by TJ Berry
“Not a terrible idea,” said Ricky. “But I don’t plan on serving watered-down cocktails to cocksure soldiers for the rest of my life. I want off this ship and onto a fresh planet.”
“Fair, but now we have a skimmer,” Bào pointed to her jacket pocket. “If we can get the unicorn horn out of the FTL drive and swap it with my bone, we can use the skimmer to get out of there. I can navigate us.”
Ricky’s mouth spread in a wide smile. “I like you, kid. You’ve got moxie. And I like your little plan. Better than mine, at least,” she said.
“Which was what?”
“When we arrived at the Bala planet, I was going to beg Gary Cobalt to rescue me,” she said.
Bào laughed.
“Knowing Gary, he probably would have,” said Bào, forgetting he wasn’t supposed to know the part-unicorn personally.
“Do you know Gary?” asked Ricky, suddenly very interested.
“Uh, no. But I read a lot about him in history class. Seems like a cool guy,” said Bào.
“Don’t believe all you read, kid. Anyways, Gary Cobalt doesn’t like me very much,” said Ricky.
“He still would have rescued you,” said Bào, partly to himself.
“I know. Isn’t he weird?” asked Ricky. “All right, I’m willing to help you out with your surgery, but we need to make it fast. The club shuts down when the morning shift comes on and they’re a bunch of stiffs who don’t tolerate any fun. Let’s get that bone out of you.”
She pointed Bào to a chair next to the table.
“Sit.”
From his chair, Bào could see people dancing and drinking out in the medbay. Here in this lighted pod, he and Ricky would be like a sideshow for anyone who cared to watch.
“Do you have anywhere a little more private we could go?” he asked.
“No one is paying attention to you, kid. They’re all busy trying to get laid,” she said.
Bào laughed.
“Seriously,” said Ricky. “On ships like this, basically everyone is sleeping with everyone else. It’s one of the perks of the job.”
The door to the surgery opened and a Reason officer poked his head in.
“Is the game still on?” he asked. “I want to win my skimmer back.” Ricky shooed him out.
“This kid won it, you take it up with him in the morning. For tonight, all bets are off. I’m doing actual doctoring in here tonight,” she said. The officer grumbled but shut the door.
“Hey medical AI,” called Ricky up at the ceiling.
“Yes, doctor,” replied the crisp computer voice.
“We need to remove a foreign object from this kid’s hand and replace it with a bone graft. Can we do that? Is that a thing?”
“Place the affected area onto the operating table,” said the AI.
Bào dropped his left hand flat onto the cold metal table. It had grooves carved into it so that blood and other fluids would run off into gutters on the sides. A screen on the wall lit up with a scan of Bào’s hand. The darker chunks of criosphinx bone were clearly visible next to the more porous human bone of Bào’s original fingers.
“Whoa, that’s pretty messed up,” said Ricky. “Who even fixed this?”
“Mermaids,” said Bào, cursing himself for sharing a bit too much about his past. Something in him wanted to impress this woman, which didn’t happen often.
“This surgery is possible and will take twenty-four minutes,” said the medical AI.
“Go for it,” said Ricky. A printer in the corner began spitting out bone graft material in the exact shape of Bào’s finger bone.
A retractable arm came down and sprayed Bào’s hand with what smelled like disinfectant. It also made his hand completely numb. Before he could ask if he had to watch, the tool at the end of the arm rotated and a yellow laser shot out a two-second burst of light. A retractor spread open the cauterized skin and pair of forceps pulled the criosphinx chunk out of his finger. It was all very clinical and painless, but Bào still felt sick watching his insides become his outsides.
“You’re not going to pass out, are you?” asked Ricky.
“No, but this is unpleasant,” said Bào.
“Just look up at me, I’ll distract you. Because if you faint, I have no idea what to do.
Bào smiled. “Come on, you don’t even know basic first aid?” he asked.
“I’m here to serve drinks and get to the Bala. I’m bluffing my way through everything medical.”
