Flotsam

by R J Theodore

  Dug’s eyelids lowered and he inhaled deeply. He looked intoxicated as he leaned toward the smaller woman who cupped his chin. But Meran looked to Hankirk.

  “As would he.”

  “Great,” Talis said. “That’s just great.” She took a step toward the bulkhead, waved a hand at it. “But we have two armadas headed for Nexus and they definitely both have plans to kill our remaining four gods. So can we leave off the subject of who wants to burn what for me, and get some answers?”

  “These are your answers,” Meran said.

  “Can you just—” Talis put the outstretched hand on her forehead, rubbed at the tension headache that was starting behind one eye. “Meran, I’m sorry, could you just excuse us for a bit?”

  “You do not wear the ring, yet you command me.”

  Talis looked up in time to catch sight of the realization that flitted across Hankirk’s face. Oh, hells.

  “You want me to put it on? Fine. Right after this.”

  “I would also burn the planet to dust for you.”

  “Absolutely! Let’s burn it all to flotsam. Brilliant plan. Right after this. Meran, please.”

  Meran gave her one last considering stare before she nodded. She looked back to Hankirk, whose eyes had locked on her again. Then she glided from the room, her bare feet silent against the floorboards.

  Dug’s expression sobered. He cleared his throat and stood firm again.

  Hankirk took a step back and resettled himself on his makeshift bench.

  Talis wished she had a chair. Her legs were engaged to run. Instead she turned to Hankirk.

  “Your people,” she said, beginning the sentence in a sighing exhalation, “they must know the aliens want to take over our world. Its resources.”

  Hankirk looked at her. Meran had laid his cards on the table, and now something shifted in his eyes. He adjusted his shoulders and his whole demeanor softened.

  “Come on, you rotted bastard, that puts them in direct competition with your precious Veritors.”

  “Or direct alignment,” he admitted. “It wouldn’t be the first alliance they formed to achieve short-term goals. They use Vein and Rakkar to help with their research, then execute them when the work is over. They’ll turn on the Yu’Nyun as soon as Onaya Bone and the others have been deposed.”

  “Turn on them with what? Cannons?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She believed him.

  “They’re going to get that pretty fleet sunk,” she said.

  “I’m sure they have a plan. But they didn’t share it with me.” He was fidgeting his hands in his lap, head bent to watch as he ran fingertips over the ends of his fingernails.

  “So Meran was right,” Talis said. Not unkindly. Just frustrated. “They really kept you in the dark.”

  “I was a hit at dinner parties,” he said with a shrug. “Fens Yarrow’s heir. Everyone wanted to be seen with me.”

  “And the rings?”

  “Lower on their priority list than mine. I had to beg for the ship to search for them.”

  Lovely. “Then what was their highest priority?”

  He looked at her. “Save Peridot.”

  She coughed a laugh. “Right. By attacking the gods who hold it together.”

  Dug put a hand on her shoulder. “He admitted he does not know anything. We have better things to do with the time before we reach Nexus.”

  Hankirk’s posture had turned to mud. His responses flippant. She could perhaps get answers from Meran or Scrimshaw. That thought did not ease the roiling in her stomach or the pain at her temple.

  She nodded to Dug. “Fair enough.”

  “Might want to put that ring on, Talis.”

  She graced Hankirk with one last scathing look, then turned her back on him and stalked off.

  “Should have killed him,” she said under her breath to Dug.

  “You still can.”

  She stayed silent. She’d already proven that she couldn’t.

  Chapter 34

  There was only one way to prepare herself for the conversation she knew she needed to have with Meran.

  So Talis went to the galley and shoveled coffee grinds into the percolator. Not the good stuff that had hints of nut and berry. The strong stuff. The cheap scrap they kept for backup.

  It was stale. She could smell that as she lifted the lid from the tin. It was acidic, and the scent that came off the pot as it brewed on the hob was a threat, not a promise.

