A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

by Alex White

  Her mind flashed to the flaming wreckage of the Capricious in the Battle of Laconte. For a marauder-class crew, it was always do or die.

  Sometimes, it was both.

  “Capricious, this is Boots, check in.”

  “Boss here. Copy that. Sixty seconds to release,” radioed Cordell, his voice tense with concentration. She knew he’d be on the bridge, focusing his magic through the amps. Hopefully their recent repairs would hold.

  “Yes, Captain. Sitrep?”

  Armin’s sour voice filled her comms. “Prince here. Nilah’s locator is making circles in the town of Arbrevert, attracting the attention of every provincial guard throughout the region. Given the speed of the movement, she’s still alive.”

  “And the extraction point? How is it?” asked Boots, but she already knew the answer; it would be bad. She squeezed her eyes tight and tried to get back into the zone. Fighting Mother’s battlegroup had been a pain, but that was open, airless space. Here, she’d face the effects of gravity and atmosphere. It’d be a live drop zone, like the bad old days.

  “You’ve got sixteen bandits: five provincial fighters and a motorcade,” said Armin. “I hope you’re good.”

  “Just remember,” said Cordell, “our ship is solid. This is what he was designed for, so let’s go get some. Aerial supremacy is ground supremacy.”

  It’d been almost twenty years since she’d dropped in gravity, and it was quite a trick back in the day. If the Capricious maneuvered too hard during Boots’s egress, she could be bounced around inside the hull, only to emerge a pile of debris. The idea was to minimize risk by firing her front impulse thrusters as hard as she could, slowing her to a dead stop while her hosts sped away from her. Then she could fall for a short span to rile everyone’s targeting before boosting away. Her nav glass showed their altitude at just under four hundred meters—not much room to move.

  Cordell added, “Boots, we don’t have to win this one. We just have to fight through. You’re my only wing.”

  “Copy, Boss,” she said, and the cargo bay door wailed behind her, the rushing wind full of deadly spells and magic shrapnel. Any enemy craft present would recognize a launch, so it was time to drop before they could fill the Capricious with a firestorm of spells. “Mag locks disengaging in three … two … one …”

  Her dampers blunted the edge of the thrust, but Boots’s head still slammed forward with their force. Like a damned rookie, she’d left her fighter’s internal gravity calibrated for space actions, and as she began to fall, she cursed her weightlessness. She may have been a hardened spacer, but falling still felt all wrong. Open, starry sky filled her view, along with the ruby gleam of more than a dozen threat warnings.

  Her ship’s dispersers immediately kicked on, knocking out two of the larger attack spells headed her way. Fragments of glyphs twisted across her hull, and she boosted through them like gossamer webs. The thrusters glued her back into her seat as she accelerated past the swollen armored belly of the Capricious, and her canopy shields glowed with the friction of atmosphere. Boots tapped on the console glass, increasing the power of her dampers as she rolled out of the way of another huge fire spell. It sizzled past her, its connective strands hot enough to slice through the toughest materials in the galaxy.

  Boots wheeled her Midnight Runner in a wide arc, soaring around mountain peaks until she came full circle to her home ship. Streamers of energy from the city below split the night sky in two as round after round pelted the Capricious’s shields. The city’s antispacecraft measures would tear apart a normal ship in seconds. A marauder-class vessel could withstand more punishment, but not much.

  “Get to work, Boots,” said Cordell, the strain of his shield spell thinning his voice. “First target is Ratchet eight-one-four, two kilometers, five hundred ASL.”

  Boots zipped toward the scrambled palace fighters, her slinger cannons armed and ready for business. As she coasted over Arbrevert, she slipped a few exploding rounds into a surface-to-air gun, transforming its tower into a pillar of flame and debris. She glanced over her shoulder as she sailed clear of the city limits and spotted the other anti-air tower. Sensing her desires, the Runner’s glass highlighted the remaining objectives on the heads-up display. She yanked back on the stick and sank back into her seat as she rolled the craft, executing a spinning turn.

  Ahead of her, fighters attacked the Capricious from above while Cordell kept the shields directed at the antispacecraft slingers below. As long as the surface-to-air guns were operational, he wouldn’t be able to protect the ship from the smaller threats above.

