The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Language modules are too expensive. The captain has one, but that’s only because a hull spar took out his speech center.”

  “I’m not talking about cyber modules.”

  Zeal halted and looked back at me again. Around us, the ship rocked and roared. Emergency alarms sounded from the distance. A mechanical voice intoned warning messages. I heard the shriek of a severed air line.

  “What, then?”

  “Why do we take out the language center in the first place? I mean, why not just leave it intact?”

  “We take the lobots as we get ‘em, son. If the speech center’s been scooped out . . . it isn’t in our power to put it back again.”

  I steadied myself against a bulkhead, as the floor bucked under us. “Then they’re all like that?”

  “Unless you know otherwise.” Zeal studied me with chilling suspicion. “Wait,” he said slowly. “This line of questioning . . . it wouldn’t be because you’ve seen her, would it?”

  “‘Her,’ Mister Zeal?”

  “You know who I mean. The other lobot. The tenth one. You’ve met her, haven’t you?”

  “I . . .” Zeal had the better of me. “I got lost. I bumped into her somewhere near the back of the ship.”

  The curl of his lip intensified. “And what did she say?”

  “Nothing,” I said hurriedly. “Nothing. Just . . . how to find my way back. That’s all I asked her. That’s all she said.”

  “She’s out of control,” he said, more to himself than me. “Becoming trouble. Needs something done to her.”

  I sensed further questions would be unwise, bitterly regretting that I had raised the subject in the first place. At least the battle was still ongoing, with no sign of any lessening in its intensity. Difficult as it was to look on that as any kind of positive development, it might force Zeal’s mind onto other matters. If we had a rush of casualties, he might forget that I’d mentioned the girl at all.

  Some chance, I thought.

  We reached the observation bubble, Zeal silent and brooding at first. He pulled back a lever, opening an iron shutter. Beyond the glass, closer than I’d expected, was the other ship. It couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty kilometers from us.

  It was another ramscoop, shaped more or less like the Iron Lady. We were so close that the magnetic fields of our scoops must have been meshed together, entangled like the rigging of two sailing ships exchanging cannon fire. Near the front of the other ship, where the scoop pinched to a narrow mouth, I could actually see the field picked out in faint purple flickers of excited, inrushing gas. Behind the other ship was the hot spike of its drive flame: the end result of all that interstellar material being sucked up in the first place, compacted and compressed to stellar core pressures in her drive chamber. A similar flame would have been burning from the Iron Lady’s stern, keeping us locked alongside.

  The other ship was firing on us, discharging massive energy and projectile weapons from hull emplacements.

  “They must be pirates,” I said, bracing myself as the ship took another hit. “I’d heard they existed but never really believed it until now.”

  “Start believing it,” Zeal grunted.

  “Could that ship be the Devilfish ?”

  “And what have you heard about the Devilfish?”

  “If you take the stories seriously, that’s the ship they say does most of the pirating between here and the Frolovo Hub. I suppose if pirates exist, then there’s a good chance the Devilfish does as well.”

  The hull shook again, but it was a different kind of vibration than before: more regular, like the steady chiming of a great clock.

  “That’s us firing back,” Zeal said. “About bloody time.”

  I watched our weapons impact across the hull of the other ship, flowering in a chain. Huge blasts . . . but not enough to stop a wave of retaliatory fire.

  “She’s switched to heavy slugs,” Zeal said. “We’ll feel this.”

  We did. It was worse than anything we had experienced before, as if the entire ship were being shaken violently in a dog’s jaw. By now the noise from the klaxons and warning voices had become deafening. Through the window I saw huge scabs of metal slam past.

  “Hull plating,” Zeal said. “Ours. That’ll take some fixing.”

  “You don’t seem all that worried.”

  “I’m not.”

  “But we’re being shot to pieces here.”

  “We’ll hold,” he said. “Long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?”

  I felt a falling sensation in my gut. “That’s our drive flame stuttering,” Zeal reported, with no sense of alarm. “Captain’s turned off our scoop. We’ll be on reserve fuel in a moment.”

  Sure enough, normal weight returned. The two ships were still locked alongside each other.

  “Why’s he done that?” I asked, fighting to keep the terror from my voice, not wanting to show myself up before Zeal. “We won’t be able to burn reserve fuel for very long without the scoop to replenish . . .”

  “Scoop’s down for a reason, son.”

  I followed Zeal’s gaze back to the other ship. Once again, I saw the hot gases ramming into the engine mouth, flickering purple. But now there was something skewed about the geometry of the field, like a candle flame bending in a draught. The distortion to the field intensified, and then snapped back in the other direction.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Her fieldmaster’s trying to compensate,” Zeal said. “He’s pretty good, give him that.”

  Now the ramscoop field was oscillating wildly, caught between two distorted extremes. The pinched gas flared hotter—blue white, shifting into the violet.

  “What’s happening to them? Why doesn’t the fieldmaster shut down the field, if he’s losing control of it?”

  “Too scared to. Most ships can’t switch to reserve fuel as smoothly as we can.”

