Star Stories - Beginnings (The Fixers of KarmaCorp Book 3)

by Faye, Audrey

  His harsh intake of breath confirmed what she already knew. “Over there, by the rift.” He glanced at her, eyes grim, assessing. “Take us down.”

  Her chest puffed again, even as her heart pounded against her ribs. This was what it felt like to be important. This was what it felt like to matter.

  -o0o-

  Amelie Descol blasted the single high, pure note into every nook and cranny of the devastated bridge—and knew she was fighting a losing battle.

  She gathered her breath and pushed more power into the single frequency. Sustaining. Demanding. Trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Her Talent shrieked, protesting the abuse. This wasn’t sustainable, even for one of KarmaCorp’s very finest.

  She knew what her Talent didn’t. This was the end game, one way or the other. If she couldn’t hold on until help arrived, this was her last Song.

  And the likelihood of help arriving in time had narrowed down to one small blip. They had a signal-obliterating cosmic storm behind them and a MayDay beacon that had deked left when it should have gone right. Amelie watched the bridge’s last functional view screen as the tiny ship they’d picked up on their sensors came into view.

  Her heart lurched. It was a surface flitter, barely bigger than the b-pod her brother flew for a living. Not the kind of vehicle that carried hull-piercing tools or interstellar comms.

  Slowly, not letting her note waver in the slightest, she moved to step in behind the ship’s captain, keeping one eye on the screen and one on the only other two people on the Ios who were still alive. Both were unconscious, and mercifully so. It had been killing her to listen to their thready screams.

  The captain’s hands clutched the edges of the console that was keeping her upright. “Attempting to hail incoming vessel.”

  Vessel was a polite term for what Amelie saw onscreen. The flitter looked ancient, and more beat up than her favorite pair of land boots. The kind of transport that colonies way off the beaten track held together with shoelaces and instaglue.

  She closed her eyes and felt the fatigue clogging her throat. They would keep doing all the right things because Fixers didn’t give up, and neither did the very tough captain of this particular small trading ship.

  But shoelaces and instaglue weren’t going to fix this.

  -o0o-

  Kish’s head felt all swimmy and weird. Her DNA mother’s ship had probably looked just like that.

  Broken. Alone.

  It was calling to her. She shook her head, trying to fix the awful pictures it was making inside her skull. It wasn’t the same. This ship was new and shiny, not like the junker she’d been born on. Pops said it was a wonder that one had ever flown at all.

  This one was a sleek trader ship, one of the ones that carried people and news and expensive things to colonies that could afford that kind of thing. And she could see why they’d crashed. One of the solar arms had a nasty, melted part. “They got hit by something.”

  Pops nodded sharply. “Space debris. People who fly out there are idiots.”

  Folks said the same thing about diggers. “They must have got caught in the solar storm.” It had been a surprise one, or at least that’s what the SatNet weather people said. No one on Halkyn VII had been surprised. Mama Simkin’s big toe had been acting up again, and that always meant solar flares.

  The storm had been pretty. Streaking lights in the sky. Kish looked at the ship, crashed on the side of the caldera, and felt her chin wobble. Pretty things could be mean. Every miner knew that.

  She circled, eyes sharp now, looking for the flattest place she could find to set down the flitter. Not below the ship—the hills were too steep.

  “No.” Pops spoke sharply, moving his hands on top of hers. “Don’t land—we’ll hail them from here.”

  Her hands froze on the flitter controls as she swiveled to look at him, gaping. “We have to go help.”

  His eyes were angry—and full of the futile helplessness she only saw there when people were going to die. “It’s a spaceship, Lakisha. They need shuttles and a rescue ship, not a couple of people in a flitter.”

  He never called her Lakisha. She looked down at the broken ship in horror. Halkyn VII didn’t have rescue shuttles. And they were in darkside rotation—their interstellar comm couldn’t send a message for hours yet.

  Not a useful one, anyhow.

  He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s hail them. Maybe we can bring them something they need. Until the rescue shuttles get here.”

  Pop’s voice had that fake sound that happened when adults were lying about really bad things. Kish’s chin wobbled some more. “I’ll hold the flitter steady.”

  His hand on her shoulder squeezed a little.

  -o0o-

  Amelie winced as the crackling view screen jarred against the note she was Singing. She was tired enough now that stabilizing the interference took noticeable amounts of effort.

  Butterfly wings. Just like the space junk that had clipped them and the solar flare that had knocked out their proximity detector. And the guy in engineering who had hit his head at exactly the wrong time.

  The screen resolved into two blurry figures—a man with more facial hair than Amelie had seen in cycles, and a small girl with huge blue eyes and a ghost-white face.

  The Singer struggled not to react. She didn’t want a child to see this.

  The man’s voice was brusque. “Trader ship Ios, what is your status?”

  The captain’s fingers clutched the console more tightly. “Hull breach. We’ve lost pressure in six of our eight sections. Five dead, two badly wounded. All of us still alive are on the bridge and trapped. One of our solar ribs was driven through the bridge doors.”

  Amelie had to respect that kind of capacity for understatement. There were two hundred tons of metal between them and escape. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

  The captain’s breath rattled. “We’re losing oxygen.”