  And there was the vehicle convoy, taking potshots at Boots. She peeled off and sunk below the city’s elevation, roaring along the mountainside as she circled. Thankfully, the Carrétan starfighters didn’t give chase. If she was lucky, that mistake would cost her enemy the battle. She surged above Arbrevert’s skyline and planted a series of shots into another gun tower, striking all along its length. She lined up for a strafing run at the remaining cannon, but stopped short of firing when she couldn’t get a clean shot. A skirmish in space was one thing, but a missed target in a city meant she might hit a house, a school, a hospital. Someone outside of the battle would die.

  She hadn’t always been so soft. During the last days of Clarkesfall, there was no such thing as a civvy. Famine had destroyed everything, and each person was part of the mad dash for scraps. But this wasn’t war. At least, not that she knew of.

  The surface of Cordell’s spell arced and spit where slingers hammered it.

  “Boots, I’m losing my shields here!” Cordell had genuine panic in his voice.

  “You can hold it, Boss!”

  “Prince here. He can’t. Take out the remaining gun or we’re dead in five seconds,” added Armin.

  There wasn’t time to circle back for another strafing run, and in the planet’s gravity, she couldn’t execute a backward spin. She had to keep moving forward or she’d drop out of the sky like a rock.

  “Four …”

  She’d have to make it a wide loop if she didn’t want to fly directly into the path of the antispacecraft spells, so she opened up her thrusters and pulled back on the flight stick.

  “Three …”

  The Capricious and the city buildings appeared before her as she hit the zenith of her loop, followed by the hot, steady stream of arcane energy lancing across her vision. Upside down, she could almost line it up.

  “Two …”

  “Shut the hell up!” She loosed a pair of bolts into the cannon structure and watched a satisfying fireball envelop the whole thing. She threw the ship into a hard bank and nearly blacked out as her blood pooled in her legs. Even with the dampers active, a fight inside a gravity well was no joke.

  “Good kill,” said Armin.

  “Now we’re talking!” shouted Cordell, and the ship’s shields swung from his belly to the upper decks, taking out one of the fighters that had strayed too close like a giant hand swatting a fly from the heavens. The other fighters scattered away, frightened, but they’d be back. If Boots could get in there and mix it up with them—

  “Orna here. We could use a little help!”

  Boots searched her keel slinger cameras to find the quartermaster almost directly below her. Ranger jumped across the road, its slinger roaring with sparkling magic. The robot seemed clunkier than she remembered … encumbered. Was it carrying Nilah over its shoulder? As if reading Boots’s mind, a race car screamed up the main drag, a couple of pursuers shooting over the lane after her. It wasn’t Nilah in Ranger’s arms, so it was … Malik?

  “Copy, Ranger. Help is on the way,” said Armin. “Boots, light up that convoy.”

  Boots whipped her craft around, slammed home the throttle, and braced herself to line up for a strafing run on the goons dogging Orna’s path. She’d have to place her shots carefully, or she might plant a round in someone’s living room. The motorcade was easy to spot, their slingers carelessly frying everything in sight as they burned across
the streets of Arbrevert after their prey.

  “Are you going to shoot them or what, Boots?” Orna hissed, scrabbling across an exploding rooftop.

  “Maybe I might.” Boots lined up parallel to the street and squeezed the trigger, blistering the tarmac with molten magic. Two of the lead cars hit the patch and went skating into a spin as their tires melted.

  The force of her shots shattered windows, and Boots winced. “We shouldn’t be fighting here!”

  “Tell that to them!” Orna grunted.

  The Midnight Runner thumped as her dispersers auto-fired. Someone down below had smacked her hull with a rust-inducing sabotage spell. She only hoped her countermeasures had caught it in time.

  “Help! Help over here!” cried Nilah over the comms, and the Runner’s heads-up display highlighted her location.

  “Headed to you.” Boots fired impulse thrusters and pulled the craft up into the wind, groaning as inertia yanked her stomach into her rump. Above her, the Capricious destroyed another fighter with a perfectly placed shot from its single cannon. Aisha must’ve been using her marksman’s mark.

