Space Unicorn Blues

by T. J. Berry

  Jenny waved Gary over to the live creatures stall when he seemed nearly finished. He gently extricated himself from the group and joined her.

  “Ready, your highness?” She was delighted to learn that it was possible to make a unicorn blush.

  Bào Zhú, the animal dealer, had set up tanks for each of the different edible creatures. At first glance, he looked like a squat old man. But when you let your gaze unfocus a bit, there was definitely something magical about him. There was a dark shading around him like an aura. He was probably mixed with at least a little Bala. Bào Zhú floated curled into a ball – legs pulled up tight to his chest. He wheezed with the respiratory disease going around the stations with substandard air filtration. Jenny found herself wishing that she’d kept her helmet on.

  In the tank below her, shiny, snakelike animals burrowed into a dark wet substrate pinned to one side of the cage by a mass of chicken wire.

  “Glitterslips are in stock, Jen. I know you like to keep those on hand,” said Bào Zhú. “Best price all year.”

  Glitterslips were tasty when charred over an open fire, but more than that, they gave you the ability to hear the thoughts of creatures around you for as long as they took to digest. You just had to make sure you didn’t buy the females of the species, who laid eggs in your abdomen which later ate you from the inside out as they matured.

  Jenny nodded and held up one finger while moving on to the other tanks. Bào Zhú put on a pair of white cloth gloves and plucked a glitterslip from out of the substrate and tucked it into a tiny floating sphere.

  Jenny passed another tank that appeared to contain floating bubbles of wet sand. As she watched, a set of tiny animal tracks imprinted themselves onto of the globs of sand. A huvelon. They were useful if you could train them to fetch, but a pain to locate if they escaped their cage.

  “Twenty for that one,” said Bào Zhú, hovering over her shoulder. “We don’t get deliveries as often as we used to.” Jenny looked around at the shredded, floating canvas of his tent – no repairs had been done since the blowout. He was probably hurting for cash and would take any little trinket she offered.

  Jenny floated to the back of the tent where a pair of trisicles huddled against each other under a dome. They were a mature breeding pair with a couple of sucklings attached to each of them – exactly what she needed for Gary. They’d need to get more to maintain a fully functional FTL drive, but this was a promising start.

  Jenny passed by the trisicles as if she didn’t see them. If Bào Zhú got as much as a whiff of her interest, he’d quadruple the price in a hot second.

  “Captain, those are the trisicles we need,” said Gary, floating into the tent. “And a breeding pair with sucklings. Fortuitous indeed.”

  Jenny cursed under her breath. Everyone within earshot now knew they were looking for trisicles and that the Jaggery was Jenny’s ship. She was willing to bet that prices on this station just jumped by a factor of ten. Bào Zhú’s mouth opened in a smile, then he froze as he noticed Gary, staring in horror.

  “You two know each other?” asked Jenny.

  “No. We’ve never met,” said Bào Zhú, far too quickly to be true. “But I have heard of you. Welcome, Gary Cobalt.”

  Gary watched Bào Zhú carefully, but did not answer. There was something going on between the two of them that Jenny wasn’t quite understanding.

  “Those are a very fine pair of trisicles,” Bào Zhú exclaimed, changing the subject. “Harvested from a fresh colony recently discovered in the rings of Saturn. They are fully mature and have already bred six litters in the time that they’ve been here.”

  “They are already breeding, Captain, this is exactly what we need.”

  Jenny held a finger in front of Gary’s face to silence him. He was quiet, but some glint in his eye made her think he’d called her bluff on purpose. Maybe to mess with her. Or maybe to ensure that Bào Zhú got a good price for his goods. Those magical beings had a tendency to stick together against humans, and there seemed to be a history between these two.

  “How much? And keep in mind I just spent my last dollar getting off that hellhole of a planet,” she offered as the opening salvo in her negotiation.

