The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)

by Guerric Haché

  If there was an airlock here, she should get a wraith out there as soon as she could.

  And if anyone saw it, that would blow their tenuous cover.

  “Come back. We’re clear.”

  The cockpit had fallen silent without her even noticing, so the sudden call startled her. She scampered with the others back outside and up the ladders, settling back into the seat that had her essentially lying down. Elsa was first to ask. “How did it go?”

  “I think they bought it. The girl on the comm sounded irritated and tired. Even if they flagged us, they’re too far away to shoot right now.”

  Turou sighed. “Baoji, tell me you’ve got a plan.”

  “Like I said, somebody owes me a big favour. He runs a gas trawling operation. He’s around Chang’e Major right now, and he agreed to let us dock with him. I told the navy I was going to deploy atmospheric survey equipment over the next few days, which should be enough time for him to get us out of the system while keeping to his pre-registered schedule. We just have to meet him on the far side of the planet.”

  “It’s not foolproof.” Elsa sounded dubious, but kept any specific doubts to herself.

  Ada thought about it, but there were too many unknowns to get a clear understanding. “Is this guy’s ship faster than ours?”

  Baoji shrugged. “With more time to accelerate, yes. Thing’s got huge engines. I’ll put us in a trajectory that will swing us around Chang’e Major’s sunny side. Once we’ve had something to eat I’ll turn the engines off; we’ll coast along a wide orbital to save fuel.”

  Ada looked around, restless. “Does this mean that I can walk around?”

  Baoji turned around and looked her in the eyes. “Ada, I’m going to have to ask you for a favour. Since I’m flying you around the Union saving your life, I figure it’s the least you can do.”

  She glanced at Turou, who looked puzzled, and at Elsa, who tensed a little. “What do you want?”

  “Could you snap my posters up in the kitchen? There are magnet strips in the drawer with them. Please don’t hang them crooked, and put the mirran lady’s eyes at my eye level.”

  Ada chuckled. “I don’t know, Baoji, that’s a lot of work. You’ll have to evacuate me from at least two more planets before I can get all the posters up.”

  “I’ll name my second-born after you.”

  She laughed and unbuckled, bringing her feet down onto the ladder and beginning to descend. Turou followed, and after some rummaging through the drawers they found a bunch of rolled-up posters and small clear strips with little dark edges that stuck to the walls. Turou began to fiddle with one of the last pizzas as Ada snapped the posters into place, setting the mirran lady image right across from the door.

  As she was snapping more posters to the walls, Turou suddenly cooed at something. “Ooh, he’s got a pack of cards.”

  She glanced over. “What?”

  “Ishtari playing cards.” He reached in and showed her a thick brick of dozens of small, flat, rigid paper rectangles. “You play games with them.”

  She raised her eyebrows. They didn’t look especially fun. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “No, really, it’s fun! There are some great games for four people, we should play.”

  “I’m sure.” She snapped another poster into place. “On Earth we played games that involved hunting each other in the woods, or throwing rocks, or drinking. Or dice.”

  Turou grimaced. “We have drinking games too. Not my proudest moments.”

  Some clunking along the ladder announced a new arrival, and Elsa stepped into the kitchen. “Hey. You need a hand?”

  Ada handed her a poster. “Here, put these up.”

  Elsa took it and grabbed some magnetic strips, setting it up under the mirran lady poster. “Turou, do you think he’s angry at me?”

  “Baoji? I’ve never known him to get particularly angry.”

  She nodded, but she was breathing shallow, and her jaw was set pretty tight. She was flexing her fingers, too, clearly on edge. She didn’t look comfortable at all, but she had gone and told Baoji what she had thought anyway, even though there was absolutely no need to. Why? Ada couldn’t make sense of it.

  There was something admirably honest about it, though. She reached out to pat Elsa on the back. “I’m impressed you told him.”

  “I had to. I can’t just pretend I was never suspicious. Gotta be honest with yourself, and the best way to do that is to be honest with other people. Can’t keep convincing yourself otherwise that way.” She sighed, looking over at the pizza in its stasis box, apparently still warm. “I just wish he didn’t joke about it, and gave me a sincere answer.”

