A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  “Welcome to Odessa Station,” Jane said.

  CHAPTER 5

  Unlike the docking bay on Valkyrie Rock, the bay on Odessa was a massive hangar, wide enough to accommodate numerous ships at once, even vessels significantly larger than Scheherazade. Being that we were the only craft within, it was hard not to feel dwarfed by the sepulchre-silent space, our tiny ship all alone on the wide-open platform meant to hold a dozen craft of Schaz’s size.

  Jane and I took all our guns. We weren’t expecting trouble, but given that we weren’t expecting anyone at all, there was no reason not to.

  We emerged from Schaz’s interior into the relative dimness of the hangar; there was emergency lighting, but that was it: the huge floodlights built into the ceiling were still dark. “There’s a hardwire access panel, there.” Jane pointed at one of the walls, picking up the necessary machinery on her HUD.

  I remembered when I’d first left my homeworld, and been so excited by the concept of spaceflight. I was still excited—I still got a thrill every time I saw a new world, every time Schaz took us out of atmosphere and the stars spread around us like a curtain of shimmering light—but I’d also gotten used to the fact that living on and around spaceships meant a lot of work: good, old-fashioned manual labor, not really all that different from what I’d done in the settlement back home, when the kids from the orphanage had been loaned out to whatever farmer needed help at harvest time.

  It took Jane and me a bit to first wire a heavy cable into the access panel, then feed the cable into a nearby extender so we could push that extender across the empty bay—one of its wheels squeaked terribly; I guess nobody had been around to oil the thing in a while—then stretch another cable from the extender into Scheherazade’s exterior port. After that, we still had to find the nearby hangar control room—up a flight of spiral stairs, through a sealed door that I had to breach with my teke—find an emergency generator, find a spare fusion battery for the emergency generator, wire the generator into the hangar controls, and divert the power conduits to the access panel we’d wired Schaz into so the relays would open up. Only once all that was done did she have access to Odessa Station’s internal network.

  Come, see the galaxy, learn about exciting electrical engineering and lifting heavy things.

  “Took you long enough,” Schaz grumbled—through the speakers in the bay, this time, rather than through our comms, which I guess was progress. Jane made a rude gesture at her through the hangar control window. “I saw that,” Schaz said, sounding vaguely offended. “Wait—I saw that. I’m patched into the hangar’s programming directives. Camera feeds, too. Apparently.”

  “Anybody in there with you?” Jane asked.

  “That would be a negative,” Schaz replied. “The table’s all set but nobody’s home, and the kitchen . . . door . . . is . . . locked.”

  “I . . . don’t know what that means,” I said.

  “You really shouldn’t try to metaphor, Schaz,” Jane added. “You’re not actually very good at it.”

  “I am too; shut up,” she replied, a little reproachfully. “Don’t be rude. What it means is that the AI core was purged, purposefully. Not damaged or destroyed, but removed, intact. Standard practice for a decommissioning.”

  “Except that the station wasn’t decommissioned,” Jane pointed out. “And if the core wasn’t ejected, then whoever breached the minefield and came on board must have taken it with them when they left.”

  “That would follow, yes,” Schaz agreed. “But the good news is, that means I will be able to get access to station systems; there’s no one else inside to fight me for them. The bad news is—”

  “I thought we already covered the bad news,” I interrupted.

  “Well, there’s more bad news,” Schaz replied, somewhat testily.

  “There always is,” Jane sighed.

  “The bad news is,” Schaz just powered through, “the former inhabitant of this network locked pretty much everything down on their way out. I have MelWill’s intrusion programs, which are a ways past the firewalls the sect here could build, so I will be able to push through eventually—it’ll just take some time.”

  “Do you have access to the hangar, at least?”

