Best of Beyond the Stars

by Patrice Fitzgerald

  The girl was running.

  She bounded to the nearest deck transport and slammed into the control, cracking the plastic the symbol was made from. She was breathing so hard she was nearly hyperventilating. “Don’t get your hopes up, Pio. We’ve been disappointed before, but I’ve got an idea!” Her mental voice was euphoric.

  Ei’Pio followed Carindi, inside and outside of her mind. Through cameras as well as the girl’s eyes, she watched the teenager bounding from place to place on the engineering deck, gathering tools.

  The girl’s momentum never stopped. Her energy had been renewed. She opened one of many engineering bays and slid the mechanicals out as far as they would go, then stuck an arm in behind them, up to her shoulder. She began to wiggle and push, grunting and straining.

  Ei’Pio asked her repeatedly for more information but was met with silence. Carindi’s attention was focused elsewhere.

  Abruptly, the girl raged, “I cannot believe this. What if all the engineers on the ship had sectilian body types and there were no atellan engineers aboard? Then what would they do if they needed to get in there?”

  “Get in where?” Ei’Pio begged.

  “I’ve found it, damn them,” Carindi spat. “The control panel for the yoke. But I can’t fit in there with the suit. Only an exceedingly thin atellan could fit.”

  The young woman paced up and down that small section of the engineering compartment. Ei’Pio could feel her mind buzzing with conflicting thoughts and ideas. It was impossible to keep up. The girl was forming a conclusion, but keeping Ei’Pio at the surface of her thoughts so she couldn’t see what it was.

  Ei’Pio began to feel an overwhelming sense of dread. “Slow down, Carindi. Let’s work through this. We’ll do it together. There has to be a way.”

  “I can’t slow down, Pio. You know I can’t.”

  Ei’Pio commanded the camera she’d accessed to zoom in on the girl. She watched Carindi pace and flail her arms around. She searched for something reassuring to say.

  The girl stopped her pacing.

  “I always knew this day would come,” Carindi said softly. Her voice was unsteady. Then she sounded more certain. “Helmet retract.”

  Ei’Pio contracted into a ball, crying, “No, Carindi!”

  But it was too late.

  The helmet was slipping back into the shoulders of the suit, revealing a mass of matted hair curling around Carindi’s head and neck. The skin on the girl’s face was so pale as to be nearly translucent, stretched tight over the bony prominences of her cheeks. Her eyes were large and brown and luminous.

  Carindi smiled at the camera through which, she knew, Ei’Pio was watching. “I’ll be fine. It’s just a few minutes. I’ll put it right back on.”

  Ei’Pio watched in horror as the front of the suit split open and fell away from the skeletal shoulders of a teenage girl only three quarters of the size she should have been, had she been free to eat, exercise, and grow normally.

  Carindi stepped out of the suit and staggered, falling to her knees, catching herself with her hands on the mechanicals. She stifled a cry of pain, then said, “I don’t seem to have much in the way of muscle mass.”

  Ei’Pio quickly moved to adjust the gravity to something Carindi could tolerate, all the while begging the child to put the suit back on immediately.

  Her pleas were ignored.

  Carindi pushed her tools into the tiny crevice and eased herself in after them. The camera picked up the sounds of power tools, clattering metal and plastic, and the girl grunting with effort, but all Ei’Pio could see were two impossibly fragile alabaster legs sticking out into the room. Carindi’s thoughts were doggedly full of electronics‌—‌circuits, relays, networks, and arrays.

  “This. Is it. I’ve done it!” Carindi crowed. “Move the ship, Pio, with my blessing.”

  “First the suit,” Ei’Pio insisted.

  Carindi’s mental voice ground hard. “Move it. I want to feel it move. Now.”

  “You won’t feel anything. Inertial dampening fields‌—‌”

  “Now, Pio,” the girl commanded.

  But Ei’Pio was motionless. She couldn’t take her eyes from her girl.

  Carindi eased out of the tiny compartment and slumped against the housing. Streaks of dark blood ran down from her narrow nose over her pale grey lips. Her eyes were bloodshot and brimming with tears. She coughed weakly.

