ARC: Under Nameless Stars

by Christian Schoon

  CHRISTIAN SCHOON

  Under Nameless Stars

  Please Note!

  This is an Advanced Reading Copy of the book and may not have been through the final editorial and proof-reading process prior to publication. Please do not quote from the text in reviews, or critique the text on the basis of perceived errors, without double-checking with Strange Chemistry to see if the final version has been amended.

  Thank you.

  To Kathleen, my guide-star.

  ONE

  When Zenn came to, she was floating, weightless, in a very dark place that smelled of animal. She hurt all over. Every breath pulled in bits of drifting dirt and debris. She spit out a long piece of straw, and the next second something unseen closed around her wrist in a powerful grip. Reacting in blind panic, she flailed, twisting in the air. She broke free and kicked away from whatever it was, brought her arms up in front of herself, fists balled, ready to fend the thing off if it came at her again.

  “Nine Hells, Scarlett,” a male voice swore from the darkness next to her. “You nearly kicked my teeth out.”

  “Liam,” she said, relief washing over her. “Sorry. I couldn’t see, didn’t remember where… I didn’t know it was you.”

  “Who else would it be?” he hissed.

  A rumbling grunt sounded somewhere behind Liam. Then, an angry, ear-splitting roar. Adrenaline and fear jolted Zenn fully awake. She remembered where she was: in a shipping cage-crate. With Liam and a full-grown sandhog boar. In the zero-gravity hold of an orbital ferry, high above Mars.

  Another roar – louder, shaking the air.

  “He’s wakin up, Scarlett,” Liam said.

  “I know that,” she said, reaching out into the dark. “I can’t find the seda dish.”

  “Here. It’s right here.” She felt Liam press something into her hands: cold, metallic – the sedation field unit. The hog roared again. “Turn it on,” he yelled.

  Zenn fumbled for the control surface on the back of the dish, then contorted her body and aimed the device at the sound of the sandhog. The sedation field took effect; the roaring softened to a growl, then an idling snore.

  “OK, he’s out,” she said. A frightful new thought arose.

  Katie!

  Zenn looked around frantically, turning herself in the air, searching. Her eyes were adapting to the dim light now, and she strained to see through the darkness.

  “Katie,” she said out loud, even though she knew it would do no good. The rikkaset had been deaf since birth. “Katie, where are you?”

  Something downy-soft bumped against her hand. A warbling trill sounded. The air in front of her shimmered lilac-and-cream, and the form of the little rikkaset took shape, allowing herself to become visible again now that the commotion of the ferry’s launch was past.

  Zenn hugged the animal to her, then released her into the air again.

  “Is Katie good?” Zenn signed with one hand; with the other, she tried to keep the seda-dish aimed at the hog. The size of a house cat, the rikkaset had a round-headed, sharp-muzzled face, and large eyes the amber-green-gold of a ripe peach, all crowned by big tufted ears. With mental abilities a little greater than an Earther chimpanzee, Katie had quickly learned the basics of sign language when still a cub.

  “Katie good,” the rikkaset signed to Zenn, the slender, black fingers on her front paws spelling out the words as she tried to keep her body oriented toward Zenn. “Bad sounds. Too loud. Shaking. And floating. No fun for Katie.”

  “Bad sounds finished,” Zenn signed, also speaking the words aloud so Katie could read her lips. But even as she said this, the sandhog emitted another deafening roar. In the confines of the metal-walled crate, which was a little smaller than Zenn’s dorm room at the cloister, the animal sounded like it was close enough to touch.

  “I thought you said he was asleep,” Liam said, reaching out to pull Zenn away from the noise.

  “He was,” she muttered, repeatedly pressing the activation switch again on the back of the seda unit. “The dish. It’s old. Doesn’t always take at first.”

  It wasn’t her fault. The seda-dish, like almost all the other things in Zenn’s exovet field kit backpack, were either hand-me-downs or borderline-expired meds she’d scavenged from the storeroom at the cloister. After the Rift with Earth cut off trade, supplies of any kind were desperately hard to come by on Mars. She’d been proud of herself for scraping together what she could from the odds and ends Otha had no use for at the clinic.

