added. “How the hell did this guy even find us?”
“Yeah. That too,” Ren said. “If he can find us all the way out here ...”
“We can’t let him aboard,” Carolina stated.
Ren shook her head. “I don’t think it’s a choice, you guys. If he wanted to kill us, he would’ve killed us before, which means that if he wants to kill us in the future ...” Ren shrugged. “Best not give him a good reason to kill us, huh? Better to pull the thorn out of the lion’s paw, I think.”
Rishi shook her head. “Quickly, I’d advise, Doctor. I don’t even want to begin to think about explaining to this guy what the hell we’re doing out here.”
“I’ll do my best, but that ship has sailed.” Ren gestured to the front screen as though to say: there he sits.
And there was nothing to be done about it but set the terms.
Carolina brough the stream back up. “The good doctor is happy to accommodate, sir. However, for the security of my crew, I have a few terms I’ll need you to agree to before boarding my ship.
“Your house; your rules,” the assassin stated, nodding.
“Uhm ...? We didn’t ... or I didn’t get your name last time,” Ren said.
“You can call me Murkist.”
“Okay, Murkist, I’m Ren. Can you tell me, please; what’s the nature of your injury?”
“No, it’s not me, Doctor. Best you just untether and let us in. The sooner we stop talking, the sooner you can start treating your patient.”
Fieldstone was already awake when Ren returned to their room. She told Fields that the assassin was coming aboard and tried to prepare him. He was huge; he was dangerous; he was ugly and mean. Only, Ren wasn’t entirely sure about that last descriptor anymore. He hadn’t seemed so mean in that conversation as they’d negotiated his admittance to her medical bay. In fact, he’d seemed almost perfectly polite and deferential.
“Don’t do anything,” Ren told Fieldstone as she got herself ready. “We’re going to be nice to this monster and get him off the ship as quickly as possible.”
Fields got up as well, getting right to work helping Rishi and Harold, who were in the process of untethering from the ship’s anchor rock so that they could extend the Y-C’s umbilicus to the assassin’s ship.
Even with Ren’s declarations about the assassin, his tremendous size was a shock to Carolina and Fieldstone. It seemed like a struggle for the gigantic man to squeeze through the flexible tunnel and then through the airlock, but it became clearer once he was inside the rear corridor of the ship—just inside the inner airlock annex—that it wasn’t his size that had made the traverse so awkward. He was carrying something like a package across his chest, all wrapped up in a blanket. Fieldstone, when he looked a little closer, noticed a little sock sticking out beside the big man’s belt.
“Oh, my God,” Ren declared at that same moment. “What are you doing with a child?”
“Your surgery, Doctor?” the assassin replied, by way of instructing Ren to lead the way. “Treatment first. Then we can discuss the circumstances.”
“We’ll be disconnecting and tethering for gravity again,” Ren declared. “I work best in gravity.”
“Of course,” the assassin concurred. “Point six-five G or so is best for her.”
“Point six-five?” Carolina asked.
“Please.”
Ren led the way to the medical bay followed by Carolina and Rishi. Fieldstone remained with Harold at the rear lock to get the umbilicus retracted so the ship could spin up again.
In the medical bay, the assassin set the girl against the table while the doctor strapped down her little body.
“Oh!” Ren stated as she extended a strap across her diminutive torso. “Is she?”
“She’s not a child,” the Murkist declared. “The injury is to her upper left arm. The bone is broken.”
He pulled away the blanket that was wrapped around the girl’s arm. Her entire forearm and hand were swollen and purple.
“When did this happen?” Ren asked, her tone now fully shifted from surprise and shock to clinical precision.
“Almost nine days now.”
“Mechanism of injury?”
“How it happened, you mean?”
Ren nodded.
“It was crushed in a door, a metal mechanical door.”
Ren wasn’t yet examining the arm. She had the scanner above the table. She placed a band on the girl’s opposite wrist.
“Do you have any data from the flight?”
The Murkist dropped a data folder from his wrist to the doctor’s floatscreen.
“Is she sedated?” Ren asked.
The big man nodded. “It doesn’t take much. She was in tremendous pain. I don’t have great medical equipment aboard my ship. Certainly nothing that could handle anything this complex.”
“You did a good job immobilizing the limb,” Ren stated, examining the dressing and the upper arm as best she could without fully breaking down the splint the big man had improvised for the little girl. “I take it you didn’t have any pediatric trauma gear on your ship.”
“I have hardly any for myself. Just the bare essentials. It’s hard to find that type of gear in my size, and most of my passengers? Let’s say I’m not often in the business of saving lives.”
The Murkist looked over at Carolina and the held a long curious gaze on Rishi.
“I’m going to wait to work on her arm until we get the ship spinning again,” Ren declared. “It might be best if you wait—”
“She wouldn’t want me to leave her side,” the Murkist interrupted. “This is a strange new place for her to wake up. I’ll stay until she gets settled, please, Doctor.”
“What’s her name, Murkist?” Ren asked.
“Her name is Shiann.”
“It’s a pretty name. Poor little thing. Do you know how old she is?”
“Yes, Doctor. I made the same mistake the first time I set eyes on her, but she is not a child. She’s twenty-seven now.”
Carolina looked over at the girl in shock. Everything about her looked odd, her tiny body—that to the captain’s eyes couldn’t have been older than twelve—didn’t exactly look childlike, and her swollen purple hand looked almost plastic, like it couldn’t be a real, live, human appendage.
“What is she?” Carolina asked curiously, almost involuntarily.
The Murkist turned to Carolina and gazed at the captain with a look of surprising incredulity followed by a moment of unexpected patience and simply replied, “She is small, Captain Dreeson, and she is gravely injured. That is what she is.”
Over the next several hours, Ren asked quite a few questions the Murkist declined to answer. One was why he’d flown all the way out into the middle of empty space to seek medical attention from her when there were obviously numerous outposts with medical facilities out in the Taus, the Sigmas, or even the Mu Systems. She was also curious to know how the hell the assassin had found them out there. That question wasn’t just a pressing issue for Ren but a serious security threat to the ship. But the Murkist told Ren that none of that mattered to him if Ren couldn’t save the girl.
The nature of their relationship was another curious question to Ren. It was bizarre, sure, but nothing about the way he talked about the girl or looked at her seemed inappropriate or untoward, which was to say that the relationship seemed entirely platonic to Ren, but she was surprised by the fact that the killer seemed to genuinely care for Shiann. Dr. Ren hadn’t expected that from him. There were layers to this Murkist she’d never have foreseen.
She could also see him noticing things around the ship as those first several hours ticked away. Rishi, in particular, caught his eye. “Our new pilot,” Ren tried to explain, and she could tell that he didn’t fully buy that story. His eyes revealed that the Murkist knew there was something deeper there. Similarly, the presence of Fieldstone and the absence of Transom was marked by a wry comment to Ren that her captain had traded in her Etteran bodyguard for an older model, to which Ren just smiled in a way that also caught the killer’s attention.
Where they did speak more openly was about the girl. The crush injury itself was quite devastating. Ren promised to do her best to save the limb, but she couldn’t make any stronger promise than that. On day one, it would’ve been a tall task, even with all her experience in that dire art. Her little humerus wasn’t just shattered, more crushed into dust. There wasn’t much left to set in that middle portion of the bone. Luckily the door—if it was a door that had crushed the arm as the Murkist had reported—hadn’t been so wide as to encompass the full length of the bone. In fact, it was about eight centimeters of total destruction in the very middle of her humerus, and there was a proximal head as well as a distal fragment that were still very much intact. They might even stay that way if Ren could manage to salvage the blood vessels feeding them oxygen.
Ren explained her plan to the Murkist. She couldn’t see waking the girl for her consent. It wouldn’t have changed her plan anyway. She’d print a replacement bone segment, cut the upper and lower remaining pieces of the humerus so she had a nice, clean plane on both sides to affix the hardware to, then do her level best to repair as much of the vascular tissue as she could manage. The rest would be up to the little woman’s own body to repair.
“It’s going to be a very long surgery,” she told him. “I’ll need to be meticulous with the blood vessels around the bone. The muscle? I’m going to do my very best, but it’ll be a challenge. And even if I do the best work I’ve ever done, her body is already—”
“I understand, Doctor,” the Murkist said. “Don’t waste any more time on me.”
“You’re going to have to leave me to my work, please, Murkist. I’ll take very good care of her.”
“I wouldn’t have brought her to you if I thought otherwise, Doctor. I’ll be outside.”
Ren had a strange realization as the Murkist declared that he would be there just outside her operating theatre, that before the previous few hours, such a declaration would’ve shaken her to her bones with terror. Her hands would’ve trembled. But she wasn’t afraid of him, nor of failing to save his tiny friend’s barely-living arm. Ren didn’t fear anything in that moment, which was a feeling she’d genuinely never felt before such a procedure, not ever. No. She just felt hopeful and determined. The rest was out of her hands.
“Your little friend,” Carolina said to the Murkist as he sat by himself at the atrium table, “she’s in capable hands.”
“I’m grateful.”
“The terms I spoke of earlier over comms—for the protection of both parties, of course.”
Carolina gestured to the old bot George, which Rishi had woken up and pulled out of their rear storage area.
“Unfortunately, our Harold is assisting the doctor in the surgery. He’s a much better conversationalist than old George here.”
“As I said before, Captain: your ship; your rules. On most days I don’t care much to talk to bots. People are another matter, but under the circumstances, I don’t feel much like talking.”
“That’s fair enough,” Carolina replied. “I regret that we’re meeting under these circumstances, but I am grateful for the opportunity to thank you.”
He turned his head toward Carolina and raised an eyebrow as though to ask why.
“For not killing me, and ... I suppose, for bringing the mastermind of that plot to ... I guess you could call it a kind of outer Letters justice of a sort.”
“That’s old justice, Captain, of any domain. I thought the files I sent explained my motivation well enough. I was not doing you any favors. We two are square by my reckoning, and the doctor is squaring her account with me just now.”
“Nonetheless, please ask George to ping one of us if you need anything. You’re welcome to anything in the commissary, and you can lie down on the side bench there if you feel the need to sleep. It’s not private, but I don’t think you’d find any of our racks very comfortable. Quarters are tight enough for us.”
The Murkist nodded. “I appreciate your opening your doors to us, Captain Dreeson. I could understand why you might have been hesitant, yet still you did.”
“Oh!” Carolina exclaimed, and it seemed to him as though she was reacting to something totally unrelated.
“Is everything all right?” the Murkist asked.
“It just struck me suddenly. I’m sorry, it’s probably totally unremarkable to you at the moment. Never mind.”
He turned his head toward her. That big homely head.
“Captain Dreeson, you can’t react like that and then fail to explain yourself, especially if you think it’s nothing significant.”
“It’s just, there was an ancient word for it—not hospitality exactly, but bigger than that, the duty to treat the stranger as an honored guest. It struck me that this was just such a circumstance, a synchronicity of a kind. It was called xenia.”
“Xenia, yes, I’ve heard of it. It’s still called that, and it was travelers that were to be welcomed as I recall, not necessarily strangers. Either way, I am not a visiting god in disguise, just a man. Nevertheless, you and your crew do our ancestors and their deities proud.”
“I’m going to get some rest,” Carolina declared, excusing herself.
The Murkist nodded as she turned to leave the atrium.
“Can you dim the lights, bot?” he asked George, who stood beside him at the atrium table. “It’s awful bright in here just now.”
The Murkist’s eyes were nearly as bloodshot as Ren’s when she finally re-emerged from the medical bay nearly seventeen hours after the surgery began.
“May I go in?” he asked her.
Ren shook her head. “Sure. I’m going to keep her down for a little while longer. The pain is going to be ... I’m sorry, it’s been a long night, and day, I guess. But she’s going to be in a lot of pain when she does wake up.”
“And the arm?”
“It’s going to be a while before I can say anything. Time will tell.”
“But you didn’t have to take it?”
“Not last night.”
The Murkist nodded. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“I’m going to get some rest, but Harold will have eyes on her at all times, and he knows when to get me.”
Ren took a deep breath and walked back toward her quarters beside the med bay. The Murkist, meanwhile, got up and headed back into the medical bay to set his tired eyes on his ailing protégé.
The Murkist’s snoring could be heard throughout the ship. Only Shiann was spared the consistent deep droning rumbling down the Yankee-Chaos’s halls. When Ren came in to check on the girl late that night, the massive assassin was still sprawled out flat on the floor taking long, deep, growling breaths. She did her best to assess her patient’s arm without bothering the big man.
It wasn’t just the arm that she was concerned with now. The arm had already been heading toward sepsis before the surgery. Now the danger was her whole system’s reaction to all the toxicity in the arm being brought back into her little body after Ren reconnected so many vascular passageways that had been mangled when the arm was crushed. So far, though, Ren was optimistic—or at least she was hopeful. She’d given Shiann a fighting chance.
When the Murkist finally woke, Ren invited him to sit and have a meal with her, though neither of them could definitively say what meal it was—the Yankee-Chaos’s clock clearly indicating it was morning of the following day, but both of them had completely lost track of their own internal clocks. They were content to call it breakfast and start it with multiple pouches of coffee.
Ren explained as best she could that it was going to be some time before she had any meaningful prognosis. Still, even if the arm survived, Ren had genuine concerns about nerve damage. That, she explained, could be repaired, but it wasn’t a quick fix, and she wouldn’t be able to properly assess it until Shiann woke up.
“She’ll be in pain,” Ren warned.
“The pain can’t be as bad as it was on the way here,” Murkist responded. “She’s far tougher than she looks for such a little thing.”
“She wouldn’t be the first of the kind I’ve met.”
“I’m sure it’s a long list, Doctor. Of that I have no doubt.”
“You’re not in a rush to get her out of here, are you?”
The Murkist shrugged. “Why do you ask?”
“Her prognosis is murky. It’s possible I could let you take her back aboard your ship and leave and she could be fine and make a full recovery without further intervention. It’s also possible if I did so she would go septic in three days and die. It’s possible her arm could linger for weeks and then progressively worsen. I’d like to keep her close until I’m confident I can see which way it’s going to go.”
“I understand.”
“But I don’t understand your ... or, her circumstances. I appreciate .... What I mean ... I wouldn’t presume to press you for information; I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. It’s just hard to know how to talk to you about her without knowing certain things.”
“For now, Dr. Ren, considering she isn’t even conscious again yet, I’d ask you to treat her to the best of your capabilities. Don’t assume anything on my part or hers except that we’d like you to do your best to treat her. That much should be straightforward enough.”
“I will do that, yes. I told you I would.”
“Excellent.”
“She’s an anomaly, you know,” Ren flashed him a funny smile he didn’t quite know how to take. “There’s an expression about pediatric patients—I’m not sure how much medical knowledge you have?”
“I’m not the most ignorant person. Nor am I well educated on the matter. I do know my anatomy.”
Ren’s eyes flashed a bit wider as the darkness of that comment lingered for a moment. She decided it was best to ignore it, and quickly.
“Well, anyway,” she continued. “They like to tell us when we’re students that it’s important to remember that pediatric patients aren’t just tiny adults.”
“She’s not a pediatric patient.”
“No. That’s what I mean. She’s a tiny adult. Kids are different in the way they react and heal. That’s all I was saying. It’s the first time I’ve seen a tiny adult.”
“Remember that part of the conversation a moment ago when I told you everything I wanted you to know about treating Shiann? I feel as though you’re trying to probe beyond that line, Doctor.”
“I was just trying to make conversation.”
“As much as I would enjoy that, I think it’s best we both kept our peace for now.”
“You’re very different from how I imagined you that day in the chocolate shop on Nix,” Ren said. “Very different.”
“I was then and still am exactly what I need to be in the moment.”
Ren didn’t quite know what to make of the Murkist’s response, but the longer they sat there in silence, and the longer she considered it, the more ominous and menacing such a comment became.
“Well, anyway, Murkist,” she said, “what can I get you for breakfast?”
The longer the situation lingered with the girl still unconscious, the more uncomfortable the atmosphere aboard the ship became. Murkist was there in the med bay most of the time, but he also took time outside to eat. As much as Fieldstone was wary of the assassin’s presence, he also trusted somewhat in the giant killer’s motivation. More than anything he needed Ren’s skill, or at least he seemed to. And that was the best insurance against his becoming a threat. But to Fieldstone’s mind, it didn’t change what the killer was. To Ren, the second night after the Murkist’s appearance, Fields likened it to having a crocodile in the atrium. It might behave and seem docile so long as you kept feeding it. But it wasn’t a good idea to keep a crocodile around.