  Turou shrugged. “I know him. The joking is sincere.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “Well, tell him that.”

  “I said my piece, and I’m not going to keep whining to him about it. Ada whines enough for all of us.”

  Ada grinned, but they had hung up the last posters and she wasn’t sure what else to say to Elsa on the subject, so she squeezed around her for the door. “Stay here and get the food out, you two.”

  She climbed back up the narrow ladder to the cockpit and sat down next to Baoji, in Elsa’s seat. He glanced up at her quizzically, his ears pointing straight ahead, alert. “What’s up, space witch?”

  “Are you mad at Elsa?”

  He looked down briefly. “A little upset, sure. I thought she liked me. But she’s military and I’m a smuggler. Makes sense she wouldn’t trust me.”

  “For what it’s worth, she’s worried you’re angry.”

  “Because she thinks I might double-cross you all now, or something?”

  Ada threw up her hands. “I don’t know. She seemed upset more than suspicious.”

  “Hm. Did you hang my posters up?”

  “Yes. Are you evading?”

  “Yes. Do you want me to teach you about spaceships? Not just the Peregrine; all of them. General principles.”

  Ada blinked, and smiled. She knew almost nothing about spaceships that weren’t Cherry, and though none of the ships in the Union could compare, it might be useful to know what exactly she was working with. Or against. “Alright then, captain, let’s get started.”

  “Then go get me some pizza.”

  It was a fairly long trip to Chang’e Major, even though this ship was supposedly faster than the last one. For a few hours Baoji explained rules of physics, orbital maneuvers, and motion that didn’t make much sense to Ada - Cherry seemed blissfully unaware of these supposed rules, but perhaps they were just technical limitations of Union shipcraft.

  He told her how the engines were powered - fusion cores, some kind of process that mimicked the energy in stars. It was a beautiful idea, a beauty rare in the Union, to create a tiny star inside their ship and use its power to propel them between real stars. He mentioned the jumpgates, and after several failed analogies Ada got the impression they basically dug a hole through space into another part of the universe, where another jumpgate opened the hole and let them through.

  “What about weapons? Any weapons on this thing?”

  She tapped the screen in front of her, as though that might do something, and Baoji hissed, ears pointing backwards a bit. “No weapons. Hey, I’ve had the ship for a day and you’re already getting pizza grease on the screen?”

  She looked closer, and to her surprise the material seemed to have become dirty very quickly. “Oh, shit, sorry.”

  He reached into a small compartment and tossed her a dry cloth, suddenly grinning again. “Don’t worry about it. A place isn’t a home without a little mess. Just eat your crust this time, don’t toss it away like some toddler.”

  She furrowed her brow and started chomping away at the least interesting part of the pizza. “How far are we from this friend of yours?”

  “A bit less than a day.”

  She nodded. “Turou said something about card games.”

  Baoji’s slit-pupiled eyes lit up. “
Of course he did. He won’t stop playing unless someone hits him.” He looked more closely at the screen. “Are they done eating? I need to turn off the engines, and that means everything starts floating. We’ve got vacuum filters for little stuff, but big pieces and fluids can cause a mess.”

  A quick shout down the ship confirmed all the food was in stomachs, so Baoji turned off the ship’s engines, and suddenly the feeling of being drawn down the ship’s tower shape went away.

  She and Baoji floated down to the kitchen, where he spent a moment smiling at the minute effort everyone had put into hanging up his assortment of posters. Turou, as predicted, insisted on playing a series of card games that were mostly incomprehensible to Ada. She had to resist the temptation to quickly slip into time dilation and send a seeing eye to look at their hands - that would be unfair, she was repeatedly informed.

  When the time came to rest, they fired the engines enough to hold them to the beds, but nowhere near a real planetary feeling. This time she bunked with Baoji, which Elsa didn’t seem to fuss about, and they spent their sunless morning afterwards in microgravity as well, aside from a brief bout of acceleration for the sake of breakfast. Ada was actually starting to like all the floating.

