Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  The sound of a neural stunner charging up startled both Jo and the man with the minty breath. He froze as someone pressed the weapon to the back of his head.

  A husky female voice said, “Chapman, why don’t you let the young lady breathe a little. I don’t believe she’s that interested in your company. The pistol is set to stun, but at this range, it’s likely to leave your brain more than a little scrambled.”

  Jo felt the grip on her arm slacken. She seized the opportunity to yank herself out of Chapman’s reach. She turned around to see a short, wide woman with wavy salt-and-pepper hair standing behind him. The familiarity of the woman only added to Jo’s sense of confusion. She would have sworn that she knew her from somewhere, but she couldn’t place her.

  “It’s your move,” Chapman snarled.

  The woman pursed her lips in a disgusted frown. “Now the Timcree.”

  Chapman nodded slightly, and his three boys backed off.

  “That’s a good man. Now you are going to run along and let this go because neither you nor I want any real trouble here, do we?”

  Chapman shook his head and stepped away. He pulled down his purple shirt, straightening up his dignity. “You better watch yourself, Gloria. That girl’s special. She’s going to make me a lot of money.”

  Jo was half expecting a snappy comeback from Gloria, but it didn’t come. Instead her face remained hard, almost frozen, and her weapon remained pointed directly at Chapman.

  As he walked backward, he pointed a finger at the woman. “You’re getting too big for your britches, Gloria. Someone’s going to cut you down to size.”

  Gloria slowly smirked. “That may be true, Basilio, but today is not that day.”

  Chapman seemed agitated. He almost danced in front of Gloria’s weapon, daring her to shoot him. “And why not?”

  “Because you know that I’m a valuable courier who doesn’t drop her cargo at the first sign of an inspection, and you need me. And because you know all that I could and would tell people if something happened to me. You remember our arrangement after our little disagreement. You don’t mess with me, and I won’t mess with you.”

  Basilio Chapman turned red in the face as he spoke. He almost yelled but instead calmed himself, apparently not wanting to draw any more attention to the very public confrontation. Instead, his voice went cold. “You’re breaking that agreement right now. As far as I’m concerned, that agreement is dead.”

  “Maybe I am, and maybe we’ll have to reach a new agreement, but that doesn’t change what I know and what I could say if something were to happen to me or my crew.” Gloria waved her gun a little. “Now, let’s both of us just go our own ways.”

  Basilio Chapman fumed in place for a couple more beats, then huffed and turned away. He disappeared into the crowd, waving for his men to follow him.

  Jo still couldn’t quite place the face, but she was now sure that sometime in the past she had met the woman staring down her attacker. Jo let her voice trail off and looked at the woman with a question on her face, hoping she would fill in her name. “Thank you …?”

  The woman didn’t take her eyes off Chapman when she spoke, and Jo noticed she kept her hand on her now holstered pistol. “My name’s Gloria Soren.” Satisfied, she looked with guarded eyes upon the young woman in front of her. “And yours?”

  Recognition dawned upon hearing the older woman’s name. Gloria Soren had captained the ship that had flown Jo, her brother Teddy, and her surrogate father Jack to freedom when the Unity had murdered her parents. Back then, the woman had been a spy for the royal government.

  In the aftermath of the disastrous war that followed, there had been no place for Imperial loyalists like Soren. Whole swaths of them had been shunted off to re-education camps, never to be heard from again. It was like a spark in the darkness to run into someone from the time before. It felt like more than sheer chance. Jo answered Soren with a slight smile. “Josephine Lutnear.”

  The answer caused Soren to take a step backward. Slightly taller than Jo, she looked her over, inspecting the whole of her again, as if she couldn’t believe what she had heard. “Little Jo?”

  In answer, Jo just nodded as her stomach unclenched for the first time since their arrival.

  “What in the name of the black empty void brings you here?”

  “It’s a bit of a story.”

  Soren furrowed her brow. “I should say, and probably not one which ought to be told here.”

