Endless Blue-ARC

by Wen Spencer

  Mikhail turned in a circle.

  The wind had been blowing steadily from one direction, coming across the water. If this was home, he would want to call it West—with the nose of his ship pointing East—but he wasn't sure that name would apply in this place. Wind tended to follow the rotation of the planet. Was the same true in this place? Was the shell of the sphere rotating? Space stations rotated to maintain artificial gravity.

  Mikhail wondered if it was an artifact or some weird accident of nature. The only difference, for him and his crew, would come if the owners of the artifact acted on their arrival.

  * * *

  After the blasting heat of the sun, the dark of the hanger was a relief. They had both the blast doors open and the constant breeze scoured out the heat.

  The hanger was filled with chaos as his crew had shaken off their shock and were now reacting. He found his Chief engineering officer, Yeygeny Tseytlin, swearing heatedly at a heavy-duty pump with fire hoses leading down the lift shaft.

  "How's the ship?" Mikhail asked.

  "Alpha Red flooded and only half of the replacements got out alive. I'm trying to get the water pumped out now, but there's debris clogging the intake valves on the pumps."

  Alpha Red was Turk's last reported position.

  "Turk?" Mikhail asked.

  Sorrow filled Tseytlin's eyes and he put a hand to Mikhail's shoulder. "I'm sorry, Captain. He's not on the ship. I don't know where we lost him—but he's gone."

  Mikhail had been bracing himself for that answer but it still hurt. He nodded his understanding, not trusting his voice.

  "Where should I store the bodies once I get the deck drained?" Tseytlin asked.

  They had a handful of morgue slots but not enough to take a quarter of the Red detachment. Normally they did all burials at space. There was no long term storage for dead on ship. In this heat, it would only be a matter of a few hours before they would start to smell—and worse—attract predators and parasites. Burying them in the sandbar would only trap the toxin of the rotting bodies next to the ship.

  "We're going have to bury the dead at sea," Mikhail said.

  "At sea? You mean throw them in the water?" Tseytlin said.

  "They're dead, we're not. But we will be if we don't make our survival top priority. We can't keep the dead anywhere near the ship, not in this heat. Understood?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Put someone else—if you have someone else—onto this detail. I need you to make sure that the water recycling system hasn't been compromised. If it has, it's your priority above all other things."

  "Water?"

  "Water is like air, Tseytlin. Without it, we'll die."

  "I think I've heard that before." This from a man that could tell you down to the seconds how long any amount of air could keep a human alive. Tseytlin had been raised on short-hull freighters, where none of the stops were more than a day apart. In the "world" he grew up in, even if something went wrong with the water recycling system, it would never be life threatening.

  Only a few of his crew had been raised landside. Worse, none had experienced true wilderness. Never had to live off the land. Never known thirst . . .

  . . .he was so thirsty . . .

  Nyanya Nastya had left that morning. Or more accurately, she had left the night before, while Mikhail and Turk slept. The day had been full of unhappy surprises: stiff new clothes, harder classes, and a strict new housekeeper that didn't sleep in the dyetskaya with them. Six-year-old Mihkail had managed all day to be a big boy and not cry, but late at night, thirsty and yet too scared to leave his bed, he started to cry.

  Mihkail's biggest problem was that he thought too much. He pondered things until he knew the best and worst that could happen in every situation. Only the best rarely happened, so he was usually disappointed, and he was often surprised that there were worse options available—ones he didn't know about—like discovering at the age of four that certain fast moving objects can amputate a finger, and that while such things could be corrected, they were stunningly painful.

  He suspected that there were no urody lurking in the shadows of his bedroom suite, but one could never be sure. His crying woke three-year-old Turk, who came padding out of his cubby, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

  "Why are you crying?" Turk asked grouchily.

  He was really crying because Nyanya Nastya was gone. He knew that she left because Turk finally mastered potty training and dressing himself, but he suspected that Turk didn't know that. Mikhail had sabotaged Turk's progress to delay her leaving, at least until they started punishing Turk harshly. He wasn't sure why she had to leave. He loved her dearly. She had said that she loved him, but she lied often about things she thought would upset him. And why would his father let her leave? That was the most upsetting question of all. So many times, a possible answer to similar questions was that his father didn't love him. His father made it clear that Turk wasn't his son, but his treatment of Mikhail was not that much different. Certainly it didn't match Nyanya Nastya's shower of hugs and kisses.

  Turk stood beside Mikhail's bed, waiting for Mikhail to explain why he was crying. He was stoic as well as patient and truthful; while Turk had been silent all day, he'd gone all furry.

  "Do you love me, Turk?"

  Turk nodded, but added. "You cry too much."

  Mikhail tested the limits of Turk's love. "Get me a drink of water."

  Turk never thought as much as he did. He went into the bathroom without considering what the darkness might hold. He came back, carefully carrying a cup in both hands. "Here."

  Mikhail drank the water and then pulled Turk into bed with him. Turk felt like a cyber teddy, warm and soft, but better—a cyber teddy couldn't fetch water, fight urody, or really, truly love him.