  Boots spotted Nilah’s race car wailing down the main drag with a couple of Carrétan police cruisers flying after her. “Captain, I’ve got eyes on Nilah. I’ll clear you a landing zone.”

  “Zap it with a beacon,” said Aisha. “I’ll drop this big boy on your mark.”

  Boots scanned the street ahead of Nilah for an open space and caught a lucky break: a large, decorative fountain, all lit up for the evening. She pinged the site with her designator.

  “Acknowledged,” said Aisha, and the Capricious banked toward Boots’s side of town.

  “This is Prince. Eliminate her attackers,” barked Armin. “We’re not equipped to repel boarders if they get inside with Nilah.”

  “Roger that,” said Boots, air-braking her craft as best she could. She was too low and couldn’t line up a shot on the police vehicles without possibly hitting Nilah.

  So Boots got right in front of the cruisers and throttled up to full, blowing them away with engine wash. The blast caught Nilah as Boots rocketed upward, sending the race car flying forward like a kite in an updraft.

  “What the hell, Boots?” screeched Nilah.

  Boots watched through her keel cameras as the car almost flipped, then came down on all four wheels. It was going too fast, though. It’d get to the fountain before the Capricious.

  As if sensing Boots’s fears, Aisha gently said, “Stand by to board, Nilah. Captain, I need shields on the belly.”

  Then the pilot of the Capricious dropped the ship out of the sky like a boulder, devastating the fountain, the park, and surrounding buildings with the impact.

  As it turned out, Nilah’s white-hot eidolon crystal was the least of her problems. First came the scorching wash of Boots’s engines, which nearly sent the Hyper 1 end over end. Nilah’s front right suspension locked up, folding in on itself like a piece of paper. She could feel it as acutely as a sprain in her ankle. She couldn’t turn, and she couldn’t stop. Then came the Capricious’s thunderous landing, and with it, a suicidal drive into a shock wave.

  Nothing Nilah could do would let her avoid the cloud of rocky shrapnel, so she triggered the Hyper 1’s emergency crash systems and hoped they still worked. She threw her hands in front of her face as phantoplasm exploded from jets, slathering her body. Rocks shot through the gelatin, harmlessly thumping against her skin, and Nilah’s stomach flipped. The crash systems must have been expired, in need of replacement. The debris shouldn’t have been able to pass through the gelatin, much less touch her.

  That meant she could still be crushed if the car flipped over and struck something.

  All these thoughts rushed through her head in the time it took the car to ramp off the remains of the road and flip over onto its open top.

  The roll bar screeched and sparked as the chassis struck metal, tumbling over and over again. The world went light, then dark, then light, before finally settling down. She’d stopped, but where? Her blurry vision was full of phantoplasm and caked debris, and she wouldn’t know her situation until the goo melted away.

  A familiar sickness settled over her as the gelatinous compound dissolved into indolence gasses, rendering all magic inert and severing her magical connection to her vehicle. Her heart hammered and a cold sweat covered her skin. She brushed the rocks and dirt from her eyes to find the interior of the Capricious’s cargo bay.

  They’d dropped the ship in front of her and she’d ramped into it.

  “I’m on board!” she coughed, but no one could hear her. The relays to the ship’s nerve center were arcane, and also subject to the effects of the gas. She shook her hands, expecting her connection to magic to return any moment, but it didn’t. The hull began to vibrate as the ship lifted from the ground. The old fear gnawed at her, the one that haunted her every single crash: what if she never felt the arcane ever again?

  She unlatched and staggered to the cargo bay doors, trying to pull in as much fresh air as possible. She took the crystal comm she’d stolen from Vayle’s office and polished it on her clothing. It squawked with the fragment of a transmission. The suppression effects of the gas were wearing off.

  “I’m in the ship! I’m on board!” said Nilah. She began to sense the machines around her, and traced her glyph just to be sure.

  “Just you?” came Armin’s reply.

  Nilah leaned against one of the large actuators that moved the doors. The streets of Arbrevert fell away beneath her as the ship rose higher. “Yeah. None of the palace guard made it in with me.”

  “Where’s my husband?” asked Aisha, and Nilah swallowed hard.