  The man on the screen knew what that meant. Amelie could see the sad horror in his eyes and knew what that meant. Rescue wasn’t in his power to deliver. She jerked ruthlessly on her control as her Song wobbled.

  Not now. She could be weak later. If there was a later.

  The captain nodded feebly at the woman behind her. “Amelie here is trying some heroics.”

  The man and the girl both stared, puzzled.

  Amelie gulped for air in the waning oxygen supply. Earlier, she’d managed to move the solar rib enough to extract the first officer and their comms intern, for all the good it would likely do them. Now she was trying to use pure vibration to hold thousands of tiny leaks at bay.

  The Singer version of shoelaces and instaglue.

  The captain’s head lolled to the side. Dammit, make that three survivors badly wounded. Amelie stopped singing and stepped forward. Singers weren’t in the line of command on any space vessel—unless they were the only one left who could speak. “We’ll need something capable of drilling a hole in the side of this ship.”

  The man was already shaking his head. “We have drills, but nothing big enough to get them here fast. It’s going to take hours.”

  He sounded competent. And certain.

  The little girl beside him looked ready to punch someone in the nose. “We have to help, Pops. They can disassemble the drills. We can fly the parts.”

  She wasn’t as fragile as she looked. Amelie registered that one thought as she sucked breath to start Singing again. If she could block the leaks well enough, maybe she could buy those hours. She added volume to her note. Power. The kind of power that might save a ship.

  And would almost certainly cost a Singer her life.

  Amelie felt a trickle adding to hers.

  Her eyes jerked to the screen. The little girl was standing now, hands fisted at her sides, face fiercely focused. Singing. Precisely matching resonance with Amelie’s note.

  The Singer felt her eyes bulge. Talent. Immense talent, out here in the middle of asteroid hell.

>   The child stiffened as her father motioned for silence. And Sang louder.

  Amelie reached for the tablet in her pocket and, sustaining the note she knew would be her last, sent off a short, seminally important message to KarmaCorp HQ. If a rescue ship ever arrived, it might even get delivered.

  She looked back up into the fiery blue eyes of the child who would one day have the kind of Talent that might save this ship.

  The child who didn’t have enough control or knowledge to try today without putting her life on the line too. And Amelie Descol couldn’t let that happen. It violated every oath she’d ever taken, every rule in KarmaCorp’s very substantial manual, and every shred of human decency a dying Fixer had left.

  So she shifted her gaze to the man beside the girl, looked him straight in the eyes, and let him see the truth.

  He met her gaze for a long moment. And then he gave one sharp nod of respect and reached for the controls of the flitter.

  The child’s keening wail as the transmission ended nearly broke Amelie’s heart.

  And it made her smile. That one wouldn’t ever back down from a fight. The child with the blue eyes would make a fine Fixer one day. The one legacy of this final horror that she could be proud of.

  Today, only one Singer would die.

  -o0o-

  Kish couldn’t see the ship anymore. They were almost back to Halkyn VII’s derelict landing pad now, and the broken body of the Ios had disappeared from view long ago.

  But she could still hear it. The woman with the green eyes, begging the stars to help.

  Because the girl from the digger rock couldn’t.

  -o0o-

  Amelie could still feel the child. Her anguish and her guilt, and the echoing resonances of a Talent that had tried to throw itself across a vacuum of space and do the impossible.

  A child born to be a Fixer if she’d ever seen one.

  If it please the fates, not a child destined to die as one.

  Amelie took one last look around the battered bridge and then lifted her chin and blasted her high, pure note one more time out into the infinity of space. A final moment of defiance.

  Then she bowed her head and changed her Song. To a lullaby. One that would send calm to the child still listening, and put everyone still alive on the ship to sleep. The gift of oblivion, as quickly as she could bring it.

  Amelie felt the black coming. And Sang it welcome.

  -o0o-

  Three Months Later…

  Pops had stopped coming with her, and when Kish got back, he would look at her with that cross face that made his eyebrows join together and lines run up from his nose.

  But her astrosuit was always charged and ready to go, every night. And even though it was battered and dinged and two sizes too big, someone had done some careful repairs on all the seams.

  She had no idea why she had to be in a dumb suit out here in the cold. Singing sounded way nicer in one of the abandoned tunnels, especially if she managed to swipe her brother’s heater mitts before she left. That’s usually where she went to sing.

  But this note—it insisted that it must be sung under the night sky.

  Kish placed the carefully shaped rock that would hold the surface tube open until she returned, and stepped away from the sensors. They were rusty as hell and nobody ever bothered to look at their logs, but occasionally even beat-up old crap managed to work right, and she didn’t want any more lines running up from Pop’s nose.

  She turned herself toward the northwest. Toward the caldera.

  The broken ship wasn’t there anymore. A rescue vessel had come. It had saved the captain with the sad face and the comms intern with the nice laugh and the first officer with the gruff voice and wrapped candies in his pocket.

  But Kish had known they were too late for the lady with the voice of gold and the fierce, sad eyes.