  Soren looked at Jo’s companion. Her tone was cautious and somewhat scolding but lacked the dismissiveness of some of their other encounters with humans in the market. “I’m not sure what you were thinking, parading her around like that, Timcree, but I think it might be wise for both of you to get off the street for a little while. Chapman’s a vengeful son of a bitch. Why don’t you come ‘round? I happen to have a case of jurang that I’ve been saving for your kind. After inspection, you might find it worth bargaining for.”

  Jo noted Soren’s understanding of the Timcree in that she didn’t outright invite him to share a drink. Such an offer would have been refused as a gift from a Gravlander. However, a chance to sample the wares was never unwelcome, as long as suitable business could be had.

  A slight eagerness in his posture told Jo’s trained eye that Tanith seemed pleased. He nodded slightly but did not speak, surprising Jo with his shyness around Soren.

  “Good, then it’s settled, and when we’re on the Clarion, Jo, you can fill me in on all the lovely things I’ve missed in the last few years.”

  “I’m not sure I’m the best one to tell. I’ve been with the Ghost Fleet since it fled Pontus.”

  Soren turned, and her eyes narrowed. She leaned in and spoke with a scolding tone. “Don’t say that out loud again until you leave this place. Understand?”

  Jo’s cheeks flushed, and she nodded vigorously. You’re such an idiot, Jo. Anyone could have heard you. Maybe I have been away from humans too long, she thought.

  It was supposed to be a party—a celebration of a profitable trip—but Josephine knew better. No doubt the medical scanner would make Kolas and his people a lot of money, but they couldn’t have procured it without Soren’s help. Timcree didn’t really celebrate until they returned to home and clan. Procuring a scanner might be the excuse, but the drink they shared was designed to create pure forgetfulness.

  The case of jurang lay open on the table, already half gone. Before the end, Jo doubted any would be left.

  That night everyone on the crew drank, because everyone had a reason to forget. Kolas drank to curse the lonely trips that took him away so often from the woman he loved. Thradling, the mechanic, drank to forget the Timcree girl who had died of the plague four days before they were to wed. Tanith drank to forget his own impotence in a galaxy that hated and reviled him for no other reason than his birth. Jo also drank to forget.

  She might be the only human who had a modicum of acceptance among the Timcree, yet she was in no way Kree. Her visit with Soren reminded her of that today. Even just the small bit of kindness shown to her by the older woman—just the fact that Soren knew her, had known her previously—all of it together tore open the papered-over wound of Jo’s loneliness and brought it storming home anew.

  When the drink had made her comfortably numb, Jo put her hand in the pocket of her jumpsuit, gently fingering the scalpel that had become both her friend and her enemy in the last few months. Jo finished her glass, put it down on the table with emphasis, and excused herself to her quarters, all the while gripping the instrument of pain and release in her pocket.

  A queer feeling came over Jo when she saw the Timcree woman walk into the makeshift medical clinic. She hadn’t seen her in a year, not since that day in the market when Jo had recovered her belongings from the woman’s stall by ‘giving’ them to her, an unforgivable act of charity from a Gravlander to a Kree. Jo’s adept use of Kree taboo against her had been a huge step forward in the long, slow process of creating a hard-won respect a
mong the Kree. That and helping Tanith stop the plague. The stinging shame of the encounter ensured that the Kree woman had never before entered their clinic. And she was a member of the rival clan who had violently disagreed with Kolas when Jo had first come on board Korg Haran—the younger sister of the man who had stabbed him. They had been the most vocal in their opposition to Kolas and his experiment with the human witch.

  Now heavy with child, Jo instinctively sensed the desperation which must have led her here. She refused to look either Jo or Tanith in the eye when she entered the exam room.

  Jo recalled the saying Tanith had told her that day. Shame given once, returns twice. As the woman lay down, Jo wondered if that were about to come true for her.

  Even lying down, the woman looked tense as Jo and Tanith passed the scanner over her body. The woman hadn’t spoken a word since entering the exam room, but Jo knew that she must be concerned about her fetus. Without a word to each other, she and Tanith both waited until the end to examine it.

