A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

by Alex White

  She built it using Orna’s hardware while the quartermaster remained under sedation. Nilah felt like a thief every time she stole down to the cargo bay to fetch tools that didn’t belong to her, but she got the job done.

  While Armin crunched the numbers on Mother’s scans, Nilah had taken to wandering the decks, looking for things to fix. The Capricious was covered in tiny problems: broken lights, clogged ventilation ducts, and stressed wiring, among others. Small repairs were the sort of thing in which Nilah could lose herself, and she took some joy in traipsing from glitch to glitch, smoothing them out. For the first time since she’d boarded the ship, she felt a creeping, natural contentment.

  And so, when she’d gone to repair the comm terminal in the crew mess, she didn’t notice Aisha in the room with her. The pilot set down a tray on the table with such a clatter that Nilah snapped from her reverie. Nilah glanced back at her, pulse pounding, but Aisha simply stared at her food.

  “Sorry,” said Nilah, pushing the maintenance access closed. “I didn’t know you were, uh, eating.”

  Aisha’s eyes were deep set, and the whites of her eyes had been rubbed a raw pink. Her hair had come undone, frayed in places. Nilah’s chest ached to look at her.

  “The captain,” Aisha began, “told me what happened to my husband. Did you know the duke’s palace would be dangerous before you went in there?”

  “I … I didn’t. I thought it would be safe for me to hide there after Cordell dropped me off. I honestly felt like it was the only place in the galaxy where these … these people couldn’t reach me.”

  “‘Safe for me,’” Aisha echoed bitterly.

  “I’m sorry.” Nilah had said those words far too rarely in her lifetime.

  Aisha’s reddened eyes bored into her. Crow’s-feet cropped up along the pilot’s formerly perfect skin. “For what?”

  “Malik was only there because of me.”

  “No.” Aisha smiled, a storm brewing behind her eyes. Nilah could scarcely tell if the pilot was spiteful or caring, accepting or furious. “Malik was there because of Cordell. They were old friends, you know, and Cordell begged him to join the crew. If it wasn’t for their time together, Malik would be by my side right now.”

  “He was there because of Orna. He didn’t want her going with you alone because she’s so hot-tempered. He knew she’d get in trouble with the local authorities.” She wiped her cheek, but a steady stream of tears replaced the missing drop.

  “And worst of all, he was there because of me. Because I liked being on a ship with my husband. If he’d taken that position at the sleep clinic on Taitu, I never would’ve seen him. Here, I—I could have him to myself almost every day.”

  Nilah crept closer, but didn’t venture a comforting hand. “You’re trying too hard to make this your fault.”

  Aisha gripped her fork. “I know you’re right. And I want you to feel the same way. If I didn’t put him in that coma, neither did you.”

  “Do you really think that?”

  The pilot smiled at Nilah, but the expression didn’t extend to her eyes. “For everyone’s sake, I’m trying to. And Boots told me how you caught him when he almost fell.”

  “Orna carried him to you. She took a lot of hits to keep him safe.”

  Aisha’s eyes bored into Nilah. “I will never have words to express the depth of gratitude I feel for you two. And I saw the contraption you made for Armin. I recognized my husband’s magic in the sleep circuit you built. He must’ve cast a spell on you on Carré, and it inspired you. He has that effect on people.”

  She set her fork down and stood up, her chair squawking against the deck in protest. Nilah took a step back as the pilot hefted her tray.

  Aisha continued, “I like knowing that, even if he doesn’t make it, he’s still helping people. You made those sleep circuits because of him, and … and that means there’s a little bit of him in you, too. I can’t … hate you for that reason alone.”

  Then the pilot strode to the cycler and tipped the contents of her untouched tray into it. She didn’t turn back to face Nilah. “But maybe that’s why I can’t stand to see you right now. You were … You were the last person he saw. It should’ve been me.”

  Nilah wanted to excuse herself, but Aisha stood between her and the door. She’d never known how to comfort others, having grown up racing. Racers were all so selfish, so childish.

