“Only two to an exploration team.”
“Must be nice to have company,” he comments.
“Not as much as you’d think.” Mari grimaces at the thought of Brenner, the red-headed giant who is her exploration partner. She’d trusted Brenner once, and he’d rewarded that by acting as if it was only natural.
They crest the hill, and a path peeps out of the trees in the distance, the liquid glimmer of a river just beyond. “But—”
Whatever he’s about to say is lost in the sudden, brassy, blaring of horns from behind them. Jonah’s eyes go round and frightened, and he sprints down the other side of the slippery hill. Thunder that does not end rumbles through the ground and into her feet. Mari doesn’t risk a glance back—never look back, never—and follows at a dead run. Jonah, with his short legs, is still ahead of her when they hit the path. Jonah takes one glance back, eyes black and liquid, glimmering with some strange light of—satisfaction?
She grasps the vector of his flight and matches; space obediently places her at his heels, going his speed. His footsteps shift from solid thumps to hollow thuds as he hits the wooden bridge, slimed green with moss and algae. Then he jumps from the bridge, into the rushing stream below.
Mari stops, gapes, and only then hazards a glance back to see: a company of riders, branching horns sprouting from their helmets and spearing the air, ragged brown cloth whipping around them as they gallop toward her. Metal flashes. The brassy sound of a hunting horn splits the air.
There is only one possible avenue of escape now, as they thunder ever closer: she jumps. The cold water slams into her like a thousand glass-edged fists, and there is no breath in her lungs for more than a shocked gasp as she breaks the surface. Teeth chattering, all sound replaced by the roar of water, she sees Jonah further down the river, sees him sharply strike a rock, and go limp. She propels herself with the current, tries to catch at the slippery, complexly spiraling lines of flow. His hand is hot when she catches it, despite the absolute cold of the water.
The roar of falling water fills her head until she cannot think, and there’s no time for anything else. Mari pulls Jonah into her arms, curls around his limp body as best she can, and—
—she’d scream as they fall but her mouth is full of water—
—forever.
* * *
The stomach-dropping feeling of weightlessness jerked Mari from sleep. White filled her vision, soft with sourceless light: a ceiling. The ceiling of ops, her muddled mind decided, just as gravity took hold of her and that white curve jumped away. She shrieked, twisting to avoid the dark shape of the control console. The navdat’s metal case scraped a stinging part through her hair as she slammed into the floor shoulder first.
Mari lay for a moment, sucking wind, then wheezed, “What the hell was that?”
“Please clarify your statement,” the computer’s voice was calm as always.
“The AG unit just cut out!” For a moment she saw lines of force against force, no longer quite canceling out, but such a visualization should have been impossible with her augment switched off. The taste of oranges flooded over her tongue like a ringing bell. No, no—she focused on the crisp sound of an apple, the feeling of a cat’s fur under her fingers, and the visualization faded.
“Gravity function is normal.”
“My ass—”
“Mari?” Brenner’s voice cut off the computer’s predictable request for clarification. “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know!”
“I’m coming to ops.”
She scrambled back onto the pilot couch and pulled up the report from the skip. As a standard exploration vessel, the Thalassa 7-9 was a stripped-down habitation module strapped to a skip drive; there weren’t that many systems present to go wrong. Line after line of Within normal parameters, greeted her eyes.
“Mari?” Brenner said from the doorway. His hair stood in a frizzy red halo, bright in the pale, egg-shaped room.
“The computer says it didn’t happen.”
“Bullshit. How long did it last?”
“I don’t know. Maybe twenty seconds?” She shook her head. “The gravity failed… when we skipped, if I had to guess. There’s nothing in the system record to confirm or deny.” She thought then, about those lines of force she shouldn’t have seen. What kind of mass could counter the AG unit—and then suddenly vanish without actually damaging the ship?
Brenner leaned over her, far too close for her comfort. She felt the heat rolling off of him. “…shit, Mari. It’s worse than that.”
“…there’s something worse than an AG failure?” He tapped the navdat’s screen, arm brushing her shoulder. “We’re not where we’re supposed to be.”