  “I still don’t see . . .”

  That was when the field instabilites exceeded some critical limit. Gobbets of hot gas slammed into the swallowing mouth. An eyeblink later, an explosion ripped from the belly of the other ship. Instantly her drive flame and scoop field winked out.

  She began to fall behind us.

  We cut our engines and matched her velocity. The other ship was a wreck: a huge hole punched amidships, through which I saw glowing innards and pieces of tumbling debris, some of which looked horribly like people.

  “She’s dead now,” I said. “We should leave, get out of here as quickly as we can. What if they repair her?”

  Zeal looked at me and shook his head slowly. “You don’t get it, do you? They weren’t the pirates. They were just trying to get away from us.”

  “But I thought you said . . .”

  “I was having some fun. This was a scheduled interception— always was. It just happened a bit sooner than the captain told me.”

  “But then if they’re not the pirates . . .”

  “Correct, lad. We are. And this isn’t really the Iron Lady. That’s only a name she wears in port.” He tapped a hand against the metal framing of the bubble. “You’re on the Devilfish, and that makes you one of us.”

  A week passed, then another. I learned to stop asking questions, afraid of where my tongue might take me. I kept thinking back to the girl in the corridor and the cryptic warning she had given me. About how I should get off the ship as soon as possible, before Mister Zeal put machines in my head or the bad thing happened. Well, a bad thing had certainly happened. The Iron Lady, or the Devilfish as I now had to think of her, had attacked and crippled another ship. Her holds had been looted for cargo. A handful of her crew had managed to escape in cryopods, but most had died in the explosion when her drive core went critical. I did not know what had happened to the few survivors, but it could not have been coincidence that I suddenly noticed we were carrying three new lobots. I had played no part in converting them, but it would not have taxed Zeal to do the surgery on his own. I knew
my way around his operating room by now, knew what was difficult and what was easy.

  So we had murdered another ship and taken some of her crew as prize. Every hour that I stayed aboard the Devilfish made me complicit in that crime and any other attacks that were yet to take place. But where could I run to?

  We were between systems, in deep interstellar space.

  Get off ship. Before bad thing happens.

  Had she meant the attack, or was she talking about something else, something yet to happen?

  I had to find her again. I wanted to ask her more questions, but that wasn’t the only reason. I kept seeing her face, frozen in the corridor lights. I knew nothing about her except that I wanted to know more. I wanted to touch that face, to pull back that messy curtain of hair and look into her eyes.

  I fantasized about saving her: how I’d do the bare minimum in Zeal’s service, just enough to keep him happy, and then jump ship at the first opportunity. Jump and run, and take the lobot girl with me. I’d outrun Happy Jack’s button men; I could outrun the crew of the Devilfish.

  But it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  “I’ve got a job for you,” Zeal said. “Nice and easy. Then you can have the rest of the day off.”

  “A job?” I ventured timidly.

  “Take this.” He delved into his apron pocket and passed something to me: a gripped thing shaped a little like the soldering iron. “It’s a tranquilizer gun,” he said.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to bring the girl back in.”

  “The girl?”

  “Don’t try my patience, Peter.” He closed my hand around the grip. “You know where she haunts. Find her, or let her find you. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “And when I’ve found her?”

  “Then you shoot her.” He raised a warning finger. “Not to kill, just to incapacitate. Aim for a leg. She’ll drop, after a minute or so. Then you bring her back to me.”

  He’d cleared the operating table. I knew from our work schedule that we were not expecting any more patients today.

  “What do you want her for?” I asked.

  “Always been a bit too chirpy, that one. She has a job to do . . . a certain job that means she has to be brighter than the other lobots. But not that much brighter. I don’t like it when they answer back, and I definitely don’t like it when they start showing notions of free will.” He smiled. “But it’s all right. Nothing we can’t fix, you and I.”

  “Fix?”

  “A few minutes under the knife, is all.”

  My hand trembled on the gun. “But then she won’t be able to talk.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “I can’t shoot her,” I said. “She’s still a person. There’s still something left of who she was.”

  “How would you know? All she told you was how to get back home. Or did you talk more than you said?”

  “No,” I said, cowed. “Only what I told you.”

  “Good. Then you won’t lose any sleep over it, will you?”

  With gun in my hand I considered turning it on Mister Zeal and putting him under and then killing him. With the rest of the crew still alive, my chances of stopping the Devilfish (let alone making it off the ship in one piece) were practically zero. It would be a futile gesture, nothing more. Without Zeal the crew would be inconvenienced, but most of them would still survive.

  I still wanted to stop them, but the gun wasn’t the answer. And she was just a lobot, after all. She hadn’t even remembered her name. What kind of person did that make her?

  I slipped the gun into my belt.

  “Good lad,” Zeal said.

  I found her again. It didn’t take all that long, considering. I kept a careful note on the twists and turns I took, doubling back every now and then to make sure the ship really wasn’t shifting itself around me. That much had always been my imagination, and now that I was revisiting the zone where I had been lost before, it all looked a degree more familiar. Now that I had been given license to enter this part of the ship, I felt more confident. I still wasn’t happy about shooting the girl . . . but then it wasn’t as if Zeal was going to kill her. When so much had already been taken from her, what difference did a little bit more make?

