by Rachel Caine
And the I spun apart into two, and Zara cried out and reached for the synthesis again, the warmth, the perfection, but it was gone, and I was back in flesh and bone that wanted to skim the stars and drink the songs. My skin was too tight, just as my body felt too small. I’d thought I understood isolation before, but this took it to a whole new level.
I drew in deep, whooping breaths, and felt the flush of warmth rush through me—an aftermath of the intensity made physical and real in all my senses. My body relaxed, though my mind was racing desperately to understand everything I’d just seen/known/experienced. I’d acted as a kind of filter for Nadim, helping him prioritize what Typhon had directed his way. It was weird and wonderful and fascinating, because I’d never thought of the human brain like that before.
“It’s unique,” Nadim’s voice said from somewhere near my head. Soft, almost a whisper. “The human brain has the capacity to analyze information in a way that few other species can duplicate. It’s one of the reasons we are so intrigued with you. You are complex creatures.”
There was a warmth to his voice, and to the room around me, that felt like an embrace. Like he couldn’t quite let go.
And I didn’t want him to, either. “Not sure if anybody ever called me complex before.”
“I neglected to note that humans are often unable to see the glory that’s right in front of them,” he said. “Pity.”
Glory. The way he said it made my skin feel tight and luminous. It almost swept me away on a tide of bliss before I caught onto a solid, rocky thought. “In all that information, is there anything about how to kill these damn things?”
The bliss faded. The warmth around me chilled.
Nadim said quietly, “I do not think so.”
The next day, we got our first look at the Sliver.
It looked like post-apocalyptic Las Vegas had crashed into a junkyard, and then rusted in the rain for a hundred years. I’d seen more inviting hideouts in the Zone, and that was as low as you got on Earth. Seemed like space crims should be a lot flashier than this. You’d think with all the tech, they could do something better than . . . well, than a ramshackle tangle of metal, garishly grafted. Bioluminescent strips, a maze of levels with no real organization, and ships hanging on to the thing at every possible angle as the station/planetoid spun in drunken spirals.
“How do we even land?” I asked nobody in particular, and got an appalled silence in response, because we were all staring at the Sliver the same way. Even Starcurrent had gone still, except for random twitches. “We have to match a Hopper to that spin?”
“It’s part of the bar to entry,” Marko’s voice said over comms. He and Chao-Xing hadn’t come back, likely because they still had a shitload of repairs left on Typhon. The list of stuff to replace was probably enormous. From the phrasing, he sounded like himself again. “Or so I heard. Honors don’t come here. Leviathan come very rarely.”
“Until now,” I said. “Okay, so . . . Bea? Can you handle this?”
She tilted her head to one side and watched the rotation. “I think so.” Better her than me, because I wanted to puke just staring at the trajectories involved. “It’s not so bad once you get over the oscillation.”
It burned me that I was supposedly the pilot, and I didn’t have the natural feel for it that Beatriz did, but she—the singer—didn’t have the ability to freely meld with Nadim the way I did, so it evened out. There was no way I was heading into a place called the Sliver without Nadim, however. We’d figured out how to jury-rig a remote connection before, and Nadim’s input would be considerably more important here. I kept our bond open. Light, but present, so he could look directly through my eyes.
I still wanted a backup.
“Bea, do we still have the tech we used on Firstworld?” I asked.
She got where I was headed straightaway. “Should be with the other gear. I’ll look.” Soon, she came back with the unit and attached it to my skinsuit, adding, “Nadim, would you rather have this installed on a bot or a drone?”
“That is . . . an intriguing suggestion,” Nadim said, but I could tell he had reservations. “I prefer to stay with Zara, for now.”
I grinned. “My legs are your legs. So, what, we grab a Hopper and jump right in?”
“Not so fast,” Yusuf said. “What will you use for currency?”
Great question. Honors were given a lot of good stuff, but bags of cash weren’t included, and Earth money wouldn’t do us any good out here. “What’s considered valuable?”
Starcurrent scuttled forward, a little too eagerly. “If I may? All value the .” That was a fantastic time for the translation matrix to blip on us. Ze waved tentacles as if ze’d ended a galactic war or something.
