A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

by Alex White

  From where Boots stood, she could see the shredded keel and twisted landing gear. “Probably going to name him Salvage.”

  “And why is that?”

  “It’d take one hell of a mechanic to get this thing back in the air. Probably two of them, if we’re being honest.”

  Cordell pushed off the wall with his shoulders and sauntered over to her. “Then I’ve got good news: Orna and Nilah are two of the best mechanics I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’re assuming Orna survives all of this.”

  He licked the inside of his mouth, as though tasting his response. “She’ll make it. After the famine took most of Clarkesfall, she fought in the cages for food.”

  “Are you serious?” Boots asked. “Did you rescue her or something?”

  “Not exactly. Armin and I responded to a distress beacon from the surface. When we got there, she’d killed most of the slavers and assembled a pretty decent antenna. Fight gone wrong or something. Anyway, she took my ship by force and offered to spare us if we brought her along.”

  “Wow. Then this must’ve been when she was … what … seventeen?”

  “She was twelve.”

  Boots tried to visualize a small child holding the Capricious hostage, but nothing came to her. “You’re really not joking.”

  Cordell shook his head. “She’s good with a bomb.”

  “Damn. I guess she’ll make it after all.”

  “The famine made for some pretty hard kids. So what are you doing in here?”

  Boots pointed to the damaged Runner. “Cleaning up this guy’s mess. What else would I be doing?”

  A long wisp of smoke curled across Cordell’s upper lip before he exhaled, blowing it away. “You were reckless out there with your sensors. Carré’s planetary defense grid almost got us.”

  Didier’s blood on her hands, as well as the heft of his corpse, flashed through her mind. “Yeah, well. I had reasons.”

  “I do, too. Mine are named Armin, Aisha, Malik, Orna, Nilah, and even Boots. Revenge is never a good reason to do anything.”

  “It wasn’t just about revenge.”

  “The hell it wasn’t. You took all that risk, and for what?”

  “The flight data recorder.”

  Cordell took a step closer. “Excuse me?”

  Boots looked him dead in the eye. “I recorded Mother’s spell, from beginning to end, within one of the active sensor sweeps.”

  He blinked, clearly not sure whether or not to be angry. “Which means—”

  “Which means we have comprehensive data on two things: what her magic is and how it works. You combine that with datamancy and a pair of genius mechanists, you might just get a viable countermeasure.” She folded her arms. “I’m tired of getting ambushed. I’m tired of her gutting anyone and everyone who gets too close to us. I don’t know if we can find the Harrow with the crew we have left, but I’m sure we can put a spell through Mother’s head.”

  Cordell’s cigarette slipped from his fingers, and he stooped down to pick it up. “Is that why you did it? Almost got us all killed for some data?”

  “Not really. I was hoping to fry the old witch.”

  Boots watched his face for any willingness to concede the point. He wanted Mother dead as much as anyone, but he gave no sign of relenting. He’d always been a hard-ass.

  “I could’ve blasted her if you hadn’t stopped me. I was about two seconds away from target acquisition.”

  “Too risky. Not worth it, Boots.”

  “You’re the captain.”

  Boots brushed past him and disappeared into the holds of the ship, in search of her bunk and a fitful night of sleep.

  Mother’s claws, dripping red. The witch’s thin, hateful lips.

  Nilah stirred to the sounds of clanking metal and turned over in her bed. The sheets carried a queer, inhuman smell, like no one had ever slept in them. Her face throbbed, and she briefly recalled the reason for her presence there: Ranger’s claws had taken thin ribbons of flesh out of her cheek. Her eyes drooped as painkillers returned a measure of intoxication to her.

  The metallic noise came again, weak and insistent: a light scratching, followed by a few taps. A tray perhaps? She pressed her cheek into the pillow, trying to will the noise away, but was rewarded with searing pain across the bandages on her face.

  The scratching stopped, replaced by a low moan, and Nilah bolted upright. The med bay was dark, but faint light lined the floors. Sensing that occupants were conscious, the ship brought a few of the accent lights online, providing a bit of definition. Once her eyes adjusted, Nilah found Orna lying on the bed across the bay, her fingers curled like talons. The metal tray table contained Orna’s circlet, which Nilah assumed was the source of the noise.