  This wasn’t the right time. Nilah wasn’t part of the Capricious’s family, and even if she were, Aisha was in the middle of a combat. She ducked away from the bay opening as a fighter whizzed past, slingers blazing. “He’s … He’s with Orna.” Not a lie. Not the truth.

  Orna’s voice sizzled across the relay, cut through with the automatic whir of slinger fire. “I’m sorry, Aisha. They poisoned him. He’s in a coma.”

  Aisha’s wail was so raw, so painful, Nilah felt sure the bridge canopy had taken a direct hit. She’d never heard a scream of its particular quality: mournful, twisted around primal.

  The Capricious arose in steady flight. The ship’s cannon blasted shot after shot, and from the proximity of the explosions, Nilah knew fighters were getting skewered. She watched out of the open bay as one of the missed spells crashed against a clock tower, toppling it into a nearby building.

  “If you’ve got Nilah, I need immediate evac over here,” said Orna. “It’s time to go.”

  Boots responded first. “I’m coming for you. Can you do your ship-riding trick in the atmosphere?”

  “I’ll try. If I can’t, I won’t live long enough to regret it,” she said. “Make a slow pass down the western boulevard. I’ve got to time this just right or I’ll wreck us both.”

  Nilah searched for Orna’s location, and had little trouble spotting the streams of spells arcing from the battle. Light diffracted into rainbows and flashed gray. A familiar chill ran up Nilah’s spine; she knew that gray spell—Mother’s magic.

  She jerked the crystal comm to her mouth. “Mother incoming!”

  “What? Where?” Was that panic in Boots’s voice?

  Nilah saw the gray flash again, its epicenter on the western side of the city. “Look west!”

  The Midnight Runner broke off its run to Orna, strafing toward the west.

  Nilah scarcely recognized Boots’s voice through her growl over the crystal comm. “Nowhere to hide, you withered scribbler.”

  With her mechanist’s art, Nilah sensed Boots crank the active scanners on the Midnight Runner up to full blast. Every satellite orbiting Carré would detect Boots’s fighter: an enemy craft in their airspace. There was another gray flash, and the Midnight Runner banked toward its source.

  Armin’s warning echoed Nilah’s fears. “Planetary defens
es coming online!”

  “Shut that off, Boots, or we’ll shoot you down ourselves.” Cordell’s voice was like a brick wall; there was no room for arguing with his tone. “Two seconds to comply.”

  Nilah felt the sensors switch off, and the tightness in her chest eased off—until the next gray flash, almost directly beneath the Midnight Runner.

  “Boots—” Nilah began.

  Cordell cut in. “Boots—get Orna. Now.”

  “Acknowledged,” was her simple reply.

  The Runner pulled off into a hard bank low enough to skim the buildings with its keel. It shattered windows and collapsed roofs as it shot across the town. An iridescent explosion rocked the area where Orna had been, and in its light, Ranger’s silhouette climbed up a long steeple.

  “Tell me you see me!” hissed Orna.

  “Get ready to jump,” said Boots. “One klick to you.”

  Ranger hunkered down, then jumped through a hail of sparking spells. Nilah held her breath, unable to see if the suit had struck home. For a moment, the battlefield seemed impossibly silent. Boots’s ship wobbled as it banked toward the Capricious’s cargo bay, impulse thrusters popping across its hull.

  “Captain, I’m on board the Runner,” said Orna.

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here,” said Cordell, and the ship began to rise a little faster.

  When the Runner came closer, Nilah could clearly make out Ranger’s form and the battle damage across his surface. His shiny regraded steel plates had been scored by dozens of slinger shots, and one of his cameras hung freely from its socket. Nilah’s heart skipped with the fear that Orna had been shot. Malik lay unconscious in her arms—she must’ve taken a few hits to protect him.

  Nilah started forward and almost missed Mother, her brass arms clinging to the Runner’s landing skids like vise grips. The old woman heaved ragged breaths through clenched teeth, her tattered cloak whipping about her like a murder of crows. Mother traced a sigil, and in the gray flash that followed, she appeared behind Orna. Nilah pointed and screamed, and Ranger turned its half-blinded head to see the new threat, but it was too late.