  It turned out a slight miscommunication meant the journey took a few hours more than expected, but eventually Baoji called them up to the cockpit. She floated up and clung to his seat as he pointed to a screen showing a rear view; they were backing up towards the other ship, a dark metal silhouette against the bright white and grey ribbons of Chang’e Major.

  “That’s the ship? It looks bloated. Wait, what are those?”

  She suddenly noticed two other silhouettes, much smaller, floating alongside the main one. Baoji grinned. “The main ship has gas storage tanks, the things that look like blisters. Those little ships are trawlers, they go down and suck gas out of the atmosphere where the concentrations are right. We’re going to squeeze into their hangar and let the trawlers fit in after us.”

  Baoji’s Peregrine slowly drifted towards the gas freighter, lining up with a broad, empty hangar bay. They lumbered in and settled inside the hangar, the ship connecting with equipment unseen, as Baoji spoke a mirran language to somebody on the larger ship. Elsa looked out into the hangar bay skeptically, her suspicions apparently not allayed. Before long they were powered down and ready to leave.

  Ada didn’t have many possessions, none more precious than her suit and her locator stone, and there was only one pizza box left. The rest of them gathered their things into small packs before floating their way to a small airlock in the centre of the ship. A hatch opened out into the hangar bay, and a mirran man was floating next to a handrail that would lead them to the edge of the chamber. Baoji grinned broadly and floated past Ada to greet him with a hand gesture she didn’t catch, then turned around to introduce them all.

  “Everyone: Adrall Hesk, captain of the Watersmoke . Adrall, this is my friend Chiu Turou, my co-pilot Elsa Carrera -”

  “And the famous Ada Liu of Earth.” Adrall’s mirran face was easy enough to read - grinning, but with one ear pointed sideways, he was trying to put on a brave face. He seemed a bit short for a mirran, and his fur was dark brown, striped with black along the arms and the back of his neck. His expression then grew a little quieter, both ears flattening, and he continued speaking in his unusual, curt-sounding accent. “Welcome to the Watersmoke . You’re lucky I indebted myself so badly to Baoji or I would never let you anywhere near me. But my word means something, and I intend to keep it that way. If the military doesn’t look at us too closely, we should be all right. Please follow me; we need to empty the room so the trawlers can dock as well.”

  Adrall led them along the guardrails, which were attached to a long metallic arm that had fixed Baoji’s ship in place; there were three other such arms all around the Peregrine. As they reached the top, Ada looked to the hangar entrance, but it was just a solid, closed door. No elegant curtains of light like there had been on the ring, then.

  The Watersmoke ’s captain turned around to glance over them all once they were out of the hangar. “You need to stay out of sight. There are a few spots not covered by the standard surveillance system. If the military decides to search the ship, I bought the Peregrine recently as a personal craft. We accelerate in three hours, for nine hours, to get into a final swing at the jumpgate. After that, eighteen hours of coasting and adjustments. Questions?”

  He was very brusque - Ada couldn’t fault him that, certainly. There were no questions, so he set them up in a small dead end corridor that contained a tiny dining room, two attached bunks, and an adjacent bathroom; the bathroom and the bunk nearest the front of the ship were off surveillance, he said. Adrall pointed to something on the lower wall of the kitchen, a small metal knob next to one of the seams in the floor. He reached down and twisted it, and a part of the floor and wall popped off.

  “If the military physically boards the ship, you’re all getting in there. It’ll be cramped, but you’ll have to manage. It’s the best I can do for four people.”

  “Thank you, Adrall.” Baoji sounded almost overly sincere. “I really appreciate this.”

  The mirran captain nodded, his ears still a little flat. “Yes, well, my son appreciates his career. I need to resume command. Baoji, call me if there’s real trouble, but otherwise, for all our sakes, keep your heads down.”

