Space Unicorn Blues

by T. J. Berry

  “Two ships firing on us now. The cargo hold has been breached,” said Gary, resting his fingers on a pulsating muscle-like string of fibers on the wall.

  “Anyone in there?” asked Jenny.

  Gary nodded solemnly. Dwarves were always tucked into every nook and cranny of the walls and floors.

  “Jim, get on the horn and talk to these clowns. They’re under your flag,” said Jenny. Jim opened his comm.

  “Hey, what gives, you guys? A guy from Wyoming can’t get any love from his fellow Americans?”

  Both ships were quiet for a moment, no doubt conferring with each other as to the veracity of Jim’s claim.

  “Why aren’tcha showing the stars and bars, friend?” asked a voice from the second ship.

  “Yeah, why you decked out all girlie?” chimed in someone from the first ship.

  “My wife,” said Jim. “She won a bet and I had to paint a giant pink flower on the side of our ship.”

  “That’s a mighty big boat for two people,” said one of the voices.

  “Manifest destiny,” said Jim, in a voice that sounded like he was evoking some holy goddess.

  “Mmm,” said one of the captains. “And the survival of man.”

  “What was the bet, buddy?” asked the second voice.

  Jim looked up, panicked, and started to take his finger off the button. Jenny slammed her hand over his to keep the channel open.

  “I bet him that I could tell what he was writing on my clit with his tongue. Turns out that man lost the county spelling bee seven times in a row.”

  Jim’s cheeks turned pink and Gary gave Jenny a somber look of disapproval. Across the channel, the two captains hooted with laughter.

  “Hey buddy, that’s a good one. But you could toss a fellow a bone from that fancy ship of yours. Help a brother out.”

  Jenny zoomed her monitor in on the items spilling from their cargo hold and spotted half a dozen sealed yellow barrels rolling end over end in zero G. She pointed at them and Jim nodded.

  “Those yellow barrels spinning toward you are filled with clean, potable water. Have at ’em, boys. And have a blessed day.”

  There was no answer, but both ships hit their thrusters so fast that the second one nearly scraped their hull in the race to pick up the water barrels. There were probably people on each ship shoving themselves into EVA suits as fast as they could to tether out and grab the bounty.

  Jenny maneuvered the Jaggery away from the scuffle. As she backed away, several other ships headed for the debris field.

  “Go, go, go,” Jenny said to the Jaggery under her breath as the hulking beast of a ship pulled away from the gathering crowd of flyers. The dwarf door opened and Boges floated in headfirst like a torpedo. She stopped to whisper to Gary and then catapulted herself off the wall back into the miniature hallway.

  “Two dwarves missing from the cargo hold and presumed dead. Six injured. We’ve sealed the breach temporarily, but it will need a permanent fix before we jump to FTL,” Gary reported.

  “The dwarves can speak directly to me, you know,” said Jenny.

  “They like him better,” said Jim with a smirk.

  “I don’t care if they like him better,” she said to Jim, then turned to Gary. “I’m the captain and I suggest you let them know. Unless you’d rather sit in your room for the rest of this trip.”

  Jenny regretted snapping the moment she spoke, but you couldn’t make words go backward.

  “Yes, Captain,” said Gary quietly.

  “There’s my old Jen,” whispered Jim, and Jenny suddenly felt as if she might be sick.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Beywey Station

  Jenny brought the Jaggery close to Beywey Station – or what was left of it after construction was halted when the economy crashed for the third time in a generation. Some corporation was probably going to buy up the remains and restart construction eventually, but until they did, Beywey was host to a thriving underground market for hard-to-find goods.

  Jim struggled to unclip his harness. Jenny stopped him. “Stay here, Jim. Gary and I are going to handle this one.”

  He looked up, first surprised, then upset, and slammed his hand onto the console defiantly.

  “I can do it, Jen,” he said.

  “I know you can. But if I take you and leave Gary alone he’ll probably run away with the Jaggery. We can’t have that.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” said Gary, waiting just outside the door.