  “I do—and since someone’s broken the hangar control-room door servos, it’s kind of a din in here, what with all the alarms.” I stole a guilty look at the door in question, still halfheartedly trying—and failing, repeatedly—to slide shut. I hadn’t meant to break it, but even though I’d learned a great deal about my teke in the last few weeks, fine motor control still wasn’t exactly my strong suit. “In the meantime,” Schaz continued, “have some light.” One by one, the big floods cut on in the ceiling above; from up in the control room, we could suddenly see all the way to the end of the hangar in either direction, what felt like miles away. This was . . . a really big station.

  “Can you get us access to the AI core?” Jane asked Schaz. “If we can get in there, maybe we can . . . expedite the process of giving you full control.”

  “I’ll have to get into the tram system first—unless you want to find your way through the station through several hundred miles of looping, twisting maintenance access shafts,” Schaz said, somewhat archly. “I don’t have access to mapping data for those areas, either, so you’d have to pick your way through blind.” I shuddered slightly—the concept of crawling through cramped tunnels again, after what I’d found in the center of Valkyrie Rock, was most definitely not an appealing one.

  “We’ll wait for the tram, thanks,” Jane told Schaz dryly.

  “A wise decision. All right—from here, I have to cut through the outward sensor node in order to get to tram system controls—no, it doesn’t make any more sense to me how the Barious laid out this network. Let me just shift . . . the intrusion program . . . over to. . . . ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT unidentified craft on approach unidentified craft on approach unidentified—”

  “Tell me that’s just us, Schaz; tell me it’s still reading our approach,” Jane begged.

  With what sounded like actual effort, Schaz stopped shouting alarms at us. “Negative,” she replied. “Two ships on approach, descending into the atmosphere of K14 now. I don’t have exterior cameras up yet; just radar.”

  “What’s the size of the contact?” Jane was asking even as she and I hauled ass back down the spiral stairs, sprinting across the docking bay toward Scheherazade. If it was the Cyn—if it had, somehow, managed to survive the rain of fire on Jalia Preserve and then somehow followed us here—at least we’d have access to Schaz’s turrets if it tried to take us on in the hangar.

  “Ah—smaller vessels, smaller than me,” Schaz said; Jane and I didn’t stop sprinting, but we slowed our pace a bit. Whoever was on approach, it wasn’t the Cyn.

  “Can you contact them? Or at least ping them, see if you get a response?”

  “I told you, I don’t have all of the station’s systems online yet, and that includes communications—”

  “Do you have your systems, Schaz? Plugging you into Odessa didn’t remove your control over your own comm system, did it?”

  “Oh. Right. Yes. Hold on.” A moment, as Jane and I reached Scheherazade’s side; we both leaned against her bulkheads, getting our breath back, our hearts pounding in our throats. “Oh! Hello! Hi! So good to see you!” Whoever the hell Schaz was talking to, she sounded delighted; I suppose that was a good sign.

  We weren’t inside, so we couldn’t hear whatever response the two ships outside made to Schaz, but we could still hear her reply: “Yeah, watch out for those, they’re . . . no, I couldn’t see them either, but Jane and Esa both swear there’s something . . . I know, I kind of thought they were messing with me at first too, but—no, no, I’m sure it’s not—come on, Var, Jane wouldn’t do that to us, and you know it.”

  I let out my breath in an explosive release. “Bolivar?” I asked Schaz, cutting into her conversation. “That’s Bolivar on approach?”

  “Bolivar and Khaliphon,
as well,” Schaz reported, still sounding just as pleased as punch, like she’d been throwing a fancy dinner party and been a little disappointed at the guests who had shown up, only to find two late arrivals at the door. “Apparently they were both following our signal back to Jaliad, got redirected here by the Preacher, and met up en route. Both of them dropped what they were doing to come help us out: isn’t it nice to have friends?”

  Jane was grinding her teeth again; I put a hand on her shoulder, and grinned weakly. “She means well,” I told her, and then started laughing.

  With actual, physical effort, Jane restrained herself from shouting at her ship. “Open a channel to Bolivar, please,” she said into her comm.

  “Of course, boss! Javier’s actually been broadcasting for a bit now; you’re just not inside, so you’re not in range of my internal speakers—”

  “And you couldn’t forward that signal to the docking bay?”

