The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Callie spun herself into the right orientation as she came through the door and got her feet locked onto the “floor.” Warwick was completely bald, without even eyebrows, and had a tattoo that resembled a labyrinth on her scalp. The tattoo was stark white against her very dark skin, and Callie knew that in the darkness the lines glowed like phosphorous, unless Warwick didn’t want them to. The security chief was working at a standing desk, flipping through screens of info on two different tablets. “I hear you brought an undocumented refugee onto my station,” Warwick said without looking up.

  “She’s plenty documented. Present in the historical record and everything. She was on a goldilocks ship in cryosleep. The crew’s xenobiologist.”

  “A xenobiologist from a time before we met aliens, which is a little like being a mechanic before we invented steam engines. Is she planning on staying on my station?”

  “We’re probably taking her to the Imperative. Ganymede maybe. More opportunities for her there. She hasn’t decided what she wants to do yet.” Callie shrugged. “I gather it’s a little disorienting.”

  Warwick shook her head. “Her goldilocks ship never even made it out of the system, huh? That’s a tough break. Like if Magellan’s ship had sunk right off the coast of Seville instead of circumnavigating the Earth. This Doctor Oh was the only survivor?”

  “We didn’t find anyone alive in the other pods, no.” Warwick was good at spotting lies, so Callie stuck with the technically true. She wasn’t about to share Elena’s whole harrowing tale. Warwick was a professional, and Callie liked her, but the chief’s loyalty to the TNA was absolute, and if she knew about the bridge generator, she’d find some quasi-legal pretext to seize the device. (Quasi-legal pretexts were easier to come by when the CEO and board members who drafted the local laws were just a hundred and fifty floors away.)

  Warwick nodded. “Those ancient ships, it’s amazing there was even one survivor. She’ll get invited to a lot of parties in the Imperative, though. They love a living conversation piece.” She glanced up from the tablet. “There, we small talked. Bonds of friendship once again reaffirmed, and I didn’t even get a hangover like last time. What can I do for you, Callie?”

  “I’ve run back and forth to the Imperative so many times I’m dizzy, and salvage has lost its appeal. I want to go hunting.”

  Warwick chuckled. “Oh? You thought you found a nice juicy wreck to liquidate, only to find a survivor with a legitimate claim on board, so you’re stuck with a lousy percentage? I can see how that would be a little demoralizing.”

  “I’m totally demoralized. I want to go demoralize someone else. With guns.”

  “Hmm, well, there’s a smuggler running Liar tech from their outpost on Iukkoth past us and on through the Jovian bridge. They’ve got a wicked fast little ship and some kind of masking technology they appropriated from the Liars, but the Raven is probably a match for them.”

  “Mmm, no. My mood is less chasing, more laying waste. I want to go after Glauketas.”

  Warwick pushed her tablets away, paying full attention now. “Are you sure? You’ve always said no to that mission before. I believe the words ‘suicide mission’ and ‘do I look stupid to you?’ usually come up.”

  Glauketas was a fat pear-shaped asteroid that drifted in the blurry disputed area between Jovian Imperative and TNA territory. There were rumors, never confirmed, that the Imperative offered the pirates at least passive protection, and it was incontrovertible fact that the thieves hit TNA targets more often than Jovian ones. The TNA was reluctant to send a formal military force to take out Glauketas for fear of triggering a Jovian reprisal – moving a bunch of warships close to another polity’s space tended to produce a negative reaction. The pirates knew that, and took full advantage of their position. There was a bounty for the capture of the pirates, though, and if a crew like the White Raven, which did security work on a contract basis, wanted to try to collect that bounty, well: that was different.

  “I always said no before because the White Raven is too pretty to risk getting blown up trying to take out a hardened base. But I heard a rumor you got your hands on some new armaments and defensive systems that could make an attack a lot more lopsided in our favor.”

  Warwick sighed. “My engineers talked to Ashok, didn’t they? Why do engineers always talk to each other? So. You just want to play with my new toys.”