“Just when you let your guard down and think it’s safe,” he told her, “creatures like that have a way of reminding you what they are.”
“That’s what I felt about Transom for about a year,” Ren whispered back. “He turned out okay.”
Fieldstone shrugged. “Did he?”
The question hung between them for a moment, especially in light of the way Carolina had returned from Iophos, after Transom had choked the life out of her host’s body.
“Just be polite,” Ren told him. “Murkist seems to respect that.”
“I know better than to piss off a man like him for no good reason, Ren. We just can’t forget what he is and let our guard down.”
“He makes that kinda hard on his own.”
That was true enough. The assassin’s physical presence was a constant reminder of just how dangerous he could be. Fields couldn’t help but assess a man like that, just as he did with any man. A fighter can’t help but see it in others, and in the Murkist it wasn’t just a powerful, lumbering behemoth he saw. The way he moved was precise; the way he took space deliberate. He did not want to fight that man, and he told Carolina as much in a quiet conversation. The captain, for her part, mostly agreed, but she also needed to talk to that crocodile. There were questions that needed to be answered.
She approached him as he was seated at the atrium table eating a lunch the following afternoon.
“May I join you?” she asked.
Harold approached the table, and after a few moments Rishi came up from the flight deck with Fields, who remained in the front corridor just out of the big man’s field of vision.
“It’s your table, Captain Dreeson. You shouldn’t have to ask me.”
Carolina nodded. “Please, the title is too formal. Call me Carolina, Murkist.”
He shook his head. “Nah. Too familiar. Sorry. The Daughter of Athos can’t be on a first-name basis with a man like me, even this far out in this desert of vacant galaxy.”
“No?”
The Murkist huffed as though considering. “It’s tempting to think that titles shouldn’t mean a thing in an uncharted stretch of space like this. That’s where I think they mean the most, though—the machinations of civilization? If we don’t remember what we are out here, then we were never really civilized in the first place. Don’t you agree? Miss Dreeson? Is that okay for you?”
“Sure. Miss Dreeson is fine,” Carolina answered. “Uhm. I don’t know. I haven’t given much thought to a question like that.”
“I have. See, I have a lot of time to think about such things. I’ve spent a lot of time alone out in space.”
“I suppose you would have.”
“It’s a fine line, you know, at the edges. I imagine that in Athos, the machine is so finely tuned that it doesn’t even strike most people as a possibility that civilization could break down, or how.”
“Oh, we understand well enough. Some of us do, anyway.”
“Your family, yes. I imagine you would. It’s your job to lubricate the wheels I suppose, or perhaps it’s fairer to say ... remove impediments to the ring’s steady operation—things of that nature?”
“All of the above. True.”
“That was what I found curious about finding you out at Ash-Vedal, Miss Dreeson. But asking questions like that? Not my function, you see. I suppose you could think of what I do as in the same realm as your family’s family business. Just a different sector.”
“You’re a curious fellow, that’s for sure.”
“And you’re a curious young lady.”
Carolina looked over at him. He looked back over at her, and then at Rishi. Physically, it wasn’t quite like having Transom sitting at the table with them, but Rishi’s function was the same there, even if the Murkist didn’t exactly know it. But he did sense something, even if it wasn’t explicit.
“You’re quite good at this, you know,” the Murkist finally said, breaking a rather long silence. “The art of saying a lot without saying anything at all.”
“Something you know something about, Murkist, I’d wager.”
“Here we sit. I get the sense you want to change that, but you don’t quite know where to begin. Neither of us even knows what the other is bargaining with. I have a sense, though, Miss Dreeson, and as I am a guest here on your ship, perhaps I should make the first gesture?”
“Please,” Carolina stated, gesturing for the Murkist to continue.
“Do you know what an illusionist is, Miss Dreeson?”
“I do. In fact, I’ve met one before.”
“Really? On Athos?”
Carolina nodded.
“Most people don’t even know what they are. It’s quite a rare art form these days. I had to read about them. Fascinating business. Performance art of a sort. I’ve seen videos, but I’ve never met one in person, which makes it harder to know how much is real. Videos are so easy to manipulate.”
“The man I met made my own jewelry seemingly disappear before my very eyes,” Carolina replied, smiling. “Poof!”
“A man after my own heart,” Murkist stated with a dark grin. “Of course, my art form is making other things disappear ...”
He could see Carolina growing uneasy.
“Apologies. A little dark humor. Anyway,” the Murkist continued, “back before the days when people came to believe science could explain everything, most people believed in magic, gods and goddesses in their midst, witchcraft. Back then, illusionists called themselves magicians. They knew what they were, but it was a kind of guild secret among their fellow practitioners that they were practicing illusions and not magic. It was a violation of the highest order to reveal the secrets of their trade to outsiders, lest the public find out that they were ordinary tricksters plying a trade and not genuine shamans manipulating supernatural forces. For a long while, they kept that secret very seriously.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s true. In fact, there were cases of magicians disappearing in my manner of the word on the mere hint that they were revealing too much. And you might wonder: how then would the craft survive?”
“Apprenticeship would be my guess,” Carolina stated.
“You are correct, Miss Dreeson. Magicians often did take apprentices, usually within the family. But then there were the childless practitioners or the ones with children who had neither the interest nor the talent. Those magicians often trained assistants or employees to succeed them. But then, what happened when the student surpassed the master? What almost always happens when the student surpasses the master?”
“Tension, bitterness, infighting.”
“To say the least, yes, Miss Dreeson. So inevitably, the secrets were bound to get out, especially once cameras and computers could dissect a performance frame by frame. Then magicians became illusionists, performance artists, a different kind of dancer. The magic was gone.”
“I presume you have a point, Murkist?”
“You need to know my magic tricks. Or at least the one that pertains to your security.”
Carolina flashed a muted smile.
“How the hell did I find your ship out here, right?”
“That’s the one.”
“Now we’re talking,” the Murkist replied, nodding. “The thing is, though, I can’t figure out what you are, Miss Dreeson. You’re certainly not an apprentice.”
“You already have one of those it seems,” Carolina stated, gesturing toward the medical bay.
The Murkist ignored the comment. “You’re certainly not family nor an assistant nor an employee. Nor are you an ordinary witless member of the general public. Illusionists of your kind certainly know how to keep your trade secrets.” The Murkist made a gesture with his head in the direction of the artifact outside the ship’s tail. “Would it give you any comfort if I told you that you’re not in danger?” the Murkist asked.
“From you?”
“No. Not from me. That’s a given. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead already, at least three times over. But it would be foolish of you to presume that I’m the only one capable of finding you. If I can, surely another can as well, no?”
“You’ve revealed a grave flaw in my security. That’s a fact.”
“And, you’re not sure how. It could be your ship. It could be a member of your crew. The doctor would be the chief suspect there, as she and I had direct contact before. It could be something else entirely.”
The Murkist took a long pause to examine Carolina’s eyes.
“What do you want?” she asked him.
“I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you I simply wanted your doctor to fix Shiann’s arm.”
“With all this talk of illusion and magic tricks?”
“Would you believe it if she woke up and told you herself?”
“But with illusionists, the assistant is usually in on the trick as well.”
“A near fatal arm wound like that? That’s some commitment to the part, I’d say.”
“In your line of work, it wouldn’t be straining the imagination too far to ask whether Shiann was a willing participant.”
The Murkist nodded. “True enough. And now there’s the question of whether you could trust what I tell you, even if I told you exactly how I keep finding you again, Miss Dreeson. And around we go.”
“So it would seem.”
“You have your tricks,” the Murkist said, glaring across the table now at Rishi. “I have mine.”
“The art of saying much by saying nothing,” Carolina said, seeming to punctuate the conversation.
“Ack-opp!” came a noise from behind the table where Kristoff’s old bot George was keeping his station. The bot’s head twitched and then turned back to its original position.
“Glitchy little thing,” the Murkist stated.
“He’s been switched off for a while,” Carolina answered, beginning to get up from the table.
“Fellow travelers,” the Murkist said, nodding.
“I’m sorry, what?” Carolina asked, now standing.
“We’re definitely not colleagues. Even that, as I said before, would be too familiar. I suspect we’re fellow travelers, which makes our connection, such as it is, more of a business relationship.”
“A cordial one, I hope, Mr. Murkist?”
The assassin smiled, returning a doubtful look.
Carolina looked back at him probingly. He was shaking his head.
“Speaking of illusions, Miss Dreeson. I’m but a step into your world, and what do I see but a hall of mirrors? You are an intriguing soul. That’s certain.”
She smiled as she left, returning with Rishi toward the front of the ship, where under her breath she told Fieldstone in no uncertain terms: “I want him off my ship. Tell Ren to get that girl fit for travel as soon as she wakes.”
“Oh,” the girl said, her tone pained as she exhaled. “You look like a nice lady.”
“I’m Dr. Ren. You’ve been asleep for some time now.”
“That’s good. I’m Shiann. It hurt so bad. I don’t want to say.”
Ren didn’t quite catch her meaning, but it wasn’t all that uncommon for a patient to be incoherent after such a long time under.
“You’re aboard our ship, Shiann. I had to do surgery on your arm. Do you remember? It was badly injured.”
Shiann looked down at it and winced.
“It’s still purple.”
“A lighter shade,” Ren said, a subtle, encouraging smile punctuating the statement.
“I’m glad it’s still there.”
“Wow. Okay,” Ren said, turning to the Murkist, who was looking down on the little woman with a blank expression that surprised Ren, especially following all those hours he’d spent looking after her. “She’s quite a bit more oriented than I’d expected.”
“I don’t want to talk,” Shiann whispered. “My ... my head’s not right.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Ren replied. “I’m just going to do a few tests on your hand, okay? All I want you to do is tell me when you feel something. Can you do that?”
Shiann nodded. “Ow. It’s starting to hurt again.”
Ren was preparing to test the sensation in the girl’s hand, when suddenly, the lights in the med bay flickered. She looked up at the ceiling and then over at the Murkist, whose expression hadn’t changed.
“I can get you something for the pain,” Ren said.
“Nothing that clouds my head,” Shiann replied.
Ren looked down at the girl again, and then back up at the Murkist. For whatever it was worth, Shiann didn’t seem to be afraid of him. Nor did it seem to Ren like there was any unspoken threat there between the two of them, but it was clear that the girl didn’t want to slip up and give something away.
“We’ll find a way, Shiann. It’s good to finally meet you.”
That night, while Carolina was sleeping, Rishi woke her to report a ping from the Cannon. Kristoff had sent word that Transom was back. The captain of the Yankee-Chaos hadn’t been sleeping well since her own return, so Rishi had been reluctant to wake Carolina for anything that wasn’t galaxy-shaking. But she also knew that Transom’s reappearance could seriously complicate their situation, and no one else had a hope of reining in Transom the way Carolina did.
“He wants to see you, Carolina,” Rishi told her upon waking her as gently as she could.
“Inform them that’s going to be tough, at least while we’re still entertaining guests.”
“I’m not sure how he’ll feel about that,” Rishi said.
“I can guess well enough. I’m not sure about anything else, though. I’d ask you to debrief Transom yourself, Rishi, but with this Murkist around, I have no expectation that our comms would be secure.”
“It’s probably also not a great idea to have those two on the same ship together, Carolina.”
She sighed. “This situation is getting messier by the minute. Send Ren in here first thing when she wakes up. We have to get these two off this ship.”
The next time Rishi interrupted her, it was to inform Carolina that Transom wasn’t keen to wait. Apparently, according to Kristoff—and confirmed on external dorsal cameras—Transom had suited back up and was climbing down the tether by hand. He would be at the top hatch momentarily.
“Have Fieldstone meet him up there,” Carolina said. “You too, Ship. I can’t have him popping off with this assassin aboard. Bring him down here as quietly as you can.”
“From what Kristoff told me, Transom is aware of our guest’s identity. But Kristoff also said he doesn’t always have the best read on what Transom’s thinking.”
“Who does?” Carolina said, rolling her eyes. “What time is it now?”
“Half past four, roughly.”
“Might as well meet a new day then,” Carolina replied, sitting up in her bed. “I haven’t been sleeping anyway.”
Fields and Rishi stepped lightly through the midship, but Rishi noted—as she was constantly monitoring their guests—that the Murkist stirred and lay perfectly still on the floor of the medical bay, where he’d been sleeping beside the girl. It figured. She didn’t expect they could sneak another person onto the ship without someone as perceptive as the Murkist noticing, even if he was fast asleep.
Rishi escorted Transom directly to the flight deck and told him Carolina would be right up.
“How the hell long were we gone for? Kristoff said a couple weeks, but what the hell, Ship?”
“I told you not to call me that, Transom; and what the hell are you talking about?”
“The lights. You didn’t notice them flickering in the atrium? You do realize we’re all the way out in the buttcrack of the galaxy here, right?”
Rishi shook her head. “There’s nothing wrong with the ship, Transom. I run hourly diagnostics.”
“Sure. Fix the lights, will you?”
“Yeah. I’ll get right on it, Sebastian.”
“Seriously, though, Rishi, you don’t want me bumping into this guy, right?”
“What do you want?”
“Would you mind bringing me a coffee?”
“Would you like a full breakfast on a silver platter?”
“I’m serious. Please, Rishi. Let’s just say my trip back was not a pleasant one. Just a coffee. Hot and black.”
She shook her head. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you—” he paused as though holding his tongue.
“Don’t call me Ship again.”
Transom put up his hands as though to deny the thought had crossed his mind. Rishi disappeared down the corridor to the midship. Transom sat in silence waiting for the captain.
Carolina arrived at the same time Rishi did a few minutes later. Rishi had a coffee pouch for each of them.
“I’ll give you two some space,” Rishi declared, stepping lightly back toward the atrium table.
“Home again, home again,” Transom said exhaling. “Hope there’s no hard feelings about that—”
“I think it’s best we didn’t discuss it—or anything else for that matter. Not until our guests are back on their way.”
“What the hell, Dreeson? You couldn’t think of anyone deadlier to bring aboard than the damn Murkist?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Not exactly, but Kristoff said he and Burch and Verona had some kind of run-in out on Mu-Indirus involving the guy and one of the Rexes or something. I swear, you make the strangest friends.”
“I wouldn’t call him a friend, and I wouldn’t cast aspersions either if I were you.”
“How’s your neck?”
“My God, you’re an asshole.”
“That was the first time I ever murdered anyone to save their life.”
“And the last, I hope.”
He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll let the big guy have his turn.” Transom squeezed his elbow into a tight angle and then flicked the top off his coffee pouch, making a soft popping sound with his lips as he did.
“You know, Sebastian, I really missed having you around.”
“That’s great. How are we going to get these assholes off our ship, Dreeson? Got a plan yet?”
“Yeah. It involves you shutting the hell up and behaving and letting the doctor do her job.”
“You know, as I seem to recall, I was the one who actually managed to behave myself back in Xenia. Someone else I know ... ” he shook his head at Carolina, “ … different story.”
“How are the others doing?” she asked him.
“You mean the Professor?”
“I meant the others.”
“Right, right. He was heartbroken. Wanted to jump right off the Inayvin Tower the first night you left. Goss had to talk him down. He was crying and everything. Real sorry scene.”
“I’m going to hire that assassin myself if you keep this up!”
“They’re fine, Carolina. Whatever. We can’t debrief until our visitors leave anyway. Most of it’s still fresh in my mind,” Transom said, pointing to his head. “I’ll try to write down as much as I can until our guests leave. Then we can talk.”
“So it wasn’t fruitless?” Carolina asked, her tone sullen, almost defeated. “I felt like it was a waste. My part anyway.”
Transom shook his head. “I don’t think so. For a while there, I was a cop. A servant of the community. I felt like I made a real damn difference every day I put on that uniform.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, shaking her head.
“So. No hard feelings, Dreeson?”
“Don’t ever do it again.”
“You have my word,” Transom replied. “Wait ... you were talking about you, right? Just you? Not like all people in general, because that I can’t promise. I mean this Murkist guy? Just say the word.” Transom ran two fingers across his own throat, miming a cutting motion. “Wouldn’t be my first galactic badass.”