Mari tried to focus on what he was saying, rather than on the fact that he was leaning on her slightly, deliberately. He was right; the stellar positions were incorrect compared to the plotted coordinates. “That’s not possible.”
“Just like the computer not noticing a gravity failure.” Brenner swallowed hard, adam’s apple bobbing.
Space looked the same as always on the screen that took up an entire quarter of the nav room’s wall, black sprinkled with the distant light of stars, the faint veil of dust from the trailing edge of a nearby nebula. Just looking at it, she’d never know they were in the wrong place, the scale so incomprehensibly vast. In the emptiness between the stars, she saw lines of force again, saw them stretch as calculations processed and visualized, moving as if something rolled through the fabric of space-time like an impossible and supermassive animal caught in sheets.
Mari rasped her tongue over suddenly dry lips—apple/cat, apple/cat, apple/cat, turn off damn you—and fought the quiver panic put into her voice. “Let’s run the calculations again.”
* * *
They lean shoulder to shoulder against a tree. Damp creeps up from the ground, sinks into bones. While Mari sees the thermal differential of their tiny fire in sunset colors, she finds no comforting warmth with her hands. “This isn’t just a dream, is it?”
“No,” Jonah whispers. A red wound slashes across his forehead like a scowling mouth. “It’s complicated.”
“Is my implant rotting out? Are you my incipient psychosis?” If he is, would he say?
He sighs. “This is unresolved space. You translate it into something you can understand. Mentally.”
She decides to provisionally believe him, because otherwise, the paranoia becomes insurmountable. “I don’t know what you mean by unresolved space.”
He answers with a voice barely audible. “The space beyond space. The non-space past the black.”
She breathes out a long, shaky sigh, because she can think of only one thing that describes. “Skip space.”
“All places and none at once,” Jonah agrees.
“But how?” How are they talking? How is she even perceiving this? Is that perhaps what the implanted processor is reacting to, even allowing her to manipulate? But the augment shouldn’t even be activating without her intervention, not like this. “Are you human?” Another EES explorer with a secret as dirty as hers, perhaps?
“No.” He gives her a wry, tired smile.
Mari tries to decide what to do—recoil? Scream? Cheer at the knowledge humanity isn’t alone? What does that expression actually look like on his face? Do aliens have faces? Far too close, a brassy wail rises, and fear stills her breath. Jonah scrambles to stamp out the fire.
“What are they, Jonah?” she whispers.
“The Hunt.”
“I don’t know what that is.” She jumps as Jonah’s hand finds hers. Is that really a hand? What is her mind interpreting as fingers, as hot, sticky skin? She shakes him loose.
“They just… appeared in our orbit one day. Tore our ships out of local space and tried to wipe us off the surface of our planet with plagues and acid rain. We… always believed in hiding and running instead of fighting, you know?” His voice drops even lower, so she has to lean toward him to hear it. “My people put me in a shi
p so I could carry them out past the black. The Hunt’s been chasing me since I left.”
“Are you really just a child?”
This smile, she can almost hear, a brittle thing. “I was.”
“That’s horrible.”
“That’s desperation.”
“What do you want from me, Jonah?” Because always, it comes down to that. Mari thinks of her family, stifling in their rigid roles and traditions, the expectation of obedience, and marriage, and faith. She thinks of her ex-husband, his demands of endless support and constant sexual availability. She thinks about Brenner, his hunger for her emotions and his expectations about relationships.
“I’ve got a billion ghosts and none of them talk.” His shoulders move. “I want to listen.”
Without the flickering fire light, she sees the stars overhead, wavering and twinkling, strings of cloud cutting the sky like folds in a sheet. Something ripples behind the stars, and she can almost, almost see the shape, read the lines of force that define it.
This time, she reaches for Jonah’s hand, links their fingers together. She doesn’t know how it translates, but it must, somehow. “Okay.” And she begins to tell him everything like a bedtime story, once upon a time, there was a little girl who wanted to run away from her parents and fly into the stars…
The horns sound again, closer.