  “You’re always so very helpful, Gary,” said Jenny flipping him her middle finger. “Trust me, Jim. You’re better off here.”

  Jim settled back into his seat and crossed his arms, refusing to look at her. She opened her mouth to coax him back into a good mood, but thought better of it as a projectile passed by the view screen. The smaller ships were fighting over the dropped water barrels. Things were desperate out here. Every moment they sat parked was another moment closer to being boarded by pirates or detained by the Reason.

  Jenny pushed off and led the way to the airlock, pulling herself along on the rocky outcroppings of the ship’s walls. Gary followed, more graceful in weightlessness than clopping over solid ground. It was almost as if both of their bodies had been optimized for space travel.

  “Hey Gary,” she said, giving herself a push.

  “Yes.”

  “Do all unicorns live in space?”

  “Technically, every being lives in space.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  “No. We developed space travel many millennia after our origin.”

  “Is there a home planet of unicorns?”

  “Not exactly. Unicorns are born in the heart of a kilonova.”

  She’d heard that term back in engineering school. Kilonovas were rare instances when a neutron star and a black hole came into contact with one another.

  “I guess you don’t get a midwife for that sort of birth,” she quipped.

  “Actually, the Pymmie attend to unicorn births.”

  “But you weren’t born in a kilonova.”

  “No, I was born on this ship.” Gary seemed unwilling to elaborate, and they were at the airlock, so Jenny didn’t push it. This had been his father’s stoneship originally. The Jaggery had been an important part of the battles between the humans and Bala. Usually on the side opposite humankind.

  The ship’s airlock was stocked with EVA suits in a half-dozen body configurations. Jenny found one that was probably for a fairy, with generous room in back for folded wings. Gary grabbed a well-worn suit that fit him perfectly. Sometimes, she forgot that he’d lived here for most of his life before the Reason had stolen it from him. Her wheelchair was waiting next to the airlock door. Boges was a miracle, getting it here from the cockpit before her. Rusted over and no longer able to fold, it didn’t even fit in the access tunnels, but Boges knew all of the shortcuts.

  Jenny struggled to get her legs into the EVA suit. Her knees didn’t bend easily and she couldn’t clear the edge of the seal. Gary came over and held out the suit as she maneuvered her feet down into the legs. When one floated off to the side, Gary spoke up.

  “May I?” he asked, holding his hand above her ankle.

  “Yeah, stuff it in there. It’s not always easy for me to get these things on.”

  He guided her foot down into the suit and helped her lock it closed in front.

  “This is why they booted me out of the Reason Space Force. If you can’t suit up and bug out in under a minute, they have no use for you,” she said, with a rueful laugh. She immediately regretted sharing something so personal, but he looked at her with complete understanding.

  “It was unconscionable for them to discard you due to your disability.”

  “Jesus. No need to pack a sad, let’s go already,” she said, locking her helmet on. She hooked one end of a tether to her wheelchair and the other end to her belt. Beywey sometimes had a little gravity and sometimes they went weightless, depending on if the equipment was working
and if they had the juice to power it. Unless she wanted to be carried or drag herself along the floor, she had to be ready to get back in her chair.

  Gary locked his helmet and Jenny hit a button for the airlock to count down from thirty. The door hissed open and they both pushed off toward the station. Gary went ahead. Her chair was tricky to maneuver in space. The tether between her and it tightened and slackened, slowing her down and jerking her back and forth. She used her thrusters to make slow and careful adjustments so that the metal floating behind her didn’t pull her off course.

  “You’ve become more skilled at maneuvering,” said Gary, waiting on an exposed support beam. She’d forgotten that they’d walked in openspace together, long ago. That time was a lot more frantic and they nearly didn’t live to remember it.

  “Ten years of practice,” she said. “I’ve been doing cargo runs in rental ships while you were otherwise occupied. You always have to get out and make repairs on those cheap ships.”

