A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

by Alex White

  And to Nilah’s shock, his shield broke into fizzling shards.

  “Evasive maneuvers,” Cordell grunted through clenched teeth. He clutched his forearm as though physically struck. “That’s some next-level tech right there.”

  “Looks like we’re in the right place,” said Armin as stars whirled through the canopy overhead. “Going to see if I can ID the system and find a weakness.”

  “Combat gravity engaged,” said Aisha, and Nilah’s weight dropped considerably.

  Aisha traced her glyph and fired again. On the projection, the red dots split apart, allowing the spell to pass harmlessly through their center. Lightning-fast, they reorganized and cast again, throwing out two grenadier’s marks, then another four, then eight. A net of deadly plasma swelled to encompass the projection.

  “Odds of survival are low on a retreat, sir,” called Armin. “We can’t get to the jump gate, and the sat looks a lot faster than us in open space.”

  “Get us to the planet’s surface,” said Cordell. “We can find cover in those canyons.”

  “We’ll have to go through the field,” Aisha called back.

  “Ahead full. Ram it,” ordered Cordell. “I’ve still got one shield left.”

  Nilah’s stomach flipped as internal gravity tried to compensate for Aisha’s corkscrew dive. The satellite collective came into full view—a slithering silver mass of machines, dynamically reconfiguring and pumping out a minefield of star-hot plasma.

  She braced as they slammed into the grenadier’s marks, the blobs of light sliding across Cordell’s shield like lethal raindrops. The ship rocked with the impact, and Nilah nearly lost her footing.

  They dove full-speed, wheeling as the satellite collective pushed shot after shot at them. It gave chase, and Nilah watched the scanner projections in wide-eyed horror as it matched pace. Aisha couldn’t let go of the sticks to cast her marksman’s mark, and even if she could, the Capricious’s keel slinger was designed to hit single targets, not swarms.

  “We can’t identify the make, sir,” called Armin.

  “Got to improvise, then,” said Cordell. He cried out as his other shield cracked, then he cast his spell again.

  “Your shields are too weak to hold off another direct hit, Captain,” said Armin.

  “From the sats maybe, but not the ice canyon walls,” Cordell shot back. “If anyone knows how to return fire, I’m all ears!”

  “Orna and I can do it,” Nilah said before she could stop herself. “Spacesuits, mag boots, and tethers—you open the cargo ramp. There’s no atmosphere to blow us away.”

  “Do you concur, Miss Sokol?” asked Armin, and Orna nodded.

  “We’ve got Ranger’s old slinger,” added the quartermaster, looking to Nilah. “Zero out the gravity and we can lift it.”

  “Go!” ordered the captain, stepping into his stirrups. “We can’t take another hit and this is the best plan we’ve got. Zero the gravity, Missus Jan.”

  Nilah kicked off a nearby railing and sailed for the door, Orna hot on her tail. The quartermaster took the lead in the corridor, and together they flew down the center of the stairwell to the cargo bay. Upon landing, they launched into the bay toward their suit storage lockers.

  Nilah had never donned an EVA suit so fast in her life, but Orna was even quicker—obviously more accustomed to emergency combat action. When Nilah locked her helmet into place, the comms chimed.

  “Prince here,” said Armin. “What’s your ETA?”

  “This is Nilah. I’m suited up.”

  “Orna here. Same.”

  “Tether up,” said Armin. “The Capricious’s inertial dampers lose effectiveness the closer you get to the cargo bay ramp. We can’t have you swept off the ship.”

  Nilah found a cargo winch on the wall and clipped it to her belt. Orna had already attached, and was busy pushing Ranger’s massive slinger out of storage. Nilah switched on her mag boots and tromped over to help. Even with the gravity zeroed out, the sheer mass of the weapon surprised Nilah. It was tough to get it moving, and once they had it going, it was hard to stop.

  “Stand by to pop the bay ramp,” said Armin.

  Atmospheric alarms sounded through the bay, growing dimmer by the second as the Capricious vented their air.

  “Hey.” Orna nodded to the tools, which had been meticulously mounted on the walls. “Thanks for, you know, organizing my stuff.”

