A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

by Alex White

  Rule number two: A killer agent makes a killer manuscript.

  Connor Goldsmith of Fuse Literary helped me get the Capricious up and sailing before an editor ever touched it. He upped our quality and our game, giving us our best chances of success in the strange world of publishing. It’s always nice when you find someone who both grasps your subtext and won’t put up with your crap. I’ve always wanted to be a series author, and he opened those doors for me.

  Rule number three: You’re only as good as your editor.

  At World Fantasy Con, I asked for a sit-down with Brit Hvide, since she’d read the manuscript, and she proceeded to give me a blow-by-blow of all my mistakes. After a few minutes, she said, “I feel like I’m just tearing up your manuscript, and you’re not saying anything!” So I turned around my notebook and showed her where I’d written all of the captivating advice I’d received. Even when she hadn’t yet bought the book, she shared her wisdom with me for free. Any author who gets to work with her should count themselves lucky.

  And just when I thought things couldn’t get better, Nivia Evans came along and added a layer of polish I hadn’t realized was missing. It must be both a blessing and a curse to have such a detailed eye, and I count myself lucky to have benefited from it.

  Rule number four: Smart writers spend their days around smarter people.

  I want to thank the alumni of Smoky Writers 2015, where I started this project, for listening to my ramblings about spaceships and race cars. We may have all gotten stuck atop a peak in the blistering cold, with a car literally careening down the mountainside at one point, but at least we had each other. Also, there was that murky hot tub, because someone left a moonshine peach in the skimmer. I guess what I’m really saying is: I love you folks.

  And, like so many authors, I’d be nothing without my beloved, so here’s to you, Renee Chantel White.

  extras

  meet the author

  Photo Credit: Rebecca Winks

  ALEX WHITE was born and raised in the American South. He takes photos, writes music, and spends hours on YouTube watching other people blacksmith. He values challenging and subversive writing, but he’ll settle for a good time.

  Alex lives in the shadow of Huntsville, Alabama’s rockets with his wife, son, two dogs, and a cat named Grim. Favored pastimes include Legos and race cars. He takes his whiskey neat and his espresso black.

  if you enjoyed

  A BIG SHIP AT THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE

  look out for

  A BAD DEAL FOR THE WHOLE GALAXY

  by

  Alex White

  The crew of the legendary Capricious are rich enough to retire in comfort for the rest of their days, but none of it matters if the galaxy is still in danger.

  Nilah and Boots, the ship’s newest crew members, hear the word of a mysterious cult that may have links back to an ancient and all-powerful magic. To find it, hotheaded Nilah will have to go undercover and find the source of their power without revealing her true identity. Meanwhile, Boots is forced to confront the one person she’d hoped never to see again: her old, turncoat, treasure-hunting partner.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Polyphony

  They writhed and swayed, bodies in motion to a blistering-hot beat.

  Wisps of arcane fireworks drifted through the crowd—glimmering wireframe dragons and murmurations of cormorants spraying cool flakes of magic as they passed. Every stare that wasn’t trained on the light show overhead rested on the singer Indira Panjala, whose silvered hair flowed in time with the kick drum.

  Impossibly, Aaron Forscythe’s eyes met Nilah Brio’s.

  This was the premier concert event in the galaxy. No reasonable person would have their eyes anywhere but the stage. But Nilah Brio’s target was looking right at her, recognition in his expression.

  She’d taken every precaution. She wore a purple wig over her now-famous mohawk. She’d done up her face, accenting different contours, flowing lines of neon makeup covering most of her features. She’d worn the sort of short party dress she hated. Her dermaluxes were covered in translucent sleeves, obscuring the patterns—even though every hundredth person in the crowd had copied her tattoos.

  Confirming her fears, he spun and began shouldering through the crowd away from her.

  “I’ve been made!” Nilah shouted into her comm, taking off after him.

  “Hunter Two, hit him with a sleeper, say he’s drunk, and bring him back to the ship.” Cordell Lamarr’s deep voice entered her ear, overpowering Indira’s crescendo.