  “That is not a very lucrative business,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  She reached out a hand to catch the beam. They’d come in on the unfinished side of the market, facing away from Earth. This wasn’t the official entrance to the station, but it was the one Jenny knew best. The one where you were less likely to be ambushed by whatever gang had control of the Beywey today.

  They climbed through the girders and struts. She pulled her chair close so it didn’t snag on the metal beams.

  “Hey Jen,” said Jim in her ear from the Jaggery.

  “Yeah?”

  “The dwarves say the cargo hold will be fixed in thirty.”

  “All right. We’ll make it quick.”

  She tugged her chair around a corner of the structure toward an expanse of glowing white canvas stretched across the beams. They floated through the vacuum toward a plexiglas bubble set into the canvas. A footrest on her chair snagged on a beam and jerked Jenny back.

  “Ooof, shit.”

  She disentangled it and caught up with Gary. The airlock was one of those cheap jobs you bought preassembled and popped into your tent or dome or whatever separated you from the vacuum of space. It was a circle of plexi, just big enough for a couple of people. This one was brand new. Not the same one Jenny had come in and out of on her most recent visit.

  Gary went in first, then Jenny floated inside and tried to yank her chair behind her. It stuck on the edges of the airlock, too large to fit. Gary grasped the tether and pulled as well, but it was too wide for the new doorway, especially since she couldn’t collapse it.

  A face appeared at the inner door and a worn cardboard sign appeared against the plexi.

  NO VISITORS

  Jenny switched to the public comm channel.

  “It’s Jenny,” she said.

  “Jenny. Get in.”

  “One sec. Your new airlock is too bloody small. Do you have gravity today?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good.”

  Jenny went back out of the airlock, unclipped the chair’s tether from her suit, and locked it around a girder.

  “Is it safe to leave it out there?” asked Gary.

  “It’s not as if I have a choice. The gravity’s off. I don’t need it.”

  She locked the outer door closed and gave a thumbs up through the window of the inner door. A hiss of air filled the capsule. As the inner door opened, their visors fogged over from the change in temperature and humidity.

  They removed their helmets and were immediately bathed in the festering moisture of unwashed creatures living with substandard air filtration. Gary looked shocked during the first few seconds on board. The tendons in his neck went rigid.

  “Smells like the Quag, huh?” asked Jenny. She pushed off away from him.

  It was a considerable accomplishment that Beywey had survived this long. Raids by Reason ships and orbital pirates, plus system failures and gang wars had reduced the once-bustling market to a single hallway of airtight tents. Each time Beywey blew out of the airlock, someone floated back to rebuild it. Moisture dripped from every surface and collected on the floor. Without functioning dehumidifiers, all the water that perspirated and respirated off of warm bodies floated in the air and collected everywhere.

  The oxygen level was lower than optimal, too. Jenny took a few fetid breaths and still felt lightheaded.

  “It’s like a goddamn outhouse in here,” she said.

  “Scrubbers are offline. Have been for a while,” said a damp man holding the cardboard sign. He folded it and tucked it into his patched flight suit. “Welcome back, Jen. That your new ship?”

  Jenny was careful and cagey around these folk. Some of them were former Reason like her, but that didn’t obligate her to answer truthfully. Information was currency in a place like this.

  “It’s the one I’m hitching a ride on for the moment,” she said. “We have a mess of ships on our tail right now, so we don’t have a lot of time to shoot the shit.”

  “Gotcha. Reason raided a couple of weeks ago, so this is what’s left. General store’s moved over there in the corner. Bar’s gone… floated away real fast out the hole. Saved a few bottles that didn’t freeze and burst if you’re thirsty.”

  “No, thanks. Just package goods this time.”

  They floated by what passed as a hospital up here; an airtight tent with a clear plastic door. A thin-boned elfin woman lay spreadeagled on an exam table, the bulbous head of a baby crowning between her legs. On the table next to her, a man lay face down, the skin of his back open for spinal surgery. The same doctor attended to both procedures. Three of his hands were poised to catch the baby and three others held traction and a scalpel for the back surgery. The elfin woman’s head came up in a grimace. Her tiny sharp teeth were brown and cracked. The grimace turned into a smile and she waved at Jenny.

