Space Unicorn Blues

by T. J. Berry

“Incoming.”

  She locked her wheels and tapped her tablet before remembering that it was disconnected from the ship.

  “Gary?” she called.

  He was back at the biological instruments, moving through a set of commands from muscle memory. The Jaggery soared up toward an asteroid field in the distance. They’d have decent cover among the huge rocks and the Arthur Phillip wouldn’t be able to get close enough to board them. He flicked his fingers across the incomprehensible controls and the ship spun and dodged around jagged outcroppings. He even managed to keep the artificial gravity steady. Stoneships were miracles if you knew how to fly them.

  Jenny scanned the area using the external cameras. The Arthur Phillip paced them outside of the debris field, occasionally letting another volley of sparks fly toward the Jaggery. The purple lightning split the asteroids nearest them as Gary jerked the ship through the maze of rocks.

  Jim barreled into the cockpit and cursed at the image of the Arthur Phillip on Jenny’s tablet.

  “How did they find us?” he asked. Jenny smelled whiskey on his breath.

  “That’s necromancer magic,” she replied, pointing to the lightning that streaked into the asteroid field around them.

  “Partial necromancer, thank Unamip, otherwise we’d already be dead,” said Gary, spinning the ship around a giant smooth asteroid that was a dead ringer for a stoneship.

  “Even a partial necromancer could track us,” she said. “They probably have one captive.”

  Jim leaned up against the console to get a better look at the Arthur Phillip. He pointed at a collection of red specks in the distance that were no longer swimming lazily through space.

  “What’s that look like to you?” he asked Jenny.

  Jenny zoomed in on the area. Six red lines sped toward them in pyramid formation, the largest at the front.

  “Redworms noticed the lightning,” she replied.

  “So much for unicorn luck,” said Jim.

  A shard of purple lightning slipped past the asteroid field and hit the Jaggery full on. A tremor started in the heart of the ship and vibrated outward until everyone in the cockpit was sick with the reverberations.

  “That seems bad,” said Jenny.

  Gary placed his hand flat on his instrument panel and listened.

  “It was,” he said.

  The Arthur Phillip made a hairpin turn and rounded on them through a break in the asteroids. The ship threaded its way toward the Jaggery, bumping rocks off its hull in all directions. Their pilot was not nearly as skilled as Gary.

  “Why Bala don’t believe in escape pods is beyond me,” said Jim, tugging at the collar of his button-down.

  “We didn’t need to escape anyone until humans came along,” said Gary.

  “EVA suits. We could suit up and get onto one of these rocks…” started Jim.

  “I’m not leaving the cargo,” said Jenny, watching the redworms close in on the light show.

  “You don’t get to decide. I’m in charge here,” said Jim.

  “Are you?” she asked, with a single raised eyebrow.

  Jim grabbed the zipper of her jumpsuit and yanked her over to the pilot’s chair. In her peripheral vision, Jenny saw Gary move toward them.

  “Are you out of your mind? No delivery is going to happen. We’ll be lucky if we get off this ship before we’re eaten by redworms or arrested by Reason. My ass is going to be sitting out there on an asteroid with an emergency beacon before the Reason boards us and throws us all in the Quag.”

  Jenny resisted the urge to smack his hand away. If Jim left the Jaggery, they were not getting through Fairyfloss Checkpoint into Reasonspace. She could not let him go out that door. She eased his hand off her jumpsuit and Gary stepped back.

  “Cheryl Ann would have wanted you to stay and fight,” she said.

  Invoking the ghost of Cheryl Ann was a dirty move and Jenny knew it. But Jim paused at the door, so she kept talking.

  “We need you to get through Fairyfloss… and to pilot us,” she added, though both of them knew it wasn’t true. He hadn’t left, but he also hadn’t turned around. “You can hate Gary and you can hate me, but you know that Cheryl Ann wouldn’t have wanted you to leave us out here again. After everything she sacrificed to save our lives.”

  Jim turned around, but didn’t meet her eyes. He sat down and strapped himself in.

  “Jim, she–” Jenny began.