  Nilah’s target shoved a woman so hard she went sprawling to the floor. He plowed through the bystanders with an unnatural strength, creating a rising chorus of protestations.

  “I’m bloody trying,” snapped Nilah, vaulting over a stumbling drunk before juking past another. Her dermalux tattoos flared to life with strobing white light, temporarily blinding anyone unfortunate enough to look directly at them. The crowd parted before her, people eager to cover their eyes and look away.

  If Aaron hadn’t been smacking everyone around, he might’ve disappeared into the crowd with little difficulty. The shifting light show of the Panjala concert made him tough to track across a sea of bobbing heads. A few meters away, hands flailed as someone shoved another concertgoer; Nilah’s eyes snapped onto Aaron as the culprit. He’d almost made it to the edge of the arena.

  “Planetwise exit! Hunter One, block him off,” she called out into her comm.

  “Damn.” Orna Sokol’s voice enjoined the radio chatter. “I’m too far away. There are a lot of tunnels down there. Don’t lose him. ETA two minutes.”

  “I’m not going to lose him,” said Nilah, dodging a spilling drink. “I’m the one that found him.”

  “You’re also the one that got spotted,” said Orna, chuckling.

  “We’ll talk about this on the ship,” hissed Nilah.

  “Focus up,” said Cordell, “We’re hearing a lot of chatter from concert security. You might want to shut those tattoos off.”

  “Blast it,” Nilah grumbled, suppressing her dermaluxes as her target made it to the arena’s emergency exit.

  Aaron kicked the door open and stormed out onto the balconies above Goldsmith Park, leaving Nilah to wrestle through the remainder of the crowd. By the time she stumbled outside, the only sign of him was a stomping sprint on the stairwell below. Cool, night-cycle air tickled her bare skin, and this high up, wind whipped at her dress. She leaned over the railing to see if she could spot him, and was rewarded by the sizzle of a lancer bolt passing by her head.

  “He shot at me!” she said, ducking away from the edge.

  “Getting a lot of police chatter,” said Cordell. “That slinger fire triggered the detectors. Cops are on the way.”

  “Hang back, babe,” said Orna. “This is turning into a cluster.”

  Nilah quickly leaned out twice more to catch a view of her quarry nearly to the base of the stairs and the lush greenery of Goldsmith Park. If she didn’t stop him now, he’d get into the Morrison Station superstructure and vanish. All the hunting they’d done would be worthless if he went to ground. She eyed the emergency descender box and swallowed. It was only sixteen floors or so to sidewalk.

  “Not the stupidest thing I’ve done,” she muttered.

  “Wait. ETA eighty seconds,” said Orna.

  Nilah pulled open the emergency box, finding ten shiny descenders inside. She took one of the clear discs and shook it, just to make sure the binary spells inside were still good.

  She was an ex-racer, and an expert at judging speeds and distances. Forty-eight meters to the ground would make for a pretty quick fall. She spied Forscythe’s shadow as he rounded the final corner and burst out into the open.

  Now or never. She swung her legs over the railing. The bass beat of the arena thumped in her ears.

  Nilah leapt into the neon haze of Morrison Station’s downtown, the descender clutched tightly in her hand. Wind roared in her ears. The shadowy figure of her targe
t grew exponentially in size.

  She snapped the descender mere feet away from Aaron’s head, gelatinous phantoplasm instantly enveloping the both of them, blunting the kinetic energy of her fall. Their limbs interlocked as they bounced across the park grounds, the world free-spinning.

  Eventually, the bubble of goo burst, spitting them out onto the summery grass beneath the statue of Carrie Morrison. The pair arose, dripping with smoky gelatin, and came to regard one another. Nilah brought her fists to a fighting posture, and her dermaluxes began to pulse in time with the distant music underneath frosted armbands.

  Aaron was boring for a trust-fund child. Given his heritage of extreme wealth, she’d expected better—perhaps some sort of cosmetic modifications. Either Aaron had never been modified, or the person who’d done his nose had no taste.

  “Nilah Brio,” said Aaron, smirking. “The little racer who never did.”

  “‘Never did’ what?”