  Nilah smirked. “Thank me after we stay alive, darling.”

  Orna fetched another winch and looped it through a tie-down, clipping it to the titanium ring on the butt of the huge slinger. “For recoil,” she said. “We’re ready, Prince.”

  “Opening the bay now,” said Armin. “Good hunting.”

  The ramp descended in front of the pair of women, revealing canyon walls shooting past at terrifying speeds. Sunset light from the nearby star filtered through the ice crystals like glassy waves, flashing with each crease and crag. Iron deposits tinged the ice crimson in places, giving the canyon an unsettlingly blood-spattered appearance.

  On the bridge, Nilah had failed to grasp the scale of the satellite collective. A dozen machines, each the size of her race car, comprised the body, and lines of arcane energy shot across their ethereal conduits like lightning. A grenadier’s mark formed in the space between them, creating a ball of sunlight.

  Its radiance baked Nilah’s suit, and sweat erupted from every pore. It was like driving on the burning sands of Wylde—the galaxy’s hardest endurance race.

  Except in this case, the sun was coming straight at her.

  The Capricious rocketed around a corner, and the spell crashed against the canyon wall, erupting into billows of roiling fire and steam. Jagged chunks of ice filled the canyon behind them, and the satellite collective just barely dodged through the shrapnel of its own spell.

  Orna grasped the butt of the rifle and Nilah held the barrel, assisting with aim.

  “Ready?” asked the quartermaster.

  Nilah nodded, her eyes never leaving the charging satellite nodes before her. “Fire!”

  The slinger thundered in Nilah’s hands, recoil slamming the muzzle upward. She almost lost control. The last thing they needed was a stray friendly shot hitting the inside of the cargo bay. Nilah’s aim was wide, and the bolts of fire harmlessly exploded against the canyon walls in the far distance.

  A lucky shot went straight for one of the satellite nodes, but it dodged out of the way with little difficulty. Its displacement, however, misshaped its next grenadier’s mark, and the satellite’s spell failed.

  “We just have to keep disrupting it when it casts!” said Nilah.

  “Negative,” Armin buzzed over her comm. “We’re going to get cornered sooner or later. You must destroy it. Look for a controller unit.”

  Nilah and Orna shared a glance. “They’re self-organizing, sir,” the mechanists said in unison.

  The pair opened up with another volley of shots at the satellite, this time scoring a clean hit on one of the nodes. It burst into glittering shards, but the other nodes immediately filled in the gaps to cast the mark.

  “Damn it!” said Orna, firing again to disrupt the spell, and though it worked, she hit nothing. Worse, Nilah felt the empty click of a used spell canister. “Got to reload!”

  “Prepare for incoming!” shouted Nilah. There was nothing to stop the satellite from casting.

  Again came the heat, the blinding light, and the orb of plasma coming straight at them. The ship dipped into the shadowed depths of the ice rift as the ball passed overhead.

  “Brace for impact!” shouted Cordell.

  Then Nilah felt the silent, bone-rattling crunch through her mag boots as the Capricious plowed through a hail of icebergs, snow and shards filling the view from the cargo bay. The satellite collective scattered and wormed its way through the gaps in the avalanche, but two nodes slammed into the falling ice at full speed.

  The remaining nine nodes reorganized for another attack. How many more would it need
to lose before it lacked the resolution to create a glyph?

  Orna slapped another clip into the base of Ranger’s slinger and wrapped her finger around the trigger. “Ready?”

  “Wait!” called Nilah. “Blast the canyon walls!”

  They were too deep inside the cargo bay for a decent shot. Nilah gestured to the line in the deck where the ramp was attached. “We have to get closer!”

  Orna pulled a remote from her suit’s belt and gave them a good amount of slack on the winches. “Hurry up. The drones are regrouping for another shot.”

  The pair unclipped Ranger’s slinger and rushed to the tie-down on the ramp, where they tried to pass the carabiner through with bulky gloves.

  “No time!” said Orna. “Look!”