“Try again.” Starcurrent fiddled with the device. For the first time, I realized ze was no longer wearing a skinsuit, just the device, held in place by a tangle of smaller fringe tentacles. “Hey, are you okay? With the air in here?”
A dismissive wave of too many fronds to count. “I have grown a filter,” ze said. “For the toxins. Given time, is easy. Ah, there. All species value stillsong.”
“Stillsong? You mean, song,” I repeated. “We’re going to sing for what we need in a space-crim scrapyard?”
“Not livesong,” Starcurrent said. “You have recordings. Those are stillsong. Rare, to have such from new species. Very valuable.”
I blinked. We had a music library, sure; it held hundreds of thousands of musical pieces, everything from old-instrument classical to glasspipe, which had been raging when we’d left Earth. “Any particular way they want to have it?”
“Share by datastream,” Starcurrent said. “Sample first. Full song on receipt of goods.”
I shared a look with Bea, who covered her mouth with one hand to smother a sharp laugh. “Wait,” she said. “Are you trying to tell us that we might be rich because we have a lot of music on board?”
All the tentacles splayed, and the tips went bright pink. “Yes!”
“Well, shit,” I said, and picked up my H2 handheld. I tapped it against the console and called up the music library, then ported the whole thing into the handheld’s storage. “I kind of love this dump now. Let’s go make some trades.”
All of us—except Yusuf, who remained in EMITU’s care, heavily sedated now—decided to go down to the Sliver, which might not have been the safest choice, but we were running out of time, or rather Yusuf was.
“Right,” Chao-Xing said as we got settled. She’d claimed the pilot’s chair with Beatriz copiloting beside her, and me, Marko, and Starcurrent were all stuffed back into the crew seats. Starcurrent, I was interested to notice, could fold up very small. I assumed, from the ninety million tentacles holding on to everything in reach, including the back of Bea’s seat, ze didn’t like the idea of landing the Hopper on the spinning, gyrating, uneven surface of the Sliver. “I’ve sent each of you priorities. Stay in teams. Marko, Starcurrent, Beatriz, you stay together. Zara and I will work our own list.”
“Which of us is looking for Yusuf’s medicine?” Beatriz asked.
“On your list,” C-X said. “Along with specific supplies and repair parts. Also, food that Starcurrent likes. Zara and I will arrange for the Leviathan’s star baths and try to locate armor and weapons for them. Stick to your lists as much as possible. The faster we do this, the faster we’re safely out.”
Safe was not usually an incentive for me, but looking at the chaotic swirl of the Sliver, I was starting to understand the attraction.
“You got this?” I asked C-X as she did the final adjustments on her course.
Bea was running the numbers, and she nodded at Chao-Xing. “Approach looks good.”
“Brace yourselves,” C-X said. “Acceleration in three, two, one—”
I didn’t even have a chance to ask her why exactly we would be accelerating before it felt like a fist punched me in the back, and the whole Hopper started to tumble and twist. Everything spun, and I heard the normally calm Chao
-Xing let out a sharp, bitten-off cry as she wrestled the controls. Starcurrent made a yowling sound, and tentacles surrounded me. I cussed until the air should’ve turned blue.
We spun faster. I felt like my eyeballs would pop out. “Chao-Xing!”
“Almost there—”
“Hey!”
“Got it.” Her words were calm, and rich with satisfaction, and the spin slowed down as jets fired, and then we were down, the Hopper fastening to the metal skin of the Sliver with a harsh, jolting click. Magnetic, I realized. The whole damn landing pad was magnetic. Which was why the surface was littered with crouching ships.
Now, nothing was turning except the stars, and if I didn’t look at them, the motion sickness wasn’t so bad.
“Helmets,” Marko prompted. “We’ll need to keep them on in there. The air’s borderline toxic at best.”
We slid them on. Thin and filmy, the coverings felt like plastic, but there was really a breathable biotech that adhered close to our faces, locked down onto the skinsuits we wore, and immediately began feeding us a rich oxygen mix. Starcurrent’s filtering system must have been feeding zim something else. “Okay. We ready to do this?”