“That’s a comforting thought while my finger is flayed open on your table,” said Bào. “If I feel faint I’m supposed to put my head between my legs.”
Ricky raised an eyebrow at him.
“Really,” she deadpanned. “Are you sure you’re not getting the fainting cure mixed up with something else a bit more fun?”
Bào laughed. She was very good at distracting him.
“Sorry. I’m corrupting a kid here,” she said.
“Corrupt away. I’m not a kid,” said Bào with a smile. He caught himself giving away more than he meant to again. He just wanted to talk to her without double-thinking every bit of personal information. “I’m twenty-two,” he added quickly.
“Sounds exhausting,” said Ricky. “I have a policy not to date anyone under thirty. That’s when people finally start to get their shit together. I don’t have time for twenty-something drama.”
“I have no drama,” he protested as the forceps dropped the criosphinx bone into a depression at the end of the table with a thunk. It plucked the mesh-like finished bone-graft off the printer. Bào held his breath as the forceps tucked it into place.
“I have no drama, says the guy who just cheated me out of a skimmer with a five unicorn flush in order to get me to help him take a Bala-bone out of his hand in order to sabotage a Reason warship,” said Ricky. “Nope. No drama here.”
The AI closed Bào’s wound with a line of biosafe glue. Ricky took his hand to inspect the computer’s work.
“You love it,” said Bào, giving her hand a squeeze. One corner of her mouth went up.
“You seem more mature than your years, kid,” she said holding his fingers for another two seconds, then letting him go. Bào had to work extra hard to hide the flush on his cheeks from reaching Kevin Chen’s face. He let his numb arm fall to his side and picked up the criosphinx bone.
“I’m going to put this into the FTL drive,” he said, getting up from the table.
“Do you actually think I’m going to let you do that on your own?” asked Ricky. “I’m dying to see the engine room.”
Bào didn’t know how he was going to get her in there, but he found himself suprisingly excited at the prospect of good company.
“Let me just close down this party,” said Ricky. She stepped out into the medbay and headed over to the bar made of a repurposed gurney. She whispered something to the bartender, whom Bào recognized from the food service crew. The bartender nodded and began tucking bottles into a storage locker behind her. In a matter of moments, that area of the room looked like a sterile medbay again.
Ricky went to a panel on the wall and tapped a few commands into the computer. The volume of the music dropped and an authoritative computer-generated voice called out over the crowd.
“Officers of the Reason, I invite you to bring your drinks to the observation deck as we pass by a startling double black hole phenomenon off of the starboard side.” The medbay doors opened and the lights began to gradually rise.
“There are no black holes in the null,” said Bào.
“They’re too drunk to care,” said Ricky, as the party shuffled out the doors and spilled into the hallway.
When the medbay was empty and quiet, Ricky draped an arm around Bào’s shoulders.
“Ready for some drama, kid?” she asked.
Bào was nervous. He gripped the criosphinx in his good hand and led the way to the engine room.
There were normal sublight engines on all starships – they were ridiculous hulking things that
took up entire decks. The Reason made a point of keeping necromancers in the dark about most ship designs. They were less likely to sabotage a system if they didn’t know the intimate details of how it worked. Typical Reason paranoia.
He did know FTL drives in a way that non-necromancer humans never would. He saw the energy that pulsed through them and how it enveloped the ship and pulled it into nullspace.
Getting into the engine room was as easy as swiping his badge. Without removing her headphones, the security grunt on duty flipped her screen to the security page to see who’d just swiped in, then flicked it back to her show when she confirmed that Bào was permitted to enter. She didn’t give either of them a first glance, let alone a second.
“That was a bit of a let down,” said Ricky. “I was hoping to spin some kind of wild tale about the ship about to explode and how we needed to get you to the FTL cabinet before we all blew into a billion pieces.”
“I’m allowed in here,” said Bào with a shrug. “Not much of an adventure.”
They stood in front of the horn cabinet.
“How do we get it in?” asked Ricky.
“I think we just open the door and put it on the shelf,” said Bào.
