Starbound: Eleven Tales of Interstellar Adventure

by SM Reine

  One that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  131 seconds.

  She should have bought better charts, but charts cost money, and there had been precious little of that lately. She’d needed the cash off this trip. Pickings had been good—not a lot of junkers collected in this sector. She had a cargo hold full of high-quality space trash.

  It would form her burial mound.

  117 seconds.

  Freja’s wailing pierced through the alarms. Sigrid glanced over at the tiny, mad arms flailing at the monstrous sounds that had invaded newborn sleep and felt her heart split in two. She’d never know now if her girl was going to have her momma’s straight blonde hair or the curls of the man who had accidentally helped to make her.

  Apparently black market fertility control wasn’t any better than black market nav charts.

  Sigrid looked back at her consoles. It was bleak. She could slow the Skrapp down a little. Enough to maybe leave their dead bodies intact instead of pulverized into ooze.

  Long enough for the sky gods to find her tiny girl’s soul.

  101 seconds.

  She’d always had a weakness for the gods. It wasn’t reciprocal. They’d never noticed she existed.

  Freja. Named for the Norse goddess of love and beauty—and of death. It had been the name that had come to Sigrid as she lay curled up on a pallet, exhausted and alone, after giving birth in the Skrapp’s cargo hold. The med bot had died right about the time her water had broken. Which was fine, because Sigrid had been about to strangle it anyhow. No damn bot got to tell her how to breathe.

  82 seconds.

  Breathing. Oxygen. The cargo hold had an evac pod. A junked one she’d scooped up in an asteroid field three days before Freja’s birth—and hooked up to her systems long enough to verify its life support still worked.

  Worth more that way.

  Sigrid bolted for the port to her cargo hold. The evac pod wouldn’t fly, and she didn’t have a door to push it out of, but it was a tough, padded cylinder. One with oxygen.

  The closest she could come to a womb on short notice.

  No time.

  She reversed herself back through the port hole and grabbed Freja, wrapped in a batik scarf and remnants of an old skinsuit. Poor kid. She’d had a weird life in her six days in the galaxy.

  Fortunately, the med bot’s single auto-diaper had still been functional.

  61 seconds.

  Sigrid kissed the top of her daughter’s head and propelled them both into the cargo hold. She tucked Freja into the evac pod, batik scarf and all. And then, heart rending, touched one finger to her sweet girl’s red, yowling cheek and slammed the door of the small capsule shut.

  Two steps and she had both hands on the cargo hold console. It worked better than most on the ship, and it would let her spend the last 61 seconds of her life close enough to see her baby girl through the evac pod’s tiny window.

  Frantically she re-programmed the code, running shunts around the systems that were already broken and the ones unlikely to survive impact.

  Impact. She couldn’t think about that now.

  46 seconds.

  Sigrid’s fingers flew, echoes of when she’d been one of the best programmers in the Federation’s fleet. Before Antonio. Before the handsome man who had pulled her over to the dark side.

  Before she’d sold her soul to try and save him.

  Her luck with men had never changed—Brag had only been the latest. Named after the Viking god of music and poetry, and he’d been a master of both. His voice had seduced her in one long, slow evening over mugs of spiced mead in between sets at the bar on Heimili Station.

  A bard with a golden voice. Maybe his daughter had inherited some of his fortune.

  She would need it.

  22 seconds.

  Sigrid cursed and locked in the last two lines of code. All oxygen would route to the evac pod on impact.

  Which would likely only mean that her beautiful, innocent, defenseless baby girl would die slowly and alone on the side of an unforgiving astral rock.

  Sigrid’s eyes filled with hot tears. She slashed them away with the back of her hand, knowing she had to be able to see. Had to time the execution of the code just right, or Skrapp’s sense of self-preservation would override the suicide script.

  8 seconds.

  She watched the view screen and the oncoming, rushing horror of the rock. Watched the evil numbers counting down, her finger hovering over the execute command. Looked one last time at the red, screaming face of her tiny girl, about to be birthed yet again into an unfriendly world.

