Blood Binds the Pack

by Alex Wells

  “I promise I shan’t lose it.” Shige thumbed a small shock sphere out of his cuff and into his palm.

  She snorted. “You’d best not even joke about it.” She reached to pop the card from her terminal.

  Shige flicked the little sphere at the tool box he’d once fetched for her. His aim was precise. The shock sphere struck the box square on and popped into dust, a harmless and nearly soundless concussion that was enough to knock the toolbox off the precarious perch he’d left it on during his last visit to her office. It plummeted off the cabinet and smashed loudly onto the floor.

  Dr Ekwensi jerked around as Shige moved to investigate, the picture of surprise. “Oh no, I think it might have broken…” he said, and bent as if to pick the contents up.

  “Let me see,” Dr Ekwensi said, brushing past him. Shige backed up out of her way, to stand by her terminal. After that, it was a trivial matter to replace the data card with his own, which pulled in all of the leached queries. He switched them back with a second and a half to spare as Dr Ekwensi straightened.

  “Is it all right?” he asked.

  “Nothing broken,” Dr Ekwensi said. “I would have been surprised, really. This equipment all has to survive close contact with fresh subjects. They tend to be hard on things.” She walked back over to the terminal and removed the data card so she could offer it to him. “A word of advice, Mr Rollins.”

  “Yes?” His fingers closed on the card, but she didn’t let it go.

  “You seem like a kind sort. I’m surprised you’ve gotten this far in the business side without having killer instinct.” She waved off his dissembling. “You’re going to be spending a great deal of time with Mr Yellow. Don’t make the mistake of thinking he likes you.”

  “Does he dislike me?” Shige asked.

  “Do you think a scalpel likes or dislikes you?” She let the card go, and he tucked it into his pocket. “All that matters is that you handle it with care.”

  He bowed to her. “Your concern is appreciated, Dr Ekwensi.”

  “If you make it back from the outpost, consider applying for a transfer to the lab. I hate to see reliable resources wasted.” She headed for the door, waving for him to follow. “Now, I believe you have a ship to catch.”

  The Kirin made a streamlined shape on the landing field, its skin reflecting the pink, purple, and deep blue of the final moments of sunset. The ship’s solar sails, there to bolster the more conventional engines with every bit of spare velocity possible, were stowed while it was on the surface.

  It was one of only three courier rift ships, and the newest of them. Most rift ships were ugly, massive drifters that moved slowly from rift point to rift point, and temporarily disassembled into still-enormous cargo landers. Shige doubted that the cargo landers were able to land and take off through normal means; the propulsion system designs were something he’d never been authorized to look at, but he assumed there was a healthy dose of proprietary, Tanegawa’s World-driven technology built into them. Ships like the Kirin and its sister, the Raiju, which had originally brought Shige to the planet, were built to be super-light and had conventional, if sophisticated engines. It meant no cargo carrying capacity, but they were intended purely to move personnel and messages as quickly as possible.

  Mr Yellow had been quiet during the entire drive out to the landing field, staring into a distant point of space that Shige couldn’t see. He found himself almost missing the odd, croaked mutterings of Mr Green; a silent Weatherman was a strange, ghostly creature.

  Once they set foot on the smooth surface of the landing field, Mr Yellow came alive. He stood straighter, his face turned toward the rift ship. His expression was the smile of someone who had never actually seen such an expression, instinctive rather than learned.

  “Are you ready to go to your new home?” Shige asked. The silence had started crawling along his spine, something he didn’t want to admit to himself.

  “We are ready,” Mr Yellow said.

  They made the short walk to the boarding ramp and up into the ship. The rift ship’s captain, Jiang, identifiable by the star-patterned tie tack she wore, waited for them at the top of the ramp. She offered Shige a polite smile and they shook hands before she ushered him and Mr Yellow – though she didn’t directly acknowledge his presence – into the ship.

  “Earth’s in a good position right now. We’ve been able to cut the in-system journeys to three weeks.”