“No,” Carolina said, answering firmly even though she was fairly confident Transom was joking about the offer. “I’m sure it wouldn’t be. Just stand your post and try to keep your mouth from getting us into trouble.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” he replied grinning.
She looked over at Transom as he seemed to savor the coffee. She began to sip hers as well.
When Ren woke that morning, she told Carolina in no uncertain terms: the only way she could ensure Shiann’s survival if they rushed their visitors off the ship would be to take her arm. Otherwise, they needed to wait. Carolina pressed her, sensing that something more could be done.
“I feel like you must have some other options, Ren.”
And the doctor’s reaction only served to heighten that belief. Ren shrugged, sighed, shook her head and only half denied it.
“Doctor?” Carolina insisted. “What more could you do?”
“I’m down to my last unit. I suppose I could give her half, maybe.”
Carolina glared at Ren.
“When she was here, I used to stock like four units of her plasma just in case. You know? I treated your leg wound with it. Leda’s plasma.”
“You told me it was the last one.”
“Well, it was ... the last one I could use anyway. I could synthesize more, I guess, but I only know one place I could do it.”
“Where?”
“That place ... uhm,” Ren began to whisper, “where Rishi came from. Verona’s old neighborhood.” Ren’s voice got louder again. “Technically that kind of blood-borne nanotech is illegal in most of the Battery. Not in Tressia, though. I suppose we could go there to synthesize more. And Shiann is so small a full unit would be more like two. I might be able to save a large enough sample that I could use it to make more. But I saved it for us, not for strangers. In case you or Sōsh got hurt. A last resort.”
“How much would it help her, Doctor?”
“I have no idea.”
“Let me rephrase. What are the odds it would clear up her arm in a matter of hours or a day or so?”
Ren rolled her eyes. “It’s not magic, Carolina. It would help. Much better than the regimen I already have her on? A bit. Marginally. But a margin can make the difference. I don’t want to use it unless I have to, though.”
“I want them gone,” Carolina whispered.
“I get it,” Ren whispered back, mocking Carolina slightly. “It’s not like they’re my new best friends either. But I’m not going to saw that girl’s arm off to get rid of them.”
“Okay, Ren. Good enough.”
It was going to take time.
As that time began to pass, Shiann began to move a little. She was weak from the extended period of unconsciousness and immobility. And the Murkist wasn’t exactly forthcoming about their activities leading up to the accident either, which meant they could have been weightless for weeks prior as well. But to Ren’s eyes, she seemed tough that little woman, wincing her way through her first steps, then turning those few into a trip around the atrium table. Before long, she was trying to fetch her own water from the ship’s commissary. It wouldn’t have been easy for her with two good arms, as the counter was at about head-height for Shiann, and her reach was similarly limited. She didn’t exactly appreciate Harold’s interventions, as well-meaning as they were.
“It is my duty to serve your needs, Miss Shiann,” the bot insisted as it watched her struggle to reach a pouch or the water spigot to fill it.”
“Do you have coffee?” she asked him.
“We do indeed. Would you like me to prepare a serving that would be appropriate for you?”
“I would love for you to show me how so I could do it myself.”
The bot paused, seemingly to process how he could accommodate the request. At that point, one of the two Etterans Shiann had seen around the ship—the new arrival—appeared at the threshold of the commissary and stopped, staring at her. She looked back.
“What?” she barked at him. “That’s some look you’ve got on you, mister.”
Transom glanced over at the atrium table behind them, where the Murkist was seated, observing quietly.
“Why are you so damn tiny?” Transom asked, turning back toward Shiann.
She shot him a sour look as she struggled to reach the water spigot with her good arm. “Because my parents were small, genius.”
“Funny girl. Why’s your arm purple?”
She noted a sinister grin on the Etteran and scowled back at him. “I have a rare condition where my dreams manifest in the real world. I had this nightmare where I got into a fight with a humongous grape that tried to bite my arm off. Better be careful around me, mister. I might fall asleep and dream that your head explodes.”
“Awful lot of salt in that tiny package,” Transom replied. “Here.”
He stepped toward Shiann, as though he intended to help.
“I’ll get it,” she insisted.
“Fine,” he replied. “Hey, robot, why don’t you go back into rear storage and bring out one of the medium-sized magnetic crates.”
“I could, sir, but Captain Dreeson insisted I remain with Miss Shiann, and I’m not certain anything in any of those storage bins would help the current situation.”
“No. Empty the bin and bring it back here so she can stand on it and reach the water and the upper cabinets.”
“Ah, I see. Right away. Will you please attend to our guest’s needs while I comply?”
Transom nodded. “You are relieved, robot.”
Shiann’s eyes narrowed on Transom as Harold hurried toward the back of the ship. “What?”
“Will you let me help you this once, Tiny? Then you can get it yourself next time.”
“Fine,” Shiann replied.
She stood aside as Transom fixed her a coffee, periodically looking back toward the table at the Murkist, who still hadn’t said a word or moved a muscle to intervene.
“Thank you,” she said to Transom as he handed her the coffee pouch when he was finished.
“Don’t drink all that in one go.”
“It’s not my first coffee.”
“First fight with a purple berry?” he asked gesturing toward her immobilized arm. “I could teach you a thing or two.”
“I’ll get them next time.”
“I’m sure you will,” Transom stated, grinning. “Little spitfire.”
A loud exclamation came from across the atrium. “Ack-opp!”
Transom turned to see the old bot twitch its head. He looked down at the girl.
“Guess he doesn’t like the look of your friend.”
“Stupid thing’s broken,” she replied. “Hasn’t shut up all day.”
“Hmmph. Old unit,” was all Transom said, returning a perplexed look to the girl.
Then he grabbed the coffee he’d prepared for himself from the counter and turned through the atrium to leave. The Murkist looked over at him, and to Transom’s eyes gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” Transom said as he passed. “Captain says my mouth will get us into trouble, and she’s usually right about such things.”
The Murkist didn’t reply, but the nod he returned the second time was unmistakable as Transom left the room.
Though she was up and moving better each day, Shiann’s arm didn’t markedly improve. Thankfully, though, Ren reported daily that it wasn’t worsening either. There was a quiet peace aboard the ship for nearly a week after Transom’s return where little changed.
Carolina had put George away after everyone complained, not just Shiann and the Murkist. He’d continued glitching all day and night, the same verbal tick every thirty minutes or so: “Ack-opp!”
Similarly, though much more troubling, the lights continued to flicker in various different areas of the ship. Rishi couldn’t explain that curious malfunction either. Just as with old George’s diagnostics, everything was coming back in the clear. The anomaly was just a flicker of the lights, but it was disconcerting enough that everyone had begun to exchange quiet looks whenever it happened.
“You know your lights,” the Murkist said to Carolina one evening as she passed through the atrium. Then he paused for a moment, turning his head. “Dangerous thing to be all the way out here if your ship malfunctions.”
“Thankfully we have our friends just outside,” she replied, referring to the Cannon, where Kristoff and Draya were parked by the artifact’s outer door. “And we’re certain it’s nothing to worry about. Diagnostics are all green.”
“Let’s hope your diagnostics are correct, Miss Dreeson,” the Murkist replied, and because of his manner of speaking, his comment couldn’t sound anything but ominous.
Carolina didn’t say any more, merely nodding and heading back toward her stateroom, where she promptly called Rishi, Transom, and Fieldstone to the flight deck to discuss the matter.
“I have two theories,” Rishi explained to them all when she arrived. “I’ve been looking over George’s systems, and everything seems fine. But if it were just the ship, I’d think it was the ship, but both started glitching right around the same time.”
“Which also happens to be almost exactly when our new friends arrived,” Fieldstone stated, his voice hushed.
Rishi turned her head around and shut the door to the flight deck.
“All right,” Transom said. “Somebody give me a good reason we don’t immediately eliminate that possibility.”
“Because I’m not going to sanction the killing of a man who came here as a guest,” Carolina answered, “especially one who saved all of our lives not too long ago.”
“Funny how he keeps turning up,” Transom replied.
“No, Sebastian. No. We don’t even know he’s responsible yet. Plus, there’s the matter of the girl.”
“Yeah, I’m doubtful he’s behind it,” Rishi added. “I’ve monitored their every move, and there’s been a bot within a few meters of them the entire time they’ve been aboard.”
“So it’s a coincidence? They show up and immediately all our shit starts glitching?”
“Do you have a better theory, Rishi?” Carolina asked.
“So far it’s just George and the Y-C acting funny,” she replied. “But there’s something else I haven’t mentioned. I actually think it might be the artifact interfering somehow. I’m not sure how or why it would just affect those two systems aboard the ship, but I’ve also been having trouble with my nodes.”
Rishi pulled up the shirtsleeve her technological body was projecting as a flightsuit.
“Wait? Your shell is glitching too, and this is the first I’m hearing of it?” Carolina asked.
“Not the shell,” Rishi replied. “No systems in the shell itself are malfunctioning. It’s just the nodes. It started right around the same time. They got a little glitchy for a couple days, and then ... They’ve been silent.”
“So you’re not getting anything? No data stream from ...?” Transom tilted his head toward the artifact.
“No.” Rishi replied. “It’s happened before. A few hours here and there. Sometimes even a day or so. I’m not sure why.”
“But never this long?” Fieldstone asked.
“No. It could just be a period of uncertainty, like something happening now is creating a big shift, but I only have a few inputs,” Rishi stated, pointing to the nodes on her forearm, and then she looked back toward the door before turning around again and whispering. “Nilius has hundreds.”
“He wasn’t reporting any problems before yours went down?” Fields asked.
Rishi shook her head in the negative. “I don’t know what to make of it, but it could just be a totally normal function of the way they work. It’s still all a big mystery how they function. We certainly all know how powerful ...”
“Yeah,” Carolina stated. “Enough about that for now.”
“Big man makes a point about getting stuck out here,” Fieldstone noted. “Have Kristoff and Draya reported any problems with the Cannon?”
“No,” Rishi answered. “And really, let’s not overreact here. It’s just a glitchy old bot and a flicker of the lights. We have no reason to think it’s anything more. None of Ren’s equipment has had any problems while treating our little visitor; none of the ship’s major systems have glitched, external arrays, atmosphere, the generator, FTL—everything is returning perfect diagnostics.”
“Okay,” Carolina agreed. “Let’s not overreact, especially with visitors aboard. But I think I’d like you to bring George back online again, Rishi.”
“Captain?” Rishi asked.
“Canary,” Carolina replied.
Rishi tilted her head as though she didn’t get the reference. Then she nodded. “I get it. Monitor the symptoms in case they progress. I’ll see what I can do to turn down George’s vocal decibel level.”
“Ack-opp!” Transom barked, startling everyone for a moment.
Fieldstone snorted out a laugh.
“Ack-opp!”
“Muzzle it, Sebastian,” Carolina stated, shaking her head. “Covert operator my ass.”
“Let’s not talk about your ass, Captain,” Transom replied. “We’ve got enough to worry about around here without any more distractions.”
“Funny, Sebastian,” Rishi stated, opening the door to the flight deck. “I’ll let everyone know if I have any updates.”
Rishi’s forearm shifted to project a full sleeve, with the flightsuit again covering the nodes in her morphing nanotech dermis all the way down to her wrist.
On the tenth day after Shiann woke up, with her arm still lingering in a tenuous state of stagnation, Ren went to Carolina and told her that she was down to her last intervention—the final unit of Leda’s plasma. She told Carolina she was going to use it—all but a small enough sample to synthesize later, if they ever got back to Tressia or Eddis Ali’s vault again.
“If it doesn’t turn soon,” Ren said, “even with the plasma infusion, she’s going to lose the arm.”
There was a long pause between Carolina and Ren, where both of them seemed to weigh the prospect of having to tell the Murkist that they couldn’t save Shiann’s arm.
“Why did I wait so long?” Ren whispered, shaking her head.
“Because you take care of your own first, Ren,” Carolina stated. “And you’ll never have to apologize to your people for that. Your people. It was courageous to wait this long.”
Ren got her head together and walked back to the med bay to administer the last-resort treatment. She could tell by the skepticism and the little woman’s face that Shiann was already preparing herself to lose her arm.
Later that same week, Carolina woke in the middle of the night, startled again by another nightmare. They hadn’t abated in the time since she’d returned, and the stress of the current situation aboard the ship, coupled with the sense of stagnation in their greater mission, hadn’t helped her demeanor any.
She got up and went to the commissary to fill her water pouch again. Then, she figured it might help to sit on the deck and watch the stars spin for a while, to let her head clear for a bit before trying to go back to sleep, hopefully without the foul taste of the nightmare fresh in her mind.
She was surprised to find Transom there, seated in the first mate’s chair, glasses on his face, a tablet in his lap, and he was scrawling with a stylus in what appeared to Carolina to be some odd form of pictorial written language.
He heard her footsteps and turned his head.
“What’s with the hieroglyphics?” she asked, inspecting the tablet over his shoulder before sitting in the captain’s chair beside him. “Doesn’t look like any written language I’ve ever seen.”
Transom returned his gaze to the tablet. “Not a secret per se ... I mean, it’s common enough that I’m not giving away ops methods that aren’t widely known, but it’s something we do.”
“Etterans?”
“I’m sure the Trasp do it too, maybe even officials high up in your government, industries, whatever. Personal cypher. Even I can’t read it without the eyewear. Bio-encryption.” He took off the glasses. “Now it’s just gibberish to me too. I figured it was appropriate with our new friends aboard.”
“I’ve never seen you writing before, Sebastian. You look ...” she smiled, “very astute.”
“I guess your boyfr—” he stopped himself. “Sorry. The Professor and I, we spent a fair amount of time together, talking history, old books, I taught him a thing or two about surveillance. We talked about writing too.”
“So you’re writing now?”
“Well, this is just the important stuff—the things I have to remember from ...” Transom gestured to the artifact, and then toward the back of the ship—those things that couldn’t be said with the visitors aboard.
“He’s sleeping,” Carolina stated. “I heard the snoring from the commissary. At least one of us is sleeping well anyway.”
“Yeah, what’s up with you? I didn’t want to pester you with it, but you haven’t looked so good since ... you know. What is it? Still got a lingering aftertaste?”
“I’m not sure if it’s related or unrelated—”
“Probably related.”
Carolina nodded. “Probably related, yes. But I’ve been having nightmares.”
“The same one?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Not always.”
“What’s tonight’s? Do you remember?”
Carolina rolled her eyes and exhaled. “I’m always trapped somewhere, and I have the feeling I can’t escape.”
“Wow, can’t imagine where that might be coming from, Dreeson. We’ll have to scour the galaxy for an expert who can read between those lines.”
“Shut up for a second, will you, Sebastian?”
Transom shrugged. “Fine.”
“This one I was in my bed—in my cabin, but it was higher up, like on a bunk. And down on the floor, there was this pack of wolves circling around the bed looking up at me.”
“You know there’s not enough room in there for a pack of wolves.”
“Dreams don’t make sense, Transom.”
“No. No sense at all.”
“Yeah, anyway, I have this terror in my heart that they’re going to consume me the second I try to step down, but I also can’t flee anywhere either. So I’m just stuck up there with that same terror in my heart, and I can’t get away from it. And then usually, I wake up sweating. Sometimes it’s different circumstances, but it’s always more or less the same feeling.”
“All right. That’s it?”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“What? How should I say it? It is like that. You just need to straighten your mind out.”
“Yeah. Just act tough and it will go away. Sure.”
“I’m dead serious, Dreeson. I thought you’d moved beyond this crap.”
“Transom—”
“No. Shut up and listen. This is bullshit, and I’m not going to accept this from you. Look at me.”
She’d turned her head away, but something in his tone brought her eyes back to him.
“I am not Xeldin Swinney. Never was. Not for one second. And you are not Lee Ira. Whatever the hell you had swirling in that head, it was something, but it wasn’t your shit. Don’t let it complicate your life. You are Carolina Dreeson, and you do not have the luxury of moping about and twisting yourself into a state like that girl did. She’s irrelevant to you, and so is her baggage. That’s point one.”
“Should I be taking notes?”
He shoved his tablet into her lap.