  A loud banging sound rattled the cage-crate.

  “Sounds like he’s trying to claw his way out,” Liam said. “Better get that thing back online before he floats this way.”

  A harsh hum now sounded from the seda dish. Zenn shook it, then hit it hard with the heel of her hand, producing a brief shower of sparks in the dark air, followed by quieter humming.

  “Damn, Scarlett, don’t break it.”

  “I didn’t. It’s working now.”

  She swept the dish’s beam onto the hog, and he immediately stopped thrashing. His vocalizations dropped to a breathy rumble as Zenn dialed up the strength of the field. She double-checked the dish output level. Even though sandhogs were considered “domesticated” animals, they were still big enough, and unpredictable enough, to kill a person when provoked. And after the tumult of the ferry launch from Mars, this hog was plenty provoked.

  She could just discern the creature’s outline, now; it had drifted up into one corner of the cage-crate, looking like a misshapen, sofa-sized dirigible. With a body something like a manatee, or maybe a rhinoceros-sized grub, a sandhog’s most prominent feature was a pair of immense digging claws on its fore-section. They had no hind legs, no neck to speak of and a broad, concave face, with five small, spider-like eyes and a vast, gaping cavity of a mouth. The hairless, muscular body was covered in calloused-skin armor plate and tapered down to end in a powerful stub-tail, used to push the creature through the soil as it burrowed.

  “So, guess we survived lift-off,” Liam said. “I must’ve blacked out. You too?”

  “Yes. From the g-forces,” Zenn said.

  The hog snorted in his sleep.

  “You sure Tiny, there, is out for the count?”

  “Yes. But don’t let yourself get close to him. In case he drifts out of the seda-field.”

  “Don’t worry. The smell alone will keep me away.”

  Zenn reached out and pulled Katie to her. The little marsupial clung tightly to the front of the oversized worker’s coveralls Zenn wore. She’d found the coveralls hanging on the wall of the warehouse in Pavonis and put them on over her pajamas after she was kidnapped from the cloister. Kidnapped. Her. The whole thing was simply too preposterous. Senseless.

  Not now. She told herself. Focus. First things first…

  Dialing up the seda-field another notch just to be sure, Zenn pushed off the nearest wall, and coasted to park herself in the opposite corner, where she looked out through one of the vent-holes in the crate. There was a porthole in the ferry’s bulkhead. Blackness filled it, punctuated by a few blazing stars. Then, something else came into view as the ferry continued its silent ascent. A starship – the Helen of Troy.

  Though she could only see part of it through the porthole, Zenn knew the starship was a good quartermile long. Pressing her face against the side of the crate, she watched as the multilayered darkmatter collection panels at the bow swam into view, hanging like a deck of playing cards suspended in mid-shuffle. Then the passenger decks and crew quarters slid past, bulging gracefully in smooth, sculpted lines along the ship’s mid-section. Next came the huge, blocky Indra-hold, suspended at the stern of the ship on a thin stalk, far enough away to protect the passengers from the Indra
’s radiation output when it tunneled through space. There was no sign of the Indra from the outside, of course. The mighty stonehorse would be resting now, burrowed down in the metal labyrinth of its warren, gathering itself for the task ahead.

  “What do you see?” Liam asked, rising up to position himself next to her. The towner boy was a little older than Zenn, tall for his age, with longish blond hair that, like Zenn’s red locks, now rose up freely around his head in the absence of gravity. His face, sunburned from his work helping out around the cloister, was open, friendly. He was still dressed in the patched heavy cloth pants and home-made hemp-cloth shirt he wore for doing chores.

  “It’s the ship. We’re coming into dock with it.” She moved aside so he could look.

  “Whoa,” he said. “It’s huge. You ever see anything that big before?”

  In fact, she had.

  “Yes. Another starliner. When I was nine.” Her voice grew quiet. “My mother was aboard, treating the Indra…”

  “Oh. Right. Sorry, Scarlett.” Liam pushed himself back and faced her. “I’m an idiot to bring that up.”