  Talis drank it like a martyr. Black.

  Her stomach already protesting, she refilled the mug before leaving the galley.

  One step away from the exit, she realized she didn’t know where the simula had gone.

  She backed up to the intership mounted just inside the galley entrance.

  “Meran, if you would meet me in the great cabin, please,” she spoke into the horn. Her voice echoed back from the tinny pipes, small and thin. Gods, I sound tired.

  There was no answer, but she hadn’t expected one.

  As she approached the door to her cabin, she remembered with an exhausted sigh that she hadn’t been by to straighten up since they took their sudden ascent earlier. She took a breath to prepare herself and pulled the door open.

  Scrimshaw was waiting for her inside, sitting placidly at the table, surrounded by the chaotic spill of charts and equipment. Talis thanked the winds she’d steeled herself before entering. The alien placed xist hands on the table’s surface as if to push xist-self up when she opened the door, but she held out a hand and motioned that xe could remain seated.

  It wasn’t that she thought xe might still side with the Yu’Nyun. Xe’d done right by them back at Fall Island, at the cost of xist entire crew. The gray-blue scar that crossed xist torso from one shoulder to the opposite side of xist waist seemed as symbolic of xist intentions as any promise xe might offer.

  But xist sheer foreignness made it hard to trust her own instincts. Xe was difficult to read. Those dark eyes, that expressionless face. She was learning xist tells, but never one-hundred percent sure of what xe was thinking. Even though xe fidgeted or jumped when nervous, or twisted xist fingers when xe wanted to ask for something. Like xe did now.

  “Got something on your mind?” she asked, and began to straighten up.

  There were charts flung against the forward wall, which she stooped to retrieve as she entered. Aside from that, the cabin wasn’t as bad as it could have been, really. Chairs had tipped over, but with no notable damage. The lip on the table had caught her paperweights, and those had stopped her red and blue marking pencils from disappearing onto the floor. The parallel ruler had jumped the rail, though, and one of the chair backs had landed against it. She cursed herself five times a fool. The ruler’s metal arms had bent a little, but at least its joints hadn’t snapped. It could be bent back with the right tools and a good eye, but that wasn’t the point. A ship’s navigational tools were its lifeline, and no captain worth the wind in her sails neglected them so. If she needed confirmation of how badly rattled the recent events had made her, there it was.

  Scrimshaw traced the pattern of the inlay on the table with the tip of one finger. “I heard your summons of the simula,” xe said in xist accented murmur. “I felt it would be prudent to warn you about certain aspects of her nature.”

  Talis placed the ruler back in her desk drawer, where it ought to have been stowed in the first place, and frowned. “This the technological side of things, or something you learned in researching Peridot?”

  “Perhaps it is both.”

  The light from the windows along the aft wall was bright enough to turn the cabin green, though the view through it was entirely open sky. The edges were hazy, Nexus’s light so intense that it overpowered the brightness of distant stars. All Talis could see were the pinpricks of distant pumpkins.

&nbs
p; She had never been this close to Nexus. Setting aside respect for The Five’s privacy, it was physically uncomfortable to be here. Her head pounded. Her chest ached, clutched in the grip of some sadness that was not hers and was too big to comprehend.

  She closed the curtains against it. It was a useless act but somehow made her feel better.

  The pain was usually enough to keep Peridot’s denizens at a distance. There were no settled islands nearby, nothing that tempted a visit. And just to be thorough, The Divine Alchemists surrounded their home with the swirling waters of Peridot’s ocean, which teemed with aquatic creatures that could make short work of any ship that attempted to navigate on or break through the surface.

  She wound the knob on the wall and turned up the warm yellow cabin lights, then poured a touch of rum into her coffee. Seemed like both a good idea and a bad one, so she hoped that by only having a little she wouldn’t have to deal with too much of either consequence. The coffee certainly hadn’t done much except jangle her thoughts further. She sat down at the far end of the table from Scrimshaw so she could put her feet up on the chair between them. Maybe by forcing her body into a relaxed position, she thought, she might convince it to release the tension building up.

