A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

by Alex White

  Mother shoved a brass claw through Ranger’s abdomen like punching through water. Blood caked Mother’s hand, and her lips twisted in a delighted sneer. Malik slipped from Ranger’s grip and banged to the deck, rolling toward the night sky.

  He was going to go over the edge. Nilah dashed forward and slid across the deck, catching Malik’s collar. Her other hand locked around one of the cargo bay’s tethering rings, and she strained to keep him on the ship. Overhead, the Runner’s engines filled the air with a choking heat.

  “Damn it!” Orna gurgled, her armor sparking as Mother struck her again and again, yanking at the plates like picking meat from bones.

  Ranger lashed out at the assassin, slamming Mother squarely across the chest. The woman went flying backward off the craft and tumbling toward the city below. Before she passed behind the open cargo door, Nilah spotted something in Mother’s hand—a detonator.

  The explosion nearly ripped Nilah from her handhold, and her ears filled with a singing silence. She felt a tear in Malik’s collar and redoubled her grip. She’d be damned if she let him go.

  The Midnight Runner spun with the blast, choking smoke billowing from its keel. The fighter barely missed Nilah, its impulse thrusters popping every which way as it made a mad spin toward the far wall—behind which lay the critical systems and the bridge. At the last second, the ship righted itself, skidding across the deck with relative gentleness. The Runner’s nose would be ground to pieces, the canopy would shatter, the thruster ports would all require extensive bodywork, and he wouldn’t be airworthy any time soon, but it was better than a huge ball of fire in the cargo hold.

  A second explosion came, this one smaller than the first, but because it was enclosed within the bay, it struck Nilah like an avalanche. Stars flashed in her eyes and her equilibrium vanished. The Capricious pitched to one side, and the Hyper 1 came grinding toward her like a giant hand, about to scrape her out of the cargo bay and into the city beyond. Dizzy, Nilah mustered every ounce of strength to hoist Malik from the wailing opening. She dragged him clear just as the Hyper 1 banged through the entrance and tipped over the ledge into nothingness.

  “We’re in the ship,” Boots grunted, “and we’ve got wounded!”

  The cargo bay slammed shut with startling speed, and the ground seemed to swell beneath Nilah through the sudden kick of artificial gravity. Ranger sagged across the roof of the fighter, but remained firmly attached. Nilah leapt to her feet, still woozy from the blast, and made a mad dash for the Midnight Runner. The ruined canopy slid open and Boots emerged, ripping her helmet from her head as she climbed around the side.

  “Get over here and get Orna!” Boots commanded in a voice Nilah hadn’t heard before—calm, yet powerful. She had the sure stride of a woman who’d already seen a million worst-case scenarios.

  Nilah hoisted herself up to where Ranger was, her eyes darting to the open wound, terrified that she’d see intestines hanging out. Instead, she found a thin mesh of duraplex weaving over the gaping hole. Nilah’s fire suit was supposed to have a similar apparatus, but she’d never had occasion to use it. Nilah ran her fingers over the sealing wound, tracing her glyph to test the health of the system.

  Ranger’s code erupted against Nilah, slashing her with the ferocity of a cornered animal. She broke the psychic connection before the armor could short-circuit its batteries into her brain. It wouldn’t let her hack it again. The armor was incredibly hostile, and Nilah had little doubt that the suit would physically attack her if it could. Before the system cut her off, she had been able to make out a flurry of warnings, cautions, and advisories beneath the surface. Two of them stood out above all the others:

  BLOOD O2 43 PULSE 0

  PILOT CRITICAL STABILIZATION FAIL PROTECT 3506AC$

  “She’s dying!” Nilah cried, hammering the armor closure with a fist. “Oh god, get her out of there!”

  Ranger backhanded her, and Nilah almost lost her footing as metal claws tore across her cheek. Hot blood spilled across her neck, splattering crimson against the hull of the Runner.

  Fury wrapped around her, and Nilah’s reflexes kicked in like they never had on the track. She traced a glyph, took hold of Ranger’s arm, and lanced at the core of his code with a pinpoint mechanist’s attack: for blood, for victory, for Orna. Her power shot right through his personality, his critical functions, everything. With a tug at this thread of arcane energy, she unraveled Ranger like a tattered tapestry.

