The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  “The Liars appeared to offer the galaxy to us – when, in reality, they offered us just short of thirty systems, out of billions. The Liars pretend to be scattered and separate groups, but they must have acted in a coordinated way to herd and corral we foolish humans, and to keep us confined to just a few carefully selected sectors of space. Elena’s ship stumbled upon some sort of automated Liar repair station, and it accidentally revealed the truth: the Liars have vastly more powerful bridge technology, capable of going anywhere in the galaxy. Now the Liars are determined to hide that secret, at any cost.” He sighed. “I don’t see how we survive this.”

  “I came to pretty much the same conclusion, but I do see a possible way out. The Liars want to kill us to preserve their secret – so let’s make that pointless. When we get back to human-occupied space, we’ll send a wide transmission, revealing everything we know and everything we suspect. Once the secret is out, the Liars won’t have any reason to try to kill us anymore.”

  “Except for spite, vengeance, irritation, and so on,” Stephen said.

  “Except for those, yeah, but I think the Liars will be too busy getting rounded up and interrogated by every human polity in the galaxy that has a military or police division. They’ll have much bigger problems than blowing us up out of pique.” She gazed out at the planet, just a shape cast in darkness with red light shining around its edges from the dwarf star beyond. “The alternative is, we look for a habitable planet out here somewhere and retire, but then we don’t get justice for Meditreme Station.”

  “I’d planned to retire somewhere with a better breakfast buffet. Your plan is certainly worth a try,” Stephen said. “Though when the alternative is certain death, any plan would be. Shall I put together a recording with our findings? You’re always going on about my wasted gravitas.”

  “Sure. You’re good at being measured and methodical. If I tried to record a statement I’d start yelling and waving my arms around and kicking things.”

  “Your argumentation style is very persuasive, but when one is presenting an insane conspiracy theory, it is better for one to be calm about it.”

  Callie closed the channel, then stared out the window some more. Everyone had a job. Everyone except her–

  And Elena, who tapped tentatively at the open door. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Come on in. Enjoy the view.”

  Elena walked over and sealed her boots to the deck next to Callie, close enough to hold hands, if either of them had wanted to. Instead they just gazed into the pinpricked dark.

  “It’s so…” Elena shook her head and fell silent.

  “What?”

  “No, it’s nothing. I shouldn’t say it.”

  “Please. I’ve got a lot of noise in my head. Talking to you quiets that down a little.”

  Elena put one hand against the glass – which wasn’t glass at all, but a Liar material that was light as aluminum, strong as diamond, and nearly as transparent as vacuum. “All those people died on Meditreme Station, so I shouldn’t be thinking things like this, but it’s just… That’s a new planet. One no human has ever seen. Orbiting a star that may not even have a name – not even one of those impossible-to-recall alphanumeric designations. I just… I can’t get over the wonder. I never could. That’s why I volunteered for the goldilocks mission in the first place.”

  Callie’s hand brushed against Elena’s, and the doctor grabbed on, gave her a hard squeeze, and then loosened, but didn’t let go, letting their fingers intertwine. She just wants comfort, Callie thought, and decided that was something she could give. She squeezed back. “It’s really not your fault, what happened back there. You stumbled onto something the Liars want to keep secret. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else. They managed to play us for fools for centuries, but no scam works forever. It’s a horrible shame we ended up in the middle of unraveling a conspiracy, but we can do some good. Reveal the Liars for what they really are, and get justice for Meditreme. Those deaths won’t be in vain.”

  Elena nodded. “I was in my quarters, crying, before I came to see you. I couldn’t stop thinking about this one person I met on the station, a bartender who mixed me–”

  “A ziggurat. I saw, your lips were red. Was it Jana?”

  Elena nodded.

  “She’s a sweetheart. When I got divorced and fled to the edges of everything and ended up on Meditreme, she was always a sympathetic ear, and a total flirt, which was good for my self-esteem.”

  “Were the two of you…”

  Callie shook her head. “I decided I was done with all that, after Michael left me. Like an old-timey sea captain, married to the sea. Married to the stars.”