  “Shut up and save our asses,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Hibernation

  Gary felt the Jaggery taking protective measures, curling into itself as each bolt of purple lightning struck its side. Hibernation was meant to be helpful – keeping the creatures inside the ship safe until the threat had passed. But it would leave them stranded in openspace for days, until the ship decided it was safe to come out of lockdown. He coaxed it through the asteroid field, hoping they could keep the Arthur Phillip at bay long enough for one of them to come up with a plan.

  Jim sulked in the captain’s chair and for once Gary sympathized. It had been cruel of Jenny to remind him of Cheryl Ann in order to make him stay. Gary didn’t think that they needed Jim at all. Let the man float away between the asteroids if he wanted to. It could only improve things on the ship.

  “Any horn yet? Even just a sliver?” asked Jenny, craning her neck up to see his crater. He shook his head. He felt the process working: there was a giddiness in his brain and, dare he say it, a frolic to his step that he hadn’t felt in years. But it would still take hours to make even enough to jump a single AU.

  With a shiver, the ship murmured to Gary that the redworms were about to arrive. Even if they got clear of the Arthur Phillip, the worms were now focused on them with a singular goal. Eat.

  “Let the Arthur Phillip board us,” suggested Jim. “They’ll jump us back to Reasonspace before the worms get here.”

  “No. We can do this,” said Jenny, scrolling rapidly on her tablet. Gary watched to see what she was thinking. As callous a person as Jenny could be, her sense of strategy was incomparable. He’d seen it firsthand at Copernica.

  “I should have taken my chances outside,” grumbled Jim.

  “You’re safer inside the ship, even if it goes into hibernation,” said Gary. Jenny turned toward him, her face full of realization. He knew immediately what she meant to do.

  “Let the Arthur Phillip hit us square on,” she said, but Gary was already on it. He maneuvered the Jaggery into a space between two large rocks and waited.

  “What in the hell–” started Jim.

  “We have to get the ship to hibernate. Redworms will always head toward a source of heat and light,” she said, flicking on the ship’s intercom. “Buckle up, everyone.” she said. There were no harnesses where Gary stood, but a few shattered unicorn bones were worth the survival of everyone on board. The ship attempted to buck itself out of the way of the incoming lightning, but Gary spoke to it in a soothing voice, convincing it to stay in place with a whispered apology. “By Unamip, I mean you no harm.”

  “How about praying for us instead of the damn ship?” said Jim.

  “I can do both,” said Gary, not doing both.

  The Arthur Phillip’s necromancer saw the opening and cast a colossal spell toward the Jaggery. A half-dozen violet bolts struck the ship at once. The Jaggery seized, then squealed like a hurt animal. The ship tried to bolt through the asteroid field. It glanced off a rock the size of Beywey Station.

  Gary hit the opposite wall. He felt a bone crunch in his shoulder, then pull itself straight. If Jenny’s plan worked, there was a chance they could get away. Or end up stranded inside an inert, locked-down stoneship in a remote asteroid field farming mushrooms for years. Which didn’t sound half bad, really.

  Another shot burst from the Arthur Phillip. The lightning this time was a weaker pale lilac, but it was enough to send the Jaggery into paroxysms of self-preservation. The cockpit lights went out except for Jenny’s tablet, bathing them all in a blu
ish glow. The gravity clicked off and the trisicles on the floor rose around them like flying scarabs. Gary floated over to Jenny’s chair and hovered, watching as she monitored the exterior camera feed. The Arthur Phillip rounded on them for a final shot, not noticing the pack of redworms coming up behind them.

  “They don’t even see the worms,” said Jim in the darkness.

  “They’re focused on us,” said Gary.

  “Please, please, please,” whispered Jenny, in what Gary supposed was a human version of prayer. He wondered if Unamip answered those.

  A final shot of lightning hit the Jaggery, so pale that it was nearly white. The necromancer was almost spent. The Jaggery let out a hiss as it locked down all exterior openings and became, for all intents and purposes, as lifeless and impenetrable as the asteroids surrounding it.