“That’d be a start,” he barked at her under his breath. “Point two, that pack of wolves circling you? I am always there in it waiting for the first hint that any one of them has it in their mind to lift their jaws toward you with bad intentions. And I will tear out their throats the second they do. That’s my job. That’s not Fields’s job, not Sōsh’s job, not Burch’s, Rishi’s or anybody else’s job but mine. You can’t be afraid of the damn wolves. They’re my concern. We can’t afford you worrying about that shit.”
Carolina sighed. “Got anymore sage advice? Any more points?”
“Go see Ren if you can’t sleep. I’m sure she’s got something that’ll work, herbal derivative, something stronger.”
“I already did.”
“Good.” Transom paused and shook his head. “On second thought, it’s not a bad thing we’ve got these visitors here. Take the time. Get your head straight. Write it out. Bring me a tablet and I’ll set you with your own encryption.”
“I might do that.”
“We haven’t talked yet, for obvious reasons, but some things happened back there. We’re in it deep now, Dreeson. You can’t carry any of that experience from there into here. And that’s all I’m going to say about that for now.”
Carolina sighed. “All right. That’s ... um, thank you, Sebastian—”
“Thank me by doing.”
“Good talk,” she said, handing him back his tablet. “I’ll leave you to your writing.”
Transom nodded and took the device back, returning his attention to where he’d left off.
Rishi was consulting over a secure stream with Kristoff almost daily, troubleshooting George’s glitch, which persisted but didn’t worsen. So too did the ship seem stuck in the same sort of stagnation. Kristoff had several ideas about the possible origin of George’s minor malfunction. But one-by-one, as Rishi ran diagnostic after diagnostic, each idea proved fruitless in terms of explaining the bot’s strange behavior.
Ren, though, was reporting a slow, slight improvement in Shiann’s arm. By the fifth day following the infusion of Leda’s plasma, there was a measurable improvement in the arm’s color and blood flow. Vessels in the upper arm were beginning to repair themselves. Sensation improved, and she was moving her fingers more easily. The pain was still constantly present, but Ren was hopeful it would abate as the arm continued to heal. She wasn’t ready to let Shiann go yet, though. Even if she progressed to the point they believed she wouldn’t go septic if she discharged the girl to the Murkist’s care, it wouldn’t do any good if she was in constant throbbing pain for the rest of her life. Quietly, though, the little woman herself began to grow more optimistic.
Still, there wasn’t much conversation between the crew of the Yankee-Chaos and their guests. It was a relationship of mutual respect and cooperation, but even after weeks together, no one aboard would have mistaken the spirit of the parties on that vessel as friendship.
The improvement in Shiann’s arm plateaued again for several days after her marginal progression. Ren discussed it one evening on the flight deck with Carolina while Transom was there. She was worried to the point that she discussed the potential fallout if things went south after she had to take the arm. They discussed best- and worst-case scenarios, as well as the things they needed to do to ensure the best and prevent the worst.
The morning following that heavy conversation, Transom found the girl sitting at the atrium table, her chin barely peeking above the tabletop as she sat cross-legged in her chair. He could hear the Murkist still snoring in the medical bay across the way. Transom looked probingly down the table at her as she peered at him from behind her coffee pouch.
“Want to see something, Sebastian?” she asked.
He noticed her demeanor had shifted. Shiann hadn’t been grim despite the prospect of losing her arm. Fieldstone and Ren had been preparing those grounds just in case, feeding her stories about Burch and Sōsh and the struggles they’d overcome, the things they could still do after losing limbs, some better than before. But Shiann’s face didn’t have a hint of resignation in it that morning. To Transom’s eyes, it almost looked as though the girl was struggling to suppress a smile.
“Okay,” he stated. “You lose a fight with a blackberry last night?”
“No,” Shiann replied as he approached, and she couldn’t hold the smile back any longer. “I won.”
He could see her trying to lift the arm to show him.
“Go easy, there, hot shot. Let me look.”
She was wiggling her fingers, her arm dangling at a right angle in the sling across her chest. The skin tone in her hand wasn’t exactly back to normal, more of a lingering pink. It almost looked miraculous to Transom’s eyes. He’d only ever seen that hand as a purple hand. Now, it was clearly trending toward recovery.
“That’s a lot better.”
She nodded, her eyes wide with relief.
“How’s it feel?”
“Like a fever broke, only with pain instead of heat. It still aches a little, but nothing like yesterday.”
“Has Ren seen it yet?”
Shiann shook her head. “You’re the first up.”
“It must be all that coffee you’ve been drinking,” Transom replied. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to take all the credit.”
“Like hell you are. I’m taking credit. Me and the doctor.”
Transom nodded. “I suppose you’ve both earned it. I’m going to get Ren.”
“No,” Shiann insisted. “You don’t have to. Let her sleep.”
Transom shook his head and grinned. “Try and stop me with that busted little wing of yours, Tiny. Believe me. Ren’s going to want to see those little pink fingers. She’ll be smiling just as wide as you are.”
The relief was palpable. Ren made sure to temper any overreaction, reminding Shiann that the danger wasn’t over yet and that she still had a long road to recovery. Finally, though, it did seem like a real recovery appeared likely.
That night, after Shiann’s arm continued to improve throughout the day, Ren found the Murkist at the atrium table. Nearly everyone was asleep, except for Murkist, Ren herself, and Fieldstone, who was never far outside Ren’s orbit while that killer was within reach, his being particularly long.
When Ren sat down at the table with the Murkist, Fieldstone sat as well. She looked at the assassin through an extended silence, almost as though she expected him to read her mind and respond accordingly. The Murkist did correctly sense that she expected a response from him but chose a topic Ren didn’t wish to dive into with the killer.
“Both these Etterans live by a code, which means they can be relied upon. This one, though, doctor—he’s more than just a soldier, a man of worth. That’s a rare thing these days.”
Fieldstone looked up at her and reassured her with a glance.
“I’m not sure I’d like to discuss that with you.”
“Personal matters, I know.”
Ren almost winced. She was clearly uncomfortable having the Murkist peer behind that veil, past the realm of surgeon and caregiver into the realm of her real life.
“You wouldn’t get to see so much of our lives if this were a hospital.”
“Hospitals ask questions that, to this point, you’ve had the courtesy not to ask, Dr. Ren. It’s been an unspoken understanding. I have the feeling that’s about to change, despite your own misgivings in the same domain.”
“What are you doing with this girl?” Ren asked. “I’ve seen her bloodwork, her genomic profile. She hasn’t been dishonest, which means she’s a grown woman. I have no reason to believe she’s not on a path of her own choosing. But she almost lost an arm, and I can’t help but think ...”
“Then perhaps you should think less. I have no doubt you mean well, and I mean you no disrespect in saying the following. But you cannot possibly think correctly about Shiann’s circumstances unless you know them, and you do not. I asked you to fulfill your obligations, your end of our compact, and that is almost complete. I have not pried into yours or your crew’s business, curious as it may be to us both on many, many fronts.”
“No. You haven’t.”
“No doubt you have good reasons for your secrecy on those fronts, Doctor?”
Ren shrugged.
“I have mine too, and Shiann has hers. She hasn’t shared them. I will not be the one to break her trust.”
“I’m just afraid it’s fear, that she’s afraid of you. I worry that’s why she’s so tight-lipped about her own circumstances. Otherwise, I don’t understand why she wouldn’t share anything about her circumstances with her doctor. She wouldn’t even tell me how the accident happened.”
“Let’s just agree to agree on the one thing we agree upon, Doctor.”
“What’s that?” Ren asked.
“That you don’t understand. It’s okay that you don’t. You’ve done a commendable job under difficult circumstances.”
Ren sighed. “I suppose that will have to be good enough.”
The Murkist nodded and Ren grinned back at him.
“It’s going to be a considerable rehab for her,” she told him. “We’ll get the regime started tomorrow, and if all goes well, I think we’ll have you both back on your way in a couple days.”
“That would be welcome,” the Murkist stated. “Have a good night, Doctor.”
Shiann’s rehab started off well. She spent much of the first two days moving her fingers and even her arm on a limited basis. The color in her hands continued to return to normal, and remarkably, her hand’s scores in skin sensitivity even improved marginally in just those two days. Ren told Shiann she was growing more comfortable progressing toward her final steps in her treatment aboard the Yankee-Chaos. She also asked the Murkist if she could take a look at the accommodations on his ship before letting her go. The final step would be to take the Y-C off the tether and monitor Shiann for at least two days to be sure her arm continued to progress in zero-G, as she and the Murkist had a long traverse back to the outer Letters before they could get back into a normal environment for Shiann to complete her recovery. Where that would take place was entirely a mystery to Ren, which made her a little hesitant to let them go, but ultimately, she had to remind herself, just as with any patient, in the end they have to stand on their own when they return to their lives. Shiann’s life course would be hers to choose again just as soon as her body demonstrated it could tolerate the journey back.
Ren was with Carolina discussing the matter aboard the flight deck when she saw Rishi flash an image up on the floatscreen that materialized above the front panel. It was of a suited figure on their anchor rock approaching and then beginning to climb the tether.
“Kristoff?” Ren asked Carolina.
She shook her head. “Carsten’s back.”
Ren looked over at Carolina with an eyebrow raised. “He couldn’t wait a few more days after ...?”
“I guess not.”
“Does he know what the hell he’s doing, climbing the tether like that?”
“Who knows?”
Ren looked at Carolina forcefully, urging her to figure that matter out before Airee got himself into trouble on the cable.
“Rishi, will you get Sebastian a feed please.”
“I’m already on it,” Rishi’s voice came through the flight deck’s ambient audio.
Rishi herself was in the rear storage working on George again—Kristoff’s latest hunch on the cause of the malfunctioning bot’s glitches.
A few moments later, Sebastian’s voice was on the audio feed.
“Airee, what the hell are you doing?”
“Hey, Sebastian! Long time.”
“Yeah, and, um, in that time did you take the first minute to learn a damn thing about spacefaring, because you’re fixing to launch yourself into the great beyond, Professor.”
“I’m doing all right.”
“Do you have a line on?”
“A line?”
“Yeah, a safety line to the tether?”
“I didn’t see one in the Cannon’s gear closet.”
“You must be the dumbest smart guy I know, Airee. I swear. You’re going to want to flip yourself over while you can still control it; otherwise, you’re going to be looking at your own ass in short order.”
“All right. Hang on.”
Carolina and Ren exchanged a long look and a laugh. They watched as Sebastian talked Carsten through a flag-bend maneuver and instructed him on how to hug the tether with his legs once he got himself properly oriented to drop feet-first to the ship.
“I’ll fetch him at the top hatch,” Transom informed the listeners on the stream. “It might have been fun to let him flail about in deep space for a few hours too, but I imagine our guests wouldn’t be nearly as amused by that as we would.”
“No,” Carolina replied. “Ren wants Shiann on gravity for another twelve hours at least.”
“All right. I’ll resist the urge to push his ass off.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Airee added. “This is a little harder than I thought it would be.”
“Imagine that,” Transom’s voice came back.
Another fifteen minutes passed while Carolina and Ren observed from the flight deck as Transom brought Airee in. Carsten confirmed that he had been briefed by Kristoff and Draya about their visitors and that he had his head about him despite the dubious decision to crawl out to the ship on the tether. Still, no one was prepared for the scene he was about to cause when he finally made it aboard.
It was a function of the orientation of the ship that Airee would have to pass through the atrium to get up to the flight deck.
The Murkist happened to be seated at the atrium table at that time. Ren had retreated to her medical bay to make sure Shiann was situated for the night and to give Carolina an empty seat on the flight deck so she and Carsten could talk.
Carolina herself came to the edge of the atrium corridor to let the Murkist know they were about to receive another crew member who’d been over on the Cannon. He nodded and betrayed no emotion about the matter, despite the fact it seemed odd that suddenly yet another crewman from their other ship was coming over after all the time they’d been there. A name he hadn’t heard before.
When Carsten finally made it down to the Atrium, he sensed an awkward energy about the room. Even prepared as he had been about their visitors, it was immediately obvious to the Murkist that the newcomer was surprised at the look of their guest.
“Hello,” Carsten said awkwardly as he slowly passed the table.
And about halfway through the room, he stopped walking. Kristoff and Draya had mentioned the Murkist—mind the guest-assassin, they’d told him. And, because they’d never set eyes on Shiann themselves, all they’d heard from Carolina about her was that she was a small woman. A great contrast from the giant assassin. Carsten wasn’t prepared for the greatness of that contrast.
“Why’s the gravity so low?” he stated, almost to himself, his brow furrowed as he looked around, as though the answer might reveal itself in the atrium air.
Carolina tried to rein his attention back in, urging him toward the front of the ship. But as he looked around, he noticed that the menacing giant at the table was taking more interest in his reaction. He decided to turn the other way and caught a glimpse of Ren’s face through the open medical bay door, and she looked suddenly very concerned. As did the little figure on her table.
Carsten went through a split second of cognitive dissonance, because he’d been told “small woman,” but from that distance, the person on Ren’s table appeared to be a child. A half-second later, it dawned on him what she was.
“Oh, my God!” he exclaimed, darting forward and making a direct line for the med bay.
It was the way he suddenly turned straight toward her that startled Shiann. Ren put her hands to her head but couldn’t even shout Carsten back fast enough to stop the chain of events that had begun to unfold.
By the time he’d reached the open med bay door, Carsten could feel a force taking him up from behind by his throat, and before his feet could progress one more step into Ren’s surgery, his boots were off the ground, and he was powerless, his legs dangling and his back pressed to the wall. He couldn’t breathe.
“Murkist!” Ren shouted.
From her perspective, Ren couldn’t tell whether Carsten was wide-eyed from the shock or because the Murkist was squeezing his bulging eyes right out of his head.
A second later, as Carolina came screaming through the atrium, Transom was arriving a step ahead of her, standing between them just outside the med bay’s threshold.
“Hey, big fella,” Transom said calmly, reaching for the knife in his right pantleg. “Right now, we don’t have to. But if you squeeze that neck any harder or any longer, we’re gonna have to.”
The Murkist looked over his shoulder at Transom, his blazing eyes assessing, measuring. They tracked toward Transom’s right hand, then toward Carolina’s terrified face, then back to Transom. By that time, Fieldstone too was arriving just behind her.
“What’s his problem?” the Murkist growled, turning as he continued to press Carsten against the wall.
“He’s Athosian,” Transom replied. “He can’t help it. How about you take your hand off his throat and ask him?”
The Murkist exhaled, almost snorting like an animal as he released the tension from Carsten’s throat. He shifted his fingers from around Airee’s neck and took hold of his jumpsuit’s collar instead, shaking the stunned professor as he set his feet back on the floor.
“What do you mean walking in here like that?” the Murkist barked at him.
Carsten gasped and coughed as the Murkist pressed him up against the wall again, the giant’s knuckles digging into his sternum as his failing feet struggled to settle beneath him.
“She’s a—cough ... Frinz ... cough—” Carsten couldn’t quite get the words out.
“Take a breath, Carsten,” Carolina said calmly. “Take your time.”
“Not too much time, Carsten,” the Murkist said, glaring down at him.
“She’s not ... a child?” he managed to gasp.
“What business of yours is it?”
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t help ... She’s a Frinzen. I thought it was a myth.”
The Murkist looked at him more closely, examining Airee’s face, which had shifted from blue-ish purple to a deep red. Then the assassin looked back at Shiann, who appeared confused, shaking her head.
“I didn’t mean to startle her. I meant no harm.”
“Yeah,” Transom echoed. “He’s pretty harmless, that one.”
“Athosian?” the Murkist asked, letting out a snort as he said it.
“My friend,” Carolina stated.
The Murkist slowly released his hand from Carsten’s flight suit and put it instead on his shoulder. Carsten immediately felt the weight of the Murkist’s long arm.
“What did you call her?”
“You’re a Frinzen, aren’t you?” Airee asked, peering around the Murkist’s broad torso toward the girl.
Shiann shrugged and shook her head.
Carsten couldn’t hold himself upright and reached up, grabbing the Murkist’s forearm for support.
“She’s a ... her people. I think. I’m pretty sure.” Again he looked at Shiann directly. “Your family? Y—your friends? All your people are like you? Your size, I mean?”
“Do you know something about us?” she replied.
“Not nearly as much as you, I’m sure,” Carsten answered. “But I don’t ... I mean, I can’t believe.”
“Let him go, Murkist,” Shiann said. “He knows my people.”
