The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

“Probably a heightened security protocol,” Lantern said. “Maybe the station stopped seeing Doctor Oh’s crew as injured servitors and has reclassified them as dangerous invaders?”

  “That’s comforting. Switch back to the transparent view,” Callie said. “Move us in a little closer.”

  The ship hummed and crept forward. The shape in space grew, though it was still hard to make out. The bits Callie could glimpse matched Elena’s description, though: immense, organic, basically a smaller, floating version of the bizarre city they’d seen orbiting the ruby Dyson sphere. “The Axiom have a definite design aesthetic.”

  “Not much like the Liar style, either,” Drake said. “They like radial symmetry.” He lifted his bifurcated arm. “I mean, usually.”

  “The Free don’t build anything that resembles Axiom architecture,” Lantern said. “Would you recreate the cages you were kept in?”

  “Probably not.” Callie was gradually starting to believe Lantern’s fantastic story, or to at least consider it more seriously. This place really didn’t seem like anything the Liars would make. There was something brutal and strange about its configurations. “Our scanners are useless, huh?”

  “We’re looking at nothing, if you believe the data,” Drake said.

  “Ship, you’ve got nothing on Elena’s crew? No signals from their transponders?”

  “No, but it may be different once we’re on the inside.”

  “Ashok, Lantern, meet me in the drop bay. Get suited up and armed. We’re taking out the canoe. Ship, you’re coming, too. Grab a body. Probably the hull repair drone – it’s the toughest. Bring everything you think we might need. You’re smart.”

  “Am I running it remotely?”

  “That’s the idea, but your signal might be blocked when we get inside, so spawn a local copy of your consciousness into the bot to act as a backup, just in case.”

  “Ugh. I’d have to run so slowly, and leave most of my data behind. I hate being that limited.”

  “You’ll mostly be asked to carry things, shoot things, and rescue us as needed. You won’t need to debate interstellar fiscal policy or research a legal case. You’ll be fine.” She unhooked the straps on her chair. “Stephen is in charge while I’m gone, as usual. Just wait for us. If we don’t come out in seven hours, get back to our system and report everything we know and everything we suspect to the Jovian Imperative, Earth, and anyone else who’ll listen. Stephen has a recording ready to release.”

  “Ticking clock!” Ashok said. “Action and excitement!”

  Callie went to the drop bay, where Lantern was back in her environment suit, and Ashok was wearing his own bright orange one. The hull repair drone squatted nearby, a hulking collection of manipulator arms, welding torches, sensors, and tools, making a whole big enough for a person to ride around on, if they didn’t mind being uncomfortable on its lumpy back. Elena was there, too, pulling on her vintage gray environment suit from the Anjou, the name of the ship written on the back in reflective yellow letters. “Whoa, whoa. You’re staying here,” Callie said.

  “Hmm. Upon reflection, no.”

  “It wasn’t a suggestion.”

  “I’m not in your chain of command, captain, remember? I’m also the client. If I want to come along, I come along.”

  Callie crossed her arms. “What do you expect to accomplish over there?”

  “I’ve actually been inside the station before, so: quite a bit, actually. Besides, if the rest of the crew is alive, they’ll be happy to see my suit transponder light up on their screens. They won’t know who you are. They might hide from you.”

  She sighed. Having Elena on board would split Callie’s focus, because there was no way Callie couldn’t devote a large fraction of her attention to keeping the scientist safe, but Elena did have firsthand intel that might be useful. “OK. You’re the boss.”

  “That’s an interesting change.” Elena winked at her and pulled her helmet on.

  Callie got into her good suit, the prototype from a TNA research-and-development program that was scrapped because the cost was exorbitant. The suit had active camouflage – handy on bounty hunting missions – but was currently in its neutral state, a bright electric blue, easy for her crewmates to spot. “Elena, you stay with me at all times. Ashok, you keep an eye on Lantern. You’re still a prisoner, Liar. Don’t run off without permission. It’s best if you don’t do anything without permission. Mmm, and on second thought, Ashok seems a little too fond of you. He might hesitate to shoot you if you misbehave. Ship, you’re Lantern’s guard dog.”