  “All right, go.” She took a small sip. Just enough for the tingle of rum to be felt on her tongue. She looked at xin and waited.

  “You are aware she is currently under the control of the ring.”

  One day Talis was planning on very happily never thinking about that damned ring again. “Yeah, she told us. I’ve got it, but I’m not wearing it. She seems to still be on her best behavior.”

  “It would be wise not to lose track of it.”

  She gestured around the room, indicating the disarray with her mug. “I haven’t lost it. It’s around here somewhere.” She leaned forward. “But tell me about her powers. She can destroy things—or heal them—on contact. Can she do it from a distance?”

  “Perhaps if the remaining rings were found and she was fully restored. For now, she is limited to what she can touch.”

  “You may ask me about my own limitations,” came Meran’s rich voice from the open doorway. Talis looked up, startled and not a little bit guilty.

  The simula’s bearing was regal. She stepped delicately over the threshold into the cabin as though she were exiting a gilded carriage. Talis noticed she was wearing an anklet of strung brass beads and absently wondered where she kept coming up with new accessories.

  “Thank you,” she said, instead. She was the captain, and this ship was her main concern. If she wanted to know what Meran was capable of, she shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Their safety might depend on it. Talis rose from the table and nodded toward the empty seat across from her. “Make yourself comfortable. I’m still picking up from earlier.”

  Meran’s eyes flashed. “You do not wear the ring.”

  “Make yourself comfortable,” repeated Talis, unable to keep the exasperation from her voice. She was exhausted, she knew. Taxed by the proximity to Nexus. Taxed by the whole rotted thing, really. “It was an invitation, not an order. By all means, if you’d rather not be comfortable, do whatever you like.”

  Meran hesitated a moment, looking almost unsure of herself. Lost. Then her dispassion returned, sweeping the illusion of vulnerability from her face. She crossed to the table, righted the indicated chair, and sat, pulling one foot up onto the seat with her. Still regal, despite the slouch of her shoulders and the foot on the furniture.

  “The restraint of the ring is troubling,” she said. It almost sounded contrite. If she was even capable of an apology. “Even unworn, I am sensitive to its control. I understand your words, but the phrasing makes me chafe beneath the yoke.”

  Talis wondered where Meran had ever seen a yoked ox to learn that metaphor.

  “So, your limitations?” Talis crossed beyond the arch which partitioned off her private alcove, to the desk centered in front of the wide window. Its surface was bare, having spilled its contents onto the ground.

  Meran looked pointedly at Scrimshaw. Talis almost expected her to ask the alien to leave, but instead the simula said, “I cannot read the aliens.”

  Recalling how Meran almost always seemed to know what Talis was thinking, what impulses she was fighting, Talis looked to Scrimshaw and asked, “Is it part of the ­simula’s program?”

  She used words like program with some vague notion of what that meant. Sophie had used it in passing, excitedly talking to Meran about how she moved from the ring into the body. Talis was grasping at straws.

  Scrimshaw’s mouth parted to answer, but Meran held out a silencing hand, answering for herself. “They are not from here and thus there is no Nexus within them. I am Nexus, and I can feel the same energy within others. See how it traces through their thoughts and follow it. The Yu’Nyun are blank to me.”

  “Xe’s not Yu’Nyun anymore,” Talis said, gathering the course-plotting tools and returning them to their cases. Put the pencils in her desk drawer. She noticed that the box where she had stowed the ring had slid off her desktop. It lay in the middle of the floor, on its side, open and empty. She cursed under her breath and began to look around the cabin floor for the pouch that had been inside it. Keeping her voice level, she said, “Xe told me that door closed when xe got the scar.”

  Scrimshaw turned to look at her with quiet eyes. Talis couldn’t fathom xist reasons for keeping that door shut when Meran offered xin a way back, but her instincts told her to accept it. Accept xin.