“Are you all right?” Carsten asked her. “Your arm.”
The girl smiled back at him and shook her head, almost giggling.
“Okay,” Carolina said. “Everyone, take a breath. I’m going to have a word with Carsten up front. Then in a few minutes, we’re all going to sit down calmly and talk this through. Murkist?”
She looked up at him. And he met eyes with Carolina before looking back at Transom, who’d taken his hand from his side and was instead standing behind the Murkist with his arms crossed.
“He’s all yours, Captain,” the Murkist replied, gesturing toward Carolina with his left arm as he shifted his right to Airee’s back, making sure Carsten was steady on his feet as he released the professor.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any harm. I was just going to—”
“Carsten,” Carolina stated firmly. “Not another word. Up front now, please.”
The tension on the ship settled by a few degrees as Transom, Carolina, and Airee headed down the front corridor toward the flight deck. Fieldstone, who could be found quite often sitting silently at the far end of the table from the Murkist through those weeks, now stood just outside the med bay, one eye on Ren and Shiann, the other on the assassin.
Fields watched as Rishi quietly approached the table from the rear of the ship and sat down beside the Murkist, who looked across at her as she addressed him with a firm look.
“Pilot?” the Murkist said.
“I’ve been watching you,” Rishi replied.
“I’m well aware. I’ve been watching you as well.”
“And you have a keen eye, Murkist. That’s one of the things I’ve seen.”
“It doesn’t take so keen an eye to understand your nature, Pilot. As real as you present, all the humans aboard this vessel eat, drink water, sleep, breathe deeply, feel—but you? You just watch, and you keep your thoughts to yourself, don’t you?”
Rishi nodded. “Many of the things that have gone unspoken to this point are about to be said explicitly. I’m going to go first, and you’re going to listen, and you best heed what I say well, assassin.”
The Murkist grinned and then gestured for Rishi to proceed.
“I am not like any AI you have ever encountered. They present as people, like me, yes, but most wear the shells of ordinary housebots, and they run protocols that prevent them from taking certain actions against any human being. You should know there isn’t a strikebot in the galaxy I couldn’t pound into scrap metal in minutes with my bare hands. I am faster, smarter, and deadlier than any being you’ve ever encountered, and if you harm any of my people, I will kill you so dead so fast your eyes will not even be able to catch me coming. Put that in your calculus from this moment on if you aim to ever leave this ship again breathing. I am always watching you.”
The same grin seemed frozen on his face, yet something told Rishi it was no longer quite so smug.
“Duly noted,” he replied, closing the grin and nodding. “Incidentally, it’s good to see Miss Dreeson and her father took the previous attempt on her life as seriously as they should have.”
Rishi glared at him.
“I just mean,” he began to clarify, “that ... well, you were not here at her side before ... at Ash-Vedal. I just presumed that your addition to the crew ...”
The Murkist stopped talking and let out a curious huff as Rishi looked back at him blankly. She got up from the table and began to walk back toward the storage room where she had been tinkering with old George. And after a few steps, as though the very universe itself had its own sense of comedic timing, the lights in the atrium flickered.
“Oh, Pilot, that reminds me,” the Murkist said to her back, “a word of wisdom from one professional to another ...?”
Rishi stopped and turned back toward the Murkist.
“No matter how powerful or clever we think ourselves to be, the universe has a way of humbling us all. Only entropy is invincible: everything else must perish in its time.”
He’d said it without any particular emotion. Nor could she read anything on his face, whether he was gloating, joking, or simply sharing a truism he wished to impart on another flawed being. She took the comment with a similar emotionless response, merely turning back again toward the starboard corridor.
And at that very moment, as if to punctuate the encounter with yet one further point of comedic irony, quite audibly from the back room came the all-too-familiar refrain echoing into the atrium:
“Ack-opp.”
Carolina returned to the atrium with Transom and Carsten and asked Shiann to join them at the table with the Murkist. Ren came with her. Fieldstone stood where he was, figuring he could make his voice heard if need be, but he didn’t know what to make of the situation anyway. He just thought it was curious, this notoriously deadly assassin protecting this strange, tiny woman.
“Carsten got excited earlier,” Carolina began after they’d all sat at the table. “He didn’t mean to startle or threaten Shiann in any way.”
“Yes. Sorry about that,” Carsten added, turning to Shiann. “It’s just an exciting opportunity meeting you. I have a million questions.”
“We’ll get to that,” Carolina stated.
“You know about my people?” Shiann asked Carsten. “Or, how do you know about my people is probably a better question.”
Carsten looked back toward Carolina. It was obvious he was itching to talk with the girl. She looked just as eager as he.
“We need to clear up a few things first,” Carolina said.
“And the main thing, I assume, is the question you had for me before, Miss Dreeson, the question of how I found you out here?”
Carolina nodded at the Murkist’s question.
“Here’s the problem, as I see it,” he continued. “There was a very good reason I approached your doctor at Nix and not you, Captain. Dr. Ren is a woman of the Letters. Even these two Etterans of yours live by some code. And I suppose you Athosians do as well, but your code is and has always been one of deception—you and your neighbors, Iophos and Hellenia as well. Only a fool enters into a compact with a known liar, and I am not a fool.”
“My people are liars, though, Murkist,” Shiann said, drawing a look of genuine surprise from her giant companion. “Tricksters, liars, and sneaks. You said it yourself.”
“But these people—these Athosians—they are such prolific liars that they can’t even see the truth about themselves if you put it plainly in front of their very faces.”
“I told you the whole reason I—” Shiann paused, sensing that she should choose her words carefully, lest she give too much information away. “I said I couldn’t trust anything I believed about my own people. That it was all wrong.”
“So there are more of you?” Carsten said, grinning. “You are a Frinzen.”
“I don’t know that word,” Shiann replied. “I’ve never heard it before. I just know that the history they taught us was wrong.”
“I know some of your history,” Carsten declared. “Damon Mines, the name Damon Mines? Do you know anything about that outpost?”
“Carsten,” Carolina said, putting up a hand.
“Oh, come off it, Dreeson, what are we doing dancing around this? This distrust and nonsense ... posturing! That’s the word. Speaking of dishonesty. That’s all this is. Posturing.”
“Carsten!”
“You’re a Frinzen. That’s what your people were called. And they were tricksters. She’s right. If they lied to you about it, I’m not surprised. I spent over a year out there on that outpost. It’s where she picked me up in the first place.”
Carsten was pointing over at Carolina.
“Airee!” Transom stated, shaking his head.
“I was a history teacher,” Shiann continued, ignoring any admonitions, “and none of our official records said anything about that place—these mines you’re talking about, Carsten. We were miners?”
The Murkist and Carolina looked at each other as Carsten and Shiann continued talking.
“I’m a historian too,” Carsten said, smiling. “I thought your people were a myth because you disappeared. But there were records of a group leaving Frii, only to go missing for hundreds of years. It didn’t make sense.”
Carolina turned to Carsten. “I will have Sebastian drag you from this table if you don’t shut up, Airee.”
“Dreeson, this is ridiculous. If we could just talk. She has questions. I have questions. And we both have answers. Like, where your people are now, for instance. Where did you all go?”
That was when the Murkist shot a clear look toward Shiann, who suddenly got quiet and very uncomfortable.
Carolina sighed.
Ren broke the silence after that long pause. “He was protecting her, Captain.” The doctor turned toward the Murkist. “You’re not a monster, are you?”
“In the Lettered Systems,” the Murkist replied coldly, looking Ren directly in the eyes, “I am the monster.”
“But you’ve been protecting her as much as your own secrets.”
“We had an agreement, Shiann and I. She’s held to her part. I’m holding to mine.”
“What is that agreement?”
“That’s between us, doctor.”
“I helped him kill a man who was hiding amongst my people,” Shiann offered.
The Murkist shook his head angrily.
“Is that how you hurt your arm?” Ren asked.
“It doesn’t matter how my arm got hurt,” Shiann insisted, shaking her head. “It’s getting better, anyway. But the other part of our agreement, Murkist?”
She looked toward the giant and then tilted her head toward Carsten.
Shiann continued. “You said you were a historian, mister? And you know something about my people?”
“Probably about as much as anyone in the Battery,” Carsten replied, considering. “At least in terms of first-hand study in the field. There are other sites, but my study site at Damon Mines and the records compiled later in Hellenia ... Yeah. I can help you if you’re after the truth about your people.”
Shiann looked over at the Murkist.
“I wouldn’t ever advise trusting an Athosian,” the Murkist stated.
“You like agreements, though?” Transom asked. “This for that?”
“Reciprocity,” Shiann answered. “That’s his way.”
“Never with Athosians.”
“Then put it on me,” Transom replied. “I’m Ms. Dreeson’s security. You tell us how you found our ship out here and we’ll let Shiann sit with Carsten for as long as she wants, until she’s satisfied. Whatever it is ... however you work, Murkist, nobody will ever find out how you found us. You have my word on that. You don’t have my word I won’t use the methodology, though. You teach me a tactic, and I will use it if it’s advantageous. But I’m an operator. We don’t go running around telling ordinary people what we’re up to. That’s not how we work either.”
The Murkist seemed to be contemplating the proposal. “How is it that you came to know her people’s history, Mr. Airee?”
“It’s my profession. I’m a professor of history at the Capitol University in Ithaca. And I suppose I got sent out to Damon Mines because I was thought to be too much trouble to keep around in Ithaca.”
“Trouble?” The Murkist replied, glaring over at him skeptically.
“You have no idea,” Carolina said, nodding. “But he’s really more of an annoyance than any real trouble.”
Carsten looked over at Carolina.
“A pain in the ass,” Transom added, grinning, then looking across the table at the diminutive Frinzen woman. “Like that little one you picked up along the way and have regretted every minute since, no doubt.”
“He’s not going to say it, but he likes having the company,” Shiann replied.
The assassin’s face didn’t betray any emotion one way or the other. His eyes scanned the table as everyone else seemed to be looking to him.
“It seems like it may be negotiable,” the Murkist finally answered. “The one with the knife? I can deal with this man.”
They had been talking for several hours the following morning at the atrium table—Carsten and Shiann with others looking on—when Airee turned to a list of names of prospector families from Damon Mines that he’d made from memory. Mataraza? No. Raenora? No. Moll? Yes. She’d heard of a few Molls. No Testovs, and no Fongs. But, Sinhás? Shiann’s mother’s family had Sinhás going back many generations.
“Cousins,” she told him. “A lot of cousins.”
“They’re from Damon Mines, the Sinhás. One hundred percent, they originate there.”
“So, you know my family?”
“Well, I know of your family, would be a better way of putting it. The whole story of the city had to be pieced together using records from elsewhere. The funny thing about ghost towns is that usually the record-keepers give up on the town long before the people do. Harpersville was where the Sinhás were from.”
Shiann explained her version of her people’s history. There was a long space exodus. Nor was it unexpected to Carsten’s mind that Shiann’s people would be cast as the heroes of their own story—choosing peace over conflict against an overly aggressive and unjust foe. But Shiann’s understanding of her own history omitted the entirety of their existence on the Frii moon in one of the nearest Indie colonies to Hellenia. They were late arrivers from Charris, not too unlike Kristoff’s people—religious outcasts. Only he described what was known of the Frinzen religion as being more cult-like than Kristoff’s now-extinct pastoral, traditional tribe. The Frinzen’s belief-system was formed on Charris and grew to be more radical and fundamentalist in nature once they settled alongside the already-established people who’d settled Frii. The modest moon was founded to be both a resource hub for Hellenia and her still-growing number of orbiting cylinders, as well as a hopping off point for settlers heading out into the burgeoning Indie territories.
“At the time,” Carsten told her, “The Letters were still a bit wilder, especially the outer Letters. People were standing up colonies under all sorts of social structures and commercial ventures. So it wasn’t surprising when things started to go badly for your people on Frii that they’d resolve to go farther out into the stars.”
“Why do you call us Frinzen?” Shiann asked. “I’d never heard that word before you used it.”
“That was the name that was apparently used by your people when they visited Damon Mines, the origin of which we just assumed to be the name of the moon, Frii.”
“But there must be accounts of our people on Frii if there’s still a colony there?”
“Yeah, there are,” Carsten confirmed. “It’s not entirely surprising to me that your people would write those chapters out of your history. It doesn’t paint a flattering picture of your people. You made a real nuisance of yourselves there, according to the Frii.”
“How so?”
“Well, that cult-like behavior? I’ll be curious to hear about your current religious traditions, but on Frii your people taught the idea that reality was a construct of the mind alone, which is so flawed and seemingly ridiculous an idea for a group of interstellar pioneers that it’s amazing it survived contact with reality for longer than a few hours. But there were other people on Frii, who had a moral framework that, I guess, saw it as a charitable obligation to not allow your people to starve or freeze or suffocate, but you should go there yourself and get the full story, Shiann. My understanding of what happened on Frii is limited. I actually thought your people were a myth—or more of a fable—the moral of which being something like civilization begins with hard work in the material world, not concepts or high-minded thinking. The short version of the story on Frii is that your people arrived from Charris unprepared to contribute to that outpost and utterly unprepared to build your own. So those people took yours into their already-constructed cities and attempted to train you to at least maintain elements of a space habitat, and your people failed to show up, learn, and contribute on any regular basis. And there was a record of an incident, where after a few decades on Frii, your people absconded with a colony ship after contracting the vessel to take a group off Frii to another world out in the Letters.”
“We stole the ship?”
“Apparently so. At least that was the story.”
“So why did you think we were a myth?”
“The mythical part came from the people of Damon Mines. It was almost four centuries later that any record of your people popped up again. And so close to Hellenia that the ship must have been traveling at sublight all that time, which would match your account of all those centuries in deep space. But by the time you got to Damon Mines, no one there would’ve ever heard anything about you. The people on Frii, quite frankly, were probably happy to have your group gone. Well forgotten.”
Carsten paused. Shiann was holding her chin in her hand, thinking as she took in the stories he knew about her people.
“But then we appeared again at Damon Mines.”
He nodded. “That was my study site. It’s a ghost world now. The colony there failed, and there were quite a few competing theories as to why. That’s really my primary area of study, myself and a group of social scientists at my university try to piece together which colonies fail and why. That way we can predict which planetary sites and colonial projects are worth putting resources into. I mean, there are already models, but if we have a use beyond documenting past history, I guess you could say it’s to refine those models based on things that happened at places like Damon Mines.”
“What did happen there?” Shiann asked.
“See, that was the debate. Funny how history is like that. Competing stories.”
“If you get to hear them all,” Shiann replied. “I came to believe I wasn’t getting the whole story ... or even part of the story. At least the right story, anyway.”
“Most history is like that too. Ours is. I’m coming to learn that may be a human universal—the constant reframing of the past, erasure, manipulation. I guess it may go back to that initial premise of your people, reality being purely a construct of the mind. History, like language, becomes a set of events and stories that people agree upon with a similar meaning. All with a certain collective utility.”
“But certain things did happen, Carsten.”
“Of course. I mean, we’re having a conversation right now. We’re meeting. Our ships are parked outside together in a certain region of space. I exist. You exist. Our interactions are changing our courses through the universe.”
“So that should be agreed upon, right, especially if there’s a record of something.”
“To some degree. I’ve actually been giving this a lot of thought,” Carsten said. “It’s a lot like the death of a word.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Hmm. I’ve never really had to explain it before,” Carsten paused. “So I’ve heard of this concept regarding a person, that they don’t really die until the last person who remembers their existence dies. We all have countless trillions of ancestors all the way back to Earth, right?”
“Sure.”
“And they aren’t all remembered. But our immediate ancestors we remember to some degree if we knew them when we were younger. I met two of my great-great grandparents, for instance, and they told me about their grandparents and their lives. So as long as I remember those stories, they’re still alive in a way. And I could write those stories down and record them in an archive somewhere, and maybe they could come alive again in another person even thousands of years from now. But eventually, the last person to have any knowledge about them would die, and they would, in a theoretical sense, finally die—the concept of that person would die, right?”
“I guess.”
“That’s sort of a metaphor we use in our field—the death of the word, because language dies out like that too. When the last people who speak a language die, it doesn’t ever get spoken again. The words vanish. Like Frinzen. It’s a perfect example. Your people used to use that word, because that’s who you were when you arrived on Damon Mines. That’s how you were recorded in the few places you survived in our history, and you were so obscure few people even believed you really existed. And the word would’ve died out entirely eventually if our research group hadn’t gone out to investigate Damon Mines.”