  “Ship?” The hull repair drone lit up and rose, three meters high, on an array of robotic legs. “Shouldn’t you call me something differently insulting, like maybe ‘bot’, in my current circumstances?”

  “I’ll call you ‘Shall’, then. OK?” With Elena sidling into her heart, Callie found thinking about her history with Michael less painful, and as a result, her irrational but potent resentment toward his computer doppelganger was somewhat diminished. The ship hadn’t done anything wrong. Shall was basically the good parts of Michael, without the parts that liked to wander off and sleep with other people despite their promise to be monogamous when she was home from space.

  “That works for me,” the bot said. “Shall I shall be.”

  “Did you pack guns?” Callie asked.

  “Enough for us and any friendlies we need to arm once we get on the station.”

  “Into the canoe, then,” Callie said.

  The floor slid open, revealing a small coffin-shaped landing ship big enough for seven people to fit in if they squeezed, so three people and a little Liar would fit fine. “I can ride on the exterior,” Shall said. “We’re not taking the canoe into atmosphere, so it’s not like I’ll mess up the aerodynamics.”

  Callie helped Elena climb down into the canoe. The interior was bare-bones, just six jump-seats and a pilot seat placed before a rudimentary control panel. “What is this ship?” Elena asked as they all strapped in, the Liar doing her best with a restraint system designed for humanoids.

  “Lander, rover, lifeboat, escape pod, all that,” Callie said. “The White Raven isn’t built to fly around in atmosphere, and certainly not to drive around in it, so we take this when we go down gravity wells or need to jaunt to someplace with docking facilities that can’t accommodate our larger ship. Or when we need to be sneaky. The canoe doesn’t have much but a rudimentary guidance system, basic maneuvering thrusters, and a ton of heat shielding so we don’t burn up when we land. It’s got enough fuel to get out of a gravity well and back to orbit, but not much beyond that. Should be fine for our purposes, though. It’ll get us there and back again, at least.” Callie flipped switches and checked dials and gauges. Everything looked good. No surprise. She always made sure her ship and the little ship tucked under her ship were well maintained. “Open the bay doors, Shall.”

  The doors swung open, the canoe dropped into space, and the Axiom station twinkled before them like the world’s ugliest snowflake.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Just so you know, I can’t see anything,” Shall said over the comms. “I wasn’t blessed with squishy organic light receptors, and the station is invisible to me. I’m beginning to think this is all an elaborate prank.”

  “I can only see it when my lenses aren’t deployed,” Ashok said. “So weird.”

  “I can’t see because humans are enormous and the captain’s chair is blocking my view.”

  “I can see just fine for all of us,” Callie said.

  Elena chuckled softly. She was in the seat behind and to the left of Callie, so she did have a decent view through the front window. “What happens next?”

  “We put a helmet on a stick and poke it up over the edge of the trench and see if anybody shoots it,” Ashok said.

  “Launch the probe, Stephen.”

  A moment later, a low-slung triangular drone with solar panel “wings” shot out of the Raven above them and zoomed toward the immensity of the
Axiom station. “I might crash into this thing,” Stephen complained. “I’m steering while staring at the drone through a window, since the station doesn’t show up on its sensors.”

  “Just stick to the telemetry that Shall specified,” Callie said. “That should be a pretty good guess about the distance.”

  The drone shrank, and vanished, and after a few minutes, Stephen said, “All right, the drone hit its mark and I’ve got it hovering. The sensors still don’t see anything – but there is now a large swath of the sky where no stars are visible. The station isn’t visible directly to the cameras, but it’s not using any sort of active camouflage or magical transparency – it doesn’t shift to match the background. It’s just blank.”

  “The drone is acting normally?”

  “Hold on. Mmm… yes. I am currently flying it in small loop-de-loops.”