  “Carindi, my dear one... please.” She couldn’t say more. Her mind had turned to black static. Her limbs were cold and numb.

  The girl struggled toward the disarticulated suit on hands and knees. When she reached it, she sprawled forward against it, panting. She leaned her head against the suit and turned her face to the camera, chin tucked low. “I was never meant to live, but you were, Pio. You are my dear subidia, my surrogate mother. I want you to live free.”

  Ei’Pio’s limbs shook violently with emotion. She whispered, “What am I without you?”

  “You are free. Free... to find your own way.”

  Those were the last thoughts of the girl, Machinutorus Carindi Palset Teruvah.

  Her beloved Pio was alone again.

  A Word from Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Carindi was conceived as a side story in my Confluence series universe. With this short I wanted to explore what happened to some of the other stranded kuboderan navigators after the sectilian plague that I described in my first novel, Fluency. I began with a thought: what if someone survived along with the navigator? From there, this sad story of found family and self-sacrifice took on a life of its own.

  I fell in love with Pio as I wrote this. I needed to explore her character more, so she became critical to Remanence, Book 2 of Confluence and was featured even more prominently in Valence, Book 4.

  I live in Pennsylvania with two boisterous boys, the geekiest literature professor on the planet, three semi-crazed cats, and a five pound pekingese mix that licks noses and steals hearts. I am an author of the space opera variety. My second novel, Remanence, was nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards of 2016.

  To learn more about me and the next books, visit www.jenthulhu.com

  The Immortals: Anchorage

  by David Adams

  Monsters don’t sleep

  under your bed.

  They scream forever

  inside your head.

  ‌—‌ Extract from ‘A Dance of Dreams and Nightmares’, an Uynovian poem

  Anchorage

  DT-Y 44 Transport Lahore

  Deep space

  0025

  January 1st

  2231 AD

  “HAPPY NEW YEAR, Caddy,” said Golovanov as he threw a dossier on my chest, the feeling jolting me awake. “Here’s your present.”

  It took me a second to process all of this. I sat up in my bunk, shielding my eyes with my prosthetic hand, squinting in the harsh glare of the Lahore’s overhead lights. I sent my implants a mental command to dim the lights and the ship mercifully complied, dropping the illumination down to a manageable level.

  “Wait,” I said, swinging my legs over the side of the bunk and opening the steel-grey dossier. “We got a job?” The screen lit up, showing a bunch of writing and ship schematics.

  “Yup,” said Golovanov. “The Synapse Foundation is putting us in the field. You’ll like this one: it’s gas.”

  I brought the lights back up as my eyes adjusted. Seemed like all we did every day was train. Adjust to the Immortal Armour. Working in a team with the other Immortals. Fire drills.

  I skimmed over the documents, absorbing as much as I could as we spoke. Something about a ship in distress. “What’s the deal?”

  “The Anchorage,” Golovanov said. “A DT-Y 44 just like this one. Passenger liner. It went silent about three days ago and has been drifting through Polema’s space since. Not responding to hails. Long range scans show low power and thermal signatures, but spectrographic analysis suggests there’s at least some atmosphere left. So we get to take a look-see.
”

  Any excitement I had at the potential for action slowly faded. “A bunch of civilians bought it out in the black? This is a job for the Coast Guard.”

  “It is, and they’re contracting it out to us.”

  “What a beating,” I said, and considered a moment. That was very odd. The Polema Coast Guard‌—‌named for their nautical forbearers‌—‌were tasked with sorting out this kind of garbage. “Wait, why the hell would they do that? The Coast Guard is one of the best funded agencies in the colonies. Why do they need us?”

  Golovanov sat at the edge of my bed. “Maybe you should save your questions until you finish reading,” he said.

  “Reading is for nerds,” I said. I switched off the dossier with a mental command. “So. Are we mercenaries now?”

  “Eh.” He shrugged. “I prefer to use the term Private Third-Party Offshore Conflict Resolution Engineers. You can tell how fancy it is by how many words it has.”

  “So, mercenaries.”