  I turned a corner and there she was. She wolfed vile-looking paste into her mouth from some kind of spigot in the wall, the stuff lathering her metal hands.

  My hand tightened on the gun, still tucked into my belt. I took a pace closer, hoping she would stay engrossed in her meal.

  She stopped eating and looked at me. Through the tangled fringe of her hair, eyes shone feral and bright.

  “Peter Vandry,” she said, and then did something horrible and unexpected, something no lobot should ever do.

  She smiled.

  It was only a flicker of a smile, quickly aborted, but I had still seen it. My hand trembled as I withdrew the gun and slipped off the safety catch.

  “No,” she said, backing away from the spigot.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, aiming the gun. “It isn’t personal. If I don’t do it, Zeal’ll kill me.”

  “Don’t,” she said, raising her hands. “Not shoot. Not shoot me. Not now. Not now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  My finger tightened on the trigger. Two things made me hesitate, though. The first was: what did she mean: not now? What did it matter to her if I shot her now, rather than later? The second thing was those fierce, beautiful eyes.

  My hesitation lasted an instant too long.

  “Baby,” she said.

  The gun quivered in my hand, and then leapt free with painful force, nearly snapping my fingers as it escaped my grip. It slammed into the wall, the impact smashing it apart. The metal remains hovered there for an agonizing instant, before dropping—one by one—to the floor.

  I looked on, stunned at what had just happened.

  “Warn . . . you,” she said. “Warn you good, Peter Vandry. Warn you . . . get off ship. Stay wethead. Soon bad thing happen and you still here.”

  I pushed my hand against my chest, trying to numb the pain in my forefinger, where it had been twisted out of the trigger grip.

  “The bad thing already happened,” I said, angry and confused at the same time. “We took out a ship . . . killed its crew.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head gravely. “That not what I mean. I mean real bad thing. Real bad thing happen here. Here and soon. This ship.”

  I looked at the remains of the gun. “What just happened?”

  “She save me.”

  I frowned. “She?”

  For a moment the girl seemed torn between infinite opposed possibilities.

  “You try shoot me, Peter Vandry. I trust you and you try shoot me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to . . . it’s just that I need to keep on Mister Zeal’s good side.”

  “Zeal bad man. Why you work for Zeal?”

  “I didn’t have a choice. They tricked me aboard. I didn’t know this was a pirate ship. I just needed a ticket off Mokmer.”

  “What happen on Mokmer?”

  “Bad thing,” I said, with half a smile.

  “Tell.”

  “A man called Happy Jack did something to my sister. I got even with Happy Jack. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t stick around.”

  “Happy Jack bad man?”

  “As bad as Zeal.”

  She looked at me, hard and deep and inquiring, and then said, “I hope you not lie, Peter Vandry.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  She showed me her hands, giving me time to admire the crudity of their function, the brutal way they’d been grafted to her arms. “Zeal did this.”

  “I figured.”

  “Once I work for Zeal. All go well . . . until one day. Then I make mistake. Zeal get angry. Zeal take hands. Zeal say ‘more use on end of machine.’“

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Zeal got temper. One day Zeal get angry with
you.”

  “I’ll be off the ship before then.”

  “You hope.”

  Now it was my turn to sound angry. “What does it matter? There’s nowhere for me to go. I have no choice but to work with Zeal.”

  “No,” she said. “You have choice.”

  “I don’t see that I do.”

  “I show. Then you understand. Then you help.”

  I looked at her. “I just tried to shoot you. Why would you still trust me?”

  She cocked her head, as if my question made only the barest sense to her. “You ask me . . . what my name is.” She blinked, screwing up her face with the effort of language. “What my name was.”

  “But you didn’t know.”

  “Doesn’t matter. No one else . . . ever ask. Except you, Peter Vandry.”

  She took me deeper into the ship, into the part I had always been told was off-limits because of its intense radiation. Dimly, it began to dawn on me that this was just a lie to dissuade the curious.

  “Zeal not happy, you not bring me in,” she said.

  “I’ll make something up. Tell him I couldn’t find you, or that you tricked me and destroyed the gun.”

  “Not work on Zeal.”

  “I’ll think of something,” I said glibly. “In the meantime . . . you can just hide out here. When we dock, we can both make a run for it.”

  She laughed. “I not get off Devilfish, Peter Vandry. I die here.”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t have to happen like that.”

  “Yes, it does. Nearly time now.”

  “Back there,” I said. “When you did that thing with the gun . . . what did you mean when you said ‘baby’?”

  “I mean this,” she said, and opened a door.

  It led into a huge and bright room: part of the engine system. Since my time on the ship, I had learned enough of the ramscoop design to understand that the interstellar gases collected by the magnetic scoop had to pass through the middle of the ship to reach the combustion chamber at the rear . . . which was somewhere near where we were standing.