  Nilah’s entire body complained as she slipped from her bed and rushed to Orna’s side.

  “Okay, okay,” Nilah cooed, surprised at how much she sounded like her own mother. “No need to move. Let’s just lie back.”

  The quartermaster stared at her, wide eyes full of violence like a wild animal. Nilah gently pushed Orna’s arms to her sides and ran her fingers across her sweat-soaked forehead. Orna’s black, stubbly hair glimmered in the low light, and Nilah grabbed a nearby towel to gingerly pat her head dry. Thin, even trails of blood from Orna’s scalp came away on the cloth.

  “You’ve still got a lot of healing to do. You won’t be up for another day or two,” said Nilah. “If you don’t relax, it’ll only take longer.”

  “What …” Orna’s eyes traveled about the med bay, and Nilah understood the question.

  “Mother put her hand through you. No better way to say it.”

  The quartermaster’s eyes traveled to her circlet, and she weakly pointed to the tray. “Pu … p … Give t—me.”

  Nilah picked up the silver band, and her ambient magical senses wound over its circuits. It was a primitive design, but effective, and it felt like looking at some of Orna’s earliest work. Just how old was it?

  Orna interrupted her train of thought by running a finger across Nilah’s bare forearm and closing her eyes. She wanted Nilah to slip the circlet over her head.

  Nilah started to comply, but then froze. If Orna wore the silver band, she’d know Ranger was dead. She wasn’t ready for that sort of news.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea right now,” said Nilah. “You need to be resting.”

  “Want … to walk … around,” Orna said, wincing on that last word. “Ranger can …” She tilted her head toward the door.

  “Let’s not worry about that right now.”

  Orna weakly reached for the circlet, and Nilah pulled it from her grasp with little difficulty. She found it sickening to see the quartermaster with the strength of a child—a majestic beast laid low. Nilah thought of those scarred fists and powerful hands that had beaten her thoroughly, and she took a step back.

  A scream ripped from Orna’s lungs as she attempted to sit up. Klaxons and alarms echoed her cry, and Nilah rushed to restrain her.

  “Where’s Ranger?” Orna shouted, her eyes watering.

  “You have to stop!”

  “Where is … he?” she gasped, half fury, half terror. “Where—is Ranger?”

  “Lay down!” Nilah slammed the emergency button, but the nurse bot had already arrived. “Please! I’m sorry!”

  The quartermaster froze, and locked her gaze onto Nilah’s. Tears streamed from her eyes. “You’re s-sorry?”

  She knew. In that split second, everything collapsed around Nilah. The nurse bot’s purple sigil thrummed with power as it bellowed arcane smoke. Alarm cries drew out to long howls. Info panels hovered still in the air with seized vitals. And Orna’s eyes registered a betrayal unlike any Nilah had ever seen.

  The nurse bot’s preloaded sleep spell cracked against Orna’s skin, and she fell limply against the bed, purple tendrils of vapor curling from her mouth.

  In a fluid movement, the boxy bot shoved Nilah back toward the door, stopping just short
of taking her feet out from under her. “Leave now.”

  “But—”

  “Outcome negatively influenced. Leave now. You are well enough for quarters.”

  Nilah’s eyes darted to the unconscious woman on the bed; she’d subsided, but the medical alarms hadn’t. Nilah took a wobbly step back, then another, feeling behind her for the bulkhead. The stalwart nurse made no move to advance, but its shock prong remained deployed nearby in case Nilah decided to do anything stupid.

  But she hadn’t the energy for stupidity after all that. Her fingers brushed the metal frame of the bulkhead, and she backed into the hall. The med bay door slammed in her face, leaving her stunned in the corridor, the low rumble of the ship’s engines the only sound in her ears.

  Her back against the wall, Nilah slid to the floor, and a hard sob burst from her lips. She wasn’t the crying type, not like those prissy racers when they lost the precious podium. She was the work harder, get even, do better type. But here she sat, racked with guilt for perhaps the first time in her life. Nothing she could do could make it better; she didn’t know Ranger enough to rebuild him, and the robot’s personality would never be the same. Maybe she was crying because there was nothing to be done. No training. No fixing.