  The Arthur Phillip finally seemed to notice the redworms when they were a few kilometers away. They fired their aft cannons and one of the worms exploded into chunks. A second one latched directly onto one of the ship’s engines, sucking fuel and air out of the puncture wounds from its massive teeth. Redworms could, and would, eat anything that wasn’t rock.

  The largest worm opened its mouth and belched digestive acid onto the Arthur Phillip’s communications tower. The tower dissolved into bubbles of liquid that floated around the attacking pod. The other redworms drank the frozen slurry of metal and human parts that floated around the ship. Jim put a hand over his mouth. Zero G never sat well with him.

  “Do you think they’ll see us?” asked Jim.

  “We look like all the other rocks out here,” she said. “We’re fine.” But she tracked each of the worms carefully on her screen. Gary heard the edge in her voice, like she was soothing an annoying toddler.

  The Arthur Phillip spun and dodged, trying to dislodge the worms. They fired projectiles at whatever they could and even had the depleted necromancer cast a few weak bolts. One caught a redworm around the middle and twisted it in half. The two writhing halves were descended upon by the remaining four worms. Nothing edible would be wasted out here.

  The Arthur Phillip slammed into one of the asteroids head on. Gary couldn’t tell if it was a strategy or a panicked error. The ship bounced off the rock. Debris and atmosphere vented out of the crushed hull. Jenny zoomed in and Gary saw more bodies floating free. She let out a pained breath.

  “They would have done the same to us,” said Gary.

  “I know,” replied Jenny.

  Escape pods jettisoned from the sides of the Reason ship. One of the smaller worms pursued each one in turn, working methodically through the debris. A few pods managed to disappear into the asteroid belt. On Jenny’s tablet, a dozen distress beacons activated on a Reason emergency frequency.

  The three largest worms spat acid onto the aft section of the Arthur Phillip, working their way methodically up the hull. At this rate, it would take them no more than a couple of hours to digest the entire ship.

  Jenny turned off her tablet and stuck it into a pocket in her jumpsuit. She plucked a trisicle out of the air and handed it to Gary.

  “Get eating while we figure out how to get a stoneship out of hibernation.”

  She unsnapped her harness and floated toward the door, waiting for them both.

  “You want I should stay here and keep watch on the worms?” asked Jim.

  Jenny shook her head, resisting the urge to needle him about deferring to her again.

  “No need. If they come for us, there’s nothing we can do with the Jaggery locked down. I need everyone figuring out how to wake it back up.”

  Jim still didn’t move.

  “Even if you magically get this ship restarted, out of East Bumfuck, and back into Reasonspace, we’re not going to make it to Fort J in time for the Summit,” said Jim.

  “You’re right. Not if we go through Fairyfloss.”

  A mirthless laugh erupted from Jim.

  “You want to go through Borstal,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “None of you are making it through Borstal Checkpoint. They’d incarcerate a Pymmie if it suited them.”

  “You have no faith in me. Haven’t I gotten us this far?” asked Jenny.

  In the distance, the Arthur Phillip’s engines exploded, rocking the Jaggery like a ship in a hurricane. Another handful of distress beacons popped up on the tablet screen.

  Jim unbuckled reluctantly. Gary left his instruments and followed.

  “If we get the ship restarted, we should pick up the survivors,” said Gary. Jenny pushed off the door frame and into the hall.

  “I said I was trying to do better. I didn’t say I was aiming for sainthood,” she said, without pausing.

  The hallways of the Jaggery were lit by candles that the dwarves had placed into crags in the stone. Jenny sucked in her breath at the smoky globes of flame. Reason soldiers were trained never to have open fires in space, but Gary was used to it. Stoneships were not as concerned with the spread of fire as the pressurized steel cans that the Reason used for transport. When operating normally, the environment on the Jaggery was perpetually damp and the threat of fire spread was low.

  Trisicles floated freely around the halls. Gary grabbed one and crunched down on it. He had never seen so many in one place. The dwarves were packing them up into nets for storage. There was enough food here for him to take the Jaggery anywhere in the universe after they made their dropoff at the Summit. He was starting to have a glimmer of hope that he might come out of this trip with the ship he had been promised.

  Ricky’s door burst open and she flew into the hall.

