Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel

by Jacqueline Koyanagi

  Nova locked eyes with me, breathing heavily, eyes wide. She fanned herself frantically.

  I took one of her hands into mine and rubbed the back of it. “Everything is okay,” I said, keeping my voice low. She continued fanning herself with her free hand and nodded slowly. I kept her close and looked at Tev, then the other crew members. “I’m sorry, she’s not used to—”

  “I don’t care what she’s not used to,” Tev said. “This is a vessel with a chain of command and she will show some respect. And keep herself together.” She gestured at the crew with her chin, eyes acid-hot beneath her bangs. “Everyone shut up and stand by. Marre, what’s the status of engineering?”

  “Stable,” she said.

  “And the projectile?”

  “It wasn’t launched from the engine.”

  “What was that?” Slip asked as she hurried onto the bridge at the same time I said, “What projectile?”

  Tev moved toward Slip as she spoke. “Marre, activate comm and pull up imprints from the outpost. Start thirty seconds before the event.” She lowered her voice a little and took Slip’s hand. “Are you okay?”

  Again, such a quick transformation from authority to tenderness sent a wave of longing through me. When Tev caught me staring, I turned away, ears hot with embarrassment.

  Marre linked up to the comm system with tiny, deft fingers, and downloaded the 360-degree feed from the outpost’s security recordings. The bridge view screen now displayed Adul and Ouyang Outpost’s refueling station as seen from the station itself. Marre panned around the outpost until she had the ship’s departure in view.

  Adul glowed softly in the background in smooth shades of white and caramel. No matter how many times I’d seen it, Adul’s beauty always made my whole body ache. In the foreground, the Tangled Axon looked like a creature on fire, arcs of electricity igniting around her.

  “Wait,” Tev said. “Hold the wide shot with the ship and the planet. Go from there.”

  Marre complied. The crew was a captive audience before the recording. We watched as the ship sailed away from the outpost, business as usual. The others seemed unmoved, but to me, the only thing more incredible than watching the Axon sail away from Adul was having watched her descend into my repair lot on Heliodor.

  Something bright flashed across the screen, too quick to make out.

  My world capsized.

  Impossibly, Adul shivered. Starting at the equator, the planet bulged, inflating like a balloon. She almost seemed to be taking a slow inhalation. A glimmer of movement radiated out from the planet’s center in a ripple, heading north and south through the same pale, warm bands of cream and caramel I’d loved all my life. Clouds roiled in the planet’s atmosphere so deceptively it could have been mistaken for liveliness, but some deeper part of me knew, instantly, that I was witnessing one last gasp. One more flurry of life before my parents and my childhood blinked out of existence. Before the truth crystallized coherently in my mind, I could already feel myself dividing between the before and the after, a mitosis of grief.

  Adul faded slowly, like mist, or a half-remembered dream. Irrationally, I wanted to reach out and grab her atmosphere, cradle it and reposition it and fix her the way I fixed ships, make her whole again, heal her, stop this horrible thing that I couldn’t believe I was witnessing. I want to hold the planet in my arms the way Tev had held Marre, tell her to breathe, keep breathing, to hold onto herself, please. It was then that I realized I was in a panic, my breath coming in short heaves, palms damp against the console.

  We were too far away to see the Adulans in the upper atmosphere while the planet faded, but I felt them out there the same way I’d felt the Tangled Axon, only this was awful, like a sickness pulling apart my cells one-by-one. Images of the bright creatures in Adul’s atmosphere appeared in my mind, over and over again. Millions of serene, sentient beings floating harmlessly between electrical storms, flashing poetry across the thin membranes of their bodies. All those light-words—graying, dying, lost.

  Gradually, holes punched what remained of Adul’s atmosphere, honeycombing the planet. Ouyang Outpost and the station were distant flecks in the dark, crushed and devoured and burned by the dying planet. I felt the station and my parents and all those creatures—felt them pulled into the tidal wave of destruction that ate the planet away. Somewhere around me, in some other reality, the crew of the Axon was shouting and talking, but it was meaningless to me as I watched, struggling to breathe around my horror. Each second stretched out inside me as I watched my parents crushed inside the gravity well of what was once the most beautiful planet in the system. The space behind Adul began peeking through its shrinking gaseous bands, like night sky through branches. I could think and feel only one thing: no, no, no . . .