  Boots gingerly stepped into Armin’s quarters, a vast network of plugs and wires hampering her progress. She couldn’t quite see past the jungle of screens, each flickering with seemingly random information. For a blink, she might make out the unforgettable picture of the Harrow about to jump, only to have it replaced with star charts and data sheets: the texture of information.

  She shouldn’t have come, but she had scarcely seen Armin in the days since they left Carré. She’d already given him the dozens of pictures of the Harrow to speed his calculations. She wanted to personally give him the crystal containing her scans of Mother’s magic, to explain to him why she’d endangered everyone. She knew it would curry some badly needed favor with him; datamancers were suckers for raw input in much the same way mechanists loved their machines.

  “Armin?”

  Farther into the maze she went. Had his quarters always been this big? Coolant lines and chunky data ports now slithered across the floor, dynamically configuring and reconfiguring in the snow of a thousand floating readout screens. She smelled dried sweat behind the chemical stench of cleaners, and it reminded her of the training hall at Fort Halloran. When she pushed through the last curtain of cables, she found Armin perched over the ship’s computer sphere, hands stretched over its surface.

  He didn’t look like the first mate who’d threatened her after her Gantry Station kidnapping. He was a shell: hollow cheeks that quivered with each painful swallow, sunken eyes darting about with insectoid precision, pallid skin aglow with the light of information.

  “Armin …”

  “I am the first mate,” he wheezed without looking up, his lips cracked. “It’s ‘sir,’ or have you forgotten how starships work?”

  “Sir …”

  “Don’t speak to me right now. Dismissed.”

  “Okay, but I have—”

  The screens vanished and the sphere turned a dismal blue as Armin’s head snapped up to look at her. She spied madness in his pale eyes.

  “You dare speak again?” he hissed.

  “It’s about Mother—”

  He pounded the globe and snarled. “I’m searching for the damned Harrow! Do you hear me?” He had a powerful roar for a man so weak. “That is the only priority. Take your grudge and get the hell out of my sight.”

  During the Famine War, the thought of a first mate shouting her down like that would’ve frozen her heart. In Clarkesfall’s most dire days, the cost of insubordination might be summary execution. Now, there were no bases with more soldiers; no replacements. He needed her help, and for that she pitied him. Her gaze fell to his feet.

  His joints were swollen—she could see it through his pants legs. How many days had it been since he’d eaten? Since he’d drunk a cup of water or slept? His knees knocked together like an old man’s, though Armin couldn’t yet be in his fifties. Had he been locked in this room since they left Carré?

  She opened her mouth to answer him, or perhaps ask after his health, but thought better of it.

  “Dismissed,” he repeated, and she didn’t dawdle.

  She nearly bowled Nilah over as she backed out of Armin’s quarters. The door slid shut, leaving them both in the corridor, and the racer looked her over with some trepidation. Nilah’s eyes were red.

  “That good, huh?” asked Boots.

  Nilah blinked. “What?”

  “Things are going that good, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she replied, and turned to go.

  “Nilah.”

  The racer stopped. “Yeah?”

  Boots jammed her hands into her pockets. “You’ve got a lot to be proud of. Can’t be beating yourself up about what happened on Carré.”

  “Ask Malik and Orna how they feel about that.”

  “I’ll be able to because you saved them.”

  “Malik might not make it, though.”

  “Look, I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to really listen to me. I know I ain’t got any business giving you life advice. You’re rich and—”

  Nilah’s fists balled up at her sides. “Just say it.”

  “In a battle, whatever happens, happens. You’re going to have to be okay with doing the best you could.”

  She nodded and turned to face Boots, a wry smile on her face. “Learned that from experience, did you?”

  “Yeah. I lost my whole crew on an escort mission.”

  Nilah’s stunned pause gave Boots plenty of room to finish her thought.

  “I’d been serving with those folks for months when we were shot down during a drop. I say ‘we,’ but it was really the Capricious. He went down hard after they took apart his artificial gravity and smeared my friends all over the inside of the hull. We had to replace everyone after the salvagers brought him back online.”