  And pushed the button.

  * * *

  Eight Years Later…

  “Hey, kiddo. Keep it under three gees, okay?”

  Lakisha Drinkwater, eight and already one of the best pilots on Halkyn VII, rolled her eyes. “I can fly faster than that and you know it.”

  Her father ruffled her blonde, wavy hair. “I know. But the pressure hull can’t handle it.”

  She sighed. “Is the patch failing again?” That meant they’d be grounded until they could borrow Tivi Malcolm’s blow torch. Which, given how mad he was at the Drinkwaters right now, might be a while.

  Everyone was kind of mad at the Drinkwaters. Her oldest brother Jingo was the newest full-fledged digger on the rock, and he’d been assigned the pile-of-crap shaft to mine. Or at least, that’s what everyone had called it until he’d found the vein of iridium in the back right corner.

  Iridium was the most valuable thing they mined in this sector, and a new vein would earn a hefty finder’s bonus. Maybe Jingo could buy them a blow torch.

  Whatever. Kish’s mind swerved away from the boring issues of iridium and money and petty digger-rock politics and surveyed the horizon. It was a big treat to be out here, and she wasn’t going to let anything distract her for a second. Even if she had to fly at the speed of a slow turtle.

  She glanced over at the man in the co-pilot seat. Pops looked happy. There was no one better in the driver’s seat of a flitter, but that wasn’t the reason she’d been willing to get up before skybreak to come flying with him. Out here, he treated her like an equal—or at least like someone who might be worth his while one day. At home, she was just the smallest and scrappiest of eight kids, and if she got noticed, it was usually because she was in trouble. Again.

  There were a lot of ways to get in trouble on a digger rock when your heart yearned to be somewhere else and there was nowhere else to go.

  Kish looked out at the stars and wished, like she always did, that the clunky old tin can under her hands could carry her there.

  “Don’t be wishing for what you can’t have.” Her dad’s voice was gruff, and a little impatient—they’d had this conversation before.

  She could feel her lower lip popping out. “It doesn’t hurt anything to look.” But it did. She could see the small caldera coming over the horizon—the one that marked the spot where they’d found her DNA mother’s ship.

  The man who had rescued a squalling baby out of an evac pod and taken her home laid his hand on her shoulder. “Head right, kiddo. No time for sightseeing today. We need to run the lines. If we’re not back by dinner, your mom will make us eat cold potato flakes.”

  That wasn’t much worse than having to eat them warm. Payday for Pops was still four days away, and there would be a lot of potato flakes between now and then. And soy paste.

  Kish scowled. She hated soy paste. She banked carefully to starboard—it wasn’t a hard maneuver, but the left thruster had been acting up lately, and if she broke that, they’d definitely be grounded. She hummed a little to the flitter under her breath.

  “Stop with yer singing already. It’s a machine, not a baby.”

  Pops sounded annoyed. She glanced over at him, hoping he was just teasing.

  He winked at her. “Think you can hold that patch on with a little ditty, do you?”

  Not likely—but sometimes she thought her singing made Pops happier. Even when he
scowled. Kish kept humming and swept her eyes over the instrument panel with a practiced gaze. Everything was good except for the auto-stabilizer, and that had been broken since she was three.

  Fortunately, Kish had an iron stomach—so long as she didn’t feed it soy paste.

  She jumped as the radio squawked and dumped out a bunch of gibberish.

  “Damn.” Pops leaned forward, tension in his voice. “I thought Jingo fixed this thing.”

  Kish gripped the yoke under her hands until her knuckles turned white. They always left the flitter radio on the emergency frequency. Chatter on that channel meant something had exploded or someone was dead.

  Or both.

  Pops jimmied with the radio controls, trying to get a better signal. The squawking got louder—and then suddenly cleared. “… the Federated Commonwealth of Planets trader ship Ios. We have crashed and need immediate assistance. Repeat—we have crashed and need immediate assistance.”