  She drew in a deep breath, remembering. And let the single, shattering note rise up from her ribs.

  The sound reverberated inside her helmet like a space cat on synth-caf, but Kish barely noticed. She focused only on the beautiful, heartbreaking sound.

  Just like always, it made tears run down her face. And just like always, her ribs felt like they might never breathe again. It had taken her two weeks to stop panicking and triple-checking the oxygen levels on her space suit.

  The oxygen had always been fine.

  Kish tipped her head back to the night sky and imagined her puny note rising up to the stars. She knew the stars would never hear her—she was just a girl from a digger rock, and a troublesome, skinny one at that. But she sang up to the sky anyway.

  It was where the song wanted to go.

  Summoned

  Yesenia stared at the old man on the other side of the desk. “That is not possible.”

  “It is almost certain.” His eyes betrayed nothing. “I have verified all steps of the work myself.”

  She had known Regalis Marsden, Head of the StarReaders, for almost fifteen years. In all that time, she had never known him to be wrong.

  Her hand didn’t move to her flat belly, but every scrap of Talent she had moved to protect what would one day grow inside her. Every scrap of her fear said it wouldn’t be enough. “Death is not an acceptable outcome.”

  His gaze didn’t waver. Regalis was a man well used to delivering news no one wanted to hear.

  Normally, it was her job to listen and to figure out how to best use the resources of KarmaCorp to sway outcomes in the quadrant in the direction the StarReaders believed they needed to go. She respected Regalis and understood the value of his team—and why most feared them. The oracles of KarmaCorp. The elite few who stashed themselves away in an ivory tower and read the universal ether, unhampered by the messiness of human emotion and need.

  The StarReaders permitted her to visit their tower more often than most. Few were capable of controlling their emotions as well as she was.

  Until today.

  She would not raise a hand to her belly. The discipline of that, the arbitrary line in the sand, was all that kept her from breaking. She had not known she was meant to be a mother.

  Or how it would feel to know the universe planned to yank that away.

  Regalis tipped his head fractionally to the left. “Do you wish to have a child?”

  Yesenia swallowed her offense—many would ask the same question, and most would at least think it in tones far more unkind. “Yes.” She wouldn’t have imagined it, but there were no words for what had shifted inside her the moment he had asked the question.

  The old man who ran the StarReaders with an iron hand watched her. Gathering his data.

  She didn’t flinch. He had better ability to see people as human beings than most of his kind. And he wasn’t done with whatever he had summoned her here to say. She pulled enough Talent away from shielding her belly to poke his direction. StarReaders had one kind of power—she had another.

  He held up a hand. “Use of Talent is not welcome in this room, Director. You’re well aware of that.”

  She was. She also knew how many times that particular rule had been broken in the last fifteen years—she’d been present for all of them. There had been reasons, just as there were now. “I’m a Traveler, Regalis. I use Talent wherever I damn well please.” That was the kind of thing she couldn’t get away with saying anywhere else in the galaxy without terrifying the populace, but arrogance was expected in this room.

  Respected, even.

  He paused and looked off into a corner of the office, his eyes studying something far off in the distance no one else could see.

  She knew every one of the tricks the man in front of her used to inspire shock and awe—and obedience. He should know her well enough by now to dispense with the StarReader smoke and mirrors. “Out with it. We both know you have something left to say, and I don’t have a lot more patience.”

  It had taken her almost ten days to get here when his summons had arrived. She’d been out in the field monitoring the work of t
he newest batch of apprentice Fixers. Something her predecessor had never done, but it had been one of her top priorities right from the beginning. She’d spent the first year or two as Director getting Stardust Prime squared away, and then started the long process of mopping up the rest of the quadrant. Six years and that job wasn’t nearly done, which meant she didn’t have time for Regalis to play his games.

  Especially when there was a threat to what was hers.

  She would not touch her belly, even if death stalked what would one day grow there. Regalis had been very clear. The forces that would come were terrible ones. A threat not yet visible, not yet felt, not yet conceived—but seen in the stars. Regalis could not see the nature of the darkness, simply that it would come. And that it would bring with it annihilation.

  He turned his head back to hers. “We both know I owe you a favor, Yesenia.”

  He did. Of the largest possible dimensions. It terrified her that he referred to it now. She let not a molecule of that fear show on her face.

  His pause this time wasn’t smoke and mirrors—it was something she’d never seen before in this room, in this tower, on this planet.

  A StarReader caught in a moment of uncertainty.

  Regalis Marsden, grappling with doubt.

  Yesenia had visited eight timelines with skills most of the universe—past, present, and future—thought were impossible. She’d righted unthinkable wrongs, gently adjusted entire eras, ridden majestically into assignments so vast she couldn’t begin to comprehend their importance—all at the behest of the man in front of her.

  Not once had he ever hesitated.

  “There is one possible alternative.” His eyes were opaque. “If you do this, if you even consider it, you must leave the threads of time undisturbed. It is imperative.”

  The dread deepened. That wasn’t something he would say without very specific ideas of what she must do—and not do. “I’m listening.” She would make no promises—and she understood that she had made them anyhow simply by continuing to stand in this room.