  Aisha’s shoulders fell. “When I walked past Armin’s quarters, your chair … I thought I sensed Malik again, that old, familiar spell of his. When it was you, my heart just … I didn’t think I could take it.” She stiffened and turned to Nilah. “My husband is comatose, and I have to share the bits that remain with everyone.”

  Nilah jumped as the tray slipped from Aisha’s fingers and banged to the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” Nilah repeated, feeling stupid.

  Aisha’s haunted eyes raked her over. “No one can be sorry enough. Thank you for making the chair for Armin.”

  Then the pilot turned and wandered away, her soft footfalls scarcely there, like a ghost.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Back Straight

  Nilah hadn’t expected to hear shouting from Armin’s quarters as she made her way through the ship. His hoarse voice rang out, startling her, and she tried the door—locked. She banged on it, and his shouts grew louder. Panic set in. What if Mother and her hunters had slipped onto the Capricious?

  Nilah traced her glyph and connected to his lock, disabling it and sweeping aside the door so she could rush inside, dermaluxes strobing. She almost tripped on the cables, and had no idea how she’d fight in there, but she had to try.

  She found him sitting on his throne, a crooked smile on his face.

  “I did it,” he sighed, shaking his head.

  Nilah shut off her tattoos and followed his gaze to one of the ethereal monitors. The screen depicted a nebula with a small cluster of planets just outside the cloud, and Nilah drew closer to find that the tiniest planet had a geomarker dropped on it.

  The Harrow’s jump coordinates.

  “You did it,” she said.

  Armin’s uncharacteristic laugh unnerved Nilah. “I did it!”

  She smiled and nodded, thrilled to have the coordinates and deeply concerned for Armin’s mental health. He’d been sequestered away for a week, and there was only so much Nilah could do for him with the chair. “Yes! Uh, congratulations!”

  “I need actual sleep!” he shouted, blinking his red eyes. “Am I being loud?”

  She nodded again.

  “Okay! Please tell the captain so I can go to bed.”

  Nilah had scarcely made it down the hall when Orna’s rough hand spun her around and shoved her against a wall.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!”

  “Just listen to me,” said the quartermaster. “I’m sorry in advance.”

  Nilah recoiled as though struck. She’d seen a lot of strange things since coming on board the ship, but a woman like Orna apologizing never entered into her imagination.

  “Orna, I—”

  “I said listen.” She locked her ice-blue eyes onto Nilah’s. “Ranger meant everything to me. He was my friend when I was alone, and he protected me when I was scared. When some bastard or another hauled me in from the dust so I could fight for food, he was there for me. I made him, and I owed him my life a thousand times over … and you killed him.”

  Orna slapped her palms against the wall on either side of Nilah’s head, trapping her between scarred, bare arms. “I need you to understand something. I need to have said it in the plainest damned words I can so I can be sure you heard me.” Her eyes sparkled and her nose reddened, and Nilah thought back to the raging, half-dead woman in the med bay.

  “O-okay …”

  “Ranger wasn’t attacking you, okay? He wasn’t. There was nothing wrong with him, he … he was just trying to protect me.” She sniffed hard and ran her fingers over the bandages on Nilah’s face, fingers warm on the painful cuts. “I need you
to get this. Ranger was a good boy, and I loved him.”

  Boots emerged from the mess and spun to see the two of them standing there, concern immediately washing over her face. Nilah gave Boots a reassuring glance and waved her away with a flick of her fingers. The older woman nodded and crept back into the mess without a word.

  Orna’s lips quivered and her head sagged, but she wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t let it out, even though it must’ve been killing her.

  “He was a good boy … He was just scared for me. And for the first time, I feel so alone. When I wake up at night, he’s not there for me. I can feel everything in this ship—the engines, the computers—but he’s not there. He was the home I made, and he’s gone.”

  Nilah’s stomach flipped. What was she supposed to say? “I’m sorry. I had to … had to kill him or I’d lose you.”