  “The station didn’t blast it out of the sky. Didn’t reach out and grab it, either. That’s two promising outcomes. Let’s move in.”

  Elena would have gripped the arms of her chair tightly if it had arms, but it was a cushion full of smart-gel just like the jumpseats on the Raven. The seat could be firm or more yielding as needed, but it was hardly built for luxury, and it was currently about as comfortable as the chair in a principal’s office when you were in trouble in middle school.

  There was almost no sensation of movement, but the Axiom station got bigger in the window. Elena couldn’t see it all at once. Before long the crazy ragged tangle of crossing and intersecting and overlapping tubular structures filled their screen. “Where did your ship enter, Elena?” Callie said.

  She tried to think back. “Are we coming at the station from the same side the Anjou approached on?”

  “Uh, maybe?” Ashok said. “It’s the same side you departed from, anyway. I jumped us a few kilometers straight out from the position where the Anjou jumped.”

  “Then… I think, there, the lower-most segment, on the left?”

  “That’s our docking location, then,” Callie said. “Right on the edge, like the last trailing root on a plant. Moving in. Prepare to be snatched up and sucked in and torn apart by welderbots.”

  The canoe got closer, and closer, and closer, and then Callie cut thrust and maneuvered them broadside to the station. They were within a hundred meters of the structure, but the station was entirely inert. “Were you closer than this when it grabbed you, Elena?”

  “Absolutely not. Much farther out.”

  “So it either doesn’t recognize us as a ship, or this is another change to their protocol.”

  “Do we get to cut it open?” Ashok said.

  “I do have a wonderful array of implements in this body,” Shall said.

  “What do you think, Lantern? Any advice on how to get in?”

  “You will not be able to breach the walls with your tools. But it should be fairly easy to open from the inside. The Liars worked in such places, once upon a time, and there will be an interior panel I can manipulate.”

  “Ah, so to get inside, we just have to get inside first? Brilliant. I’m so glad I brought you along.”

  “You have my personal point-to-point wormhole generator. That is the only way to get inside.” Lantern’s tone was matter-of-fact, which impressed Elena. She would have been tempted to sound a little snide.

  “Oh. Right. The old triple-pee-double-you-gee. I just enter the distance I want to go, right?”

  “I am happy to make the journey if you wish,” Lantern said.

  “And let my prisoner loose on a space station full of alien super-weapons? Not so much. I can do it. What does the switch to open the door look like?”

  “There will be a large panel at roughly my height above the floor, on an exterior wall. It will have many switches, but the one that opens the hangar door immediately is for emergency use, so it will be large, and a different shape and color. It should be very obvious. Just hit that.”

  “Understood. If I end up stuck inside a wall, Shall, kill the Liar.”

  “It is unfair to link my survival to your potential user error,” Lantern complained. “But you won’t get stuck in the wall. The generator compensates for such mistakes. Just make sure you set the distance far enough, or it will compensate in the wrong direction, and you’ll be floating outside the station instead of inside, waiting hours for the teleporter to recharge.”

  “How thick are the walls?”

  “About two meters.”

  “All right. Call it a hundred and five meters, then, to put me inside the hangar bay? Make it a hundred and twenty to be safe.”

  She fiddled with the device strapped to the arm of her suit, checked her life support systems and comms, and took a deep breath. “Off I go.”

  “Wait!” Elena unstrapped, took a step forward, and wrapped her arms around Callie’s chest. “Be safe. Watch out for kaiju and brain-spiders.”

  “You say the sweetest things. Get back in your seat. I don’t want to accidentally teleport your arms off.”

  “It doesn’t work that–” Lantern began, but then Callie winked out of existence.

  “Cap, you there?” Ashok said. “Hey, cap, report.”

  There was no answer, and Elena closed her eyes as something deep inside her rolled over heavily, like a stone.