  Piece by piece, puncture by puncture, Adul disappeared. Sixty seconds, and there was nothing left. A bolt of agony struck through the center of me, worse than anything Mel’s had delivered. The world yawned open and I fell through into a twisted, ugly place where my parents were dead and Adul had fallen into oblivion.

  Sensations I didn’t have room for closed in on me: my toes crushed by the then-unbearable pressure of my boots, skin a hot and oppressive casing over my body, heart thundering hard enough to feel in my head and fingers and legs, breath too short to do any good.

  It took me awhile to realize Nova was making an awful sound somewhere between a sob and a howl, but like the crew, it sounded wrong and far away, part of some other existence. She grabbed my arm and pulled on me, as if I could do something to stop this thing that had already happened, a thing we would have had to reach through time to reverse. Distantly, I was aware of putting my hands on hers and prying them away from my arm, but all I could see was death, all I could feel were the tremors of nascent grief tearing through my body. All my movements moved as if through water. Even the air was heavy and viscous.

  My parents’ lifework, the station that brought them together, the station where I’d known my ex-wife as a child—all of it. Gone. Pain compressed my skull until I bit my fist so I wouldn’t give voice to it. Memories shot through me like lightning: watching one of the Adulans exchange colors with my mother and the team; helping my father scratch coded love messages for my mother into the metal behind her desk after hours; Kugler and I falling asleep against the observation deck glass while schools of Adulan juveniles floated past.

  But Adul was gone, and had taken its entire population and my parents with it. Spots of light floated across my vision. Little suns that spread into the center of my head and carved out pain-furrows until all the voices and images on the bridge with me just magnified the sensation. Objects floated through space in ways they shouldn’t.

  “They’re dead,” I whispered. It didn’t sound like me. “They’re—”

  From the point in space that was once the planet’s core, a shockwave shot out in all directions, knocking into the Tangled Axon and sending us into a temporary tailspin. From our safe vantage point in the future, we watched Marre struggle with the thrusters to right the ship’s course. Eventually, the ship stabilized.

  “That should have destroyed us,” Slip said, her voice distorted in my mind.

  Vaguely, I was aware of Tev leaning in and fiddling with the viewer controls. “Apparently not.”

  “She’s right,” Ovie said, his low voice a near-echo. “We should have sustained more damage. The ship shouldn’t have held together.”

  I imagined the creatures in Adul’s atmosphere being punctured along with the planet. Every last one, disappearing. No resistance. Just a quiet passing into oblivion along with half of my family. Horrible images of my mother and father grappling for purchase flashed through my mind. Images of their bodies crushed under the pressure of a dying planet eating the space station, bloodied and broken between compressed metal walls . . .

  Horror slid down my throat and congealed in my stomach.

  “They’re all dead,” I said, gagging on my words.

  The screen showed t
he Axon up close.

  “What was that flash before the event?” Tev said as Nova’s arms enveloped me, her jasmine scent making me sick now. Nova’s warm body shook with sobs, her anguish-mangled voice ringing in my ears as Tev continued issuing orders. “Marre, go ahead and play it from just before the light cuts across the screen, but slow it down.”

  I couldn’t keep myself from watching while I held Nova. On the viewer, something moved near the ship, then shot across the screen with a tail of light trailing behind it. Sickness rocked me again, painting a whitewash over my vision, pinging against the physical pain wracking my body. Every few seconds the realization hit me anew: they’re gone. You will never see them again. You will never hear their voices again. They will never fly with you again.

  “Stop.” Tev pointed at the object. “It’s moving too fast. Go back and replay it. Slow by fifty percent.”