  “I know that!” Orna’s head shot up, and her hot breath came like a dragon’s. “Don’t you think I know that? I just want to hear you tell me—tell me he didn’t do anything wrong!”

  Nilah stared down the quartermaster. Orna’s eyes were an ocean of rage, fear, and grief—an expression all too common around the Capricious those days.

  And she craved the kind of absolution that she could only get from another mechanist.

  “Ranger was perfect, to the very end,” said Nilah. “He was a masterpiece.”

  Orna’s breath hitched, and she blinked out a tear. She wiped it on the back of her hand, then inspected it as though she’d found an oil leak. She wiped her cheek twice more and stood up straight, releasing Nilah from her prison.

  Nilah started to relax, but Orna wrapped her fingers around the back of Nilah’s neck and pulled her in for a hard kiss. The quartermaster’s other arm snaked around her waist, reeling her in like a steel cable, and Nilah arched her back, leaning into the warmth of Orna’s breast. The quartermaster’s breath mingled with hers, and Nilah closed her eyes as Orna’s tears dripped onto her cheeks.

  As quickly as it had started, Orna shoved her against the wall and pushed off, turning her back to Nilah.

  “Thanks for saving my life,” Orna mumbled before storming around the corner and disappearing.

  Nilah remained in the hallway, her lips still tingling.

  “So this,” said Armin, pointing to a small planet in the ethereal projection, “is Wartenberg. That’s where the Harrow jumped after Goulding Station.”

  Boots leaned across the table in the darkened mess hall to get a closer look at it. It wasn’t much of a world, barely large enough to warrant classification as a planet—more like a moon.

  Cordell had gathered her and Armin for a consultation; Armin had the strategic authority, and Boots had the knowledge of obscure planets and ancient treasures.

  “That’s Wartenberg?” asked Boots. “I always thought it’d be bigger.”

  At the end of the table, Cordell crossed his arms. “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Sure, Captain,” said Boots. “There are all kinds of doomed mining missions throughout the galaxy. They make for great salvage legends, you know. ‘Go here, there’s a bunch of abandoned equipment and the like.’ Rubes love it.”

  “I appreciate your candor, Boots,” said Armin, shaking his head. “I’d almost forgotten that we were some of your rubes.”

  She gave him a tight smile. “Sorry, sir. I just meant that I’ve come across Wartenberg before.”

  Cordell grinned. “I knew you had to have some real truth in all the lies you peddled. Fill us in.”

  “Here’s what I know: this big company had a mining outpost there before the Famine War. They’d supposedly found a huge strike of eidolon crystals, so they set up a ton of infrastructure. Only, the veins were dry—barely anything to mine. They sold the real estate after the mine went bankrupt.”

  “That’s more than I got,” said Armin.

  “I bought a logbook of mining inspections a couple of years ago,” said Boots. “It’s in my apartment on Gantry Station if we ever make it back there.”

  Armin nodded. “I couldn’t find much on the Link. Just a deed registered to a private holding company, the Hatch Fund, based in Taitu. Strict no-trespassing policy. No listed permanent residents. The company claims demi-sovereignty with Taitu.”

  “So if we land there, and they shoot us …” Cordell began.

  “They’ll claim self-defense under Taitutian law,” said Armin.

  “With all due respect, sir,” said Boots, “someone is going to shoot us no matter where we land. Does it really matter if it’s our enemies or the local authorities?”

  Cordell nodded. “That’s fair. Armin, could you at least find some survey data?”

  “I did, sir.” Armin tapped the planet, and it expanded to fill the entire mess. A satellite pinged above Wartenberg, sending glowing echoes through the room. “This is recent—just a few hours since the last sweep of the system. They have a registered orbital defense system, though it’s not much. Just enough to keep out any curious ships.”

  The captain rubbed his chin. “One slinger sat could knock down a yacht, but they’re nothing a marauder-class ship couldn’t handle. Any downsides to blowing apart their defenses?”

  Boots smirked. “It opens them up to piracy?”

  “Nearest jump gate?” asked Cordell.