  * * *

  There was a disorienting sensation of motion; it reminded Callie of being tossed into a swimming pool at a party at Michael’s mother’s house, one long-ago summer. They were on the moon, so it was a low-gravity pool, big as a lake, and they’d done these amazing dolphin leaps, arcing high out of the water, laughing uproariously, young and immortal and alive and in love forever.

  At least this time she didn’t end up soaking wet and cold and divorced ten years later. She did fall on her ass, because she’d been sitting down when she teleported. Probably a rookie error. She took a moment to make sure she still had all her arms and legs, and to silence the suit alarm – something about that transition had upset her environment suit, but it wasn’t blaring the “you are dying of radiation” or “life support systems going offline” warnings, so she didn’t worry about it. The suit was probably mad at her for covering too much distance so quickly and stopping too abruptly: that kind of motion was bad for human brains, at least when you were abiding by stodgy old standard physics.

  Callie got to her feet in the darkness. She felt her body weight in a way she hadn’t since leaving the spin gravity of Meditreme Station. They really did have some kind of artificial gravity here. That technology would be worth a fortune if anyone could reproduce it. She switched her suit visor to thermal vision. That didn’t do a damn thing, because everything around her was pretty much equally cold. Night vision didn’t help, either: there was nothing much to enhance. “Ashok, do you read me? Shall? Elena?”

  No answer. The station was good at shrugging off every sensor they threw at it, so it was reasonable that it should also block radio transmissions. She’d better figure out how to open the hangar door, before her people on the canoe did something loyal and stupid to try to come after her. There was no telling what the station would do if someone started cutting or shooting it.

  Callie couldn’t make it far in the dark, so with some reluctance, she turned on her suit lights. They didn’t penetrate far into the gloom, but what she could see of the space matched Elena’s description: gray floors that might have been metal, and assorted struts, gantries, and other structures, all more organic-looking than they would have been on a human station: live vines grown in the shape of cranes. There were no bus-sized kaiju bug-flowers – at least, not yet.

  Callie moved toward the external wall she’d teleported through, a scant few meters ahead of her, looking for a switch, but the wall was blank and gently curving. Should she go left, or right? She’d teleported from pretty much dead center, so one was as good as the other. She chose left at random and shined the light on her wrist down around waist height as she slowly walked along.

  Something clattered far above her,
and Callie doused her light instantly and froze. The noise had sounded like metal-on-metal; like a wrench, maybe, dropped from a hand, except that was an unlikely cause for the noise, in this place. The sound meant there must be an atmosphere in here, for the sound to travel through. She checked her environmental readouts and grunted. There was breathable atmosphere inside the station, but she didn’t pull her helmet off. The atmosphere would be sucked out when she got the hangar door open, and besides, taking off your helmet around here apparently made you vulnerable to attacks by cybernetic brain-spiders.

  Callie counted to three hundred, slow and steady, and when there was no further sound, she decided to proceed. Maybe it was nothing: some old part of a mostly dormant station clattering against another part. She turned on her wrist light and continued her search for a control panel, the wall curving so gradually it looked almost straight. She ducked beneath metal struts and wires that extended from the floor and wall up into the darkness. The only sound was her own breath in her helmet. Just like when she’d clambered into the wreck of the Anjou, except that time Ashok was by her side, and this time she was very much alone.

  Something clattered again, and this time she doused the light and turned on her active camouflage, which would hide her heat signature, among other things. She moved a dozen meters away from her last position, then scanned around with her thermal vision, looking up, this time, into what could be a many-stories-high forest of platforms and scaffolding.

  She saw a flash, yellow and orange, which abruptly vanished, probably hiding behind something dense and cold. There was something moving around up there, maybe two stories high, and it was giving off heat. Not something the size of a bus, either, so probably not the kaiju bug. So maybe…

  Callie considered. It was risky, if Elena’s crew was compromised by the station’s neural implants, but it was a risk they were going to have to take soon regardless. She switched her suit radio away from the White Raven’s frequency, over to the one Elena’s crew had used. “I’m on a rescue mission looking for the crew of the Anjou. Are you in distress?”