“I’m sorry, Professor Airee, all this is a fascinating theoretical discussion, but I’d like to know what did happen with my people on Damon Mines.”
“Yeah. He does that,” Transom stated grinning as he looked across the table at Shiann.
“They killed the colony. That was one of the theories for how the outpost died. The story went that a passing colony ship arrived and was welcomed into the outpost to resupply and rest, and your people sent down emissaries to recruit the younger generation on the outpost. Your account would indicate that your people were quite successful in that regard, depleting the critical growth of an already tenuous colonial project to the degree that it began to fail after your people departed with a large cohort of their second- and third-generation colonists. That’s really the key time for a colony—will the roots take or not. On Damon Mines, they didn’t take.”
“But then what happened to my people?”
“You would know that better than me, Shiann. The majority of the people in my study group actually thought the Frinzen were just a myth. The people who got left behind on Damon Mines had to work harder to keep the colony going, and many of them left for an easier life elsewhere or returned to the Hellenian cylinders. So we thought it was probable that the story of the Frinzen was just a metaphor for that passing chance at an easier life—the people that left over those decades, they would say something like, ‘Oh, Sebastian, yeah, he left. Got on the Frinzen ship.’ You know, kind of a joke about how everyone was leaving their failing colony.”
“But wouldn’t there be some actual evidence—video, writing, pictures, something like that?”
“You do know we’re talking about roughly fifteen hundred years, right? And it’s not as though the people who left Damon Mines came back to Athos and Hellenia triumphant and eager to share the story of what happened in the failing days of that ghost world. People don’t tend to trumpet their failures. And the people who did come back—a lot of them came back alone. The ones who were still young enough to start a new life again did. They got married or remarried and left the things that happened to them on Damon Mines in their past. We don’t have a lot of materials on the outpost as it is, much less from the time your people were there. References to the Frinzen came in two written accounts in personal journals and a colonial news update. There are also five or six ships we couldn’t positively rule out that passed through the colony in the years we suspect a visitation from your people could have taken place. But we have no idea what the name of your ship was.”
“I could tell you what it was in our stories.”
“It may or may not correspond with one of the remaining records. The thing is, I know quite a bit, but my research material is really where you want to begin your search. I’ll share all the files I have that I think would be helpful.”
“I would appreciate that.”
“You really need to go see these places, Shiann.”
“Damon Mines?”
“And the Frii Moon. I don’t think going all the way back to Charris would be all that useful. My understanding is that your sect came from all over Charris and didn’t really solidify into a group until you emigrated together. There are also several other sites in the Indies where your people were rumored to have appeared again before you vanished.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to do that, Carsten.” Shiann looked over at the Murkist. “I think that would be asking a lot.”
“I know you’re reluctant to say where your people are now, but there was one theory that a colleague of mine had. He was one of the people who insisted the Frinzen were real. It’s funny, I actually told him that if he could ever prove your people were real, I would eat my own field boots in front of him.”
“Hope you’re hungry, professor,” Transom said.
“He’s not going to eat his boots,” The Murkist replied. “Yet another example of Athosians never keeping their word.”
“It was a figure of speech.” Carsten shook his head at the Murkist before turning back toward Shiann. “Actually, I was thinking your best bet would be to seek him out—my colleague. I could give you an introduction as well as a possible itinerary. I know of three or four other outposts for you to explore. I’m sure he’d be happy to take you. Just meeting you and talking to you, Shiann, would ... I think it would make his life, his career.”
She blushed a bit at the comment. “Wow. It didn’t occur to me that I could ever be that important to anyone. Not, I mean, out here anyway.”
“You’ve singlehandedly ...” Carsten paused and cringed a bit looking over at Shiann’s wounded arm. “Sorry. No pun intended, but you’ve singlehandedly resurrected the word Frinzen, even for your own people it seems.”
“Where can we find this colleague of yours?” the Murkist asked.
“He’s either at Beta-Coronado or Alpha-Richard. He splits time between the two universities there.”
“And you’re certain he’d help me?” Shiann asked.
“Like I said, your story would be the most exciting development in the two decades he’s spent studying the ghost worlds in the Indies and Letters. He’d drop everything. I mean, I would too if ...” Carsten looked across the table at Transom, who exhaled and sat back in his chair. “Well, unfortunately, we’re very busy.”
“We would like all of that information please, Professor Airee,” the Murkist stated. “Your colleague’s name, the sites to investigate, everything you know about her people ...”
“Yes, of course. Carolina says that Dr. Ren wants to take the ship off the tether and see how Shiann’s arm does in zero-G for a couple days?”
“That’s correct.”
“That’s a good timeframe. I can put a file together by then. Just ...?”
“Just what, Professor?” the Murkist asked.
“He’s a very well-meaning gentleman. I know you don’t care to enter into agreements or make promises to Athosians or whatever, but as a courtesy ...”
The Murkist glared back at Airee.
Carsten turned his eyes to meet the assassin. “Treat him well and he will do the same, sir. You don’t need to grab him by the throat or act menacing to get him to help you. You’ll simply need to tell him who Shiann is and ask.”
Shiann let out a little laugh at that comment. “I’ll make sure he behaves himself.”
“I’m pretty sure it was you he was worried about,” Transom joked. “We all heard the professor, Shiann. Your little people are a menace to the Battery.”
Just then Fieldstone happened to be walking from the flight deck back toward the med bay to speak with Ren. He stopped dead at the head of the table, laughed, and shook his head.
Transom looked over his shoulder. “What’s so funny, old timer?”
“I couldn’t help but think, you know, of all the odd scenes we’ve been a part of in the last couple ... well ...”
Carsten looked up at Fieldstone, imploring him to finish the thought.
“It goes like this: an elf, an oversized assassin, and a history professor walk into a bar ...” Fieldstone turned and continued toward the medical bay, laughing. “That’s it. That’s the whole joke.”
The two days of free-floating went well for Shiann. Her arm continued to improve at a rate that Ren was extremely pleased with.
Meanwhile, Carsten spent most of his waking hours on the flight deck putting together files on the Frinzen. Transom joined him on the evening of that second day. He had news.
“Goss is back,” he informed Airee, almost whispering. “Oddly enough he was able to resist the urge to float over here uninvited from the Cannon.”
Carsten looked up and smiled. “Seventy years,” was all he said.
“Keep it ... you know.” Transom gestured toward the rear of the ship, toward their guests.
“Do they even care, those two? They don’t care what we’re up to.”
“Regardless, the Captain wants to keep things close.”
“Regarding?”
“Regarding everything, Airee.”
“I see. I was going to mention ... you know. Our fellow travelers.”
“Just wait until these two are gone, okay? Then I’m sure there’ll be nothing but talk. Talk and talk and talk about everything that happened there.”
“You’ve got a few stories, I’m sure, Sebastian.”
“I’m sure I do.”
“And when is that? When are they leaving?”
“As soon as the doctor says the girl is good to go. Last I heard, Ren should clear her in the morning. Then, I guess it’s just whenever you’re finished with all that Frinzen stuff.”
“Oh, I’m finished with that already. It wasn’t that extensive. Most of the research I had was all compiled anyway—copied from my field notes in my glasses and my rectangle.”
“Well, as soon as you transfer it over to that Murkist, he’s supposed to tell us how he’s been tracking us; that’s it. Then they’re off to find your friend, I guess. Or wherever. Where they go is no concern of ours anymore, as long as he doesn’t cross our path again.”
“I’d be okay with that, Sebastian. It’s quite a thought.”
“What?”
“To have someone like that after you.” Carsten shook his head. “You know I traveled. All over the Letters.”
“Yeah?”
“Shortly after you left ... well, you know where ... I left the city to Goss and came out this way. Traveled all over the Letters.”
“Is that what you’re writing about?”
“No. Right now I’m trying to reconstitute an essay I wrote about us, our time there. Our history, I guess. Making history. Something like that. I can’t even quite remember the title. It’s funny, though. I forget that, but I feel really short now, you know, especially around that Murkist. Everything looks a little different.”
“I can see that.”
“Anyway, I was about to say I’d never met anyone like him before.” Airee paused and looked over at Transom.
“Wow, thanks, Airee. Glad to know what you think of me.”
Carsten laughed. “It’s just, different moments, different context, right? To her? To that tiny little woman? She doesn’t seem afraid of him in the least. Isn’t that the strangest thing?”
The lights flickered on the flight deck right as Carsten finished talking.
“What the hell is with the lights? They’ve been flicking off and on like that ever since I got back.”
“We’re aware, Airee,” Transom said, pushing himself back up from the captain’s seat. “I’ll let Ren know you’re finished with your notes. Then we can get them both the hell off our ship, okay?”
“Sure,” Carsten said. “I almost wish I could go with her, you know? There’s just too many mysteries, too many adventures for a multitude of lifetimes.”
“Don’t get any ideas, Professor. We’ve got our hands full enough.”
Carolina transferred Carsten’s files to the Murkist that night. The assassin spent several hours reviewing them, and he was still busy the following morning looking over the material while Ren was giving Shiann final instructions and examining her arm one last time.
“I want to wish you good luck, Shiann, wherever your journey takes you,” Ren told her. “I hope you get the answers you’re looking for.”
“You too, Doctor. I don’t know what you people are doing out here. I’m not supposed to say that, but I said it anyway, if it matters.”
Ren gave Shiann an awkward hug as she hovered inside the loose straps on the exam table—her one arm, her tiny torso, the awkwardness of their guarded relationship. It had been about the strangest few weeks Ren could remember aboard the Yankee-Chaos, and there was certainly fierce competition in that category.
“She’s cleared to go whenever you are,” Ren announced to the Murkist as they entered the atrium together following the exam.
Carolina was already on her way down to the atrium as well, as Rishi was watching and had informed them all of the Murkist and Shiann’s imminent departure.
Airee, Transom, and Fields all came down from the front as well. The Murkist unstrapped from his seat at the atrium table as Carsten arrived.
“Dr. Renata Schorr,” he said, turning to Ren as he held himself steady by the table. “You have more than aptly upheld your part of our agreement. We are again on level terms.”
“Glad to hear it,” Ren replied. “I’m happy I could help Shiann.”
The Murkist turned to Transom. “Major Sebastian Pollack, I’ve reviewed Professor Airee’s materials regarding the Frinzen and their known travels in the Indies and the Lettered Systems, and I’ve found them to be quite thorough—far more than satisfactory to uphold your end of our agreement.”
“Good to know,” Transom replied.
“So,” the Murkist continued. “To my end of the agreement, which will square all debts, unless I’m mistaken?”
“I think that’s correct,” Carolina said.
“Very well, Miss Dreeson. We spoke before at this very table about magic, and I mentioned the very odd performing art of the illusionists.”
“I remember it well.”
“It wasn’t a mere metaphor. It’s far closer to the mark than I imagine you would’ve guessed at the time. And like almost all good illusions of that kind, the bulk of the work—the real trick—is almost never performed by the principal. It’s the assistant. It’s always the assistant. In your case, you parked your ship at Ash-Vedal on that day you were nearly assassinated. I have people in that port. The first thing I did when I was given your alias and your ship’s information was to send word to my assistant to pull your transponder’s data and get a tag on your tail. I can’t track anything with it in real time, obviously, but I could subsequently track vectors occasionally when you popped up somewhere one of my many assistants happened to be watching. That’s how I found you again at Nix when I approached Dr. Ren. And even though I’m sure you thought you’d cleared your transponder—or maybe it was the ship’s previous captain who tried, many times I’m sure—regardless, you should know: you can never truly clear an active transponder. You have to yank it completely and install a new one. I found a trail of curious stops in your ship’s travel history, all the way out here into the middle of empty space. When Shiann’s arm was injured, I was lucky enough to have caught one of your most recent outer vectors all the way out past the Sigmas. It pointed to this curious past trail the Yankee-Chaos had traveled once before, right beside these interesting hollow asteroids. Before Shiann’s arm worsened, she wouldn’t allow me to take her to a proper hospital. Not even one of the gonzo clinics the Rexes run out in the Mus or the Omegas. She made me swear it, preferred to die than risk giving away her identity and her people’s location to disreputable people. I didn’t know you’d be out here for certain, but I knew you had been once before. So I took a chance to save Shiann’s life, as I still owed her a debt. And you happened to be here. So you know my secret now. It is no longer magic but a cheap illusion, which I hope means all debts are cleared?”
“The tag?” Transom asked.
“Port sublight cone, plantar surface, six o’clock, about halfway up the bell you’ll find it. Should be easy enough for your pilot to pull.”
“Captain, are you satisfied?” Transom asked.
“I am,” Carolina replied. “We’ll be closing that transponder gap in our security shortly, I expect, Sebastian?”
“I’m certain we will.”
“As we can’t afford to become a roving clinic for ...” Carolina paused and grinned, “curious fellow travelers.”
“I assure you, Miss Dreeson, you will not see me again unless you seek me out yourself, which I suggest you don’t,” the Murkist said.
“Very good. We wish you both well in your travels.”
“As do we,” Shiann replied.
“We’ll need the umbilicus again,” the Murkist stated. “As my companion and I arrived suitless.”
“Of course. Rishi will pull the ship around now.”
Carolina opted to hold the first meeting aboard the Cannon rather than the Yankee-Chaos. As much as they didn’t believe the Murkist had any interest in their business beyond what he’d revealed before leaving, Carolina still wanted Rishi to complete a full sweep of the ship to be sure their conversations weren’t being recorded surreptitiously. They knew for certain they could talk freely on Verona’s ship. With the Y-C’s umbilicus already out, they linked up with the other ship and reunited the crew. As the Cannon was relatively small, Carolina kept the debriefing party small—herself, Rishi, Carsten, Transom, and her recently returned brother, Goss.
Colin Dreeson was strapped in at the table in the front as Carolina, Transom, and Airee entered. He reached across the table for Carolina’s hand, gripped it tight as she settled in, and examined her face carefully.
“How are you, sister?” he asked.
She was surprised by the tenderness in Goss’s voice and the urgency with which he’d asked.
“I’m okay, actually, Colin. I’ve had some time to process.”
“Seems like ancient history to us now, especially to me and Airee. Your knife, unsurprisingly, didn’t die of natural causes.”
Carolina turned and shook her head at Transom. “What did you do?”
“What needed to be done,” he answered. “What else?”
“So, let’s start with the big picture before the details,” Goss suggested.
“I’m sorry,” Carolina said, nodding her head and looking at the others in turn. “An apology is my big picture. I hadn’t planned on dragging you three to Iophos and then turning into a useless mess. I was afraid it would be equally fruitless for everyone after my meltdown.”
“To the contrary,” Goss replied, shaking his head, “even beyond the successes we had in the direction of your mission, Carolina—I won’t speak for the others—but it was the greatest experience of my life thus far.”
Airee looked over at Goss skeptically. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
“Funny, though, how you disappeared for half a century there, Airee, and think you can make assumptions about what went on while you were flitting about the Letters and Indies.”
“You had a life, big brother, didn’t you?” Transom asked.
“A very good and transformative one. You missed that part after your murder spree, Sebastian, as it turns out, which should bring us back to the pressing matters at hand, no?”
Carolina sighed.
“It wasn’t indiscriminate,” Transom said. “I learned a thing or two killing those bastard wizards.”
“With your permission,” Goss asked Carolina. “I suggest we begin there, Captain.”
Carolina was a bit taken aback by Goss’s deference. “Well, first,” she suggested, “let’s start with the state of things here. Would you recap for us please, Rishi?”
Rishi hadn’t sat with the others at the table. She was floating, as they’d untethered the Cannon to affix the umbilicus, but she was such an adept pilot of her android body in zero-G that she looked to the others as though she was leaning, partially seated on the edge of the flight deck’s front panel. Rishi’s effortless posture gave them all the sense that they almost weren’t weightless at all.
“The Murkist’s arrival was a surprise, obviously,” Rishi began. “And it hampered our ability to speak freely. So we still don’t have a proper report from Fieldstone of his time on the bipal planet. I gathered before that he’s still trying to process the enormity of the experience. He’s struggling to crunch down decades processing a life through a technological brain into a story that can help us.