  “Liam, it’s OK. I’ve… learned to deal with it.” Not entirely true, but at least now she could talk about it without seizing up entirely. “Like Otha said once, afterwards. Mom was doing what she loved, trying to help an animal that needed her. And she knew the risks. She knew accidents happen.”

  “Yeah, but to be inside an Indra and then… They ever figure out what went wrong?”

  “There was an inquiry. They said it must have been the in-soma pod’s autopilot. Software bug. Apparently the pod rerouted itself, took her into the Indra’s skull. The Indra’s immune response triggered. Whatever was making it sick might have made the response more powerful than usual.”

  “And so the Indra just, like, vaporized?”

  Zenn flinched at the word. Over the years, she had more or less sealed off the memories of that terrible day, encapsulated them within a sort of protective cyst in a far corner of her mind, away from the light, where it couldn’t hurt her. Liam’s questions and the sight of the Helen of Troy opened the cyst and released its contents in a stomach-twisting rush of emotion. But she knew it wasn’t healthy to push the memory down inside her, to let it fester. It was better to talk. At least, that’s what she’d been told.

  “When the blast shield in the pilot room retracted, the Indra chamber was empty. Mom, Vremya, the Indra… were just gone.”

  “Vremya?”

  “Mom’s lab tech. She was in a vac-suit, inside the chamber, monitoring the pod-insertion.”

  “So, you being on the ship. How’d that happen, anyway? You were just a kid.”

  “When Otha and my dad drove to the ferry launch port to go up to the ship, I hid in the back of the truck.”

  “You?” Liam laughed. “I don’t believe it.”

  “They couldn’t leave me at the port. So they had to take me along.”

  “You little sneak.”

  “Liam, I was nine.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean. Mule-headed from an early age.”

  “Mules are highly intelligent creatures, I’ll have you know.”

  “Fine. You’re a know-it-all mule.”

  The ferry fired its braking jets, jostling the craft. Liam’s attention was drawn back to the porthole.

  “So, you’ve actually seen a live stonehorse, huh? What are they like, in person?”

  “Well, they’re impressive. The one I saw was a full-grown female, must have been seven-hundred feet, with that kind of snake-like, flattened body.”

  “But, what’s it like to look one in the eye?”

  “Sort of eerie. They don’t have eyes, really, but three sets of full-spectrum radiation sensor slits where eyes would be. They can perceive everything from infrared through visible light all the way up to ultraviolet.”

  “Damn, I’d love to see one up close.”

  “Well, if we get away with this,” Zenn said, thinking about what they were actually attempting, “maybe you will.”

  “What? Get into the pilot room? I thought they didn’t let mere mortals in there.”

  “Uh huh. Usually just the Indra grooms and their sacrists. Maybe a VIP passenger now and then.”

  “And exovet moms and their smart-alec kids,” Liam said, grinning. Then, adding quickly: “Geez – sorry. I did it again.”

  “I told you. I’m dealing.”

  He put his face against the crate wall again to look out.

  “So, the ship’s big bulge at the end of the long tube, that’s where the Indra lives.”

  “Right. The Indra warren.”

  “And how do they get the thing to do what it does? You know, take everybody to the next stop?”

  “The Indra groom summons the Indra, and it enters the chamber, the front part of the big bulge. Then the groom communicates the coordinates to the next star system. The Indra responds by turning dark matter into warping catalyst. And about a nanosecond later, they open what’s called a tunnel and the entire ship is transported across… You probably don’t care about all this. I’m just rambling.”

  “No. Really,” he said. “I’m gonna be on that ship out there. Won’t hurt me to know how it works.”

  “I know, but I know sometimes I just sort of spew out information.”

  “Hey, I asked for it, OK? And I’m serious. I’ve never paid much attention to, you know, the sciencey stuff. Like why do some people call Indra stonehorses? They don’t look anything like a horse.”