  “We don’t take Reason currency here any more,” said Bào Zhú, flipping himself around in a circle to distract her. His left hand was curled up to his body and his face was marked with dozens of small scars as if he’d been hit at close range by a shotgun blast. Everyone had their war wounds.

  “You’re legally required to accept the official currency of the Reason,” she said.

  “After the last raid, they reasserted their right to Beywey and threw everything out into the vacuum. Only those of us with self-contained tents survived. And some of us,” he gestured to the shredded tent with his uninjured hand, “only made it by the skin of our teeth. None of us want their dirty cash now. You want to spend dollars, go back to the front of the market where the humans are.”

  “But why come back to Beywey at all? You know the soldiers will eventually return. They’ll clear you all out again. Over and over. The Reason never gives up,” she said.

  “And where would we go?” Bào Zhú asked, suddenly angry. Minuscule pinpricks of electricity crackled around him. Jenny backed away. “Do you think it’s so easy to leave when you’re surrounded by openspace?” He growled and turned back to the tanks, which vibrated with the muted screeches of the creatures inside.

  Jenny pulled a vial full of creamy white liquid from her suit and held it out to Bào Zhú.

  “Angel tears. Three full ounces. You can–”

  He slapped it out of her hand and the vial went spinning away into the market.

  “No one wants your tears. We want a way off this station.”

  Jenny kept her eyes fixed on Bào Zhú while tracking the trajectory of the vial in her peripheral vision. Her angel tears were one of the few valuable things she had left – they were a gift from a former lover and she didn’t want to leave without them.

  A few of the Bala vendors had gathered near the back of the market, listening to the conversation. Bào Zhú turned to Gary.

  “The Cobalts were a good and honorable family. Surely you can offer safe passage to one of the remaining Bala worlds for those of us who have survived?” he asked.

  Gary looked at Jenny and waited.

  “I’m the captain of the Jaggery,” she said to Bào Zhú. “It’s me you want to negotiate with.”

  Bào Zhú continued to speak only to Gary.

  “I beg of you, your highness. Have mercy. They’ll surely kill us all the next time they raid the station. They took my son the last time they came. They said he was a ‘natural resource.’ I don’t know where they took him.”

  The translator came forward, holding out a necklace that seemed to be made from thick finger bones.

  “They killed my husband during the raid. Sliced out his heart with a laser scalpel while they held him down in front of me. He was still alive when they started cutting into him.”

  Another Bala creature spoke in a language that Jenny couldn’t understand. The others listened and nodded along sadly as the creature’s voice crackled like a bonfire, then dissolved into a sound like the rain.

  “I’m sorry about your family,” said Gary.

  Jenny stayed close to the trisicle bubble that had been forgotten in the larger conversation. She wasn’t going to leave without them, but it was getting a little close in here. All the Bala were getting riled up and crowding around both of them. It made her squirrelly.

  “Well, Captain. What is your decision?” asked Gary, folding his arms in front of him. At moments like this, she could see why unicorns used to rule the universe. When he looked at her like that, she felt petty and small. It took all of her will not to flip him the finger and head for the airlock with the trisicles.

  “Is the group making an official request?” she asked, stalling. “If there’s a formal request, I need to hear it.”

  “We, the Bala o
f Beywey, request formal asylum from the captain of the Jaggery,” said Bào Zhú. A handful of creatures nodded or waved, as was their custom. A couple verbally agreed in English.

  Jenny reached over and grabbed the vial of tears that had become stuck to one of the few functioning air vents. She tucked it back into her suit pocket and looked around at the creatures waiting for her answer.

  There was certainly room aboard the ship. There was enough space for ten times this many refugees. And if she asked for some of their wares in exchange for transport, say thirty per cent, that would leave them each a little nest egg to restart their business elsewhere. Financially, it was a sound plan.

  The only problem, and it was a significant problem, was having all of these Bala tagging along with her through the Reason. Even through the relatively easy checkpoint at Fairyfloss, it presented a huge risk for everyone.