  The mechanical beast’s arms went completely limp, and he hissed open with a metallic chime to reveal the devastated body inside. Orna’s cool, glassy eyes gazed into nothing; her scarred flesh was pale with the loss of so much blood. The duraplex graft remained stuck to her abdomen, holding Orna’s guts in place.

  Boots called to her from the deck, two gurneys hovering obediently before her: one with Malik, one empty. “Med bay! Let’s go!”

  “She—I don’t think she—” Nilah sobbed.

  “I said let’s go!”

  Nilah jumped down, and together they loaded Orna onto the empty gurney. Boots and Nilah raced through the corridors of the ship. With every step came the sudden nauseating shift of the artificial gravity; the Capricious was doing heavy maneuvers as they ascended. The ship rattled and groaned under the weight of a barrage of explosions, but Boots looked unfazed as they pulled into the deserted med bay.

  “You get Malik into the sleep pod,” said Boots, gesturing to the convalescence bed in the corner of the med bay. “And hook up the oxygen. We’ll hook up the feeding stuff in a bit.”

  “You should do that. I can help Orna—”

  Boots wheeled on her, face like stone. “I have more training with battle injuries. Do as I say, right now, and maybe we can save both of them.”

  Nilah grimaced. Boots was right. Her legs unsteady, Nilah pushed Malik’s gurney to the convalescence bed. When she couldn’t figure out the levers to unload him, she traced her glyph and compelled the bed to do it for her. She used her mechanist’s art to decipher how to start up the oxygen, and fitted Malik with a mask and pulse monitors. Out of the corner of her eye, Nilah glimpsed Boots unceremoniously slice off Orna’s tattered clothes, avoiding the place where the quartermaster had been impaled.

  As soon as the convalescence bed registered steady—but weak—vital signs, Nilah rushed back to Orna’s side.

  Boots wheeled the old nurse cart to the side of the bed and began plugging up wires and sticking down sensors. The medical bot ran diagnostics and responded to what it found. It attacked Orna’s exposed flesh with a variety of syringes and tubes, sinking needle after needle into her body.

  “That thing is ancient. Are you sure it’s safe?” Nilah asked.

  Boots picked up the pace as she laid out tools for the bot to grab. “We can’t do any worse by Orna. Connect up to the sensors and make sure it’s reading right.”

  Nilah wove her magic into the robot, and aside from a little wear and tear, found it to be in pristine condition. Malik had taken excellent care of it. Synchronized with the ship’s sensor array, the bot could locate all of Orna’s life-threatening injuries, and Nilah saw them too—hot red on a sea of cooling blue.

  The nurse bot extruded mechanical tentacles and plunged into the quartermaster’s abdomen. Orna’s skin writhed with their movement, and Nilah felt them spinning duraplex grafts across Orna’s injured organs. It pumped her heart for her. It sank a tube into her neck and pushed an oxygenated blood substitute through her jugular. Syringes emptied, and Nilah called out their contents as Boots rushed back and forth, always making sure the nurse was supplied. The scanners reported the state of Orna’s brain: all waves flat, but not dead.

  Orna could die or live. Maybe she would be whole, maybe she’d never be the woman she was in the prime of her life.

  The nurse noted old scars, broken bones, torn grafts from a dozen years or more of violent struggle. Not a single one of Orna’s ribs had made it to adulthood without being crushed or broken at some point. The nurse’s
cycles idly suggested possible causes for the internal scar tissue: contusions and shearing, lacerations and debridement. It was like the quartermaster had been dropped in a meat grinder and reconstituted over and over again.

  Given her medical history, the nurse estimated her odds of survival: 28 percent.

  Gradually, the thud of detonations gave way to smooth space and smoother gravity. Nilah realized they must be free of Carré’s planetary defenses, or they’d be dead by now. Somehow, they’d shaken away the fighters and found freedom without Boots and Nilah ever leaving Orna’s side. Maybe the Capricious had already slipped through the gate, and they were on their way to god-knew-where.