  There, from the side of the hull near engineering, something detached from the ship. It moved a small distance away from the Axon, then fired into Adul.

  “That’s what did it,” Tev said.

  “Not possible,” Ovie said. “I ran diagnostics already today.”

  “Shipwide scan confirms a foreign object on the port hull near engineering,” Marre said.

  “Marre.” Tev still stared at the image, white-knuckling the edge of the console. “Get us out of here. Fast.”

  She seemed unaffected. “Yes, Captain.”

  Tev didn’t move. “Ovie.”

  “Captain.”

  “Find out what the hell just happened to my ship.”

  He left without comment, locs swinging behind him. All my senses snapped back into place, fashioned into a needle-sharp point of determination by some deep, resilient part of myself I didn’t know existed. I jogged to catch up with him, fighting to force my feet to carry a weak body down the hallway. Nova shouted after me, but I held my palm up to her behind me to stop her, then turned back to Ovie. My whole body shook. Heat curled up between my fingers, in my palms, at the center of my chest. Fire pumped through my veins.

  I knew what I was feeling.

  Rage.

  “Please.” I touched his arm with a shaking hand. He stopped and looked at my hand, then at me. A low growl rolled in his throat.

  “Please,” I said again, through clenched teeth. I loosened my jaw and closed my eyes briefly before speaking again. Then: “Let me come with you.”

  “No.”

  “My parents.” I choked. The rest of the words lodged themselves somewhere in my throat. I couldn’t say it again. They’re dead. They were on the station.

  “I can’t have you getting in the way.”

  “Please!” I noticed the heat on my cheeks before I registered the tears that blurred my vision. “I have to do something. I have to. My parents.”

  He gave me a hard look with those ice-blue eyes. “Fine. Just stay out of my way.”

  “Alana . . . ” Nova said, having caught up. Her once elegant makeup, now smeared into a mess, made her look alarmingly young and lost. “Where do I go?”

  My mind was a mess. I desperately needed to do something to prevent those images from surfacing, all those images of my parents being crushed and killed, their faces stricken with terror, the Adulans flashing in terrified colors, the planet disappearing into an empty point in space. I had to do something useful, had to be somewhere other than the bridge, which was now imbued with death. I had to channel all this trembling emotion into something productive or I would tear myself apart with it.

  I couldn’t comfort my sister now. I didn’t have it in me. Looking at her just made me think about our shared grief—a grief I couldn’t yet confront directly, or it would swallow me whole.

  I jogged back a few meters to find Slip. “Please, can you take my sister—”

  “No.” Tev broke her connection to the comm system and took Nova’s arm before Slip could respond. Nova tried pulling away, but relented when Tev held her firm. My sister wasn’t used to being on the bottom of the hierarchy, but where I would have once relished in her being taken down a few notches, I now only wanted to protect her.

  “Our parents were on that goddamned station,” I said, unable to keep the vitriol out of my words as I stepped toward them. “Let her go.”

  “I’d like to go with my sister.” Nova said, straightening her back and fixing her face into a mask of regality despite the smudged eyeliner around her eyes, the puffy cheeks, the trembling mouth. She looked like pure emotion barely contained by superficial gloss, and I half expected her to glamour Tev into submission.

  “You’re not going into my engine room, love.” Tev let go of Nova’s arm and rested it on her shoulder. “Slip will take you to your quarters. You should rest, and we have to work.” She looked at Slip. “Make sure she’s going to be okay.”

  Slip nodded. I watched as she guided a helpless Nova away. My sister didn’t glance back at me, or the bridge, or Tev, or the silence beyond where our parents used to be. Her back just disappeared into the dark corridor, enveloped by the ship. As I stared after her, everything leading up to that moment blinked through me in rapid succession: meeting Slip, stowing away, Ovie, Tev, my sister, Adul. The Tangled Axon was a thread through the center of it all, tied to my heart, changing me.

  Chapter Six

  I closed my eyes and placed my hands on either side of the engine room entryway. One step, then another. Deep, shaking breaths. Ozone and metal tinged the air in my lungs.