  “My window went black right at the good part of the battle,” she complained. “What else am I supposed to watch around here?”

  “Why don’t you put your brain full of tricks, cons, and scams to good use and help us figure out how to get to Fort J in time?” said Jenny.

  Boges floated around a corner, holding a lantern.

  “Captain, if you’re headed for the engine room, don’t bother,” she said. Gary wasn’t sure who she was addressing, because she certainly wasn’t looking at Jim. “I have ten of my best kin in there and none of their usual songs are waking the ship. Abattor only knows how long we’ll be stuck here.” Things were certainly dire if Boges were invoking the dwarven god of axes.

  Everyone floated to a stop.

  “So, what now?” asked Jim. Jenny shook her head, her brown hair coming undone and splaying around her like a crown.

  “Now, we must use a dwarven strategy for problem solving,” said Boges.

  “What’s that, hammers and pickaxes?” asked Jim.

  Boges floated off toward the main hall.

  “No. We eat,” she called over her shoulder.

  Jenny pulled out her tablet. The redworms had eaten about half of the Arthur Phillip, but they were getting full and slowing down. One rested on the top of the ship, basking in the light from a nearby star that had just begun to peek around the asteroids and warm the hull. She scrolled through all of the distress beacons in the area, then tucked the tablet away.

  “It can’t hurt. I need to think for a few minutes anyway,” said Jenny.

  Gary was grateful for the break. He was ravenous. Besides the trisicle and a couple of sips of chai, he hadn’t eaten since the night before. The Quag wasn’t in the habit of wasting a morning meal on a man who was about to go free. But it was already late afternoon Jaisalmer time, the night before the Summit. They had less than twenty hours on the cargo clock. This dinner would have to be fast.

  The Jaggery’s dining room had been closed up during storage. The dwarves preferred to eat in their own tucked-away homes in the walls. The waterfall had been shut off and all of the banners rolled up and tied to keep them free of dust. In the dim candlelight, it looked like a cave.

  “Creepy,” said Ricky, floating in and hovering near one of the long communal tables.

  A group of dwarves floated in with lanterns using pressurized fuel that was much brighter than zero G candles. They hung t
hem in the rafters, illuminating a vaulted ceiling and huge timbers crossing the expanse in geometric patterns. The wood was primarily decorative, telling the stories of past adventures through carved motifs. Gary recognized a few of his father’s more notable exploits memorialized in the wood.

  Another set of dwarves came through the far door, carrying platters of food covered in glass domes.

  “I apologize for the lack of options. We haven’t been able to restock the pantry,” said Boges. She shot a glance at Jenny, who had come on board with more mouths to feed and no provisions of her own.

  The dwarves set down a tray of roasted sweet potatoes. “Apologies for the lack of butter. We ate the cows years ago.”

  Jim grabbed a potato out from under a dome and warmed his hands with it. Jenny took hers and floated away from the group, pulling herself around the perimeter of the room in the weightless equivalent of pacing. Gary took one and ate it between bites of trisicle. He needed to grow horn, but his human organs still needed sustenance. This simple potato was better than any of the food he’d had in the Quag over the last ten years.

  “I might be able to spare a little wine for cooking if you need it,” Ricky said to Boges. “That is, if you have any dwarf artifacts to trade.”

  Boges bounced with giddy excitement. Locked in here, she had likely not had access to a luxury like alcohol for a long time.

  “I do have some antique human clothing you may be interested in. One of my kin crashed his ship during Earth’s mid sixteenth-century. Out of the entire crew, only seven of them survived. They were stranded for nearly a year until they were able to mine and refine enough metal to fix their ship.”

  “That sounds like quite an ordeal,” said Gary.

  “Not so terrible,” said Boges. “They set up a cabin in the woods and made a lovely little life for themselves. There were some unfortunate run-ins with the locals, but they survived.”

  Ricky leaned close to Boges and they began conversing in hushed tones over the trade value of a magic-infused Bala mirror.

  Gary hooked his legs around a bench bolted to the floor and pulled a second potato out from under the dome. He bit off nearly half of it before remembering to slow himself down. He’d picked up the terrible habit of eating as fast as he could swallow.