  Elena went hmm. “I understood this century was fairly liberal. Do you have some religious affiliation that requires marriage in order to enjoy physical intimacy?”

  “Ha, not so much, no. But I’ve always been terrible at casual sex, and Jana is – was – well. Casual was her thing. She enjoyed sensations, and sharing new things with people she liked. I don’t think she’d be happy with how she died, but she always seemed happy with how she lived, and that’s something. I’m glad you got to meet her. Of all the random encounters you could have had on Meditreme, she was a good one to have.”

  “Did you lose many friends?”

  Callie shrugged. “The people I’m closest to are on this boat. My boss Warwick was a friend, too. I saw my friend Hermione one last time, right before we left. I had a distant cousin, Carter, pretty much my only living family out here – I mean, out there – who worked in engineering on the station, and we always visited, but mostly out of duty, and because we knew each other as kids. He was a bitter little misanthrope but good with a spanner.” She sighed. “But I spent years with Meditreme as my home base. I knew scores of people well enough to say hello to them. I can’t even wrap my head around the fact that they’re gone. It’s an act of war, isn’t it? Not just against the Trans-Neptunian Authority, but against all of humankind. The Liars aren’t supposed to be capable of acts of war – they aren’t a nation, they’re just a species, organized into little tribes and clans. Or so we always assumed. But if they’ve been hiding bridge technology from us, if they have secret assassin squads with unknown weaponry and the ability to control inertia… that changes everything. They’re not strange but lucrative trading partners anymore. They’re a shadowy hegemonic conspiracy. It’s like finding out, I don’t know, that a bunch of wandering grifters are actually the secret masters of the galaxy. We have to tell people.”

  “The world is going to change,” Elena said. “It hardly seems fair. I didn’t even get a chance to learn about the world as it was yesterday.” She sighed, and let go of Callie’s hand. “I suppose our rescue mission is canceled?”

  “Hell no.” Callie made the decision right then, snap, as she made most of her important decisions; she’d learned over the years that her mind did most of the necessary analysis below the level of her consciousness, and presented her with a feeling of certainty when it was done. “We’re going to get your crew back. From a purely practical perspective, they’re vital evidence for the Liar conspiracy: they can back up your story. You guys are going to be testifying before assorted subcommittees for months, but at least you won’t have to worry about room and board and social reintegration anymore. Besides, the Liars killed my friends on Meditreme. I’m not going to let them get away with killing anybody else, even by stranding them in an alien station.”

  Elena hugged her. Her hair smelled wonderful, faintly like vanilla chai. “Thank you so much, Callie.”

  “This is all assuming Ashok can get the bridge generator going again. If so, we’ll pop back to our solar system, send out a message detailing everything we know and suspect about the Liar conspiracy, and then open a bridge to the station where your friends are being held. In the meantime, though… we have to do the hardest thing of all. We have to wait.”

  Ashok’s voice crackled over the PA. “Cap, could you come down h
ere? I think I figured out a thing.”

  “Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?”

  “Definitely one of the two,” he said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Come on,” Callie said. “At this point, I don’t feel a need to hide good or bad news from you.” Elena was pleased to be included. This was such a tightly knit crew, it was hard not to feel like an outsider all the time, and she was already an outsider in so many other ways.

  They went down to the machine shop, where Ashok waved them over with great swooping gestures. “So, in digging through the various messages this thing is producing, I found something that looks a whole lot like a countdown. Assuming it stops at zero, which is kind of a big assumption, and assuming its rate remains constant, which is also a big assumption, then we’ve got about six hours and fifteen minutes before it’s done.”

  “What happens when the countdown is finished?” Callie said.

  Ashok shrugged. “Maybe the bridge generator works again? Either because it’s all recharged, or it deems us safe after our emergency exit? Or maybe it explodes. No reason to think it will, except for the way a lifetime of consuming fiction makes me associate countdowns with things exploding.”