  “I want to do my duty and help the Trans-Neptunian Authority promote peace and prosperity and safe shipping lanes. And to play with your new toys. Ashok said there’s some fancy stealth tech? Or shields? He wasn’t clear on the details.”

  “Good. Maybe my engineers have some sense of discretion. No, it’s not really stealth, or shields either. It’s more like displacement technology. Countermeasures. Basically the enemy sensors get baffled and think you’re several degrees away from your actual position. Radiation signatures, engine exhaust, sonar, it tricks everything. So when the enemy fires, their missiles blow right past you. The technology even affects direct visual observation.”

  “How? I can see tricking sensors, but how do you trick an eye?”

  “Remember that R-and-D boondoggle you were part of, with the active camouflage?”

  Callie nodded. She still owned the only working prototype suit from that project, because it had been custom made to fit her. “Sure. But it was too expensive to put on a space suit, how is it cost-effective to put it on a ship?”

  Warwick shrugged. “Ask the Liars we bought it from. They miniaturized, they mass-produced, they figured out how to make a fabricator spit the components out without breaking half of them in the process. Who knows? We cover your ship with little cameras and projectors the size of pinheads, totally unobtrusive, and they can project an image of your ship elsewhere, while making your actual shape invisible.”

  “You’re getting me excited, Warwick. How about guns? There are also guns?”

  “Various new and interesting guns, yes. For a non-violent species, the Liars sure do a lot of interesting things with antimatter and sound waves and focused light. I can send you the specs for available weaponry, if I decide to give you this commission.”

  “I thought the commission was mine for the asking?”

  Warwick rubbed a hand across the maze on her skull. “Yes, but that was before you asked to borrow my new ordnance. We were going to do a lot of testing, to see if we wanted to invest in upgrades for the main security force. Sending you out there is tempting, though. Glauketas has been trouble for a long time. Plus, taking over their base would be nice – give that asteroid a little push more firmly into our space, and it would make an excellent border outpost…”

  Callie watched the calculations in her eyes. No matter how well armed, there was a chance the Raven might be captured or destroyed, and maybe the new weaponry was too valuable to risk falling into the hands of pirates. There was clearly a complex cost-benefit analysis going on. After a moment Warwick nodded. “All right. I’ll have your ship outfitted. I’m going to fit the new equipment with failsafes, though, so your computer can decommission them completely if the Raven gets captured. No way I’m letting pirates get their hands on this kind of materiel.” She sighed. “Until they can afford to buy it from the Liars themselves, anyway. All the equipment comes back to me when you’re done, too, understood?”

  “Like I want your guns ruining my ship’s beautiful silhouette forever. Can you make it happen with a quickness? It’s a bit of a trip out to Glauketas, and Stephen has a religious festival coming up.”

  “The Church of the Ecstatic Divine, right? My wife’s mother joined that a few years ago. I don’t like to picture it.” She shook it off. “I’ll put a rush on the order. Everything is slower today with the mass Liar defection, but I’ll prioritize.”

  “Do you, ah, have any idea why the Liars are taking off?” She was keenly aware it was all her fault, and pretty sure Warwick didn’t know it, but she wanted to hear what the security chief’s working theory was.

  Warw
ick jabbed at a tablet with her fingertip. “I have no idea. There aren’t any aliens left on the station to ask, not a single one, and it’s not like the answers would mean much anyway.” She shrugged. “I’m just trying to keep everyone calm. They’re acting like the Liars leaving is an early warning system or something. There’s a rumor going around that the Liars got wind of some threat and scampered off to avoid it, but as far as we can tell there’s nothing to worry about within range of our sensors, and no bad news from any of the outlying bases. Even so, we’ve seen a twenty percent increase in departures among the human population. Not many of the permanent residents are leaving, at least. When the station doesn’t explode into fine dust over the next couple of days, or spontaneously melt into nano-goo, I’m sure things will get back to normal.” There was an edge to her voice. Callie suspected the TNA was scanning the area around them very carefully for potential threats, and putting out feelers to all their informants and spies in organizations friendly and otherwise throughout the system. She thought of their canoe, floating out in the black some distance away with an alien artifact at its heart, and was glad she’d gotten it off the station, just in case.