  Kish and her dad gaped at the radio.

  “We caught their signal. We must be close.” Pops yanked an ancient pair of binoculars out of the net above his head and jammed them against his eyes. “Take her up. Now. Fast and hard.”

  He wasn’t Pops now. Those were the terse orders of one of Halkyn VII’s finest first responders.

  Kish’s chest nearly blew up with pride. He was letting her fly. In an emergency. Only the best pilots got to do that. She pointed the flitter’s nose almost straight up. Height first—Pops needed visibility. The old machine stuttered, but it went up. Kish pushed a little more, and started to sing.

  The stutters evened out a little. She watched the rising coolant temperature—much higher, and they’d have impeller issues.

  Pops still had his binoculars glued to the window. “Nothing. Swing right. Head past that caldera first—I want to see the far side.”

  Kish gulped and headed straight for the place where her DNA mother had died. No one ever went there. Ghosts. Bad juju. Darkside cold.

  A flash out the left window caught her attention. “Pops. Over here.”

  He swung himself to the other side of the flitter in one quick motion. “Where? I don’t see it.”

  She didn’t either—not anymore. But something inside her knew where it had come from. “I know where to go.” Kish wrenched at the controls, suddenly frantic. In an emergency, speed mattered. Seconds mattered. People died in seconds.

  Pops said nothing. He just stared out the window.

  Kish couldn’t look—she had her hands full holding the flitter steady. But she could feel the right way to go. There was a rope now, reeling her in.

  His harsh intake of breath confirmed what she already knew. “Over there, by the rift.” He glanced at her, eyes grim, assessing. “Take us down.”

  Her chest puffed again, even as her heart pounded against her ribs. This was what it felt like to be important. This was what it felt like to matter.

  * * *

  Amelie Descol blasted the single high, pure note into every nook and cranny of the devastated bridge—and knew she was fighting a losing battle.

  She gathered her breath and pushed more power into the single frequency. Sustaining. Demanding. Trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Her Talent shrieked, protesting the abuse. This wasn’t sustainable, even for one of KarmaCorp’s very finest.

  She knew what her Talent didn’t. This was the end game, one way or the other. If she couldn’t hold on until help arrived, this was her last Song.

  And the likelihood of help arriving in time had narrowed down to one small blip. They had a signal-obliterating cosmic storm behind them and a MayDay beacon that had deked left when it should have gone right. Amelie watched the bridge’s last functional view screen as the tiny ship they’d picked up on their sensors came into view.

  Her heart lurched. It was a surface flitter, barely bigger than the b-pod her brother flew for a living. Not the kind of vehicle that carried hull-piercing tools or interstellar comms.

  Slowly, not letting her note waver in the slightest, she moved to step in behind the ship’s captain, keeping one eye on the screen and one on the only other two people on the Ios who were still alive. Both were unconscious, and mercifully so. It had been killing her to listen to their thready screams.

  The captain’s hands clutched the edges of the console that was keeping her upright. “Attempting to hail incoming vessel.”

  Vessel was a polite term for what Amelie saw onscreen. The flitter looked ancient, and more beat up than her favorite pair of land boots. The kind of transport that colonies way off the beaten track held together with shoelaces and instaglue.

  She closed her eyes and felt the fatigue clogging her throat. They would keep doing all the right things because Fixers didn’t give up, and neither did the very tough captain of this particular small trading ship.

  But shoelaces and instaglue weren’t going to fix this.

  * * *

  Kish’s head felt all swimmy and weird. Her DNA mother’s ship had probably looked just like that.

  Broken. Alone.

  It was calling to her. She shook her head, trying to fix the awful pictures it was making inside her skull. It wasn’t the same. This ship was new and shiny, not like the junker she’d been born on. Pops said it was a wonder that one had ever flown at all.

  This one was a sleek trader ship, one of the ones that carried people and news and expensive things to colonies that could afford that kind of thing. And she could see why they’d crashed. One of the solar arms had a nasty, melted part. “They got hit by something.”