  As he drifted to sleep, feeling safe, Turk started to purr.

  "Captain?" Someone said close to hand, and the memory flitted away.

  Mikhail pressed a hand to his forehead. For a few minutes, the memory was solid and real as the broken ship beneath his feet. He'd thought of that night before, but never with such clarity. The print on Turk's nightshirt. The blue of the cup. The taste of the water. Was he suffering from some kind of head trauma or just going mad?

  Unfortunately, either was just as likely.

  "Captain?" Tseytlin repeated. Mikhail recognized his voice this time. "After checking the water recycling system, what should I focus on?"

  He blinked to clear the memory from his vision. A mark of how rattled Tseytlin was he seemed unaware Mikhail had phased out. Mikhail had a good crew, but he just landed them in a situation that probably was beyond their ability to cope with. He had to keep himself in control. He forced himself to consider Tseytlin's question.

  Water tight was a minimal concern since the ship was compartmentalized and airtight. Even with the damage to the bridge and the breach in Alpha Red, the rest of the ship wasn't in danger of flooding even in the worst of storms. Luckily they had landed in shallow water, so it was unlikely they would sink.

  "With the bridge gone, we're defenseless," Mikhail said. "We need to get the guns online."

  "Is this a nefrim controlled world?" Tseytlin asked.

  He glanced out the open hanger door to the bright shimmering blue, so far innocent of anything more menacing than sharks. "That is yet to be seen. We should assume it is. Maintain covert protocol. Radio silence. Minimal energy output."

  Tseytlin nodded slowly. "It will take some time, but we can modify the Tigertail's weapon control to handle the Svoboda's guns."

  "Good."

  "Captain?" Rabbit had been trailing behind him, apparently obeying the last order given to him until given new ones.

  Mikhail frowned at him and realized that Rabbit was looking across the hanger. He followed the direction of the little Red's gaze. There was a tall Red that Mikhail had never seen before limping toward them, licking blood from its lips. It was one of the replacements from Paradise.

  Mikhail stepped backwards, wi
shing he had a weapon. While he trusted the Reds that been part of the crew for several missions, these replacements were loose cannons. "What is it?"

  "I'm top cat." The Red said.

  So the Reds had spent the time determining who was next in command with Turk's disappearance.

  "What's your name?"

  "547-8210-UKU-S68."

  Mikhail hardened his gaze on the Red. It was difficult to intimidate someone you knew could tear off your arm and beat you with it. After growing up with Turk, Mikhail was fully aware of how strong a Red at any age was compared to a normal human. Still, the crèche-raised had to be dealt with from a position of apparent power. "What is your name?"

  The Red blinked as if surprised by the request, and hesitated, thinking it through before offering up his handle. "Butcher."

  "Butcher." Mikhail repeated, digging in hooks in the Red's attention. "How much do you know about planets? Ever been out of the city on Paradise?"

  "No."

  "Can you swim?"

  "What is swim?"

  Mikhail sighed and dropped his gaze. Oh Turk, Turk, Turk—I need you here, alive and well. "Do you know how to do duty rosters?"

  "Yes, sir. I have ten dead, three wounded, leaving me twenty-seven fit for combat. I have set up three shifts of nine Reds each and assigned commanders for each shift."

  "Good." Mikhail nodded. At least the new top cat was more than a set of finely tuned muscles. "Butcher, if an unidentified boat approaches, I need the Reds to hold fire until ordered."

  "You said that you wanted natives to know we're unfriendly," Butcher said. Mikhail's orders to Inozemtsev had filtered through to the Reds then. "Why the change?"

  "There might be other spaceships that crashed here," Mikhail said. "If the humans survived, they might use boats to travel around on. You know what a boat is?"

  Butcher put his hands together to form a prow of a boat with his fingertips. "It's a thing that floats on water."

  "Just because they're humans doesn't necessarily mean that they're friendly. Consider them as possible hostiles." Gods, how smart was this Red? Mikhail wouldn't have had to explain himself to Turk. "But do not fire on them unless ordered. Do you understand?"

  "I understand." Butcher rumbled. "Show your teeth but don't attack."

  * * *

  Mikhail managed not to feel for hours, keeping it all blocked out as he climbed through his darkened, half-flooded ship. Finally he couldn't hold it off any longer. He retreated to his cabin to lock his service pistol into his safe. Using a marker, he wrote "Bad Misha Bad" and drew Turk's cat face scowling at him. He felt no need to turn his pistol on himself. No. Not yet. He could feel it coming, like the sun setting on the horizon; his ability to cope was fleeing. Dark despair would set in as inevitable as night, and this time, Turk wouldn't be there to save him from himself.

  He leaned against the wall and covered the cat picture with his palm. "Good God, Turk, what am I going to do?"

  "You go on," Turk would say, as if it was so simple and easy. He always envied Turk of that strength and had always leaned heavily on it.

  He wanted to believe Turk was still alive, but the facts weighed too heavily. The airlock had opened while the Svodoba was still two or three kilometers off the water. Even if Turk survived the fall, he'd be hurt and out in open water teeming with predators. There would be no safe place to rest or hide.