  The satellite collective swarmed closer than ever, its nodes charged and ready to fire another miniature sun into the Capricious’s cargo bay. Nilah went down on one knee, bracing the massive slinger in her armpit like a tripod. Orna squeezed the trigger, and they sprayed the canyon walls in front of the nodes. Orna aimed a little high, so the collective couldn’t simply ascend out of the canyon.

  “We’ve got another tight fit!” called Cordell. “Brace!”

  But Nilah and Orna were at the edge of the inertial dampening field, and when the ship entered a nauseating corkscrew, the tether snapped from Ranger’s slinger, and Nilah was slung outward. She bounced off one of the hydraulic ramp struts and screamed in agony. Her cable snapped taut ten meters outside of the ship, and she twisted at the end of the cable like a worm on a hook. She clutched Ranger’s slinger as tightly as she could and shouted aimlessly into her helmet.

  Looking past her feet, she saw elemental explosions as the nodes crashed against jagged chunks of ice, obliterated in the moment of impact. Only one node made its way through the avalanche, and it bore down on her at high speed.

  Its directive was clear: if it couldn’t cast the grenadier’s mark, it was to use itself like a cannonball. Nilah was the closest target.

  It blasted out of the ice storm, a glittering trail in its wake like a comet. Nilah wrapped her legs around the barrel of Ranger’s slinger and braced the butt with her belly before jerking the trigger. A wild spray of spells ripped from the muzzle, and she closed her eyes against the recoil hammering her body.

  One of the shots struck home, and the node collapsed into jagged metal shards.

  “Negative scanner contacts,” said Armin. “Good kill.”

  “Reel me in! Oh god, reel me in!” Nilah gasped as they took another turn that brought her a little too close to the wall.

  The Capricious slowly rose up out of the trench so as not to slam Nilah into any large hunks of ice. She clutched the slinger with one hand and the cable in the other, the sound of her fast breathing filling her helmet. Her harness finally scraped against the bay ramp and she scrambled inside. Getting to her feet, she swung her arms around Orna and squeezed as tightly as she could.

  “Okay,” said Orna. “I’ve got you. You did it. You’re okay.”

  Nilah pushed back and looked at her companion with wide eyes, their scratched visors reflecting stray sunbeams. As the fear drained from her body, Nilah cracked a smile.

  “Tell me you saw that bloody shot,” said Nilah.

  Orna returned her grin. “It was pretty badass. Quick thinking, keeping hold of Ranger’s slinger.”

  Nilah hefted the metal weapon, struggling against its inertia. Even weightless, it was hard to manipulate. She presented it to the quartermaster.

  “I cost you so much of him,” Nilah said. “I didn’t want to lose the last piece.”

  Orna’s smile faded to quiet reflection, and she took the slinger from Nilah’s hands.

  “Okay, Prince,” Orna said into the comm, turning away, “button him up and give us some atmos.”

  As the cargo bay ramp closed, Nilah added, “And may I please have some gravity? I miss it.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Waystation

  Boots peered into the various scopes and scanner readouts on the bridge as she relayed the best approach vector for the Wartenberg Mining Colony. She hadn’t been a scanner tech since her days in the Arcan Civil Air Patrol, and she sucked at it. Her readings on arrival at Wartenberg had been slow, and she was ashamed of her performance.

  If Mother hadn’t blown the skids on her Midnight Runner, Boots could’ve been flying wing out there with a set of scanners she knew far better. It was probably too much to hope that they’d be able to repair her fighter before they located the Harrow.

  They came into visual range of the colony, and the Capricious’s high-powered scopes locked onto it. Boots squinted at her screens, then routed them to Armin. “I’m seeing something weird here, sir.”

  “Good,” said Cordell, before Armin could reply. “I’d hate it if we shot down someone’s satellite for no reason.”

  Armin looked over Boots’s readouts and mixed them with countless other data tables, collating the results and teasing meaning out of them. “This is a good find, Boots. Captain, those red deposits you saw are iron. They’ve been magnetically aligned to confuse subsurface scanning. This entire moon was realigned by a large spell.”

  “Okay,” said Cordell. “So that means …”

  “It means,” said Armin, “we don’t know how far down the Wartenberg Mining Colony goes, nor do we know its layout. It could be a few feet, or it could be miles. The Harrow might be here and we’ll never know without feet on the ground. That’d be a real shame, though.”