  “Won the Driver’s Crown,” he said, a tremor entering his voice. “He’ll be pleased when I bring him your body.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, my god. You cannot be serious right now. I saved the universe from your lot and literally punched out a horde of springflies. It was all over the Link.”

  “The news always lies,” he said, whipping his slinger level with her face and blasting off a few lancers.

  She tumbled away from his wavering aim with little difficulty, rolling to her feet and bolting forward. Nilah’s flashing arms made wide, pulsing arcs, the tattoos leaving only the afterimage of waves upon the eyes of her target. Two more shots erupted in her direction, but Aaron didn’t have the military precision required to make them land. His grip on the slinger was too tight, too amateur.

  Nilah whipped her arms toward him, momentarily blinding Aaron with the spray of light, then sent a dark kick straight into his jaw, lifting him up off the ground. He came down hard on the small of his back, then slackened.

  “ETA thirty seconds,” said Orna, her voice almost panicked. “What’s going on over there, babe?”

  “I just took him down. Glass jaw, as they say—”

  Two figures emerged from the shadows around the Morrison monument, glinting knives twirling in their hands. Both male, clad in fine suits, their postures spoke of expertise. Perhaps they were bodyguards for Aaron. Perhaps they were assassins come to cut her limb from limb. Either way, she’d have to deal with them alone. Her stomach churned at the thought of engaging trained killers.

  “Forscythe has friends,” said Nilah. She squared herself to the newcomers, her dermaluxes gently pulsing like lightning in a storm cloud. “Hello, boys.”

  They spread out to flank her, silent as ghosts. Aaron began to stir. His beady eyes flew open, and he scrambled to his feet, dashing away between the two newcomers. In two seconds, he’d be into the access corridors.

  “Why don’t we skip all of this?” Nilah asked of the closest one. “You can just walk aw—”

  They slashed glyphs from the air with their fingers—one elemental sigil of ice, the other of wind. Together, the spells could form a flash-freeze that would kill her instantly. Her eyes darted from spell to spell, searching for the more powerful of the two casters.

  Nilah dashed for the wind caster, falling upon him in a hail of flashing blows. He tried to ward her off with the knife, but she kicked it away; his spell fizzled in the jolt. With his guard softened, she leapt for him like a great cat, latching on and attacking. The man shouted in pain as she wrapped her legs around his chest, boxing his ears and eyes with punishing fists. She kicked off of him, knocking him backward against a rock, where he lay still.

  She rose to her feet to find the frost caster’s glyph engorged with power. The fellow moved with surprising alacrity, ripping arcane ligatures from the night. She’d misjudged their skill, taking out the wrong target first. The ice caster’s fingers smeared closed the last throbbing line of the glyph, and the air crackled with frost.

  It was like being thrust into the raw vacuum of space. Every inch of her overexposed skin seared with pain as frigid air wicked moisture away from the surface. Her eyes stung, and she shut them on reflex. Nilah wanted to shout, but when she opened her mouth, the freezing air bit her throat. Orna had been right, Nilah shouldn’t have engaged them alone. The spell howled, wrapped around the distant sounds of Panjala.

  Then came another noise: a familiar, mechanical galloping.

  A metallic screech erupted from above them, and a suit of bloodred mechanical battle armor landed upon the ice caster, folding him in half. As soon as Nilah could move a muscle, she looked away, shivering. She was glad to see Charger, but would’ve preferred a less lethal resolution.

  Charger’s cockpit hissed, popping open to reveal Orna strapped inside, a smile on her face. “Told you to wait, babe.”

  “And how were you supposed to come to my rescue if I did?”

  “Hunters, enough cute banter,” interrupted Cordell. “Have we got eyes on Forscythe?”

  Nilah bounded up to Charger and mounted his back plate, sinking her feet into his vents like stirrups. “In pursuit, Boss.”

  Orna shut herself back inside the cockpit, and the battle armor rocketed in the direction of the Morrison Station access corridor. Nilah held on for dear life as the creature beneath her loped along.

  Nilah wrapped her arms around Charger’s metal neck. “We really should put some handholds on the big guy for this! Some up top and footholds on the side.”