“Can you open an FTL cabinet while it’s on?” asked Ricky.
“I think so,” said Bào. “We have a doctor in case anything goes wrong.”
Ricky smacked him on the arm.
“Well, you do it,” she said. “I’m not going to get sucked into an alternate dimension again.”
“Again?” asked Bào, intrigued.
“A story for later,” said Ricky, backing up a few steps.
Bào stepped up to the FTL cabinet. He could see both the wooden shape of the carved cabinet in the ship and the overlay of pulsing nullspace energy at the same time. It was helpful to know how to straddle the two places at once. If you closed your eyes to access the null all the time, you were likely to get shot in real life.
He grasped the handle and pulled. Ricky let out a tense squeal. There was no lock on the door. The designers never imagined anyone would be stupid enough to open an FTL cabinet midjump. It opened easily and silently, without so much as a hiccup in the nullspace jump.
Bào looked over his shoulder to see Ricky standing with both fists pressed against her mouth, brow furrowed, as if she expected the cabinet to blow at any second. Bào laughed. The sound deadened as it was sucked into the cabinet like smoke. Then it rippled back out, not so much as a sound but as a feeling that swept through the ship like a burst of invisible radiation. The grunt at the desk giggled behind them.
Ricky put her hands down and stepped toward Bào and the cabinet. The corner of her mouth lifted in a smile.
“What was that?” she asked, her cheeks flushing pink. Her voice was also pulled into the cabinet, then rippled back out in a pulse of joyful wonder. The security guard sighed happily at her station.
“It’s acting like an amplifier,” said Bào, curious if horn did this normally, or if it was only while they were in the null.
The security officer looked up from her station. “What are you two doing in here?” she asked, suddenly interested.
“Routine maintenance,” said Bào, pretending to hold a screwdriver to the side of the cabinet. He twisted his empty hand and lifted a skeptical eyebrow to Ricky. She laughed and the entire crew of the Kilonova laughed with her. The officer sat back down with a broad smile on her face.
“Do you think if we made out that everyone on the ship would make out too?” asked Ricky.
Her thought reverberated across the Kilonova. Bào slapped the cabinet door shut, but it was too late. In approximately forty weeks there would be six tiny new members of the crew.
“Stop,” he said. “Just for one second while I have the door open. Then you can say anything you want.”
“Absolutely,” said Ricky, miming a zipper across her mouth.
The raw nullspace energy coming out of the horn felt like warm sunlight; comfort and home. All the stiffness in his joints melted away. He felt light and free and young again. In the split-second that he stood and basked in it, Ricky leaned her face over his shoulder and spoke into the box.
“Everyone is dying to buy drinks from Ricky,” she whispered.
Bào grunted in frustration and unceremoniously shoved the criosphinx horn onto the shelf next to the unicorn horn. The ship bucked, then surged forward. Bào slammed the door shut. “What are you doing?” he asked incredulously. “It’s going to amplify that now.”
“Good. I could use the cash,” s aid Ricky. She turned and yelped. The security officer was standing so close behind them that Bào could see the freckles on her cheeks.
“I’m dying,” she said. “I need a drink.”
“Oh dear,” said Bào.
“Stop by the medbay tomorrow ni–” Ricky began. The security officer’s eyes bulged. She lunged forward and grabbed the lapels of Ricky’s jacket.
“I’m dying. I need a drink now.”
Ricky tried to pry the woman’s fingers off her, but she only clutched harder in new spots.
“Dying,” she croaked. She started trying to climb Ricky in a gangly and awkward dance. Ricky pushed her off and ran for the door. The security officer followed with the fierce determination of a dying woman.
“Kid!” yelled Ricky, getting as far as the hallway before the woman tackled her to the floor. He heard other boots pounding down the hallway as other crew members headed for Ricky, desperate for drinks to save their lives. Bào yanked open the cabinet door and said the first thing he could think of to stop them from hurting her.
“We all love Ricky Tang,” he shouted into the raw energy. The thought rippled out across the universe.