  “Excellent.” Shige could appreciate that as an achievement, while simultaneously wincing at the length of even this fast transit. It would be another three weeks once they reached their destination, and that would give him only two weeks left to see that things were prepared for the inspector.

  “We’ve received orders that Mr Yellow is to pilot us through the rifts,” she continued.

  “I wasn’t aware of that,” Shige said. He would have thought that Dr Ekwensi would at least tell him.

  “It’s often good for them to have a shakedown flight. Very common. Our Weatherman, Mr Red, will be keeping a hand on the controls as well, so you needn’t worry. Mr Red has taken us successfully through fifty-seven rifts.”

  Shige raised an eyebrow. “Any unsuccessful?”

  Captain Jiang laughed, a rather hollow sound. “Unsuccessful rift transits don’t come back, sir.”

  Space and mass were both at a premium; as much as possible had been removed from the ship design, so corridors became open at odd intervals where only support struts were needed. Small cargo crates were lashed around the support struts, making partial walls, standing starkly against the ship’s otherwise soothing interior paint job of cool greens and pale creams. Captain Jiang led them to the engine room, where another Weatherman waited. He looked appreciably older than Mr Yellow; there were crow’s feet at the corners of his black-in-black eyes. In uneven patches, his dark brown skin had gone white, along with shocks of his tightly curled black hair, which had been shaved close to his skull. It took Shige a moment to remember the name of that condition as vitiligo, a disease that had been all but eliminated on Earth and its closest colonies.

  Captain Jiang caught his curious look and remarked, “I’ve been assured that’s a harmless effect of aging on the older Weatherman models. Some sort of unintended side effect. Newer models like your Mr Yellow ought not be affected.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an old Weatherman,” he said.

  “From my viewpoint, age is a sign of reliability,” Captain Jiang remarked. “That is why Mr Red has been entrusted with this ship.”

  Shige watched as the two Weathermen moved to stand together in front of the rift control nexus. It was just the tip of what made the heart of the ship, a crystalline core that glowed faintly green from within and looked like it had sprouted a multitude of glass fibers – the direct neural connections. Not quite touching these fibers, the two Weathermen leaned toward each other so their foreheads almost touched. They were utterly silent; he wasn’t certain if that was normal, since he’d never seen more than one Weatherman in the same place at the same time. Captain Jiang ignored them both.

  “We’ve a seat for you on the bridge. The view during take-off is excellent.” When Shige glanced at the Weathermen again, she said, “We no longer exist for them.”

  “Then I would be happy to appreciate the view,” Shige said.

  After they’d successfully exited Earth’s gravity well, Shige excused himself to his cramped cabin, a remarkable space on a ship where the only other person afforded true privacy was the captain herself. Two small cases that had seemed so modest in size when he packed them took up almost the entire free floor space. He opened the one with a security seal to reveal the thick packet of flimsies he was to take to Ms Meetchim, as well as the data card – and his own well-hidden equipment. The flimsies were an unheard-of thing for any other planet, but without reliable computers anywhere but the secure basement laboratories on Tanegawa’s World, the switch to old technology had been necessary.

  With painsta
king attention to detail, he read through the sheaf, sheet by sheet. First, he wanted to be familiar with every order and bit of information. Most of it concerned the mineral sample that had been sent back to the labs with him – now dubbed “amritite” by Corporate – and its possible applications. Ms Meetchim was ordered to immediately cease all other mining operations and focus on tracing the origin of the amritite vein and finding more deposits. More personnel would be sent on the next worker rift ship to take over the regular mining and farming operations, but this effort was the top priority. Shige saw opportunity in that; the miners and famers wouldn’t like the disruption to their routine, and he was in prime position to make things as rocky as possible.

  More importantly, there was a very specific piece of information he sought out. He found the first occurrence on the third page of the orders: BCRE labor inspector Liu Fei Xing will be arriving for a “surprise” inspection between one and four weeks after your receipt of this message.