  “There’s no money in integrity. You got a problem with that?”

  “Naw,” I said. “Like they say on Eris, money doesn’t buy happiness, but poverty doesn’t buy anything. If we’re here to do dodgy stuff, and we’re going to make a buck doing it, that’s fine by me.” I stretched out my arms. “But I thought we were supposed to be tracking down and recovering Earthborn technology. Who cares about some civvie freighter?”

  “The Coast Guard suspects,” said Golovanov, “that the Anchorage was attacked by Earthborn raiders.”

  Well. That would explain a lot of things. “Why not call in the Colonial fleet?” I asked. “If the Earthborn are pushing up into our space, we should hit them hard. Another Reclamation would be...” I didn’t even want to think about it.

  “Money talks, but wealth whispers.” Golovanov’s eyes met mine. “Polema wants to avoid making waves‌—‌their economy is only just beginning to recover from the Reclamation. If the Earthborn really did hit the Anchorage, this might be just an isolated incident. You know, some renegades blowing off steam, or maybe a bunch of clones went rogue. Not an organised attack.”

  My thoughts went to the same place. “And if that’s true, and Polema raises the alarm, and it all turns out to be nothing, they’ll lose tens of trillions of creds. They want this whole mess to be taken care of quietly.”

  “Right,” he said. “A few hundred civvies die, but the rich get richer and that’s the important thing.”

  It was as it always was. “The Prophets Wept.”

  “It’s not all bad,” said Golovanov. “This is a gas opportunity for us, too. If the Earthborn really did hit the Anchorage, they probably left stuff behind. Stuff we could use.”

  “Right,” I said, standing and stretching out my cramping legs. “Whatever. It’s gotta be better than more drills.”

  * * *

  I splashed some water on my face and adjusted my chrono implant. It began feeding my body chemicals to suppress drowsiness. By the time I left my quarters, I felt like I’d slept for a year then chugged ten cups of coffee.

  Almost. Synthetic sleep was never the same; it was too perfect, too fake, as though some part of my brain were silently screaming in protest. They said it was bad for you.

  But so was falling asleep during a firefight.

  My suit of Immortal Armour was waiting in the cargo hold, an empty space at the rear of the ship. The Synapse Foundation had converted the area to a hangar. My armour, like the others, hung suspended from the ceiling by thick cables, a ten foot tall ape-like monster, boxy and metal. A caged hunter begging to be unleashed.

  “Caddy,” said Angel, from behind her suit, one of the seven others. She seemed to be in a particularly bad mood. “You’re late.”

  “Came as fast as I could,” I said. “How far out are we?”

  “Six hours,” said Angel, stepping into view‌—‌shaved hair, muscled frame and all‌—‌and reached into the suit’s cockpit. She pulled something out that sparked before it went silent. “The Anchorage should be coming up on external sensors momentarily. Golovanov said he’d pipe the feed down here. AI, let me know when we have eyes on it.”

  “Of course,” said the voice from her machine. Genderless. Empty.

  I didn’t know how I felt about Angel. We’d been training together for months now. Things had been very professional. We hadn’t bonded properly yet; the Immortals and I. Angel least of all.

  She was from a world called Uynov. They called themselves The First to Suffer. Uynov had been trashed by the Earthborn during the Reclamation; their bio-weapons turned it from a watery paradise to a shit-hole full of toxins and quarantined areas. Most Uynovians lived in space these days and they tended to be broody and aloof.

  There didn’t seem to be anything Angel loved more than weapons drills, or practising endlessly with her armour. Angel might as well be a robot, an observation compounded by her heavy cybernetic augmentation. Prosthetics jutted from almost all parts of her flesh, blunt chrome slivers. Her face was hard, hair shaved, skin rough as cracked desert earth. She couldn’t have been older than twenty five but looked in her forties.

  She was the first Uynovian I’d ever met. I wasn’t sure what I expected. But, you know, a smile occasionally wouldn’t go amiss.

  “Hey Caddy,” said Stanco, clapping me on the shoulder from behind. “You ready to do this?”