  As soon as she saw the child, the problem became clear to Jo. Her hands started to sweat. The scanner started to beep its concern. The Timcree woman jumped as Jo shut off the warning.

  Jo glanced at the worried mother-to-be. For less than a second, their eyes met, and Jo felt the understanding pass between them. She knows, she thought. Jo did not look at her again. Instead, she continued with her scan and spoke dispassionately to Tanith in English. “The baby has no brain, Tanith.”

  It wasn’t technically correct. The baby did have a main brain stem, but the telencephalon had failed to develop, and Jo was pretty sure that Tanith hadn’t yet learned the English word telencephalon, so brain would suffice.

  “I see that also, Meeta.”

  “The mother knows that something isn’t right.”

  “Yes, Meeta.”

  Jo didn’t say anything more. Instead, she turned control of the large scanner over to Tanith and quietly left the room, heart in her throat.

  Delivering bad news was always tricky business with the Kree. Science might say that the baby could not live because it had failed to develop a proper brain, but for the Kree, there was always a reason such a thing occurred. In the face of a universe seemingly indifferent to the Kree, the superstitious Homo dissensio always found a cause for any misfortune. Jo and Tanith had agreed that with such a view, bad news was best delivered without the outsider present to act as a lightning rod for the inevitable blame.

  Jo walked the short distance from the isolation-ward-turned-med-bay to her quarters, her heart sinking into her toes.

  This is bad, Josephine. No good can come from it.

  The first sign of the brewing tempest came before dawn only two weeks later. Jo sat at the table with Zonezah and the precocious terror, Jozie. Jo’s relationship with the Timcree matron of the Kolas clan would never be warm, but Jo had learned that Zonezah reserved her affection only for Kolas and her child, so she no longer took it personally.

  Without any warning or explanation, Kolas stepped in the room and announced in his usual deadpan tone, “We won’t be opening the clinic today. Do not walk outside, Medical Internist Josephine.”

  This was surprising, but not in itself concerning to Jo, until she noted that Zonezah had jumped a little at the announcement.

  Experience had taught Jo that at certain times it was best for the Gravlander to disappear. Without a word, she took her bowl and returned to her quarters, but she could only stand isolation for so long. Her will dissolved a couple of hours later when she heard animated voices in the corridor outside her door. She had just stood from her bed when the door to her room opened and Tanith stepped in.

  “What’s going on, Tanith?” Jo spoke in English.

  Tanith responded in Kree. “The baby with no brain has been born. The mother is blaming you. The other clans are threatening war on the Kolas clan unless we turn you over to them.”

  Jo’s stomach turned sideways with fear. “Tanith, she knew!”

  “Yes.”

  “Tanith, it’s a lie and a trap!”

  “Yes.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Very little, Meeta.”

  Tanith drew Soren’s neural stunner from his belt. It had been part of the trade with Soren for the jurang. He pointed it at Jo.

  “After all I’ve done, Tanith? After all this?” Jo felt suddenly weak in the knees, too betrayed to be angry. A tear dripped from her eye.

  “Everything will be okay. Kree pa, Little Meeta.”

  Jo held her breath, her heart trying to escape her chest.

  The bolt of perfectly tuned electrical energy hit Jo square in the face.

  11

  Strident

  Upon returning her senses, Jo lay still, trying to shake off her desperate sense of despair. Heart pounding, she tried to take a breath and realized she couldn’t. Something very large and metallic had been shoved into her throat, forcing her mouth open. She tried to cough and began to gag. The something started to slide itself out, burning as it did so.

  Jo’s eyes snapped open, but she could not see. The whole world seemed to have dissolved into an aqua-blue haze that weighed her down and felt sticky and wet. Just as Jo started to thrash, strong hands reached into the fluid and grabbed her by the shoulders. Jo’s face broke the surface as the horrible thing in her throat pulled itself free. She wretched and started to cough. Jo saw the breathing end of an ancient hibernation system slithering away from her, still covered with her own slime. She looked down to see her naked body being lifted into a sitting position in a tank of bright blue goo—a kind of hibernation fluid that hadn’t been used in nearly a century anywhere in the galaxy.