  “Well, the head kind of has a sort of seahorse look, if you use your imagination. But they got their name because in the wild they live inside asteroids. Big ones, made of metals like iron and nickel. They keep these asteroids in front of them when they tunnel, as particle shields. So, the grooms call them stonehorses.”

  “Yeah, that’s another thing. The grooms. They go into some sort of trance, don’t they? Some kinda spooky mumbo-jumbo?”

  “Their rituals, you mean? They say it’s part of their communing with the Indra. Dates back to when the first abandoned Indra-drive ship was discovered. I think it’s just to make up for the fact that no one really understands all the aspects of tunneling. When people don’t understand something in nature, they invent things to make sense out of it.”

  “Well, whatever works.”

  “How close are we to the docking port?”

  Liam let Zenn take a turn looking out. The ferry was near enough to the ship to let her examine the vessel. The details now visible betrayed its history. Along one section of the underbelly, a rust-eaten pattern of unrepaired micrometeor damage speckled the alloy hull; farther along, billowing filaments of silvery insulation had squeezed out of a vent opening and dangled in long streamers that glinted as they unfurled against the jet-black backdrop of space. This aging ship had seen better days. She must have been built over a half-century ago, during the heyday of the huge Earther shipyards. The same bitter tide of anti-alien sentiment that brought the Temporary Executive Authority to power on Earth had also spelled the end of those imposing orbital assembly platforms and the titanic machines they produced.

  But the age and condition of the Helen of Troy didn’t really matter to Zenn. All that mattered now was getting safely aboard. Then she would try to locate the Skirni who had kidnapped her father and then her. She would follow him. If he didn’t lead her to where Warra Scarlett was being held, she would find a way to make the Skirni tell her where he was. She knew it wasn’t much of a plan. But she was her father’s only hope. She had to find him. It was that simple.

  If Liam could help her do what she need to do, she’d take advantage of that. But talking with him here, she felt herself falling back into old habits, bantering as if he were the same, easy-going towner boy she’d known for years on Mars. The fact was, she’d thought she knew who Liam Tucker was. She’d been wrong. And this mistake had almost destroyed her home, her school and the alien animals she was caring for. He claimed he’d seen that he was wrong, and he seem
ed genuinely sorry. So, maybe he really had changed. But until she knew for sure, it made sense to be careful. She would keep her guard up.

  A grinding noise came from outside the hull as the ferry docked. She turned to watch the floating sandhog, but it continued its fitful slumber. There was the groan of a hatch opening, a whoosh of inrushing air, then the rattle of a machine approaching, followed by scraping sounds. Then the crate heaved into motion and, a few seconds later, she, Katie, Liam and the hog all dropped to the floor of the crate, pulled down in the grip of artificial gravity.

  She’d done it. She was aboard the Helen of Troy. Now, all she had to do was track down a single three-foot-tall Skirni among the starship’s thousand or so other passengers, follow the alien to find her father, free her father from his captors and get away again, all while first avoiding discovery and being sent back to Mars. Right.

  With the sandhog’s slow, raspy breathing the only sound, she and Liam sat silently on the floor of the crate and waited several minutes in case anyone should come. Finally, Liam stood and cautiously peered out through one of the holes in the crate wall.

  “Looks empty,” he said quietly.

  “Katie hungry,” the rikkaset signed at Zenn, big eyes blinking. Then she went to Zenn’s field kit backpack where it lay on the floor and began pulling at the cover flap with her deft little paws. “Friend-Zenn have treats? Treats for Katie in bag?”

  “No. Sorry. Treats later,” Zenn signed. “Wait a little.”

  Katie huffed at her, sat down and wrapped her long, striped tail around her body.

  Zenn went to where Liam stood and looked out to survey the scene. They were in a vast, dimly lit cargo hold, with containers of all sizes and shapes piled to the ceiling as far as she could see. The sandhog rumbled and twitched in his sleep; the movement made the entire crate rock back and forth.

  “Hey, I’ve got a wacky idea,” Liam said, regarding the hog. “How about we get outta here before Tiny rolls over and mashes us?”

  Zenn eyed the hatch on the crate’s ceiling.