  “So you don’t think there’s a threat?” she said.

  Warwick looked toward the ceiling, as if pondering. “Between you and me? I’m concerned. Not outright anxious, but concerned. I haven’t seen any intelligence reports with troubling information, and I don’t know where a serious threat would even come from. We’ve been getting along well with Jupiter, and nobody else who wields any power is even out here on the edge of things. This is where people come to get away from trouble. That said… I’ve called in all the roving security patrols to the station, and I’ve got them combing over the Liar quarters, looking for anything suspicious.”

  “Are they finding much?”

  Warwick snorted. “All manner of contraband, sure. You know Liars. They don’t really believe in laws. But there are no bombs, no manifestos, no secret invasion plans, no dark prophecies.” She waved her hand. “But we’re still looking, so, go. I have work to do.”

  “Thanks, chief. I bet it’s just, you know, Liar things. Some weird alien emotional weather.” She wanted to put Warwick’s mind at ease, but she could hardly do that definitively without revealing her possession of potentially system-changing technology to a TNA officer, and she didn’t feel that guilty. “We’ll get armed up, pop over to Ganymede to drop off our refugee, and then see what we can do about Glauketas.”

  “Don’t die. I’d be devastated to lose all my new weapons.”

  Chapter Ten

  “A bar is a bar is a bar,” Elena muttered, stepping into the Spinward Lounge. This was supposed to be an expedition for street food, but the sudden craving for a drink, and even more importantly, for quiet and isolation, seized her and wouldn’t let go.

  “They had bars in Shakespeare’s day, and your day, and ours,” Shall agreed in her earpiece.

  The Spinward Lounge was dim, an open space filled with tables and chairs and little arched nooks and crannies holding booths and couches; some of the nooks were screened off with curtains. The lounge was sparsely occupied, and that was very appealing. The station corridors were crowded with people, some so physically modified Elena only knew they were human because she’d been told Liars were the only aliens, and there weren’t any of those on the station at the moment. She’d known people who were transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and more in her time, but the accepted range of human variation had clearly continued expanding.

  She’d hugged the station walls, staying out of the bustling flow, cursing herself for her cowardice, until she finally decided she was no more confused than a citizen of 1700s Italy would have been if they’d gone into, say, a twenty-second century San Francisco sex club. Of course she was overwhelmed. She’d expected to finish out her days, best-case scenario, on a colony world populated by her crewmates and infants birthed from incubators. This profusion of people, and the overall strangeness of the situation, against the backdrop of her ongoing anxiety, was simply too much for her.

  She wanted to retreat to her cabin on the White Raven, but she refused to be defeated. She was going back into space, and soon, and might not return here; she might not even survive. She intended to partake in a little of the works of modern humanity before she flitted back into the void. She’d never expected to see a bar again, after all, and once upon a time, she’d loved them.

  She was glad it was a quiet and nearly empty bar, though.

  “I don’t have any money, so I’ll have to flirt for drinks, I guess. It’s been a while. I hope social mores haven’t changed so much that I accidentally propose marriage or provoke a duel.”

  “Marriage is considered a bit old-fashioned, at least out here on the edge of the system. There are contractual relationships of various sorts, but you won’t enter into one of those accidentally. Usually legal AIs get involved. I’ll pay for your drinks, though, don’t worry. I have more lix than I know what to do with. Just order and they’ll charge through your tablet.”

  Elena went to the bar, tended by a human with a spiky haircut and a vest that looked like leather over her otherwise bare chest, where glowing abstract tattoos writhed in her cleavage. “Drinkies?” she said.