“Weapons check,” Chao-Xing said. She stood up and drew one of the sleek black laser guns that both Typhon and Nadim had aboard; I had a similar model at my side, as did Bea and Marko. We checked charges. All full.
“No weapon here,” Starcurrent said. “None is needed, bless.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I hoped it didn’t mean ze thought the people who lived out here were good at heart. In my experience, fringe dwellers were loyal to their own, but everybody else needed to stay sharp.
“Got your tunes?” I asked. All four of us humans held up H2 units. Starcurrent’s tentacles flared pink at the ends again. I wondered if that meant ze was excited. “Let’s boldly go shopping.”
That was when someone banged on the Hopper’s armored side. Loudly. With what sounded like a hammer big enough to flatten a Leviathan.
“Open up!” The roar came across all our comms at a volume that made my ears ring.
FROM THE UNOFFICIAL PUBLICATION A GUIDE TO THE SLIVER
Source: Bruqvisz Planetary Database, unlicensed copy
Welcome, brave traveler! To dare the Sliver is to declare your independence and show survival in all excellent forms. Your first challenge will be minor: landing and paying for the privilege of not being undocked.
Your second will be finding allies upon tiers, to assist in earning your way while on the Sliver. Bold thought and bold action are needed. The rule of the Sliver is lack of rules, but for two: never steal from Bacia Annont, and never steal from the Sliver bank. Killing in defense is allowable, but check alliances prior to such or could bring worse consequences. Theft from vendors is expected. Cheating, lying, deception: all are art.
If such is not your nature, brave traveler, move on. The Sliver is not for you.
If it is, many riches may be found.
The difficulty is leaving with riches intact.
CHAPTER THREE
Binding Agreements
“THEY ARE DEMANDING a docking fee,” Starcurrent said. “Or they threaten harm.”
“Yeah, got that part,” I said. Chao-Xing and I took up positions, and Marko hit the control to power the Hopper doors open with the hiss of pressurized seals releasing. Scanning, my skinsuit helmet told me with a scrolling datafeed that I was in low-G and that oxygen was poor. Like Marko had warned, didn’t look like I’d be taking off my helmet anytime soon.
Magnetized boots clanged against the metal docking floor, alerting me to company before I spotted the twin figures in power armor. Rounding our shuttle, they were slick as hell, impossible to tell what this species looked like, except that they had four arms, two legs, and what I suspected might be a tail. After hanging with Starcurrent, I was totally chill with all of this. Totally.
“We don’t want trouble,” I said, like that wasn’t my damn middle name. I hoped their matrix could factor Earth talk.
Evidently it was highly adaptable. “State your business,” Thing One snapped.
“We need to make some deals.”
I was apparently speaking the right code because the hostility ramped down as the two conferred. Then the first one turned to me. “You have barter?”
I suspected that wasn’t exactly the right word, but close enough. At least nobody had gotten shot yet.
“Tons of original music. You won’t have heard anything like it!” To my own ears I sounded a little desperate, like the guy in the night market trying to unload the last of his shoddy bootleg chips.
If they asked about proof of intellectual property ownership, we were so screwed. One of them made a call and talked to someone higher up the food chain. “Show us,” Thing Two said. At least, I thought it was Thing Two. Hard to tell. The translation field was omnidirectional, to my ears.
Bea played some classical tune snippet on her H2; it wasn’t my jam, but it made all Starcurrent’s tentacles flitter around like ze was a sea anemone riding a strong tide.
At my cue, she cut the sound. “We can upload that to pay for docking, just say the word.”
“Word,” said the guard.
Bea must have been rolling her eyes, but she sent the data, and a light flashed on the handheld Thing Two was brandishing. Well, I called it that, but it looked nothing like Earth tech. This was pretty and crystal and to me, the way the colors and symbols flashed, they might’ve told me it was a magic gem, and I’d have halfway believed it.
“Accepted,” Thing One said. “Scanning to decrypt format.”