  “I’m not putting love handles on my killbot.”

  They reached the superstructure access hatch, which poked out from between a pair of bushes. Charger’s claws left long ruts in the grass as the pair skidded to a halt. Caution flashers blinked around the thick door frame, indicating the lack of gravity beyond. The drive range didn’t extend to the outer hull. Charger stepped inside, and Nilah’s stomach flipped as she adjusted to weightlessness.

  The superstructure was a mesh of translucent tunnels with running lights, punctuated every now and again by a viewport. From the city streets inside Morrison Station, the tunnels above appeared as a glowing, glassy web across open space. During racing seasons, Nilah had enjoyed using the tunnels for fitness training, doing speed runs between the various observation decks dotting Morrison’s expansive hull. She could do a hundred kilometers of low-grav kicks easily.

  The bright corridor extended before them, splitting into three offshoots. They kicked off to the end of the corridor, and Charger sampled the air as they flew. His neck snapped to the right, polychroic lenses flashing green with excitement.

  “Good boy,” Orna murmured through his speakers, and they bounded down the right side of the split.

  They raced through the superstructure, Charger scenting out their prey with little trouble. Each of the bot’s powerful kicks left an unfortunate red stain on the pristine walls, and Nilah wondered what they’d tell the police. When they reached the first observation deck, they found Aaron Forscythe trembling and red-faced, his slinger placed against his temple. He stood before the a wide cupola window, and Taitu was in planetrise behind him.

  Charger’s high-cal slingers swung out from their hip holsters before Nilah could even blink, but Orna stayed her hand.

  “This isn’t how it was supposed to happen,” said Aaron, his voice cracking. Upon hearing him, Nilah guessed that he couldn’t have been much older than eighteen. “You shouldn’t have been there!”

  Nilah pushed off Charger’s back, grabbing on to one of the floor’s many handrails. If he decided to fire at her, it’d be tricky to get out of the way. She couldn’t maneuver as unpredictably in zero gravity—it’d just be a straight line. “We tracked your message. We know someone was here to recruit you. What have you gotten into?”

  “They’re going to kill me,” he said, gritting his teeth.

  “If you don’t drop it,” said Orna, locking back the hammers on Charger’s massive slingers, “I don’t think they’ll get the chance. Now tell us who you were meet
ing.”

  “That’s open space behind that window,” Nilah warned, placing a hand atop one of Charger’s slingers.

  “Yeah, well, I’m sick of going after these newbies,” said Orna. “Bunch of rich idiots with almost no intel.”

  Aaron sneered. “You think we can’t end you and everyone you love?”

  Orna’s laugh came out tinny through Charger’s speakers. “The only thing you’re doing is boring me to death.”

  “Stop, darling.” Nilah tensed her legs, preparing to leap away in case he took a shot at her. “I’m sure he thinks he’s very important.”

  “You ruined this for me!” screamed Aaron. “I was chosen!”

  Nilah and Charger exchanged glances.

  “I mean,” Nilah began, “not really. I’ve met the chosen ones. They’re stonking powerful, and you can’t even shoot straight. Just give up.”

  A glint of sunlight warmed the window as their star crested Taitu’s horizon. Nilah prayed no civilians would come around for a morning constitutional.

  “Look, let’s work something out,” said Nilah. “I want to get back to my comfy clothes.”

  “‘Work something out’?” He laughed, a tear rolling down his cheek. “You’ve robbed me of my place among the gods.”

  “Believe me,” Nilah said, inching closer. “I’ve met your gods before, and they’re as mortal as you and me. You know what we can do. You’ve seen the shows on the Link. You’ve read the news stories.”

  “You got lucky once,” said Aaron. “This is different.”

  “Can I shoot him yet?” growled Orna through Charger’s speakers. “He’s getting annoying.”

  “What did your recruiter want you to do? What was the price of entry?” asked Nilah, motioning for Orna to lower her weapons. “We might be able to arrange protection.”

  “Indira Panjala spoke up against the Children of the Singularity,” said Aaron, shaking his head. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and his face twisted with something like shame. “Anyone who stands in the way of their plans has to die. Just like me.”