  “Oh. Well. Yes. In my defense—I’ve been a ship for a very long time. Getting used to being a ship and a station both is taking some getting used to.”

  “Schaz—”

  “Transferring Javier’s signal now,” she said hurriedly, and then both our comms and the hangar speakers were suddenly broadcasting Javier’s voice. “Jane, Esa, this is Javier—Can you read? Repeat—Marus and I are on approach, making our way past these . . . whatever the goddamned hell these monoliths are. If you’re there, please respond. Jane, come on, just—”

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Jane said. “We’re here—we’re okay. My ship is just an idiot. It’s good to hear your voice.”

  Javier laughed. “And yours,” he said then, as he shouted into another channel: “Marus! I got them! They’re on board!”

  “Hi, Javi!” I said, not willing to let Jane have all the fun. “How’s it going?” I know, it was kind of stupid, but I couldn’t help it: I was glad to hear his voice.

  “Hi, kid,” he replied; I could hear him grinning. “I’m good, like always; more to the point, how are you doing? It sounds like you’ve had a rough few weeks.”

  “Been better,” I replied. “But I can channel energy through my teke now, so, you know. That’s . . . cool.”

  “The approach is simple enough,” Jane told Javier, ignoring me completely. “The obelisks down in the mists seem like a navigational nightmare, but we think they’re avoiding contact on purpose; how big, floating mountains have a purpose is a question for another day.”

  “Yeah, we’ve noticed that too—Marus closed Khaliphon with one, to try and scan some of that weird writing on the side, because of course he did.” As an explorer and cartographer, Javier tended toward “look, don’t interact” when it came to new discoveries; as an intelligence operative, Marus’s inclinations were always a bit more . . . active. “It actually moved away from him, even though Khaliphon himself still couldn’t sense it. Weird shit. Anyway, we’re both coming up on the hangar ingress now—we’ll see you soon.”

  “Sounds good,” Jane replied. “And Javier?”

  “Yeah, sweetheart?”

  “Thanks for coming.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  I triggered my comms off. “For that,” I whispered to Jane, “and so that you can use him as you will, mostly to satisfy your massive appetite for—” She glared at me, and I sniggered, looking away. I hadn’t realized how tense I had been, until the arrival of our friends had broken that tension like a fever. Schaz was right—it was good to have friends.

  CHAPTER 6

  Given that—out of absolutely necessity—I had managed to break the airlock seal on the control-room door, just a little bit, Jane and I were forced to retreat to the interior of Scheherazade as the hangar airlocks cycled to allow Bolivar and Khaliphon entrance to the station.

  Parked together on the gleaming metal deck, the three ships were a study in contrasts: if Scheherazade was a knife, her vestigial wings like the curved guard sweeping forward from the hilt of her engine, then Bolivar was an arrowhead, smaller and lighter than Schaz, his exterior studded with all sorts of sensors and probe-launchers for Javier’s mapping duties. Khaliphon was smaller and sleeker than either ship, built for stealth and insertion—unlike Bolivar, he did possess wings for agile atmospheric flight, but they were retractable, folded up against his body when he was maneuvering in the void, then expanded as he approached atmosphere. It was a design decision Schaz was constantly needling him over, given that she felt his Reint designers had settled on a compromise choice rather than sticking to their proverbial guns on one path or the other.

  Javier and Marus descended almost as soon as the airlocks had cycled again; they were about as mismatched a pair as could be, Javier tall, good-looking in a rakish, just-rolled-out-of-the-cockpit kind of a way, Marus slight even for a Tyll, possessed of a kind of preternatural stillness that contrasted even more with Javier, who always seemed to be in motion, even when he wasn’t. Jane and I emerged from Scheherazade to meet them, and I gave Marus a hug as Jane granted Javier a significantly more . . . enthusiastic greeting.

  “I suppose it must be strange for you, to be in this place,” Marus murmured softly as he released me. “Whatever it is you need, Javier and I are here for you, Esa. I want to make sure you remember that.”