  "I'll try to be strong, Turk. The last thing my people need is me falling apart. I'll try to make you proud."

  * * *

  The next ship morning, they gathered under the constant noon sun for the mass funeral. They tested one of the body bags the shift before—made sure that it would float. It made him uneasy to launch his people out not into space but this seething living water. Space felt safe, its vast emptiness protected his dead from being disturbed until God chose to gather them up. It seemed like a betrayal, setting the dead adrift, helpless to countless forces that would disturb them. But there was nothing that could be done. They couldn't afford the bodies polluting the waters near the ship.

  He read his memorial speech and then the names of the dead. Turk's name was on the list, but he couldn't bring himself to say it aloud. One by one, they pushed off the bags, letting the current take their dead. The sky was perfect blue, the sand a delicate pink, and the water crystalline. The black bags remained visible for hours, slowly drifting away. Helpless.

  Afterwards he gathered up all the vodka in his cabin and shared the bottles out to the crew. They needed a drunk Captain no more than they needed a dead one.

  6: I eat you

  The current brought them evidence of the Icarus' fall within hours. Paige knew that Icarus had been heavily forested, but the amount that had been spilled off the vimana amazed her. The floating debris rolled toward them on the waves until the ocean was carpeted with green and brown. Drift flowers, naturally designed to ride the waves, reached them first. Then drop nuts, riding among the flowers like bald hillsides. Finally the broken bodies of dead land animals.

  The chance of fouling the longboat rotors was too great. They would have to wait until the current carried the debris away. The repair to the fresh water tank was simple; filling it was an arduous process of hand-cranking the emergency desalination pump with a painstaking rate of one ounce of water per three minutes. They lacked the materials, though, to fix the hole punched through the crew's quarters. Rather than sit idle, stewing on what might lay ahead, Paige set the crew to fishing the drop nuts out of the flotsam. If she ended up buy a new engine, they'd need things to sell to raise money. With Jones standing guard in the sniper nest, the crew used the long boat hooks to herd the nuts into the cargo net to be lifted up to the deck. There Becky wrestled the large nuts out of the wet netting and rolled them into place to be dried.

  "The birds I understand how they got up to the vimanas." Hillary prodded the body of a large furred animal with her boat hook. It rolled in the water, revealing that it was four-legged and hoofed. "But how did that get up there?"

  "One of the many mysteries of life." Paige checked the nuts on the deck. Thanks to the baking sun of the cloudless day, the husk was already dry to the touch. "Take a break from fishing and turn these. Once they're dried, we'll move them to the cargo hold and fish more up."

  Hillary made a sound of disgust. "One of the many mysteries of life. We're not savages. We still know how to build jump drives, terraform hostile planets into paradise, and alter our DNA. If we put our minds to it, we should be able to figure out anything. Can't you even guess?"

  "I don't know enough to guess," Paige said.

  "What is that suppose to mean? Don't know enough." Hillary shoved away the animal.

  Surprisingly, it was Jones that came to Paige's defense. "How many life stages does that animal have? Kites start as nymphs. That animal there might have wings in a different stage in life."

  "It could have evolved on the vimana." Avery said. "We don't know how old the vimanas are geologically speaking."

  "Or devolved." Paige said. "Theoretically you could create a species that could fly up to the vimana and yet the next generation be wingless."

  "Hell, it could have been catapulted up," Avery said. "It might have been the only one of its kind on Icarus."

  "Catapulted?" Hillary said.

  Avery nodded. "Ya-ya supposedly experimented with catapults a hundred years ago. They shot animals at passing vimanas."

  "They did not!" Hillary snapped.

  "Did too," Avery said.

  "Hillary." Paige said as the girl opened her mouth to automatically deny the possibility. Avery had a way of mixing nearly believable lies with unbelievable truth, so you were always sure he was lying, but every time you tried calling him on something that seemed too unbelievable, he could furnish proof.

  "Icarus does not pass over Yamoto-Yamagochi." The girl said after a minute of outraged silence.

  "I'm just saying that if Ya-ya tried it, then maybe someone else tried it too," Avery said.

&nb
sp; "Why they'd stop trying?" Becky asked. "Living up there on the vimanas would be better than being down here on the water."

  Ranantan whistled in a negative tone. "Stay with ship. Tech is good."

  "So dismantle the ship and haul it up, piece by piece." Becky said.

  "The only thing you can land on an vimana is organic material like the kites," Avery said.

  "Do you think that's really true?" Jones asked from her perch, her heavy rifle across her knees. "That spaceship hit Icarus. If you can hit an vimana, maybe you can land on it."

  Paige shook her head. She had tried not to think of it, but the memory of the accident had replayed again and again. There were times she wished she had a different kind of brain, one that didn't see life as puzzles that needed to be picked apart. "The ship only grazed it. Icarus was rolling even as the ship skimmed its topside." Paige mimed vimana and spaceship repulsing each other even as the ship's trajectory brought them together. "Like two polarized magnets, they repelled each other. Don't think the ship would have survived otherwise."