  So much for Liu’s arrival being a surprise. Shige marked the place and kept reading. He noted every mention of the incoming inspector. His next task was to remove each one and seamlessly restructure the documents. That wouldn’t be challenging, just time-consuming. Unfortunately, there was nothing about the source of the information, though that was really Ayana’s problem and not his.

  Shige pulled a padded roll from the case, which contained a portable scanner and flimsy printer. It would be reduced to a mass of metallic polymers and fused circuits as soon as he landed on Tanegawa’s World, but it didn’t need to last beyond this project. A little more digging through the case and he found the roll of security fibers he’d liberated from TransRift Corporate storage before leaving. Humming quietly to himself, he rolled the scanner over the first page. He’d always been good at this sort of detail work; it fell in the same array of enhanced cognitive skills that had let him score perfectly on test after test all through his childhood. He recalled his results being laid side-by-side with Kazu’s older scores in their father’s office for consideration by the whole family. Ayana had always looked so triumphant, and as Shige had grown older, the fact had tainted his pride with severe discomfort, made worse by Kazu’s studied lack of any interest in the proceedings. It had been so easy to get praise from their parents; all he had to do was precisely what they asked, and Kazu had already lowered the bar precipitously.

  And, once again, Shige had succeeded where Kazu had failed, in that he still lived. He didn’t feel at all proud of himself now. However, he also didn’t need to feel at all good to get the job done. He’d learned that a long time ago.

  Shige had just begun his side-by-side comparison of the old documents and the fresh, altered copies when an urgent message came over the ship’s network from Captain Jiang.

  You aren’t disturbing me at all, Captain, Shige returned. How may I be of service? He hadn’t expected to hear anything at all from her until it was time to fully deploy the solar sails, another pretty sight that ship captains liked their passengers to exclaim over.

  Your Weatherman wishes to open the rift now.

  He wasn’t certain how he felt about Mr Yellow being listed among his possessions, but that was a very distant, secondary thought. We’re too near the gravity well, are we not?

  By hundreds of thousands of kilometers, Captain Jiang said. But he insists. And Mr Red agrees with him.

  It is your ship, Captain Jiang. She could tell the Weathermen “no” just as effectively as he could, if not more so because she had actual control of the engines.

  My orders from Corporate say that I’m to let Mr Yellow open the rift as soon as he feels ready. He’s your Weatherman. Perhaps you ought to point out to him what a foolish idea it would be.

  Shige considered all of his interactions with Mr Green. He’d done a little cajoling, but never truly convinced him of anything. He also didn’t particularly want to die in some sort of experimental rift accident; he had too much still to do. I’ll make the attempt.

  He set his work aside and hurried down to the engine room, where the Weathermen still stood together. An engineer had been added to the mix, attending to the in-system engines. It made for a tightly packed room.

  Shige addressed the Weathermen: “Mr Yellow. You’ve caused the captain no small amount of concern. We’re too close to Earth still.”

  “We see it,” Mr Yellow said. “We feel it. It is close enough for us to touch.”

  That wasn’t a terribly comforting statement. “Yes, Earth is still very close,” Shige tried again.

  Mr Yellow shook his head. “We speak of home.” He stepped back from Mr Red and approached Shige, who fixed his eyes on Mr Yellow’s left earlobe. From the corner of his eye, he saw Mr Yellow’s thin fingers, then felt them on his face, dry as spiders.

  Shige swallowed, his throat suddenly very thick. He maintained a calm tone through sheer force of will. Nothing good had ever come of a Weatherman being this close to him. “Yes, Mr Yellow?”

  “You know us,” Mr Yellow whispered, and there was that music in his voice, somehow. Not quite singsong, but it echoed in Shige’s body and he swayed slightly, toward the Weatherman, before he caught himself. “And through you, we hear our home. You know us.”