  “Xe will never be of this world,” Meran said, dismissive. “Whatever xe has become.”

  Scrimshaw stood from the table in a quick fluid motion and held xist chin aloft, proud. “You are as alien as I am.”

  Xe looked back to Talis for a moment and dipped xist head, then turned and exited the cabin. Xe had to duck so that the high arch of xist head could pass beneath the doorframe.

  “I think you hurt xist feelings,” Talis said to Meran. “But xe’s not wrong. You are strange, and I need to understand what you can do.”

  “This world is strange,” Meran said, an icy edge to the words. Everyone’s pride had taken a hit in the last few hours. “But it is built on the power that was stolen from me by those you would worship for the act.”

  “You’re as ancient as that ring.”

  “More so. Will you seek the others?”

  Talis leaned a hip against the side of her desk and crossed her arms. She had thought about the other four rings. It wouldn’t do to let anyone else get to them first, but the interested buyers didn’t hold much appeal to her any longer. For her and her crew there was little profit in pulling them from their hiding places. “Figured I’d wait and see how things go when we get to Nexus,” she said.

  Meran pursed her lips at that and looked disappointed. Which only reinforced Talis’s fear of what all five of those rings would make the woman capable of.

  “I called you in because I need advice,” Talis said, desperate to change the subject. “I realize you’re far from an unbiased opinion, but only you understand what it would mean if I put on that ring.”

  Meran inclined her head slightly, almost with curiosity. “You fear that if you take control of me, I will take control of you.”

  Talis felt the skin next to her nose twitch. That hadn’t been exactly how she imagined phrasing it, but Meran had the gist of it. She shrugged, as much an affirmation as false bravado.

  “It is a thing that has been owned before.” Meran held up a hand, fingers splayed, and rotated the wrist to look at the muscles moving beneath the skin.

  “I noticed a pattern. Doesn’t sound like anyone really survives the experience.”

  Meran curled her fingers into a fist. “One man covets what another man possesses. In my case, the ring brought much devastation, even though none managed to free me from its confinement.”

  Talis h
eld up the empty box where the ring had been before their unexpected altitude adjustment.

  “Not something I should be leaving out on my desk, then,” she said, by way of a confession.

  Meran rose from the table in a sudden movement, like a crouching predator flinging itself into motion. “Certainly not.”

  “All right, I know, that was a bad idea. Help me look. It’s in a pouch.”

  They searched for a while, mostly silent aside from Talis’s low grumbling. The great cabin was minimal in its furnishings, but there were still far too many items that a small object could be flung under or behind.

  “Tell me, Talis,” Meran said, interrupting a string of expletives that Talis was directing at the missing object. “Why do you choose not to wear the ring? You could trust me to follow your will implicitly so long as it touches your skin.”

  Meran searched the fore half of the cabin, where the heavy hardwood table was bolted to the floor beneath a rough-hewn chandelier.

  “I know that,” Talis began, and picked up the blanket and cushions that had slipped off her bunk, shaking them to be sure the ring hadn’t been gathered up within their folds. “How can I expect you to align yourself with me if I don’t trust myself to make the right choices for this ship? For Peridot?”

  Meran stalked across the floor, leaving no inch of the deck unexplored. Talis considered whether she ought to light more candles to help them see, or whether the soft blue glow of Meran’s tattoos was enough to search by. Then the woman made a small ah noise and crouched, disappearing beneath the table.

  Talis stopped what she was doing to rub the back of her neck and watch Meran. It occurred to her to wonder what an intact Meran would be like. This one went from royal haughtiness to crawling on her hands and knees under the furniture in a matter of minutes.

  The simula reappeared on the other side of the table, pushing a chair back to give her room to get up. She held the pouch by its cord, gripped lightly between her fingers.

  “You have a good instinct,” Meran said. “Possibly your intent—to rid this world of its foes—is enough.”