  “As the captain of the Jaggery,” she said, twirling her helmet in her hands and drawing out the words so she could weigh the options for a few seconds longer. “I’d like to ex–”

  The airlock exploded in a burst of light. The air in the market was sucked out into openspace. Jenny’s muscle memory of boot camp emergency decompression training kicked in. She slammed on her helmet and locked it. As the suit pressurized, she instinctively turned to help the soldier next to her, except no one was there.

  Gary had been sucked backward and ended up stuck against the wall of a tent. Luckily for him, the canvas had prevented him from being pulled out of the blown out airlock that now vented into openspace. She noted in dismay that his helmet was still clipped to his side. He had only a few moments before he suffocated and froze.

  Reason officers floated into the market, suited up in their dark red zero G riot gear. Their faces were obscured by visors, making them all look like giant beady-eyed insects. They began throwing everything into openspace that hadn’t already been sucked out of the broken airlock. Including the vendors.

  Jenny landed next to Gary. She unclipped his helmet from his belt and slapped it onto his head. She latched it shut and the suit pressurized automatically.

  “Good?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said between panting breaths. “Get the others.”

  “That’s a negative,” she said, pushing off and unclipping the trisicle tank from its shelf. They barely seemed to notice the sudden drop in temperature. Trisicles were accustomed to the rigors of deep space. The thick, chitinous shells that kept them functional in a freezing vacuum also made them the perfect meal for bone-hungry unicorns.

  Bào Zhú had tucked himself into a large airtight tank. He sat on a perch, curled into himself, presumably hiding until the officers left. His lips moved as if he was chanting. All of the air had emptied from the market and goods floated freely. The Reasoners were coming closer as Bala in EVA suits fought to get away. Bodies floated frozen and stiff among the shreds of tents and bits of debris. The translator’s hair undulated around her frozen corpse like snakes across sand.

  “Gary, follow me,” Jenny said into her comm. She tossed him the tank of trisicles. They floated through empty hallways that used to be full of vendors.

  Jenny pulled the lever on an airtight door at the end of one hallway and floated into a dark section of the station that had never been finished. She wound her way through exposed girders, looking back to make sure that Gary was keeping up.

  “Where are we going?” asked Gary.

  “There’s a control room in the back that always has pressure and gravity, even when the power’s out. We can hide back there until the Reason leaves.”

  She gave a hefty pull off a girder toward a light ahead of them in the darkness. They crossed a large atrium that was in the central gathering space of the station. The control room would have looked down over a dozen floors of shops, docking ports, and living quarters. There were even plumbing pipes at the bottom which indicated the design of an elaborate fountain in the center. It had all been left to decay in the freezing darkness.

  Jenny typed a code into the airlock on the control room door. She stuffed the trisicles in ahead of her, then shoved Gary inside while she squeezed in last, pulling the door shut. They were jammed up against each other with the trisicles somewhere below her feet where she couldn’t see them.

  The interior airlock door opened and gravity kicked in. They all spilled into the room in a heap. Someone reached down and unlatched Jenny’s helmet.

  “Well, well, well,” said a familiar voice. “What do we have here?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Unamip’s Blessing

  Gary cringed at the string of profanities coming out of Jenny’s mouth. Being deferential to Reason personnel didn’t always help, but swearing at them never did. It was hubris driving her to spit every foul word she knew at the officers instead of trying to negotiate for their release. The senior officer drew his weapon and held it against Gary’s forehead. The junior officer unholstered hers as well, but with trembling hands. Seeing that, Jenny quieted. Thankfully, she was smart enough to know that a nervous person’s finger could easily slip on the trigger.

  “We are not in violation of any statutes,” said Gary. He hoped to mitigate Jenny’s inflammatory comments by appealing to the little “r” reason in these people. “We don’t intend to interfere with your sweep of the market. Go about your confiscation and we’ll be on our way.”