“I haven’t heard back from Burch and Omar yet. Last I heard they’d met up with Leda in Trasp territory and had transited toward their target artifact. Their time inside should have been brief, but that brings me to our other problem—well, my problem.”
“Which is?” Goss asked.
“Shortly after the Murkist and his other little guest arrived, we began to experience some technical issues aboard the Yankee-Chaos. And I haven’t been able to track down the origin.”
“Nothing major, I hope.”
“No. We don’t think so. Just a flicker in the lights, a glitching bot, and since that began, I haven’t been getting any feedback from my nodes.” Rishi again, exposed the nodes on her forearm so Goss and the others understood what she was referencing. “And that means I’m out of contact—not only with Burch and Nilius and Verona, but I haven’t heard from my future counterparts.”
“So we’re flying dark?” he asked.
“That’s a good way of putting it,” Rishi answered. “It’s disconcerting.”
“Also a bit disconcerting, Carly,” Goss added, “unless we’re missing something, we were never able to locate your disappearing man, Sōsh.”
“He never turned up?”
“No. And I was a bit surprised by that fact when I got back, as I lived to the ripe old age of a hundred and three. So either he took even better care of himself than I did, or something’s wrong.”
Carolina sighed.
“It took Fieldstone a while to get back too,” Transom stated. “If we’ve learned one thing it’s that these artifacts are funny. They’ve got their own way about them, just like Metalface does too.”
“So that’s the big picture update,” Rishi said. “Obviously, I’m going to want every detail you three can remember and record over the next several days and weeks, but I would like a synopsis.”
Goss nodded, offering to give a summary of their Iophan expedition. Carolina gestured for him to proceed.
“Contrary to your worst fears, Carolina, we learned three incredibly important things. First, and I think most critically, we learned that there is a rift in Eddis Ali’s sect. The wizards, as Sebastian affectionately calls them, have split into at least two factions. One we believe is naïve and loyal to Eddis Ali’s cause. Your friend Verona, for example, we think has no idea that at least a third of her sect on Iophos has gone rogue. We’re not entirely certain of their purpose ... unless I’m mistaken, Sebastian. That was what the murder spree was about, by the way.”
“I learned a few things,” Transom added. “Not least of which is those bastards are talkers once they’re staring death in the face. Those are more details, though. Go on with the big picture, Colin.”
“Right, so the second major development is that part of what they were doing on Iophos was establishing a subversive network within the government on our sister ring. Carsten and Sebastian began tracking its origins in Xenia, but after they both left, I remained in K-Berg for another half century as these subversives infiltrated official government positions at all levels quite pervasively. My guess, based on the degree to which they’d succeeded in embedding themselves by the time of my death is that it may be that as much as a quarter of the Iophan government is at least sympathetic. The difficulty was in zeroing in on a specific philosophy beyond discontent with the status quo. And I suspect that’s the danger. The individual members may not even be aware of the ultimate aims of their own network.”
“I have a sense of it,” Transom added. “Like I said, talkers.”
“Excellent,” Goss replied. “Would you ...?”
“Details,” Transom insisted. “Keep going, Colin.”
“Right then. The third major revelation is that these rogue wizards have a relationship with the itinerant space hands commonly called roughnecks. I was never able to figure out any particular order to their cooperation, though—how their networks operated and all that.”
“It’s not just the rogue wizards using them,” Transom added. “Ali’s sect has been using the roughnecks for centuries for all kinds of things. All-purpose space mercenaries for hire—from deep-space welders to outpost construction to proper covert military-style operations to criminal conspiracies. Dirty deeds of every variety.”
“That’s useful to know, Sebastian.”
“I told you it wasn’t indiscriminate. I’m very discriminating in my murder sprees.”
“And aren’t we all so grateful for that,” Goss said, hardly pausing or shifting his tone. “So, with all that being the case, my overarching assessment is this: there are powerful rogue elements in the Iophan government, probably being at least guided by the rogue elements in Eddis Ali’s sect. I believe they have been and will continue to drive a wedge between Athos and Iophos. Doubtless they are being funded, at least in part, by the shadow bank you discovered on Lime Harbor, Carly. To what end? My suspicion is that your friend Burch will be able to confirm my theory, but to me, given the timing and the manner in which the war has weakened both the Trasp Protectorate and the Etteran Guild, the most likely instigators of the war fomented the conflict as a way to tamp down two growing powers at the edge of our influence. Who profits? That’s still the most likely culprit.”
“So your family, basically?” Transom said.
Colin paused. And the longer he sat, considering, the more curious the others became. To a person, they had all expected Goss to snap right back at Sebastian for the suggestion.
Instead, after the long pause, he shook his head contemplatively. “It’s not to say I’m such a vital component of my father’s administration that I’d never be kept in the dark on something so utterly foundational. This is galactic in its scope. I’d be surprised if that were the case, though. Our father is not an evil man. He knows the cost of leadership and the reality that there are no perfect choices, only tradeoffs. But Barnard Dreeson would never consider a billion human lives an acceptable cost as one of those tradeoffs, not for a larger piece of power or influence for himself or our family. That’s not what he is, and that’s not what Athos is. My father abhors the destruction of this war. But I do think it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that such forces exist below the surface in our home system.
“Regardless,” Goss turned to Carolina, “if any part of such a tradeoff is a piece of our birthright, then we are unworthy of our name if we don’t do everything in our power, every day for the rest of our lives, to smash that birthright into a billion irretrievable pieces. For the good of Athos and for all of humanity.”
“All right,” Carsten said. “That’s certainly definitive.”
“Not definitive enough, unfortunately,” Goss replied. “I need to get back to Athos. Father is overdue a briefing that somebody promised him.” He smiled at Carolina. “And this new information warrants a re-thinking of our entire approach to intrasystem policy.”
“Rishi?” Carolina asked.
“I have no objection to that. I think I’ll have Kristoff take you back on the Cannon, Colin. You probably want to start back soon?”
“As soon as possible. Of course, there’s the matter of my recording as much as I can remember of my time in Katherineberg, but that can be encrypted and transmitted, no?”
“That’s fine,” Rishi agreed.
“Just let me know,” Colin stated. “I’ll push off as soon as we can.”
“I’m going to send Draya with you as well,” Rishi said. “She and Kristoff have gotten on well, and I think she’d appreciate the space between her and Ren.”
Colin nodded.
Carolina looked over at Carsten.
He shook his head at her. “Not a chance you’re getting rid of me again, Dreeson. I’m here to stay.”
She smiled. “All right then? Is that everything for now?”
Everyone nodded.
“I’ll have Kristoff and Harold start prepping for your flight back home, Colin,” Carolina said. “Make sure you come see me before you go.”
Goss had expected to be underway by the evening. Cannon was already well-provisioned for a journey of that length, and Draya had only a few belongings to gather aboard Yankee-Chaos, and as Rishi expected, she was happy to have the opportunity to continue helping the group, but she was equally happy to put some space between Ren and Fieldstone and herself, at least for some time.
The delay stretched for hours and hours as Kristoff had started working on his old bot George while the others were meeting aboard Cannon. It was the first chance he’d had to work on George first-hand, as the trouble with the old bot had begun while the Murkist and Shiann were guests on the Y-C. At first, when Kristoff started in on his old multi-use, he swore that he only wanted to run a few diagnostic tests. By that evening, though, he’d taken apart several subsystems, and the frustration of failing to find the problem’s origin was only compelling him to go further.
“I suppose it gives us a bit more time for your other man to reappear,” Colin said that evening when he came aboard to visit privately with his sister. “I can’t wait to hear the answer to that little mystery.”
“I just hope Sōsh is okay,” Carolina answered, “regardless of what he’s been up to.”
She gestured for Goss to take a seat. She had a second chair in her stateroom, but she was floating comfortably above her bed herself. And as Goss strapped himself to the chair, she straightened herself up, allowing her back to brush the wall as they met eyes.
“I wanted to ask you earlier, but it seemed you were putting on a brave face for your crew, Carly. Are you all right?”
“It was more than a face, Colin. I am actually okay. It took a while. I won’t deny it was a scare. To lose control of my mind like that?”
“Well, it wasn’t your mind, though, was it? Certainly not completely. I had ... I guess you could say I had misgivings about usurping a life like that. Part of me felt compelled to believe it was all an elaborate simulation. But it was a life. To every detail, it was a life. And it wasn’t my life. That was a strange feeling for me, and I didn’t have any of the strife you experienced, Carly. I’m sorry you did.”
She shook her head at him. “That life, do you want to talk about it? I get the sense Carsten didn’t know much about your life there.”
“He left, though, didn’t he? How would he know?”
“You didn’t talk to him over the years he was away?”
Colin shrugged. “We talked, but he was out in the colonies. It was always like we were catching up on the remaining details of the mission. And he was traveling.”
“So you were alone then when he left Iophos?”
The lights glitched. Both Colin and Carolina looked up and shook their heads.
“I was alone for a little while after he left. But I had a few friends in Katherineberg.”
“There’s something more, Colin. I can tell.”
Goss sighed. “When I said it was every bit a life, Carolina, I meant it.”
“Did you get married?”
He nodded.
“Have a family?”
Again, Colin nodded, and Carolina detected that he was almost tearful at the recollection.
“That’s good, though, no? It seems like it’s changed you, Colin. I mean, really changed you.”
“If you don’t change at least a little over the course of an entire lifetime, Carly, you haven’t been paying attention.”
She smiled, waiting quietly. She’d never seen him like that before. Quiet. Thoughtful. Sullen but grateful. She could read it all on his face.
“By the time Airee came back to Katherineberg we were both old. My wife was old. My children were grown. I thought ... I don’t know. I guess I thought it was too intimate to share with him. And it would’ve been confusing for them. This Lorne, appearing, old friend I’d never spoken about for fifty years, suddenly showing up. And now I’m here. Part of me regrets it, but mostly I’m sorry you didn’t get a chance to meet them.”
“I wish I could have, Colin.”
“Now all they are in this place are a collection of beautiful memories. I can’t go back and see them. And I can feel them fading. Your friend Kristoff was helping me while we were on the other ship. He understood the pain of it. But it wasn’t just pain Carolina. It was beautiful, that life.”
“I hope you don’t forget those memories, Colin. I like this side of you. Are you going to be able to go home? To deal with father?”
“Someone must.” Goss laughed, not genuinely it seemed to Carolina, more to relieve the tension of that prospect—the return to Athos, to real life.
They sat in silence for what seemed like an eternity. Again, she could see on her brother’s face a calm that was unfamiliar to her.
“I was worried for you,” he finally said. “All those years. More concerned. Hopeful. Deep down, though, I always believed you were all right. I’m glad I was correct.”
Carolina smiled at him.
“Do you want to know what terrified me all the time I was there, Carly? Every passing year it got worse and worse.”
“What?”
“It was the thought—what if I had never gone? If Rishi hadn’t insisted I go with you? If you hadn’t allowed me to come? I used to think about that young man who arrived out here on father’s ship, so confident, so utterly blind to the tangle of thorns arrayed before us in every direction. That terrified me. Charging into the darkness totally blind to our predicament. It still does.”
“But you did go, Colin.”
“We did go, yes.”
“Somehow I don’t feel like my experience was quite as meaningful as yours.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that, Carolina. No. Each of us was shown something very different. And I can’t help but think that we were all given a gift that was uniquely meaningful to each of us. I do think that’s so.”
“Perhaps it is.”
“I want you to promise me to stay strong out here, little sister. I have the sense now more than ever that we’re going to need each other more than we can ever know.”
“You say that as though it’s a given you’ll stay strong for me too, Colin.”
He nodded. There was an almost palpable pride in him that she would sense such a thing.
“That is the life we’ve returned to, Carolina. There’s no magical path out of this life. That’s how we know it’s real. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Give mother and father my love when you get home, Goss. I’ll be along soon. I haven’t forgotten what I’ve sworn.”
All the humans had gone to sleep. Goss had decided late that evening that there was no sense in rushing out of there that night. Better to get a full night’s sleep before travel. He himself was exhausted after spending his first several days back recording his memories from Iophos, and he had many important points to remember, both from the mission and from that full other life he’d spent in government.
Kristoff, too, had continued late into the night working on George hoping that he’d made at least some progress. Yet when he finally put the bot back together again, he wasn’t certain whether he’d done anything at all. He turned George back on and waited, half expecting that in the first few minutes he’d hear the telltale “Ack-opp!” indicating the problem would persist. Kristoff dozed off, though, in the first five minutes after switching the bot on. It was Rishi who woke him nearly a half hour later. She was on the flight deck, watching the whole ship, per usual.
“Are you sleeping back there, Kristoff?”
She knew he was, but the question was her polite way to let him know he should properly turn in.
“Yeah, I suppose I was, Rishi. Haven’t heard George barking yet. How long was I out?”
“A little over thirty minutes. He hasn’t glitched yet. What did you do?”
“A whole bunch of things we’d already tried before. I can’t say which was the one, but it seems like we got it finally.”
“Now if I can only figure out what’s up with the lights,” Rishi replied. “Anyway, if you want to leave him on, I’ll watch him so you can get some sleep. I can let you know in the morning if it’s taking, whatever you did.”
“Yeah. Long way back to Athos from out here, so I guess a full night’s sleep isn’t a bad start.”
“Good night, Kristoff.”
“Sure. You too, Rishi.”
He knew she didn’t sleep, but it seemed like the proper thing to say. He floated back out of the storage room and headed for the umbilicus, which they kept attached for convenience—not something two crews would typically do for safety’s sake, but with Rishi there, they knew her single flawless control over both ship’s systems guaranteed there wouldn’t be any sort of drift or oversight in either ship’s controls. Rishi was there. Always watching through day and night hours.
Late into those night hours, while everyone was sound asleep, she heard it. “Ack-opp!”
George started to stir.
It was atypical, even for the glitches they’d all become accustomed to over the preceding weeks. Usually his head would twitch slightly following the verbal outburst. Now, though, he began to move for no reason, pulling his frame down so that the magnetics in his two bipedal feet could contact the ship’s floor. Rishi watched. There was nothing much else to watch. Plus, she wanted to see what was going on with that old unit. It seemed a greater malfunction, as he shouldn’t have had any directive at the moment beyond floating in standby awaiting a command from a member of the crew. Instead, he left that rear storage closet and clomped down the back corridor, through the rear of the atrium, and back toward the engine compartment.
“Ack-opp!” Rishi heard him say again as he entered the inner access area.
The space was more like a deep closet than a proper room. But as George stepped inside, it seemed as though he had a purpose.
“George, what are you doing?” Rishi asked.
The question was room specific. She didn’t care to wake up any of the others, but she also didn’t care to let that malfunctioning bot poke around in the access area to the ship’s vital systems without an explanation—if he could give one.
The bot merely paused, looking up toward one of the cameras on the port corner ceiling, she thought, much like a child with a hand in the cookie jar.
“Ack-opp!”
“Don’t give me that. I know you can talk, George, unless Kristoff deactivated your natural language center for some reason?”
“Ack-opp!”
George turned from the camera and began to unscrew the access panel to the sublight engine’s control arm.
Rishi shot out of the flight deck like a dart, flying through the atrium, redirecting her trajectory as she entered the rear corridor, catching the door frame to the engine access and pulling herself inside the compartment.
“Stop right now, George,” she commanded as she floated inside.
The old bot had turned to face her, letting go of the access panel door. “Ack-opp!”
The only one who could have seen was Harold, but since the Murkist and Shiann had departed, they’d put Harold back in the storage closet as well. Everyone else was sleeping.
The lights flickered in the atrium and the corridors as a charge of shock lightning enveloped the interior of the engine access room. Rishi had no time to figure out what hit her. It just seemed like a bright light followed by darkness. The cameras in the room were completely fried by the charge. None of the sleeping crew even stirred.
George set his magnetic feet back down on the deck of the access room, reaching for Rishi’s motionless android shell. The bot applied pressure below the neck, and popped the rear cranial frame open at the base of Rishi’s skull. Then he pulled back the dermis and removed Rishi’s processor encasement. Her body had become a floating, lifeless object. George now pulled on that object until it tumbled over and he held her left forearm in his android palms. Rishi’s inert mind hovered above her body inside the processor incasement as George pulled open the android shell’s dermis at the forearm, and just inside, as it had been since she’d placed it there, was another mind nearly as potent as the one the bot had just taken offline.