  I also didn’t know how I felt about Maddisynne Stanco. He was built like a bull with biceps like fire hydrants. Fun fact: he was also born a she. A trans-man. Not that there was anything wrong with that.

  Although we were all supposed to be enlightened these days, and we’d been taught to accept trans people for what they wanted to be, I couldn’t. I tried. I knew it wasn’t right‌—‌if someone wanted to identify as an eggplant or something, why couldn’t they?‌—‌but, sometimes, I couldn’t look past the parts of Stanco’s facial structure that were effeminate. The way he sometimes looked at me or others.

  Eris, my home, was very traditional. Osmeon, Stanco’s world, was viewed by most Erisians as decadent and hedonistic. Of course, they saw us as uptight, bigoted prudes.

  But now, at the end of the day, we were all in this together. They had to accept us, and we had to accept them.

  I was trying.

  “Yeah buddy,” I said, trying to smile my best. “Our first real mission, huh?”

  Stanco leaned up against Angel’s suit, folding his big hands behind his head. “Fuck yeah. It’s going to be gas, my friend.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, and I took a few steps to my suit.

  Tall and strong, a mirror of the others, a hunchback made of steel.

  “Morning Caddy,” said the suit’s AI, smooth and feminine. I had named her Sandy, after Sandhya, a woman I’d fought alongside during the Reclamation.

  I probably shouldn’t have done that. Sandhya hadn’t come home. We’d been close: we shared ammo magazines, tactical info, and far too often, a bedroll.

  I probably shouldn’t have done that either. I had been married to Valérie at the time. Valérie, who had stood by me after I’d been wounded. Valérie, who’d been endlessly understanding, endlessly loving, endlessly patient.

  Almost endlessly. We were divorced now. I hadn’t seen her in years.

  “Morning Sandy,” I said. “How’s your diagnostic coming?”

  “Coming along nicely,” she said. “I think I’ve narrowed down the stability issue; the gyros weren’t aligned correctly. It shouldn’t happen again.”

  That was gas. The suits were new technology‌—‌not only were they inherently unstable, to give us better manoeuvrability, they required an AI to operate. We were the guinea pigs, working out the kinks.

  I wanted to ask Sandy more about exactly how she was fixing this complex problem in software, but Golovanov stepped into the hangar and everyone fell silent.

  “Immortals,” he said, casually folding his hands behind his back. Just like the old days.

  “Ho,” we said in chorus. Only Ang
el, Stanco and I were here. We had eight suits. Where was everyone else? Nobody seemed concerned. Maybe I should actually read the mission briefings in future.

  Golovanov’s eyes flicked to me, then he addressed the group. “We’re coming up on the Anchorage,” he said. “Should have eyes in a few minutes. Based on the large amount of debris, it’s starting to look like someone did, in fact, attack the ship.”

  “Cunts,” spat Angel. “Of course the Earthborn would prey on civilians.”

  “Any information from the distress beacon?” I asked. “Maybe they mentioned who was attacking them.”

  “It’s just an automated beacon.” Golovanov narrowed his eyes. “So if it was the Earthborn, they struck fast.”

  That was their MO.

  “Deployment is three suits,” said Golovanov. “That’s you guys. The rest of the Immortals will cover you. Float over from the Lahore, get inside the ship, find what you can. Take some emergency bulkheads in case you need to secure an area and dismount, but have someone maintain overwatch. Deployment is with standard layouts for Angel and Caddy, Stanco as fire support with the assault gun.”

  Standard layout was an autocannon, grenade launcher, and flamethrower. “Fire support on a boarding mission, sir? Don’t you think that assault guns are kind of overkill?”

  “Hell no,” said Stanco. “Automatic weapons are the most casualty producing weapon in the fire team. It’s more than simply fire support and suppression.” His face lit up in a wide, cheesy grin. “Plus they’re fucking rad. I feel like a god when I spin that thing up.”

  “Deific posturing aside,” said Golovanov, “we have no idea what’s going on aboard that ship, and if the Earthborn are aboard, we want a firepower advantage. Even if it’s in close quarters.”