  “Let’s assume it’s the former, because if it’s the latter, we have to jettison the generator out of the airlock, and then we’re definitely stuck here forever.”

  Ashok nodded. “I can keep poking at stuff here, or I can do an EVA and give the Raven a once-over to make sure everything’s ship-shape.”

  “Is there any reason to think it’s not?” Callie said. “The Liars didn’t manage to blast us, and the ship’s computer would have mentioned if there were any issues.”

  “Sure, but we passed through a new kind of bridge, so maybe stuff is, you know, all weird out there.” He waggled his fingers – there were a lot of them to waggle – in a way presumably meant to illustrate weirdness.

  Callie sighed. “You just want to be the first person to do an EVA in an uncharted system, don’t you?”

  “It’s definitely a good addition to my life list, cap. Even cooler than visiting all twenty-nine colony systems. Give me a little joy on a sad day?”

  “Fine, clamber around, but stay tethered to the ship with cable. I don’t want you drifting off. You’re the only one who can operate this generator anyway.”

  “Nah, Shall could probably manage it, and in at least some circumstances the generator is happy to operate itself. But don’t worry, I have a strong sense of self-preservation.”

  “You do not, Ashok.” Callie glanced at Elena. “He wanders into life-threatening danger more casually than anyone I’ve ever known. You know that saying about how fools rush in where wise men fear to tread? Ashok rushes in where fools won’t even go.”

  “I may not be overly concerned about the preservation of my original appendages, I’ll grant you that,” Ashok said, “but I like to keep my core systems intact. Anyway, it’s just space out there, it’s empty by definition. I’ll be fine. Just tell Drake not to go full burn while I’m outside.” He clapped his hands together excitedly. “Yay! I love EVA. You want to come, doc?”

  Elena widened her eyes. She’d done two extravehicular activity drills, in training, at a space station in orbit around the Earth. “Ah, no, thank you. I find them very disorienting.”

  “You just gotta push through the weird terror and then the euphoria sets in.”

  “No means no, Ashok,” Callie said, and he shrugged and hurried off toward the aft airlock. She grimaced at Elena. “Sorry. Ashok is composed largely of enthusiasm.”

  “I like him. He must be good for morale.”

  “Insofar as he gives the rest of us a single person to focus our annoyance on, he absolutely is.” Callie sighed. “So now we wait. I’m terrible at waiting. Come have a drink with me?”

  “Isn’t it early for that?”

  Callie shrugged. “We have a saying: ‘It’s always five o’clock in space.’”

  Elena chuckled. “All right. As long as it’s not a ziggurat. I had no idea it did that to my lips.”

  “Looked good on you, though.”

  Was that flirtation? “I used to enjoy doing the femme thing, sometimes, when I had an appreciative partner,” Elena said. “I spent most of my time in a lab coat or a cleanroom suit, so it was fun to play dress-up every once in a while. I left my heels and lipstick and earrings back on Earth, though, alas, and also several centuries in the past. Fortunately I’m modeling the height of spaceship chic.” She did a little shimmy with her hips.

  Callie snorted. “Sorry, I know spare crew coveralls aren’t the most comfortable. We should have sent you shopping on Meditreme before we took off. I’d let you dig through my stuff for something to wear, but you’d swim around in my clothes.”

  “Is Janice any closer to my size?”

  “Janice doesn’t have anything you could wear. She and Drake– it’s hard to explain. Actually, before that drink, do you want to come up and meet them? The fact that you haven’t yet is starting to feel like a big old elephant in the room.”

  “Of course, I’d love to.”

  “OK. Just be prepared, they were in a really bad accident some years back, and the reconstruction was… they don’t look much like you’re expecting, I’ll give you that.”

  “I am a biologist, Callie. I also grew up on Earth in the bad old days. I’ve seen all sorts of trauma. I can handle it.”

  “You took Ashok fine, but with Drake and Janice it’s different, and they’re pretty sensitive about it.”

  “Let’s just go up,” Elena said. “Really. It’ll be OK.”

  Callie touched her comms. “Drake? Janice? You have a minute to meet our new crew member?”