  The bot chirped, “Stand by for cardioid resuscitation.”

  The nurse began to shave Orna’s oily black hair, and Nilah swallowed hard. She’d seen plenty of dramas where a shaved head was the last gift a person received before the universe decided they were a lost cause.

  The bot cast a net of shining, barbed probes across Orna’s naked scalp. They fell in even spacing, drops of artificially circulated blood falling where they’d landed.

  “Stand clear,” said the bot. “Charging crystals.”

  Nilah winced as the nursing bot pushed a long orichalcum wire through the edge of Orna’s eye socket, just to the left of her nose. The penetration looked too forceful to Nilah, but it was their only option. The mechanical nurse gripped Orna’s neck and forehead with specialized forceps, pinning the quartermaster’s skull to the gurney.

  Monitors flickered on all around the med bay, Orna’s darkening life essence mapped to her dying brain. The predicted path of the arcane spark overlaid the image, a warm red energy signature traced out for the benefit of surgeon magi. The nurse started its calculations to find the exact order to ignite the probes. When it reached 100 percent, it’d fire.

  “Gonna be okay, kid,” murmured Boots. “Orna has some strong magic keeping her here.”

  Nilah looked to Boots and knew the older woman was thinking of her arcana dystocia; if it was Boots on the gurney, she’d be dead. They had no way to bring her back from the most catastrophic injuries. Nilah’s heart felt as though it was tearing in half, and she took Boots’s hand, gripping it tightly.

  Boots returned a smile. “Don’t worry about me. This ain’t my first rodeo.”

  To shock someone’s cardioid was devastating to their system; more than a few attempts would kill Orna outright.

  “Calculations complete,” buzzed the nurse. “Contact.”

  On the monitors, a cascade of magic sloshed through Orna’s brain, racing along her skull and down her spine. The afterimage of the roughly heart-shaped cardioid faded from her head like a lightning strike, leaving only darkening neurons. The screen readout showed the new odds: 13 percent. One in eight or so.

  “Recalculating spark path …”

  Nilah squeezed Boots’s fingers as tightly as she could. The nurse would hit Orna again, this time harder, and it would keep doing so until there were no odds of survival.

  “Contact …”

  Nilah focused on Orna’s eyes, willing them to blink around the orichalcum probe.

  “Negative.”

  Six point three percent. Was that one in fifteen?

  What would Malik have done if he were there? What drugs would he administer? What machinery would he have hooked up? A trained doctor was so far beyond a mere triage robot. Nilah glanced around the bay, looking for anything she could add to the equation, but was interrupted.

  “Contact …”

  Blink, Orna. Close your eyes and open them.

  “Negative.”

  One point eight nine percent. Almost one in fifty.

  “Recalculating … contact.” Its voice was like a harsh antiseptic, and Nilah’s breath caught at the sound.

  “Orna!” screamed Nilah, and the monitors froze in place. She traced her glyph and slapped her palms against the med bot.

  “Nilah, stop! You don’t know what you’re—”

  Boots tried to pull her back, but Nilah knocked her away with an elbow to the gut. Every fiber of Nilah’s knowledge channeled into making this bot work in the most optimal way. She fused with it, overcharging its eidolon crystals, retuning its probes to fire the perfect shot.

  The monitors flashed with the discharge, the whole med bay growing bright with their radiance.

  At first, Nilah thought she’d shorted the monitors out. They were stuck on the image of the cardioid, magic flowing from it the same way the probes had predicted. Then she spotted tiny waves in the blue flow of energy; it was a live image of a living brain.

  “Complete. Subject sustained.”

  Orna gasped and screamed, swinging her fist at the nurse bot, but it easily held her in place as it filled her blood with sweet anesthesia and euphoric medicines.

  Nilah turned back to Boots to find her companion on the ground, clutching her stomach, mouth hanging open in shock.

  “You …” Boots started, blinking. “You actually did it.”

  Nilah gave her a shaking nod, frowning hard so she wouldn’t start crying. “I bloody well did, didn’t I? I told you PGRF tuners were good.”

  She helped Boots up and threw her arms around the woman, clutching her so tight that Boots grunted.