  “And why is that, Mister Vandevere?” asked the captain.

  “Wartenberg claims demi-sovereignty,” said Armin. “We’d lose any salvage rights.”

  Cordell shook with a short, bitter laugh. “These people killed one of my crew and put another in a coma. Forget the law. I just want to find out their secrets so we can take what we can from them. I’d like to ruin everything they care about, if it’s possible.”

  “How do you think they did it—magnetically aligned all of those deposits?” asked Aisha.

  “With a ship like the Harrow,” said Cordell, “I bet you could do anything.”

  The Capricious drew closer to the colony, and Boots got a good look at the docking clamp. “Look at this ring, Captain. It’s the old style, older than our bucket.”

  “We’re not going in the front door,” said Cordell. “We’re going to cut our way into one of the isolated rooms and go from there. Ten to one the docking tubes are wired to blow the second they engage.”

  Boots shrugged. It was a fair assessment. A large, rectangular imaging artifact flickered on her screen some two kilometers from the colony, then disappeared. It was like catching a brief reflection through several panes of glass—hard to pin down exactly what she saw and where. She dropped the playback into the aggregator.

  “Sir, we may not have to cut anything,” Boots called out. “One of our scanner reflections caught a subterranean structure the size of a docking bay.”

  Armin took the playback and cross-referenced it against dozens of resources like ice brittleness indexes, meteor strike patterns, and the Capricious’s active scans of the surface, narrowing down the possible origins of the reflection. “This trench here,” he said, “is big enough to dock a ship like the Harrow, located within a klick of the colony, and appears to be highly stable. Captain, I’d recommend taking us there.”

  “Very good, Mister Vandevere,” said Cordell.

  They proceeded to the designated point in near silence, save for Armin’s occasional approach orders to Aisha. They descended into the wide canyon, where Boots’s scanners went dark, except for the immediate pings from the canyon walls. They descended past the level of sunlight penetration, into shadow. Aisha cranked up the ship’s searchlights, but there was little need for them in the massive trench.

  “Should be something at eleven o’clock,” said Armin, and the ship slowed to a stop. Aisha swept her searchlights across the canyon wall face, but found nothing.

  “F
alse positive maybe?” asked Cordell, and Boots flushed with embarrassment. Of course she’d read it wrong—this wasn’t her usual setup.

  It had made so much sense, though: the large trench, the secluded docking point, Armin’s calculations and the reflections. Boots racked her brain for a solution, only seeing a blank ice wall before her.

  “We could drill it with a few shots from the keel gun,” said Cordell. “Maybe it’s back there somewhere.”

  Armin shook his head. “Or we could bring the trench down on top of us.”

  “It’s the old waterfall trick,” said Boots, more to herself than anyone else.

  Cordell leaned forward in his chair. “Explain.”

  “There are loads of stories about caverns hidden behind waterfalls where treasure is buried, sir,” said Boots. “Every planet has a couple—even Clarkesfall. Take the Legends of the Landers, for example: when they stole Robert’s saber, where did they hide it?”

  Cordell nodded. “In the mouth of the cave behind Ranier Falls.”

  Boots cocked an eyebrow. “Exactly. I bet if you target that wall with dispersers, you’ll unravel an illusion.”

  “Missus Jan, charge the dispersers and fire on the northern wall, full blast,” said Cordell.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  When Aisha fired, a huge swath of the trench wall shuddered and convulsed, and for a moment, Boots feared they’d destabilized it somehow. Aisha fired again, and the pockmarked ice writhed and twisted before disappearing entirely.

  In its place lay a large blast door, the kind often used to cover atmospheric bubble shields. The Harrow wouldn’t have fit in it, but this site certainly could’ve served as a shipyard.

  “Come in, Miss Sokol,” said Cordell, “this is Boss.”

  Orna’s voice echoed across the bridge. “Sokol here.”

  “I think we need to give you some code names, like real operators,” he mused. “You think you and Nilah could hack that bay door open?”

  There was a long pause.

  “You mean you want me and Nilah to jump across and try to physically access security?”