That took a bit, so we cooled our heels. It didn’t make sense that they’d use the same type of files we did, but with their tech level, it would likely be a cake walk to reverse engineer our code. Finally, the green light flashed, and music pulsed from Thing One’s hand—loud, industrial grindhouse stuff that nearly made him drop the unit.
“A trap?”
Uh-oh, Thing One sounds pissed. Bea edged closer to me. “I sent the wrong file,” she whispered. “What do I do?”
I stepped up. “Hey, that first thing? That was nothing. This, this is the good stuff,” I said. “Don’t want it? Fine. But I guarantee you, nobody here has anything like it.”
The guards conferred. Blared the grindhouse some more. Finally turned back to us. “Too much like ,” they said, and whatever the word was, the translation matrix gave up on it. “Other one.”
Bea took a deep breath and tried again. This time, when the decryption finished, the classical melody washed over us, rendered weirdly wrong by the thinner air, but the guards seemed happier. Too happy, since they kept listening. Chao-Xing tapped her foot, and I felt the weight of her glare, even if I couldn’t see her eyes.
This shit takes time, okay?
Thing One finally said grudgingly, “Open line of credit? Give access to ship database?”
“Don’t give them access,” Nadim whispered in my comms.
Having him perched on my shoulder was all kinds of handy, but did he think I was that fresh? “I wouldn’t,” I whispered back. Too far for telepathy. That would be more discreet. “’Cause I’m not nine kinds of fool.” I raised my voice. “Not gonna happen. Separate line of credit, no ship database. How much does that song buy us? A week’s docking?” I just made it up, but at least it was a starting point.
Thing Two let out a sound that was like metal grinding. I hoped it wasn’t laughter. “Half day.”
“Four standard Sliver days.”
“One.”
“Two.”
The guards stepped back. More convo. Then: “Agreed.”
One song, two days of docking privileges? Not bad. I was starting to like this place.
“What business you want?” Thing One asked. Didn’t seem mad that I’d shut down his effort to outright rob us. Maybe that was just a polite opening gambit in the Sliver.
I opened my mouth, but Chao-Xing said, “Not your business. We need a
vendor list.”
That set off the bargaining again, but we got by for an additional pop song. Thing One handed us a shimmering white crystal. I had no idea what to do with it. “Where do we use this?”
“Kiosk,” Thing One said. “Welcome to the Sliver. Have a nice day.”
Behind them, part of the dock clicked, then tilted down to reveal a rusty metallic hallway.
The guards clumped away down the ramp.
“Follow?” Marko asked.
I shrugged and fell in behind the guards.
As soon as we stepped off the landing pad, we were in alien territory. The shape of the hallway reminded me of a honeycomb, made out of ancient, rusty metal, scarred with faded traces of what must have been graffiti. Too bad I couldn’t read the faded yellow glyphs. Maybe they were ads.
My weighted boots kept me from floating away in low-G, but I wished I had magnets too. That’s going on the buy list.
Behind us on the other side of the Hopper, a blue energy field shimmered, all that stood between us and a quick, cold death in vacuum. These fools could vent us back into space any time.
I looked over at Marko, who was hanging close to Bea. “You locked the ship down, right?”
“I don’t know what kind of slicing tools they’ve got, so I can’t guarantee security, but yeah, I did my best.”
“Nadim?”
“No one will get inside,” Nadim said. “And if by some miracle someone steals the Hopper, I won’t allow the shuttle to dock. If any intruder tries Typhon, the Elder will crush them. We will be fine.”
The guards must have been aware of that probability. Whether or not they would give it a try depended on how risk-averse these crims were. I suppose hijacking a Leviathan was right up there with stealing a planet. Probably beyond their pay grade, at least without serious authorization.
Our group followed a curving corridor that ended in an impressive-as-hell door. I wouldn’t be surprised if this beast could stand up to a starving Phage legion. Thing One inputted a complicated code, and then lifted the visor to breathe on the panel. Interesting, that. DNA-based access? I glimpsed vaguely reptilian features and a set of sharp teeth before the faceplate came down again.