  It felt so damn good to let her course through me and carry all my thoughts away.

  The heart of a ship doesn’t beat; it thrums in a brilliant, burning plasma cloud above the engine. I wanted to block out all other sensation and feel nothing else but that singed air, the voltaic pulse. The Tangled Axon’s song moved through me, louder than ever, her lightning inside my veins. Every centimeter of me was electromagnetically charged, channeled through the ship. I boiled inside her, she inside me. I felt her in my fingertips, my blood, my hair, as if the Axon would scorch me straight through to the bone until I were made of pure glass.

  This was my prayer. Nova shepherded human souls, but I offered my devotions through copper and coil. My goddess was plasma, and She was fierce. Worthy of worship. I could feel what ailed her, an object like cancer on her hull, piercing my own skin.

  “Are you going to meditate or help me?” came Ovie’s deep voice.

  I kept my eyes closed, shutting away everything inside me that tried rising to the surface. Adul. My parents. Adul. My parents. I shut it all out, that ruminative cycle of horror that wanted to consume me.

  Nothing exists but her, this machine, this music.

  I’d been in plenty of engines, had my hands inside enough ships that you’d think this would be routine, but it never was. Especially not now. This ship’s engine possessed an unparalleled voice—one that sounded to me like sunrise, like falling in love, like seeing divinity. It was so beautiful I mourned how much of my life I’d spent in her absence.

  “Hey!” Ovie barked.

  “I just need a second,” I breathed.

  He sighed. “When you’re done communing with the door, we’ll need to make sure everything’s running normally in here before we go outside. It would go faster with two sets of eyes.”

  My eyes snapped open. “Outside?”

  Ovie was hunched over, contorting himself so he could examine the bottom of one of the reactor coils. At my question, he paused, resting his elbow on a knee and raising his eyebrows at me. “That would be where the hull is.”

  “You’re letting me come with you?”

  “No. You’re standing by while I check it out, but I need to keep you close.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “You just said you could use a second pair of eyes in here. What if the thing out there is more complex than you think?”

  He sighed and resumed working. “This ship already has an engineer, and I hear he’s decent.”

  Okay. I knew when to back off, even if it meant fighting
every instinct in me. An ailing ship wasn’t easy for me to ignore, and it was the only thing that would keep the truth of what had happened from clawing its way to the foreground of my awareness.

  Electric webbing sparked and sizzled above our heads, flickering with light. If I weren’t worried about lowering Ovie’s opinion of me, I would have stretched myself out on the floor right there to stare at the display and take in each note, each sigh between the arcs. I wanted to stop time and listen to the Axon until I was fluent in her language.

  I made my way over to Ovie and crouched down, still resisting the urge to touch the Axon’s coils and wires, like running my fingers through a lover’s hair. There will be time for that, I thought, though it hurt to wait.

  Ovie compacted himself away from me. Clearly, I crowded his space just by being in the engine room. This ship was his girl, after all, and here I was putting the moves on her.

  “I’m sorry if you think I want to take your job—”

  “Doesn’t matter even if you did. You’re not going to. Captain Helix is a loyal woman. And you can see how enormous this ship is and how unlimited our supplies are. What makes you think the captain is going to take on the cost of another warm body for no real reason? Once she’s sure your sister is staying, she’ll drop you off somewhere and give you shuttle money to get home. It ain’t personal.”

  It was the most I’d heard him say since I’d arrived. Evidently, I’d struck a nerve.

  “I just want to be part of this,” I said.

  He huffed, a short growl rolling under it. “The engine?”

  “Yes. The engine, the ship, the silence. All of it.” I untied my hair and let the locs fall, trying to remind him we were kin, as engineers. “We’re not different.”

  I placed my hand on the coil next to his. Mine looked so small by comparison. “I know you have to hear the songs too, don’t you? Her songs? She is so beautiful, Ovie.” I lifted my hand and placed it on the coil again for emphasis. “This is all I want. I don’t want to crowd you out. I just want to be let in.”