  “Baby time, Jen!” she cried, then groaned as another contraction seized her and liquid dripped from around the baby’s head. Gary looked away to be polite, even though the woman didn’t seem to care who watched.

  “Good luck Mymo, you’re doing great,” said Jenny, pretending not to be slightly nauseated at the glimpse of the elf’s distended bits. Kids were a pain in the ass and definitely not worth wrecking your fanny over.

  They moved past a vendor trading engine parts. Some of them were scorched by the plasma torches used to pry them out of pirated ships. Others were damaged by the missiles that had blasted their previous owners out of the sky. On a regular day, Jenny would have picked over the parts. Fixing up salvaged ships and reselling them paid better than hauling cargo.

  Their guide went down to the far end of the hall where the air smelled fresher and the slightest bit sweet.

  “This here is where we moved the exotic items after the blowout. You’ll find what you need here.” The man pushed off toward the airlock.

  Gary hadn’t even cringed at the word “exotic,” even though it was only ever used as a euphemism for Bala. He’d probably heard much worse in the Quag. Or maybe he’d learned to nod along with the insults so no one guessed he was “exotic” himself. You really couldn’t tell when he was all suited up. As long as he kept his pants on, no one would notice that he was part unicorn.

  Jenny breathed in the smells of the Bala stalls. Fruit floated under plexi domes anchored to the table that kept them contained in zero G and were airtight in case of sudden decompression. A loss of all this produce would likely bankrupt someone living up here on a razor-thin margin.

  “How much for these?” asked Gary, resting his hand on a dome filled with fuzzy pink fruits. The scaly vendor drew himself up until he was higher than Gary, undulating like a pennant in the wind. His face pulled back in a reptilian smile, but he did not answer. Jenny gave him credit, trying to negotiate with a grootslang. They were almost as ruthless as Ricky Tang.

  Gary started to move on, but a small voice called out from another tent.

  “He’s talking to you in your mind.”

  Gary frow
ned and appeared to concentrate for a moment.

  “Sixteen of something?” he said.

  “He said he attended a formal dinner with your family once, when he was a hatchling. He says it’s good to know that there are still unicorns alive in the universe. It gives him hope that someday the Bala might rise again.” The translator said the last bit in a flat voice, devoid of emotion, as if she didn’t believe a word of it herself. The grootslang unsealed one of the domes and held out a fruit to Gary.

  “How much?”

  “He says it’s free,” said the translator.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You should. He never gives things away. Take it before he changes his mind.”

  Gary bowed.

  “It’s my honor to have met you.”

  The grootslang turned six shades of blue in succession and settled back into his booth looking satisfied.

  The market wasn’t large and the conversation had been overheard. So much for no one knowing Gary was part unicorn. More of the Bala vendors came out of their tents to have a look at him.

  The young translator looked like an elf mixed with some other being that gave her oversized feet and hands. She floated in front of Gary and explained to the group, “This is Gary from the House of Cobalt. His father is Findae. Gary is the one they say will lead us out of the cold darkness of Reason.”

  The group murmured and conferred. A few of the older beings genuflected in the manner of their species. Jenny hung back, wary of being surrounded by potential hostiles. She got her back up against a wall out of habit.

  “Thank you all,” said Gary. “I’m humbled by your welcome. But it is not necessary. I am simply Gary Cobalt now. The Bala nobility no longer exist. I am the same as all of you.”

  The translator piped up from her stall.

  “Let them fawn over you a bit. It’s a rare day that they get to practice the old customs.” She held out an empty bag. “For all of the tributes they’re going to give you.”

  “No, I couldn’t…”

  But the vendors were already crowding around, handing him anything they could spare from their tents. Hastily written notes were slipped into his bag to be read later. Most of them were probably pleas for Gary to help imprisoned relatives or enslaved friends. A fairy flapped her wings. The breeze she created smelled like roasted lemons. The translator crossed her arms and waited.