  The projection rotated and zoomed out to show a course between a jump gate and Wartenberg. “Torm: one day away.”

  “So we jump in next to the planet and swat down the defenses,” said Cordell, “but if we have to hot-foot it out of there, it takes a day.”

  Cordell folded his hands in front of him, resting his elbows on the table. The projector illuminated his face from below, giving him an eerie appearance. “I don’t like this at all; my Midnight Runner is barely operational, I’m down two crew members, and we’ve got no way of knowing what we’ll find. We still don’t have analysis of Mother’s spell or a countermeasure. If we see her, we have to run. More to the point, Mother knows we have the jump images. She’s going to follow us there.”

  “Correct, Captain,” said Armin.

  Cordell frowned. “What the hell was the Harrow doing at Wartenberg?”

  “Only one way to find out, sir,” said Boots.

  The captain stood, prompting Boots and Armin to their feet. He called for the lights, and the projection disappeared. Sunny illumination flooded the mess, bringing all of Didier’s plants back into focus. They were overgrown, poking out of the tops of their enclosures; the crew had been eating out of the ration stock without their cook.

  “Okay,” said Cordell. “The sooner we get this done, the sooner we get Malik to a real hospital. Inform the crew that we’re jumping at the next gate.”

  Nilah stood on the bridge, watching the stars streak past. Familiar pre-race nerves hit her, like having rocks in her guts. Red light suffused the space, summoning all crew to battle stations.

  The Midnight Runner still wasn’t spaceworthy after the damage to its skids and thrusters. They didn’t have the materials to repair it, and Cordell deemed it too risky to land on any civilized worlds. Nilah could’ve fixed it with Orna if she could just buy the parts—

  —and if she’d spoken to the quartermaster since the kiss.

  So, no parts, no Runner, no wing to protect the Capricious on approach. At least Nilah had been able to get Orna’s tools organized in the cargo bay.

  “Dropping into normal space in three …” said Aisha, and Nilah glanced to the captain. He looked as collected as ever, and she wondered if anything ever fazed him.

  “Two …”

  Nilah’s eyes traveled over the others. Orna stood by her, face unreadable. Armin waited patiently by the captain’s side, hands folded behind his back. Aisha tensely gripped the controls in the pilot’s chair.

  “One,” said Aisha, tracing her glyph with one hand and pulling a throttle with the other. “Normal space.”

  The craggy little gray sphere that greeted them was pockmarked with craters and ice rifts. Nilah saw no at
mosphere, no lights along its surface, no evidence of any human life whatsoever.

  “That’s it, huh? Weapons free,” said Cordell. “Take out that defense satellite. I want us on the surface in under an hour. No point giving them time to prepare.”

  “I got a fix on the sat, Captain,” called Boots, pecking at the radar station where Didier once sat. She clearly wasn’t accustomed to working a bridge station, given the way she tapped at her console. “Relaying to the aggregator.”

  The projection hovering in the center of the bridge lit up with a single red point—the hostile satellite.

  “It’s requesting access codes,” said Armin.

  Cordell smiled. “Missus Jan, why don’t you knock on their door for me?”

  Aisha rolled the Capricious so its keel gun could acquire the target and planted a shot directly into the center of it. The red dot exploded into mist on the projection.

  “Good kill, Missus Jan,” said the captain. “Scan for the mining settlement and—”

  “Uh,” Boots interrupted. “I’m still reading hostiles, I think …”

  Nilah stepped down the terrace to look closer at the cloud of scanner contacts. Debris should’ve flown off in all directions at random. This set of pings seemed more organized somehow. They drifted into a configuration Nilah vaguely recognized as a colossal grenadier’s mark.

  She spun to face Cordell. “Look out!”

  The captain was on his feet with his shield spell cast in the blink of an eye. The satellite collective lobbed a ball of energy in their direction, and the ship’s dispersers failed to collapse the spell in time. The liquid fire sphere crashed against the Capricious’s canopy like an egg. White-hot plasma congealed against Cordell’s blue shields, arcing and flashing.