  “Where were you during all of this?”

  “I was flying a Midnight Runner, just like the one you see out in the cargo hold.” Boots crossed her arms. “It was my job to keep everyone in the air … but sometimes, your orders ask too much of you. Sometimes, they ask for everything.”

  “How did Cordell survive?”

  “He’s a good shieldmaster. Those guys can live through any crash, jump from any height, you name it.”

  Boots had played through the incident a thousand times in her head, turning over and over what it must’ve been like on the bridge in those final moments. With the impulse thrusters gone and no artificial gravity, they’d known they were going down and that nothing would save them. All radio transmissions from the bridge had been absolute bedlam.

  Cordell’s orders had them drop at Laconte, one of the strongest points of enemy control. He would’ve had thirty or forty seconds to watch his friends realize there would be no tomorrow for them. He, like everyone else on the ship, knew his magic would save him, and he had to live with the fact that he’d sent them to their deaths.

  Nilah mulled over Boots’s words, clearly stunned out of her typical derisive comebacks. “I’m sorry. I know … I know I did everything people expected of me … It’s just that I make my living on perfection.”

  Boots shrugged. “Don’t be sorry. You can be as perfect as you want, and you still wouldn’t have gotten Malik out of there in one piece. A little bad luck in a fight turns into a whole lot of misfortune.”

  “That’s cold comfort.”

  “It’s reality. We’ve got a long way to go before you and I are safe. If you can’t figure out how to live with this and move on …”

  “I’ll try.”

  Boots tried on a warm smile. It fit a little tightly, but she managed. “You don’t strike me as the ‘trying’ type, champ.”

  She returned a weak grin. “Yeah. Maybe not. I just wish I knew what to do now.”

  Boots felt in her p
ocket for the memory crystal from the Midnight Runner—the one that contained scans of Mother’s spells. She held it out for Nilah to see. “I think I know exactly what you can do to help.”

  “What’s on the crystal?”

  “Mother’s magic, recorded from start to finish. Between you and Armin, I bet you can figure out how her spells work … maybe even come up with a countermeasure.”

  Nilah’s eyes widened as she took the crystal. “Why haven’t you given this to him yourself?”

  “He hates me. That’s just how it is. Can’t say I blame him.”

  “Really? He’s always nice to me. You should get the credit for this.”

  “I don’t want the credit, sugar. I want the job done,” Boots said.

  Nilah gave the crystal a quick squeeze and opened her palm, inspecting it. “When you were on the Link … going on that big adventure to find the Chalice of Hana, I bet you hated every minute.”

  Boots smirked. “The adventure? Never.”

  “No. The fame. It obviously doesn’t suit you. I’d never turn down the credit for something.”

  Nilah sighed, pocketed the cube, and took a few steps in the direction of Armin’s door before pausing. “Do you know the worst part about being stuck on this ship?”

  Boots grimaced.

  “Being so wrong about you. It’s embarrassing. I’ll make sure Armin knows where I got this.”

  Nilah gave Armin the memory crystal, and he jumped at the chance to analyze it. When she’d told him the scans came from Boots, he’d scoffed, “She can’t be worthless all the time,” but he softened a bit.

  Nilah spent the next few days keeping the half-crazed datamancer alive. He’d had little sleep, no baths, and paltry amounts of food and water. Despite Orna’s presence on the ship, no one had built anything ergonomic for the first mate, and he didn’t know what a skilled mechanist could do for him in that department.

  In between races, Nilah liked to work hand in hand with Lang’s Safety and Human Factors Group, and as such, knew how to carve her own seats for rapid prototyping, weave moisturizing gel mesh fire suits, redirect ambient energies into nourishing spell shapers, and on and on.

  With these skills, she constructed a throne for Armin to make any datamancer jealous. While seated in it, he would never have to drink or eat, and his body temperature would be perfectly regulated. The throne stimulated his muscles and massaged his skin, eliminating the bedsores and joint pain that plagued many datamancers. She used arcane circuits to model copies of Malik’s sleep spells, helping Armin to flatten out.