  “Are you out of your bloody mind?” said Jenny. It was a moment before he realized she was speaking to him and not the officers. She pointed up at the taller one. “Don’t you see who that is?”

  Gary stared at the humans in front of him. Unless he looked closely, all the pink fleshy men looked alike. The junior officer was brown, like him, but the peach one was sporting a fresh burn in the reverse outline of a hand. As if he’d put up his palm to shield his eyes from a blast. He realized this was the officer from the bar, Colonel Wenck. The one they’d shot. So much for little “r” reason.

  It was interesting to Gary that though the three nations that had come together to form the Reason were ostensibly equal, the officers were almost always pink people. It reminded him of the way Bala made the distinction between unicorns and centaurs. They were very close in everything but a few small cosmetic differences, but you would never find a centaur at the seat of government.

  “You have no right to detain me. I was released this morning,” said Gary.

  Wenck spoke only to Jenny. “In accordance with the FTL Fuel Conservation Act of 2249, this fuel source is property of the Reason and will be confiscated.”

  “He’s a man. Leave him alone,” she replied.

  Wenck nudged the plexi tank full of trisicles with his boot.

  “If he’s a man, why does he need a whole family of trisicles?” he asked.

  “He’s a xenobiologist,” said Jenny.

  “And I’m Santa Claus,” said Wenck with a smirk. “I’m here to pick up a present for all the good Reason girls and boys who need to get into FTL for Christmas.” He grabbed the edge of Gary’s suit and yanked him forward until he could see down into the crown of his head. “Mmm, there we are.” He let Gary go and crouched in front of Jenny, his gun resting on his knee, but still pointed in her direction. “But what about you ‘Captain Perata’?” Gary could hear the quotes around her name and title. Wenck clearly didn’t think much of Jenny.

  “I’ve been commissioned to deliver a cargo. All legal. Check the paperwork,” she said.

  Jenny slowly moved her hand to the keypad mounted on the arm of her EVA suit. Wenck’s eyes unfocused for a moment as he received a data dump on his ocular display.

  “No warrants, no irregularities. I guess I have to let you go, Captain Perata.”

  The second officer, a thick woman with a wide neck that barely fit into her EVA suit, reached for Gary’s head. Gary grabbed her hand by the wrist and held it there. He could afford the risk. If they shot him, he’d heal in minutes.

  “Colonel?” asked the officer, with a slowness to her voice
that echoed the speed of her dawning realization. “I think we’ve got a uni-corn here.” She broke “unicorn” into two words like he’d heard Jim do occasionally. It was a funny thing humans did when they were uncomfortable saying the word. Unicorns had been mythical creatures on their world for so long that a large number of people had a hard time believing in them. Even when face to face with direct evidence.

  Wenck continued reading Jenny’s records without answering. The junior officer went on.

  “He doesn’t look like a uni-corn, but I think it’s at least part uni-corn. The bottom part. Because he doesn’t have hoof hands. Where’s his horn?”

  The woman looked genuinely confused by Gary’s mixed appearance. Wenck sighed heavily.

  “He’s a half-breed, Gakhar. Part human, part Bala. Probably sold his horn for cash, but he’ll grow a new one. Count on it.”

  Gakhar wound her hand around in a circle until Gary had to let it go. She used the muzzle of her firearm to push Gary’s head down so she could see for herself.

  “There’s a little bit of horn left, but it’s smaller than I thought it would be,” said Gakhar, peering down over him. She pushed on the spot and Gary felt pressure on the top of his head. “And sharp, too.” He could have kicked her into unconsciousness in half a second. At the very least, they seemed to have no interest in taking Jenny along. If they took him, she was clever enough to come up with a plan to get him back from the Reason. She was excellent with loopholes in regulations. And if she was properly motivated, she had the ability to access Reason systems and find him.

  “I’ll go peacefully,” said Gary.

  “What are you doing?” Jenny said in a low voice.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure out a plan once you’re back on the Jaggery,” said Gary, emphasizing the last four words.