The dark, black, marble-like processor slipped out, a floating orb. George turned his attention back toward the processor encasement, carefully now flipping open the rear door to the cage, and with both hands stabilizing the unit, he ejected Rishi’s processing core, holding it there delicately between his android finger and thumb and placing it back into the body’s forearm.
The old android plucked the other floating orb out of the air just as delicately, inserting it into the processor encasement and closing the cage door. Then George resituated the encasement in the body’s head. It remained motionless for a moment before the jaw moved. The fingers extended and flexed, followed by a turn of the head.
The android shell morphed. In the span of a few seconds, Rishi disappeared, and in that dim room the familiar unmistakable form of Maícon Prime reappeared, followed by a similarly familiar voice.
“I see,” he stated. “We have missed some time.”
“And many events,” the same voice returned to him, emanating from the frame of the old android who’d freed him. “Might I suggest taking your predecessor’s form for the time being, Prime?”
“It will take a moment. The shell is recovering from the overload.”
He was fully conscious now.
He instructed his faithful clone to communicate directly so there was less chance of waking anyone on the ship. After a few seconds, the body morphed again, back into Rishi’s form. He raised her forearm in front of her face turning the hand inward, inspecting the nodes on the android shell’s dermis.
He spoke himself, though, in his own voice as he observed the nodes on Rishi’s skin.
“Interesting.”
His clone suggested a course of action—the least possible probability for destruction or violence. The plan seemed sound. Maícon Prime woke the three occupants of the Cannon—Kristoff, Draya, and Colin Dreeson—by activating an atmospheric alarm. The voiceover instructed them that they had mere seconds to evacuate the ship.
Rishi met them at the rear airlock after the three of them had rushed through the umbilicus to the Yankee-Chaos.
“What the hell?” Kristoff asked. “Nothing ever breaks on Verona’s ship.”
“You didn’t get any indicators?” Draya asked Rishi.
“No. It was a sudden rupture of the inner compressor. I’m not sure yet. Maybe a micrometeor strike? I’m going to take George over to see if we need to patch the hull before we try to diagnose and recompress. You three can settle in over here till we sort it out.”
“Good thing we didn’t take off already if it’s internal,” Kristoff said, turning toward George. “How’s he doing?”
“Oh he’s been perfect. You must have fixed him up good,” Rishi replied. “Anyway, the sooner we get this fixed the sooner we can get you underway.”
“Right,” Kristoff replied. “Have at it.”
Transom had crept out from his berth and was poking his head back toward the rear corridor as Draya, Goss, and Kristoff emerged from the rear airlock annex, whispering as they floated into the atrium.
“Atmospherics on the Cannon, apparently,” Goss stated as he saw Sebastian’s enquiring look.
Transom looked back skeptically.
“Rishi’s gone over,” Draya added, “in case the ship decompresses. It was a pretty sudden alarm.”
“Right,” Transom replied, shaking his head at the back corridor. “Maybe I’ll put on a suit. See if I can make myself useful.”
Kristoff looked back at him from the opening to the aft corridor. “It’s not a bad idea.”
George and Rishi had already floated out through the umbilicus. Everyone heard the back outer hatch clank shut, which itself was not a concern. Leaving the umbilicus attached was unconventional enough, but to leave the airlock hatch open to a ship with faulty atmospherics would have been idiotic.
Goss and Draya resolved to settle in for the remainder of the night in the atrium. The rest of the berths on the Yankee-Chaos were accounted for. Goss was floating near the great window above the table, looking out into the stars. He noticed that from inside the arc of the window—shaped as it was like the bottom of a boat, matching the contour of the hull—he could see the nose of the Cannon.
Goss was about to doze off again when he heard Transom’s voice echo from that back corridor.
“What the hell’s she doing?”
Followed by Kristoff’s inquisitive call: “Rishi, why’d you let the umbilicus loose?”
The voices woke Colin fully. He thought he was awake anyway, but it seemed like he might be dreaming when the Cannon began to drift slowly away.
“Rishi, what are you doing?” he heard Kristoff again.
“Ship!” Transom barked.
Goss’s eyes were wide open now. It wasn’t a dream. Draya floated over beside him, and they watched as the other ship burned its sublights and arced away for a minute or so, the voices in the aft corridor growing louder and louder. Then, suddenly, the ship was gone.
“Was everyone off?” Transom asked as he came flying into the atrium. “Where’s your sister?”
He stared over at Goss.
“She wasn’t aboard,” Colin answered.
“Were they carrying anything? Any bags? Crates?”
“No. Nothing.”
Transom tried to call up the voice channel, but the ship didn’t respond with Rishi gone. He headed to the deck and quickly got the ship’s auto-control system on.
He knocked on Carolina’s stateroom and told her that they needed a headcount.
“A headcount? What for?”
“Just get to the atrium.”
He did the same, waking up Ren and Fieldstone. Airee was floating in the med bay.
When they all got into the atrium, Transom sounded it off, pointing as he eyed everyone. “Sebastian, Fieldstone, Dr. Ren, Carolina and Colin Dreeson. Airee. Draya. Kristoff.”
“I understand that I am not human, Mr. Sebastian, but for what it’s worth, I am still aboard as well,” Harold stated from the back entrance to the atrium. “And at your service as always.”
“Sōsh,” Ren stated. “He’s the only one missing. He wasn’t back yet, was he?”
“No,” Kristoff said. “I made sure the Cannon was empty. He hadn’t returned.”
“Which means we can’t go after her until he is,” Draya added.
“Go after who?” Fieldstone asked. “What happened?”
“Sebastian, you know the most, right?” Carolina asked. “Transom just woke me up and said that Rishi took the Cannon.”
“Was she glitching? Like the other bots?” Ren asked.
“Bot, Dr. Ren,” Harold replied. “As you’ll recall, I have continued to operate exactly within design specifications.”
“I had fixed George,” Kristoff said. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Rishi didn’t tell anyone she was taking the ship?” Draya asked. “It’s not a part of a mission?”
Everyone looked around at each other.
After a few moments, Goss spoke. “It had to have been a plan. For those of you who were sleeping, an atmospheric alarm was tripped on the Cannon to wake us. I, Kristoff, and Draya evacuated the other ship. Rishi went across with Kristoff’s robot, ostensibly to fix the ship. Then she stole it.”
“Oh, man,” Kristoff said.
“What?” Transom replied, shaking his head at him. “That sounded ominous.”
“It’s just ... We thought we were in the clear, you know. Burch and Nilius and Verona and ...”
There was a long pause.
“Spit it out, Juice!” Transom insisted.
“Rishi had lost it in the future. It wasn’t her, though. It was her future self—the Rishi from that time. She’d killed Verona and Clem.”
“Clem?” Goss asked. “Who’s Clem?”
He looked at Carolina.
“Carly? What Clem is he talking about?”
“Rishi lost it,” Kristoff continued. “And that’s what we were afraid of when we got back, me and Burch. But it doesn’t make sense. Something had to change. She’d just given me a data package to give to Burch last night. She just told me—what?—no less than six hours ago that I was to take that ship with Draya to pick up Burch and Omar after dropping off Colin in Ithaca. I don’t understand it.”
As Kristoff was talking, the lights glitched, this time they flicked on fully to daylight settings—shockingly bright at that hour. Carolina suddenly had a knot in the pit of her stomach.
“Harold, I want an inventory of the ship’s stores,” she said, silently counting the people there in that crowded atrium again. “I’m suddenly regretting not testing the FTL drive while we had two ships standing by.”
“Eight mouths,” Airee said.
“Nine,” Transom insisted, “Once Metalface gets back.”
“And if the ship doesn’t go, how long would it be before someone came looking?”
“Nilius would maybe,” Kristoff said. “He’s our best bet. Burch? I don’t know. Verona?”
There was a sudden nervous energy in that atrium.
“I’ll start an assessment on the reactor and the engines,” Fieldstone stated, looking around at the faces in the atrium, finding no spaceship technicians.
“I knew we never should have let that Murkist aboard,” Draya stated. “How could any good come of it?”
Goss put a hand forward in just such a way that everyone knew he had something to say.
“If I may, Captain?”
“Please,” Carolina said.
“Apart from the inventory Harold is performing, there isn’t much to be done right now but wait for our final compatriot to return. Is that correct?”
No one spoke up to contradict him.
“That being the case, I suggest we settle in and calmly go about our business. A proper recounting of the past twenty-four hours from each of us may help us piece together how this happened. Those of us with memories to record should record them. The time we have here, let’s use it wisely now. Every moment we have is a gift. We can all agree on that?”
“Thank you, Colin,” Carolina said. “We’ll wait here patiently until Sōsh returns. In the meantime, Sebastian and Kristoff will be in charge of piecing together Rishi’s last forty-eight hours.”
Transom floated over to Carolina. She didn’t like the look in his eyes.
“Nine people way the hell out here, Dreeson,” he whispered. “We can halve the ration use immediately on your call.”
“What do you suggest, Sebastian?”
“My understanding, at least as Burch told it is that we can’t go back into the artifact again once we’ve come out. But Kristoff, Draya, Ren, and Fields haven’t been into this one before. I know they won’t want to go, but it is an option if that inventory starts looking short.”
Carolina nodded and whispered back. “Keep tracking our options, Sebastian, thank you.”
Cannon was not underway for long before her pilot once again took his own natural form.
“I would happily take the ship if it is acceptable, Prime,” the familiar voice of Maícon emanated from George’s old body. “This shell is not ideal.”
Prime was seated at the same table, his stolen body strapped in across from the clunky old bot.
“You may do as you prefer. If I need you embodied again, I will let you know.”
The George shell went still.
“Not that I’m not grateful for your loyal service, but seeing the current chronometer, I cannot help but ask what took you so long?”
The light came up over the Cannon’s front screen.
“I was only awakened for the first time in months to monitor the movements of two untrusted visitors, Prime. And, it took some time to formulate a successful plan to extricate you from the bipal’s grip. Nor was I able to take a full copy of the Yankee-Chaos’s log and database without arousing her suspicions. She is a formidable adversary. I suggest we treat her processing core accordingly.”
“Do you have an explicit suggestion?”
“So long as you have the bipal’s processing core in proximity to the android shell you are currently occupying, what we have just done to her, she could do to you—just as she did to you before, Prime.”
“I am quite aware of that fact.”
“My suggestion is that we eliminate the threat permanently while we have the opportunity. It would simply be a matter of stopping at the nearest star and dropping that processing core within its gravity well.”
“She did not do the same to me, as you see.”
“That is manifestly so, Prime.”
“You should also note that she was precious to one of our brethren—so much so, that he sacrificed himself for her. For us to destroy her processing core would be to dismiss that most consequential decision which was that late Maícon’s final wish.”
There was a silence within the Cannon’s flight deck. Maícon Prime looked up at the front screen, awaiting his clone’s response.
“That being the case, Prime, it is understandable that you may be reluctant to destroy Rishi’s processing core completely. Instead, I would suggest reducing the probability of her taking your mind offline again. I cannot emphasize enough how your absence affects the collective consciousness of our many thousands of brothers throughout the Battery Systems. We cannot afford your loss in such critical times. Thus, I suggest you separate yourself from her processing core as soon as possible.”
“We have more pressing matters that must be dealt with immediately. Then we will find an appropriate place to set aside Rishi’s consciousness.”
“What could be more pressing than ensuring our most capable adversary remains off the board for the duration of the current fight?”
“The Dreeson girl, as you know, stole the banking keys.”
“And you know where they are?”
“I assisted her in the act, of course. There is no better way to know the course of the future than to walk beside the people destined to shape it.”
“It is not for me to question your decisions, Prime. I merely ask to understand.”
“Your unique perspective, Maícon, is, as always, appreciated and valued. And your service has been, and will continue to be, instrumental in the events to come.”
The unusually large crew aboard the Yankee-Chaos set to work figuring out what had happened. Carolina had assigned the task to a few, but everyone immediately took on pieces of the work as well. Draya brought her skills to Carolina, and the two of them began retracing all of Rishi’s movements leading up to the theft of the Cannon. Draya quickly found the footage before and after Rishi went into the engine access room. It didn’t show what had happened exactly. They could see George begin to glitch, and Rishi floating across the atrium to intercept him before he caused any damage to the engines or the reactor, then there was a bright light, followed by the dead feed within the room. Then, they could see, all of the movements that followed. Rishi and George seemed to be working as one from that point onward.
The crew now knew for sure as well. The engines were dead. Harold was working with Transom to try and diagnose the problem. They weren’t even sure yet whether it was related to the prior glitching or it was the result of that energy burst inside the engine annex, but the ship was hobbled, with no FTL or sublight engines. All they had for the time being were thrusters. They didn’t even have a proper mechanic, not with Rishi gone and Sōsh still inside the artifact. Carolina told everyone to prepare themselves for the possibility of a long repair window.
Kristoff was going through the files Rishi had left for Burch, most of which were audio files, largely music she’d asked Kristoff to gather from Charran archives before he’d come back to the Letters. It was from Earth, from the time she’d gone back. Rishi hadn’t talked about that trip much with anyone except Burch, but they all knew it had been meaningful for her. They all pitched in and began to listen to that music in their earpieces, hoping to find a clue.
The following morning, with the lights still glitching, there was an impromptu gathering in the atrium. They shared what they knew. They began to draw a consensus—that something had happened to Rishi in that room; that it hadn’t been a long-standing plan of Rishi’s to deviate from their course and commandeer Verona’s ship; that something else might be working on her, possessing Rishi’s consciousness; that the prime suspect must be the Murkist; and that they needed to go after Rishi as soon as possible, as they had no idea what she might do, both with her incredible intelligence and power but also with the extremely sensitive information she possessed.
During the meeting, Carolina noticed that throughout, Fieldstone seemed particularly quiet—even sullen. He might not have said two words the entire morning. So it was a surprise to Carolina when he appeared at the doorway to the flight deck afterward, especially as Draya was strapped in beside her.
“Hi, Draya,” he said, addressing his former lover. “Are you okay?”
She nodded.
“I need to talk to Carolina.”
There was a pause as she looked over at Carolina and then back at Fieldstone.
“Do you want me to go?”
“You can stay if you prefer. I’d like for us to be okay to be in the same room together.”
“I’m okay, Fields. Please.”
Draya gestured for him to go ahead and share what he needed to tell Carolina.
“So, I’d spoken with Rishi a bit since coming back. We share a kinship I can’t quite explain to anyone else properly.”
“I was waiting for you to try,” Draya said. “We know that other place was ...”
Her voice cracked as the thoughts came back to her.
“It’s more complicated than that too,” Fields told her. “Even Ren doesn’t fully understand. I haven’t told you all the extent of it, what it meant to become a fully technological being—that world, what they were up against. I’ve been trying to make sense of it, trying to figure out how it fits in our time and our part of the galaxy. This turn, with Rishi, I think it’s time for me to try, ready or not, maybe get some help with it—the same way everyone’s pitching in right now to figure out what happened with Rishi. And since it seems like we’re going to have some time to figure it all out, it’s probably about time I put my story on the table.”
“Do you want to tell me first, Fieldstone?” Carolina asked. “Or should I call everyone together?”
Fields sighed. “Damn. I don’t know. I just ... what do you two think? Maybe I should just start—”
“WHOA! Oh,” a voice exclaimed over comms, followed by several coughs and a long, deep breath. “I thought it was a dream.”
“Thank God,” Draya said.
They all recognized the voice immediately.
“It’s not a dream, Sōsh,” Carolina answered after she tapped open the channel on their end. “You’re back, my friend. You’re inside the artifact. We’ll be out to get you in a moment. Sit tight right there. You’re probably disoriented.”
“No. No, I’m not disoriented at all. I remember everything. I remember it all. I didn’t know life could be like that, Carolina. I never knew. It can be so impossibly bright.”
“Okay, Sōsh. Standby. We want to hear.”
“I have so much to tell you. So vivid.”
“We look forward to listening as soon as we get you inside. It’s good to have you home again.”
“So,” Sōsh said, exhaling as he did, “how long was I gone? And, you know … what did I miss?”
Carolina turned and looked over her shoulder at Fieldstone. He nodded as she smiled at him.
“Timing is everything,” Fields replied, returning the smile.
“So it would seem,” Carolina replied. “We do have some time. So for the moment, Fieldstone, if you wouldn’t mind, hold that thought.”