  “It’s about time,” Drake said. “Sure, we’re just scanning the planet down there. It’s rocky, a bit smaller than Earth. It’s got a magnetic field. There’s ice, and liquid water, too. Atmosphere is a little thin for us, but it’s not corrosive or anything. There might even be life down there.”

  “It’s gonna be bugs and slime mold at best,” Janice said. “Just like every other habitable planet around every other star we’ve visited. The only other intelligent life anywhere is fucking Liars. This galaxy is lousy.”

  “Come on up, Elena,” Drake said. “I think Janice is in the mood to tell our tale of woe.”

  Elena looked at Callie questioningly, but she just shrugged and gestured. “Up to the cockpit. One level past the observation deck.”

  Elena unsealed her boots and drifted to the ladder, then pulled herself up all the way to the nose of the ship. When the ship was moving under thrust and simulating some degree of gravity, the open viewport in the cockpit was “up”, like a domed ceiling with views in all directions, but those orientations meant less in microgravity around this strange planet.

  The chairs in the cockpit were mounted on armatures capable of twisting and turning in most directions, and they currently faced toward the ship’s nose. As a result, the seats had windows on all sides: it was the closest you could get to the sensation of floating in space without leaving the ship, and the view was both breathtaking and a little scary.

  There were two chairs covered in straps and buckles empty on either side, and in the center, an egg-shaped enclosure of some kind, bigger than a person. Some kind of specialized pilot’s chair, Elena assumed, with cushioning to protect the crewperson during acceleration: Drake must be in there. But where was the comms and navigation station? Where did Janice sit?

  “Come on in.” The voice sounded strange, like Drake and Janice were speaking simultaneously. An arm emerged from the left side of the ovoid chair and beckoned, and Elena barely managed to suppress a gasp.

  The arm was Y-shaped: it had a single upper arm and bicep, but then it divided at the (obviously heavily modified) elbow, and two forearms jutted out from the joint: one pale and freckled, and one a very dark brown. The forearms ended in matching hands, one of which had too many fingers, and one of which didn’t have enou
gh. “Back on Earth in the old days, you would’ve had to pay five lix at a freakshow to see something like this.” It was Janice’s voice, cynical and grimly amused.

  Elena glanced at Callie, who just raised her eyebrows and nodded. Elena drifted further forward, grabbed onto the arm of a chair to the right of the egg-shaped chair, and turned to face the pod.

  Drake and Janice sat in the hollow of the chair, tubes and wires snaking into their bodies and out again, disappearing under the seat. At first, Elena couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing, but then she understood. “Oh,” she said. “You’ve been… put together.”

  “Butchers,” Janice said, from one side of the head. “The Liars are butchers.”

  “They meant well,” Drake said, from the other side. “They were trying to save our lives. But they’d never seen a human before, and they made some bad assumptions. They didn’t have much to work with. It’s amazing they managed as well as they did.”

  “I begged for death, once I was able to speak,” Janice said. “They didn’t seem to understand. They didn’t seem to think wanting to die made any sense at all.” She paused. “But it’s not so terrible now. I’m used to it. Drake isn’t bad company.”

  Elena settled into the chair and fiddled with the controls until it twisted around to face them.

  Drake and Janice had one head, with two faces. Drake’s face was on the left side, and Janice’s on the right, though Janice only had one eye, and they had only one nose between them, centered equidistant between their faces, on the front of the head. It had been Drake’s, to start with. They had no visible ears at all, and no hair. Elena could clearly see where the flesh and bone had been grafted, with Drake’s dark skin meeting Janice’s pale flesh on the scalp. Their body was mostly hidden in a modified environment suit, but in addition to the bifurcated left arm they had a more conventional right arm, half light-skinned and half dark, with six fingers and two thumbs. If they had legs at all, Elena couldn’t see them. She leaned forward slightly, taking them in. “You’d think the Liars would have focused more on radial or bilateral symmetry, given their own forms,” she murmured, then blinked. “Oh. I’m sorry.”