  Adrall floated off, leaving them alone in the surprisingly empty-feeling ship. Ada’s attention was almost entirely absorbed by something unexpected, though - the window. Or, more precisely, two windows, one of them in the kitchen and the other in the bunk near the rear of the ship. Both looked out onto the vast, impenetrable atmosphere of Chang’e Major, from such a close distance that Ada couldn’t see the edges of the planet at all.

  If there was one thing Ada was learning about space travel, it was that space was absurdly vast. At least that vastness gave them time to play games, go over the broad strokes of Union history and society, and eat that last pizza once the ship started accelerating and gravity reasserted itself. Ada did eventually peek over their shoulders during a game, once, to see what cards they were all holding. She still lost.

  Turou won, but from the lingering stiffness in Elsa and Baoji’s own evasion of eye contact with the lieutenant, Ada guessed Turou’s win wasn’t down to pure talent. She didn’t actually know what they ought to say to each other, but there didn’t seem to be any real problem to fuss over either. Why hadn’t Elsa just stayed quiet?

  She decided to put an end to the issue when she noticed Elsa glance at Baoji and then retreat, as though trying to avoid a fight. Baoji and Ada were leaning by the window, looking out at the planet, talking about spaceships and space combat. Baoji had been showing her some kind of story told through video he called movies, and there was a great deal of imaginary space combat going on in them, set to dramatic music. It was enthralling, but she cut him off. “She still thinks you’re angry. You’re both irritating me; just talk about it.”

  Baoji growled, flicking an ear sideways. “And say what? So she thought I was going to betray you all. So what? I don’t care.”

  “Then say that.”

  “If someone doesn’t trust you, telling the truth is useless. She’ll think I’m trying to manipulate her or something. After all, I’m just some criminal.”

  Ada blinked. “Wait, are you feeling judged?”

  “No, I’m not feeling -”

  “She did judge you. You are a smuggler.”

  His ears flattened, and he bared his teeth at her. “Hey, I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve only ever shot two people, and I aimed for bits they didn’t strictly need. I don’t want to hurt anybody - I just want to get people the things they want that our thick-booted government doesn’t want them laying hands on without tracking and surveillance and fees and taxes and paperwork and -”

  “I get it.” Ada held up a hand. “I’ve actually killed people and used them for parts, and I still don’t like it when p
eople call me a monster. They do it no matter what. Well. Almost all of them do.”

  “Almost, eh?”

  She thought back to that warm starry night outside Campus. “There are weird people out there who are willing to see the good in you no matter what. But most people will flat their ears at you sometimes.”

  He hissed in amusement. “Flat their ears? Very mirran.”

  “One of my best friends from Earth is mirran. You should meet him someday.”

  “Hey, Ada, I know some humans. You should meet them someday. You’ll have so much in common.”

  She grimaced as her face reddened. “Okay, fair enough, that was stupid.” She waved away the screen. “Tell her she made you feel judged, and she’ll have something to apologize for. She won’t believe you’re just fine.”

  He shrugged it off, though, so when the time came for them all to rest for the last six hours of acceleration, Ada demanded that she bunk with Turou. He was intensely reluctant to do so; perhaps she had spoiled that particular dish with her behavior when they originally met. She ended up bunking with Baoji, who was happy enough to have separate bunks and didn’t much care that she preferred not to sleep in her suit; apparently their being of entirely different species alleviated the odd sheepishness colonial humans were prone to.

  She dreamt of orange dust and black smoke and things exploding.

  She woke up feeling like something terrible had happened, even though nothing seemed amiss. She clambered off the upper bunk, hoping not to disturb Baoji on the lower, and found it was actually cold on the ship. She didn’t want to put her suit back on just yet - with luck, she’d be able to get more sleep in - so she grabbed one of the spare sheets, thick red things set in a shelf next to the bunk, and wrapped it around herself. It was the closest thing to a dress she had worn since, well, ever.

  Her locator stone lay next to the sheets and the suit vertebrae. She picked it up, keeping it and a corner of red sheet in her hand to keep her body’s heat close to her skin. She walked over to the window, a floor-to-ceiling viewport looking out on the great white planet beyond. It was massive beyond comprehension. It was also, in a way, kind of insignificant.