  A voice behind her spoke. “Easy there, Josephine. It’s going to be a bit before your mind is straight.”

  The voice had a familiar quality to it, but she couldn’t place it. She turned and looked into the kind but stern face of a woman with curly salt-and-pepper hair. Jo understood that she knew this person, but she couldn’t remember her name.

  The woman must have seen her puzzled expression because she answered it. “I’m Gloria Soren. Do you remember me?”

  Instinctively, Jo brought her hands up to cover her breasts. She didn’t answer but instead just shook her head.

  “That’s okay. It’s going to take a bit.” Soren looked to someone standing near the foot of the hibernation chamber. “Vi, help me get her out of here, and then I want you back at the controls. We’ve got a really tight burn, and the number six thruster has been misbehaving. I want you double checking the computer.”

  A young woman about Jo’s age with an inordinate number of pink freckles and wavy red hair answered, “Yes, sir.”

  Working on either side of her, the two women helped Jo get out of the blue slime that had encased her.

  Now free, Jo still couldn’t really remember anything, only her name and a few vague details. As her body started to tremble, she hugged herself and took a tentative step away from the woman supporting her.

  “Easy there, Jo. Your memory will come back. It’s the hibernation tank. It does that to people.”

  Jo turned to face Soren.

  Soren looked her in the eye. “You’re safe here. No one will hurt you. Yanking you out like that wasn’t the best way to do this, but that tank was pretty unstable. It’s old, and it was a crime that you were in it in the first place. We’re going to take care of you.

  “Let’s start by getting you as cleaned up as we can. If we were on the Clarion, I’d offer you a shower and a little privacy, but we’re not. We’re on the Strident. It’s the ship’s boat for the Clarion. Privacy is at a premium, and we don’t have a shower.” Reaching down, Soren picked up a white towel off a crate. “The best I can do is to offer you this. The microbes in it should get you cleaned up pretty quickly.”

  Jo gratefully took the towel.

  Soren allowed her a moment with her scattered thoughts while she toweled off. In the haze, it helped her most when she remembered that she had me
dical training, and that she had seen this before. Hibernation tended to suppress memory function. She thought her symptoms were worse than usual, but she couldn’t be sure of anything.

  As she finished cleaning herself with the towel, she spoke quietly without looking up. “How did I get here?”

  Soren handed her a spacer’s jumpsuit as she answered. “Tanith contacted me. He said you were in trouble and needed someplace to go.”

  Tanith? I know that name. Who is that?

  She was about to ask when Vi’s voice interrupted. “Captain, I need you in the cockpit. I have three ships on an intercept course.”

  With a concerned glance at Jo, Soren stepped through the door.

  Having dressed, Jo followed shortly thereafter.

  The small crew space on the ship’s boat was perhaps a quarter the size of the hold Jo had just left. There were four fold-down beds—all currently tucked away—a small galley with an automated food plant, then further forward, the cockpit with four seats arranged two by two. Jo moved forward and sat in one of the chairs in the back. The young woman named Vi occupied the pilot’s chair, while the still-familiar Captain Soren occupied the co-pilot’s seat.

  With a clenched jaw, Vi worked with a computer plot of the whole star system projected on the front screen. Soren was keeping a close eye on the three incoming ships.

  Vi cursed furiously. “That bastard Kree sold us out to the feds.”

  Soren shook her head. “I don’t think so, Violet. They aren’t coming in like the feds would. They’re trying to look casual about it. On the course they’re flying, they might be making for that gas giant or one of its moons. The feds would just come straight at us.”

  Violet glanced Jo’s direction and went back to her work. “Well, he sold us out to somebody. How far out are they?”

  “Just under a light minute and closing at around .65. They’ll be on us in less than ten minutes.”