* * *
“We’re fucking lost, Mari.” Brenner said, voice tight. Eyes heavy with interrupted sleep, Mari stared at the black and white strings of plotted equations. Idly, she drew a wandering path on the screen with one finger, knocking numbers only she could see around like billiard balls. “The course calculations are correct.”
“They’re not correct.” Brenner scrolled through the calculations, stopping at a section highlighted in red. “I did these by hand, to check. These are off.”
Her implant ran the lines and informed her they were correct. She still made a show calculating them manually, following the scrolling output only she could perceive. That had been the point of the chip, after all, a secret fix for the severe dyscalculia that would have kept her grounded and on Earth. The illegal bioware was inert and indistinguishable from normal brain tissue when not active thanks to a surface protein coating that somehow disguised the metallic factors. The flesh hacker she’d bought from had guaranteed she’d sail through all standard medical scans so long as she avoided anything as archaic as magnetic imaging, or her money back. A safe promise for him to have made since she would have been in jail at that point if his guarantee failed.
“No, they aren’t,” she said. Even if the chip wouldn’t turn off, even if she was in the early grips of psychosis, its processing functions should still be accurate.
“You’re doing that wrong.”
“No, I’m not.” Computers were more reliable than people.
“You are, and we should turn around.” He thumped his fist on the navdat. “Why won’t you listen to me any more?”
She tasted his anger in the back of her throat, metallic like a ten penny nail. “Think spatially. If there is an anomaly warping nearby space, it doesn’t matter which direction we’re going.”
“Then we stop skipping until we know what it is.”
No. They were in the middle of an exploration sweep. She was running from the Hunt with Jonah. She still felt his hand in hers, remembered I’m tired of being alone.
For a moment, she entertained the thought of telling Brenner about the lucid not-dreams, but he’d think she’d lost her mind completely, crazy to go with—how had he put it?—emotionally unavailable. Perhaps she was, the chip nestled in her brain ticking away like an old-fashioned time bomb. “If we continue to skip, we’ll be able to roll the course deviations together and get the measure of what’s warping space. And it could be exactly what we’re out here to find.”
“I’m logging a protest.”
“That’s fine. It’s my decision as senior navigator. We keep going.”
“My senior navigator’s an asshole,” Brenner said bitterly. “It’s always about rank, huh.”
Mari ignored the words, one of the reasons she’d used to end their relationship being thrown back in her face. She’d joined the exploration program because space promised her clean, geometric answers if she flew far enough out into black. “Start the countdown to the next skip.”
* * *
Mari half expects the world to be different, now that she knows the truth. What masochistic part of her psyche thinks the best translation of this place involves numb feet and the constant threat of a sprained ankle? But she finds herself climbing another hill with Jonah, the gray light of dawn filtering through mist and bare tree branches.
“Are you skipping as well?” she asks. “How are we synchronizing?” The odds are astronomical, but not impossible.
He shakes his head. “I’ve been in unresolved space for… it’s impossible to say how long. It’s harder for them to find me here.”
She stops dead in her tracks, mind stuttering over that. What kind of power does it take, for a ship to remain in a non-dimensional state indefinitely? What kind of power does it take to chase someone in a non-dimensional state? The thought turns her knees to water.
Jonah grabs her hand and tugs. “I watch for your computational node. That’s what I talk to.”
At first she thinks he means the ship’s computer—he can talk to that? But then why her? Why not Brenner? Then sick realization hits her: the augment chip nestled among her neurons. And she remembers the first dream, the scent of oranges and taste of copper, and stays mulishly still. “What did you do to me?”
“Nothing.” He gives his head a little shake.
“No.” She thinks of Brenner, seeing subtle problems in the calculations that she and the computer don’t. “You’ve done something to me. And the navdat. Tell me.”
“I didn’t—”
“You just don’t want to be alone? Is that more bullshit?” If that’s been a lie, what about the Hunt? She’s spent a lifetime being manipulated by other people. Fool her for the thousandth time. “Tell me!”