  “Thanks, Marus. I’m . . . I feel like, yeah, it’s weird, a bit. But it would have hurt a lot more a couple of years ago. I lost something in this place, true, something I didn’t even know I had to lose when it happened. But I’ve made myself a new family now.”

  “Pretty much through sheer force of will, yes.” He smiled at me.

  I shrugged. “It helps that I had a wise old uncle to guide me through.” I patted his green-skinned hand, matching his smile with my own.

  “I’m not that much older than Jane,” he protested.

  “She doesn’t actually know how old she is. She told me that earlier.”

  “Well, I know how old I am,” he retorted, “and it’s not old enough to not object to being called ‘old.’ I’ll take the wise bit, though. Happily.”

  “Fine. I should tell you . . .” I paused. Maybe it should have been Jane to say it, but she was occupied, and he deserved to know. “I know you served with Jane, back in the day. I take it that means you served alongside Mohammed, as well.”

  “I did, yes. Though ‘beside’ might be a stretch; the work the two of them did was . . . associated with my own, much in the same sense that the work you two do now is linked to mine, but we were rarely in the field together. I passed intelligence on to their division; they acted on it. The lives they took doing so—that weight was on me, as much as them, I admit, though I much prefer the way we do things now, when I can claim at least partial credit for the lives you’re saving.” He studied my face again. “Esa—the Preacher told us what happened; she scanned Scheherazade before she jumped to hyperspace, knew that he didn’t get on board before the weapons systems defending the planet fired. I know he’s gone. I’m sorry you had to suffer through that.”

  Just the kindness in his voice, the sympathy, was enough to bring the moment welling back up inside me; I stuffed it back down, and kept myself from crying again. “I’m sorry you lost your friend, Marus,” I said in reply.

  He sighed. “That’s the thing about getting ‘old,’ as you put it: you reach a certain point where, unfortunately, you have to learn to make your peace with that aspect of life. Mo’s search for his God was always quixotic in nature—I sometimes wonder if he was looking for answers, or if he was really looking for one last fight. One final good battle, where he could feel he was on the side of the angels again. Setting off the pulse bomb robbed him of that feeling, of the security he’d always felt, serving with the Justified. I believe, if he made the choice he did, it was because you granted him that sense of righteousness again. I’d thank you for that.”

  It meant the world to hear Marus say that, but it also meant I was about to start crying, yet again. “Thank you,” I told him, then turned to Jane and Javier. “Do
I have to find a bucket of water to throw on the two of you?” I shouted, more to give myself something else to talk about than for any other reason. “You can make out later; we’ve got work to do!”

  Given that her mouth was somewhat occupied at the moment, Jane replied with a two-fingered salute, one Javier had taught me had been particularly rude among the sect she was born into. Of all the other vestiges of that life Jane had left behind, it was funny what still clung to her like barnacles on the hull of a boat, invisible beneath the waterline of her personality.

  “I’ve managed to get basic structural readings from the sensors,” Scheherazade put in. “The station’s still sinking into the atmosphere, its orbit decaying day by day. We’re not in any immediate danger, but a year from now it will be entirely beneath the sea of atmosphere, and once that happens, some of its automated propulsion systems will short out, and its descent will begin in earnest.”

  “What about internal sensors?” Jane asked her, finally breaking away from Javier. “Do you have any readings there?”

  “Basic integrity only, so far,” Schaz replied. “The superstructure of the station has multiple structural failures, ranging from minor to severe. Also, several of the station bulkheads—more, the lower down you get—have been breached, and several of the emergency airlocks have failed. I’d say roughly a quarter of the station is flooded with atmosphere.”

  “Is that affecting the fusion reactor?” she asked. “Is that why power’s so spotty?”

  “In parts, yes,” Schaz said. “It’s also because the reactor was supplemented by solar panels, which, currently sunk beneath the fog, are operating at . . . less than optimal efficiency.”

  “You mean they’re doing fuck-all in this soup,” Javier translated, his tone dry.

  “I mean pretty much that, yes.”