“Not better!” shouted Ricky from the hallway. Her voice was muffled as if covered by multiple limbs. “Try again please!”
“Everything is normal,” said Bào, trying to project the thought as calmly as he could muster. “There’s no need to check the FTL drive.”
He shut the door and went into the hallway. A few crew members were helping each other up, bewildered expressions on their faces. A couple apologized to Ricky for something Bào hadn’t seen. One of them offered her their cabin number, which she politely declined.
“I told you to watch what you were saying into the drive,” said Bào. The ship lurched nauseatingly sideways, but Ricky didn’t seem to notice.
“Do you feel that?” asked Bào. “I think it’s working.”
“Feel what?” she asked. “It always does that. It’s normal. Hey, did you get the criosphinx horn into the drive?”
“I did,” said Bào.
“Too bad it didn’t have any effect,” she said. “I really thought it would work. You must be disappointed after all you went through to get it out.” She gestured to his hand, which he suddenly noticed was throbbing. “I have some other fantastic sabotage ideas, if you’re interested.”
The criosphinx horn was working just as intended. Every few seconds, the ship fluttered like an irregular heartbeat and skipped in a random direction that didn’t necessarily bring them closer to the Bala planet. It was a one step forward, three steps back kind of motion. It would take them years to reach the Bala planet this way – and with his last thought amplified, no one was even aware of it. He might have to come back here every once in a while to remind everyone that stumbling backward through the null was “normal,” but that wasn’t difficult. Even so, Bào wasn’t quite ready for their little adventure to end.
“What kind of sabotage do you have in mind?” he asked.
By way of answering, Ricky held up an access badge that she’d swiped from one of the crew members who had tackled her.
“I was thinking we should head down to sanitation and see about backing up the entire system. There’s nothing that slows down a starship quite like fountains full of crap.”
“Sounds lovely,” said Bào, taking her arm.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sink or Swim
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br /> Gary raised his hands to show the Sisters of the Supersymmetrical Axion surrounding him that he did not intend to fight. Of course, the weapons trained on his vital areas couldn’t possibly kill him, but a bullet into muscle never felt pleasant. He crossed his legs and sat like a child in class. He hoped that the Sisters would sit down and talk instead of opening fire.
The spider-creature folded its long legs under itself, then scooted close enough to Gary that he could feel its respirations on his arm. It looked back and forth between the Sisters and Gary with its eyeless face.
“You need to leave the forest, Gary Cobalt,” said the smallest of the Sisters. Despite the formless red jumpsuit and opaque red veil, Gary thought he recognized her.
“Why are the Sisters way out here?” he asked. “Are you investigating the Bala disappearances?”
“Walk back out the way you came. The octomite has determined that you’re clean. It won’t attack you again,” said the Sister. Gary stood up.
“I came here to find out what is happening to the missing Bala. Are you involved?” asked Gary. The Sisters didn’t speak. “I’m not leaving until I get answers,” said Gary.
A taller Sister stepped into the circle.
“He’s not going to cooperate. It’s his human side, all curiosity, no sense,” said the Sister. “Restrain him. Put him with the others.”
“We can’t put him with the infected ones,” said another Sister.
“Then just put him in the tunnels,” replied the tall Sister.
In a flash, Gary’s wrists were bound with a silvery rope. He hadn’t seen any of the Sisters move, but two of them were now at his side, tugging him to his feet.
“This is not necessary,” said Gary, pulling away from them. “We can discuss this reasonably and come to a solution. I’m only here to gather information. Others who come after me will not be as circumspect. There is a centaur gathering an army–”
The rope around his wrists tightened and burned. This was angel hair, capable of tying a creature of any strength indefinitely. Even a centaur would not be able to break it. The Sisters gathered in formation in front of him, scanning the trees for more intruders. They led him to a large tree nearby; wide enough around that three beings would have had to join hands to span it. The bark nearest the ground shimmered and an open doorway appeared. Gary saw a couple of steps down into the blackness beyond. Perhaps a cave of some sort