“No!” He has tears in his eyes. Tears, Mari reminds herself, that aren’t actually there. That her mind is only translating as being there. Her mind that may be halfway to psychosis thanks to an illegal biochip she can no longer turn off. “That’s not it! I was going to—you stand out so badly, don’t you see? I used your computational node to access the dumb computer. Because I—because I thought you were going to get me caught, but then maybe—maybe I could trick them into taking you instead. But I changed my mind! I don’t want that anymore!”
She feels sick, thinking of the way he’d almost left her behind at the bridge. “I followed you,” she whispers. “God, I’m a fucking idiot. I thought—stop looking at me like that!” Because he stares at her, with a child’s eyes full of more pain than she can imagine, and somehow she feels like she’s the one who has done wrong.
“They’re depending on me, Mari. I have to—but I’ll find a different way. I promise. I’m sorry.”
She turns her back, begins to pick her way down the hill. People always say it’s because they had no choice, when they hurt you. I needed the money. Or, You wouldn’t give me enough. “Go to hell.”
“Mari!”
The sound of horns shatters the air, drowning out the echoes of Jonah’s shout. The space between the trees past the bottom of the hill warps, twists, turns to whipping fabric and steaming breath as riders burst into sight, and she recognizes the the shape that is not a shape from normal space and skip space. There is no time for faces, to see anything but a flash of metal that flares out impossibly like a gravity well, and that low, haunting note slithers down her spine again.
She turns and claws her way back up the slope, reaching for vectors like ropes in a net, propelling herself toward Jonah. They crest the hill and careen down the other side, but the riders are so close she can hear nothing over their thunder. Mari feels Jonah fall. Her fingers sink into the thick muck
as she turns and slips to her knees, scrambles back up. She leaves streaks of black dirt on his shirt as she drags him up and they stumble into motion again.
From the corner of her eye, she sees the sweep of dark shapes, closing in. The arm of one raises, long and thick and black, and she tries to put on a burst of speed, veering, throwing Jonah ahead by grabbing a handful of unreality and twisting it into an impossible fold. She reaches her other hand for the equations governing the horse-not-horse now horribly close and stinking—
The rider swings. Something hits the side of her head with a crack that must be her skull splitting. She tastes lightning and crashes to the ground, mouth open and catching mud. Her head fills with the rushing of blood, the squeal of metal as a dark blur circles, a smaller blur arcing up again.
Jonah screams over the whine in her ears: “I’m here! I’m here, come get me!”
Something snaps in her head and she tries to whimper around the stinging taste of hydrogen peroxide that incongruously floods over her tongue. One hand twitches against the ground, over and over, a strangely steady tick that will be 630 times per hour if she lives that long. She should get up, she really needs to get up—get up, getupgetupgetup—
* * *
Mari opened her eyes, seeing only a pale blur. Her head throbbed, each beat a crescendo into sharp pain. Feeling strange and sick, she made ineffectual swimming motions, hands brushing against the ceiling. The light touch sent her spinning r=aebx, leaving a trail of crimson (x-h)2+(y-k)2+(z-l)2=r2 in her wake and it sounded like lemons and tasted like a dog barking. “No—” she mumbled with a thick tongue. “Not yet.”
Steady 9.8m/s2 acceleration returned. The pale floor of her quarters jumped up to meet her and stole her breath. For a moment, all she managed was a thready moan as the equations turned into fireworks that shattered in the air.
“You require medical assistance,” the AI said, the words barely audible over the ringing in her ears.
“Mari? Mari, are you there?” Brenner was tinny, far away. “I need you on the bridge. Wait, what’s this alarm—”
They needed to skip. To not skip. It was a trap. Was it a trap? Bit by bit she rebuilt her thoughts into a rickety scaffold. She unrolled to her feet like a bent spring and reeled drunkenly toward the door, out into the corridor. A soft, liquid pattering followed her and felt like cherries rolling across her skin as she ran equations for acceleration of liquid droplets through air. Halfway up the infinite hallway, she saw a blurry shock of orange-red, bright against the neutral background. Like…like hair. Hair on a pillow. Oh no, she didn’t want to think of that. “Brenner?” she croaked.
Kzine Issue 19 Page 7