  “Thank you. Sorry I hit you. Thank you,” Nilah whispered into Boots’s ear. “When I thought we couldn’t save her, I … You kept me together.”

  “You did good,” said Boots, smacking her back. “You did really good.”

  Boots pulled back, and they looked over to where Malik lay locked in his hibernation spell, his heart beating in slow motion. He was stable, but the system had little it could do for him. They needed to get him to a major hospital where the best surgeons could work on him.

  But dropping him off now would be like signing his death warrant. Mother would find him in no time.

  “I meant to say, back in the cargo bay …” said Boots, pulling Nilah back into the moment.

  “Hm?”

  The fighter pilot grinned warmly, nodding her approval. “Malik: nice catch.”

  “Thanks.”

  Boots shooed her off. “And now, I want you to say good evening to these two. The bot has a lot of work to do setting up Malik’s food. I’ll take first watch, okay?”

  Nilah hugged herself, surveying Orna’s scarred face, her bloodstained skin. “You’ll call me if …”

  Boots nodded. “The doc bot will be by to check your face in a bit. You need to get some rest. Take one of the beds in the corner. I expect a relief watch in four hours.”

  The adrenaline began to fade from Nilah’s system, exhaustion flooding her in its place. She agreed and went to a nearby cot, settling down onto it. The cool pillow soothed her bare neck, and she closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. Boots switched the lights to the sleep cycle, and Nilah opened her eyes to the dim sunset glow.

  “Hey, Boots?”

  “Hm?”

  “I don’t know what happened, but I’m sorry about Didier.”

  Boots turned away, returning her attention to the monitors, checking the status of the nursing bot. “Yeah … me too. Get some sleep.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  After Action

  Boots squeezed a lever, lifting the Midnight Runner’s banged-up husk into the cargo bay mag clamps. The damage wasn’t extensive, but its maneuvering thrusters wouldn’t get the ship into place anymore. Until Orna could be up and about servicing the fighter, it wasn’t going anywhere.

  Her hands stung from a morning of heavy lifting and cutting. The new tools Nilah had ordered on Carré were scattered and tipped by the explosion, and needed straightening up. She’d had to cut the Runner’s panel free from where it had sliced a nasty groove into the deck plating. Carbon scoring dotted the deck from where Mother had blown apart the Runner’s skids. Boots wiped her sweaty cheeks with a gloved hand, not caring if she got a few metal shavings on her skin. Things were too bad to worry about a couple of cuts.

  The far b
ulkhead swung open, revealing Cordell, his captain’s jacket scuffed and disarrayed. His hair was matted in odd spots, no doubt from a night of restless sleep. He pulled out a cigarette case, tapped one to pack it, and lit up.

  Boots didn’t salute, because they weren’t in the military anymore. Instead, she called to him, “You can’t smoke in here, Captain.”

  He gave her a mirthless smirk and a smoky sigh. “The hell I can’t. This is my ship.”

  “I understand if you prefer to make special rules for yourself, sir.”

  “Why did I take you on again?”

  Boots shrugged. “You kidnapped me. I guess you wanted to go legit.”

  “Very funny.”

  She grimaced at his constant puffing. “You’re going to make the whole place stink of smoke.”

  The captain swept his open palm over the scene—the burnt pylons, the carbon scoring—and scowled. “This whole place was nearly burnt to a crisp. A little cigarette smoke ain’t going to hurt anything, girlie.”

  “Remember the first time you called me that? Right after I came on board the ship.”

  He leaned back against the wall like some kind of juvenile delinquent. “Yeah, I do. You filed a complaint with Command, and we were attacked during the disciplinary hearing.”

  She kicked a piece of scrap out of the way. “It was a hell of a way to get out of a harassment charge.”

  He grunted an assent as he took a drag. “What do you make of that story Nilah told us, about the racetrack being a glyph?”

  Boots mopped her forehead with the back of a glove. “Damned if I know how any of this fits together. But I’m sure she was telling the truth. What glyph?”

  “Armin can’t figure it out. Says he thinks it’s only partial.” His eyes cut to the wrecked Midnight Runner hanging from the mag clamps. “You ever going to name that thing?”