  “Please. I haven’t had a drink in about five hundred years.”

  “Some catching up to do then.” The bartender smiled, showing off teeth that gleamed with metallic hues, and a flash of blue tongue.

  Elena didn’t react to the colorful smile. If she could avoid looking like a bumpkin, she would. She recognized almost none of the bottles behind the bar, and many of them were unmarked anyway. Homemade, or bespoke, or merely ornamental? “What do you recommend?”

  “You like sweet or sour or something with a bite?”

  “Why not all three?”

  “I’ll make you a special special.” The bartender deftly snatched bottles and poured her selections directly into an oversized martini glass, where they formed distinct layers, like a parfait. The bottom level was pale green, the second deep red, and the top rich black. She rubbed the rim with the peel of some citrus fruit Elena didn’t recognize, then sprinkled one side of the rim with sugar and the other with flecks of something reddish and crystalline. “It’s called a ziggurat, invented by me myself in the icy nowheres, to keep you warm where it counts.”

  Elena picked up the glass carefully, impressed at the way the layers stayed distinct. She sipped, the black liquid washing over the sugared rim, and it was citrusy at first and then smoky and then almost coffee. Heat blossomed in her belly when she swallowed. “Mmm.”

  “Try the other side,” the bartender said, and Elena obligingly sipped. This time it was more like paprika smokiness, and sweet, almost cherry, as the red layer swirled up. Another sip and the green mingled, fresh and bright and summery and citrus-tangy. It was like three cocktails in one.

  “This is amazing, thank you.”

  “Your lips are all red and red. From the sweet liqueur in the center. Color will fade soon but pretty until.”

  Elena dabbed at her lips with a napkin, which didn’t come away stained, anyway. “I could probably use the color. I spent a long time in the dark.”

  “You sound from far away. Down a well?”

  “I’m from Earth,” Elena said. “Originally.”

  The bartender whistled. “Not too many of you come all the way out here except on business. You for business?”

  She sighed. “Would you believe I was in cryosleep for five hundred years and just woke up, I guess yesterday? If it was yesterday. I don’t even know how days work here. I was adjusted to a twenty-seven hour cycle, because we were pretty sure that was the length of the day on the planet we were traveling to.”

  “Ah.” The bartender blinked. “A day out here is a set of shifts. Six-hour shifts, set of four shifts a day, so it’s not too bad if you have to pull a double sometimes.”

  “Ha. You have a twenty-four hour day, this far from
Earth? I guess humans did evolve to live that way.”

  “It’s not so bad, and anyway, the station doesn’t sleep. I come from Triton. A day on Triton runs a hundred and forty hours, which is not so good. We break it up there too.”

  “Neptune’s only sixteen hours. I remember that from school.”

  The bartender poured a small glass of something dark brown into a glass and took a slow sip. “Nobody much lives on Neptune. Mostly AI, tending the wind farms. Are you really a past person? No jokes?”

  “No jokes. I was on a goldilocks ship. We… didn’t get where we were going. We were stranded, far from our destination. I was the only survivor.”

  The bartender winced. “Sorry to hear. I’m Jana, by the byway.”

  “Elena.”

  “Welcome to the now and now, Elena. Drinks on me, OK?”

  Elena smiled, touched by the kindness. “Thank you. I expected to wake up in orbit around a distant planet. I didn’t expect to wake up here, but in a way, it’s even stranger.”

  “Five hundred years,” Jana ruminated. “Bad times back then, before the Liars, and the wilding and the opening-up. There are some other past people here and there, I hear. They get to their planets, sometimes, they wake up, they find a colony already there, because we got ahead of them, through the bridges. You know the bridges?”

  “I’ve heard about them, yeah.”

  “Maybe there’s somebody you know, even? Could check the Tangle, find some friends, feel less lonely maybe?”

  That hadn’t occurred to Elena, but she had met many of the other goldilocks crews, at least in passing, during training. “That’s a good idea. Thank you.”