  Pops nodded sharply. “Space debris. People who fly out there are idiots.”

  Folks said the same thing about diggers. “They must have got caught in the solar storm.” It had been a surprise one, or at least that’s what the SatNet weather people said. No one on Halkyn VII had been surprised. Mama Simkin’s big toe had been acting up again, and that always meant solar flares.

  The storm had been pretty. Streaking lights in the sky. Kish looked at the ship, crashed on the side of the caldera, and felt her chin wobble. Pretty things could be mean. Every miner knew that.

  She circled, eyes sharp now, looking for the flattest place she could find to set down the flitter. Not below the ship—the hills were too steep.

  “No.” Pops spoke sharply, moving his hands on top of hers. “Don’t land—we’ll hail them from here.”

  Her hands froze on the flitter controls as she swiveled to look at him, gaping. “We have to go help.”

  His eyes were angry—and full of the futile helplessness she only saw there when people were going to die. “It’s a spaceship, Lakisha. They need shuttles and a rescue ship, not a couple of people in a flitter.”

  He never called her Lakisha. She looked down at the broken ship in horror. Halkyn VII didn’t have rescue shuttles. And they were in darkside rotation—their interstellar comm couldn’t send a message for hours yet.

  Not a useful one, anyhow.

  He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s hail them. Maybe we can bring them something they need. Until the rescue shuttles get here.”

  Pop’s voice had that fake sound that happened when adults were lying about really bad things. Kish’s chin wobbled some more. “I’ll hold the flitter steady.”

  His hand on her shoulder squeezed a little.

  * * *

  Amelie winced as the crackling view screen jarred against the note she was Singing. She was tired enough now that stabilizing the interference took noticeable amounts of effort.

  Butterfly wings. Just like the space junk that had clipped them and the solar flare that had knocked out their proximity detector. And the guy in engineering who had hit his head at exactly the wrong time.

  The screen resolved into two blurry figures—a man with more facial hair than Amelie had seen in cycles, and a small girl with huge blue eyes and a ghost-white face.

  The Singer struggled not to react. She didn’t want a child to see this.

  The
man’s voice was brusque. “Trader ship Ios, what is your status?”

  The captain’s fingers clutched the console more tightly. “Hull breach. We’ve lost pressure in six of our eight sections. Five dead, two badly wounded. All of us still alive are on the bridge and trapped. One of our solar ribs was driven through the bridge doors.”

  Amelie had to respect that kind of capacity for understatement. There were two hundred tons of metal between them and escape. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

  The captain’s breath rattled. “We’re losing oxygen.”

  The man on the screen knew what that meant. Amelie could see the sad horror in his eyes and knew what that meant. Rescue wasn’t in his power to deliver. She jerked ruthlessly on her control as her Song wobbled.

  Not now. She could be weak later. If there was a later.

  The captain nodded feebly at the woman behind her. “Amelie here is trying some heroics.”

  The man and the girl both stared, puzzled.

  Amelie gulped for air in the waning oxygen supply. Earlier, she’d managed to move the solar rib enough to extract the first officer and their comms intern, for all the good it would likely do them. Now she was trying to use pure vibration to hold thousands of tiny leaks at bay.

  The Singer version of shoelaces and instaglue.

  The captain’s head lolled to the side. Dammit, make that three survivors badly wounded. Amelie stopped singing and stepped forward. Singers weren’t in the line of command on any space vessel—unless they were the only one left who could speak. “We’ll need something capable of drilling a hole in the side of this ship.”

  The man was already shaking his head. “We have drills, but nothing big enough to get them here fast. It’s going to take hours.”

  He sounded competent. And certain.

  The little girl beside him looked ready to punch someone in the nose. “We have to help, Pops. They can disassemble the drills. We can fly the parts.”

  She wasn’t as fragile as she looked. Amelie registered that one thought as she sucked breath to start Singing again. If she could block the leaks well enough, maybe she could buy those hours. She added volume to her note. Power. The kind of power that might save a ship.