  Shige felt oddly distant, as if he stood outside his own body. He considered that traveling the rift now would mean arriving at Tanegawa’s World several weeks early, which would do his mission no end of good. And yet the logic of it felt like thin paper being wrapped over a conclusion he had already made and didn’t recall making.

  “We will help you,” Mr Yellow whispered, and stepped away.

  “Our orders are clear,” Shige said. We will proceed, Captain Jiang. Prepare for rift transit.

  In front of him, Mr Yellow stepped into the rift control nexus. The filaments quaked around him and came alive, brushing against his skin like cilia before sinking in. Around them, the ship shuddered.

  “Shit.” The engineer slapped one of the controls on his panel. A klaxon sounded through the ship. “Emergency shutoff on the network!” He turned his horrified gaze to Shige. “You just fucking killed us.”

  The emergency shutoff was like suddenly losing one of his senses. The absence hit Shige like a blow, and he staggered. He caught himself on the edge of one of the panels and glanced wildly up. Perhaps that disorientation was why he did the one thing he knew to never do: he met Mr Yellow’s eyes.

  And fell

  into the black-on-black depths, the space between stars, the color-noncolor that was the rift, the place where all things and no things existed at once. There was no sound, and all sound, and music that tore his marrow down to its individual atoms and boiled his blood. He couldn’t move, couldn’t do more than gasp for breath and try to hold on to the simplicity of his name as possibility tore at him. There were other Shiges, infinite ones, ones that had come screaming and wet into the world from between their mothers’ legs rather than slipping from a silvery, impersonal tube. There were other Shiges that smiled with blood on their teeth, that wore the blue TransRift suit without irony, that raced across dunes with their brother and called themselves Samedi and drank whiskey straight from the bottle, and they all tore through his skin, fighting to be free.

  He felt Mr Yellow sink his invisible talons into the fabric of the universe and part it between his hands. Light that was taste and color and sound flowed from the scars around Mr Yellow’s face, hanging in the air like a bell-tone, a soft counterpoint coming from Mr Red. Mr Yellow stirred all of those possibilities, the infinite timelines and points of space, and selected one point, one moment, one life, one song.

  He felt the universe shift around them, slide, and it was something no one could know and remain sane, because no person should feel the fabric of reality unwinding to threads in their hands.

  Distantly, Shige felt his knees slam into the floor, his chin hitting the panel with a sharp crack.

  Suddenly Mr Yellow’s eyes were just eyes. The ship was solid around them all again. And
slowly, Shige became aware not of music, but the klaxon, and the engineer retching against the deck plates. His chin and tongue throbbed in time with his too-fast heartbeat. Blood filled his mouth.

  “Status report,” Captain Jiang demanded over the audible intercom. “Status report, engineering.”

  Since the engineer seemed unlikely to recover in the next few seconds, Shige felt for the intercom with a shaking hand and triggered it. His words came out clumsy around a swollen tongue. “All right down here, captain. Is all well on the bridge?”

  “You son of a bitch,” Captain Jiang shouted. There was a pause, then she continued in a more reasonable tone: “We have arrived in Tanegawa’s World local space.”

  Both of these things were impossible, Shige knew. Rifts could not be opened so close to the gravity well of the planet. That had been a hard-learned, early lesson for the company. And yet. He looked up at Mr Yellow, staring at his chin at the last moment. He didn’t want to fall into those eyes again.

  Mr Yellow’s thin, colorless lips curved into a smile.

  Chapter Twelve

  52 Days

  “Come on. I’m serious,” Coyote said.

  “I know you’re serious,” Hob said, eyeing him. He’d popped into her office, like he had so often before he’d gone missing. It felt eerily right and wrong at the same time. This was the best he’d looked in the two weeks since they’d hauled him out of the desert, which wasn’t saying a hell of a lot. He was still stick-thin, and while his eyes had their old focus back, there was a hectic gleam to them that she really didn’t like. “Don’t make it any less goddamn stupid.”