The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  You went to war on the battlefield you had. Uzoma said this access tunnel was the closest Callie could get to the observation area without risk of detection, so it would have to do. She bellied up to the opening and looked through – and then her perspective reoriented dizzyingly as she realized she was looking down: the floor was about twenty meters away. More games with gravity. The “down” inside the tunnel was perpendicular to the “down” out there on the observation platform. How would that affect her shot? If the bullet started out on one gravity plane and then abruptly entered another, its trajectory would be dragged downward in the new direction… The physics were annoying. She decided to poke the barrel of the gun out of the hole when she fired so most of the projectile’s journey would take place in the proper plane.

  First she needed something to shoot at, and she didn’t have that yet. She saw Elena’s boots, just on the edge of her vision, and she was talking, not exactly pleading, but trying to reason with someone. Callie thought the time for reason was past, but then Elena didn’t have a gun, so she was doing the best she could.

  Sebastien entered Callie’s view: she was looking at him top-down, and was nastily gratified to notice a bald spot on top of his head. Though the metal spider clinging to the back of his skull was a greater flaw in his physical beauty. She tracked him with the pistol, waiting for him to pause long enough for her to drive a bullet right through the top of his head, centered on that bald spot, but he didn’t stop moving until he was very close to Elena. Callie had a shot, and the bullets were soft-nosed, so they’d break apart inside Sebastien’s brain instead of passing through to do more damage, but if she missed, the ricochet could easily bounce into Elena.

  The two of them were talking, but Callie couldn’t understand what they were saying. Sebastien stepped back, and she lined up her shot, but then he gestured and a pair of bizarre machines, like rolling polyhedral wireframes, tumbled past him and out of her field of vision, distracting her for a moment–

  Then Elena was there. She looked OK. Mussed, sweaty, no helmet on, but basically fine. She was, however, moving right up to Sebastien, utterly ruining any hope Callie had of making her shot without risk to Elena.

  Then Elena went up on her tiptoes, and she was kissing Sebastien. Callie let out a low growl. His hands were all over Elena, roving up her back, down her back, then lower, squeezing her ass, and she was pressing herself against him. It had to be a seduction ruse, right? Or else Sebastien had already compromised her brain somehow, and was using his control to gratify–

  They pulled apart a little, and gazed at one another like lovers. Callie had a clear look at Elena’s face and saw her say, “Oh, Sebastien.”

  Then Elena punched Sebastien in the back of the head. It was an awkward blow, because how could it not be, from that angle, in that position? You couldn’t deliver any real power that way. But Elena didn’t need to hit hard. Apparently Sebastien hadn’t realized the rings on her glove were weapons – that was part of why Callie liked them, they were subtle – and a moderate impact was enough to trigger their electric shock.

  Elena struck Sebastien right on his brain-spider, and he jolted, stumbled away, sputtered for a moment, and then dropped like all his bones had been teleported out of his body. (There was probably an Axiom weapon that did that.)

  Callie got on her radio: no worries about Sebastien listening in now: “Open the hatch all the way.”

  Uzoma complied, and the aperture expanded. Callie could slide through… and get yanked sideways by gravity and fall twenty meters and land on her head.

  Elena was kneeling by Sebastien, checking his pulse, it looked like. Callie wanted to put a bullet in his head just to be sure, but it was hard to justify that when he was unconscious and immobile. Not hard to justify to herself, really, but hard to justify to Elena.

  “Elena!” Callie called, and Elena looked up, eyes widening. “I came to save you. Wasted trip, huh?”

  “How are you in the ceiling?”

  “Uncomfortably. I’d like to get out of it. Uzoma, Sebastien is down. Can you do something about the gravity in the observation deck? He won’t notice.”

  “I can try.”

  “Hold onto something, Elena.”

  Elena nodded, looked around, and found a rail to hook her feet under. A moment later her hair floated up around her face and she lifted a little off the ground. Sebastien floated up lazily, unmoving.

  Callie grabbed the edges of the tunnel – she still had gravity here, it was bizarre – and yanked herself out, launching straight for Elena. She twisted her body and got her legs under her. She bumped gently against the wall, close enough for Elena to reach out and grab her hand. They pulled together, and Callie kissed her hungrily, with passion and relief.

  “What was that for?” Elena said when they pulled apart.

  “You just electro-punched a mind-controlled wannabe god. You rescued yourself. That’s hot.”

  Elena wrinkled her nose. “Remember when I punched myself in the face back in the reconditioning chamber? This was the exact same thing, except Sebastien’s head was in the way this time. You’ll have to teach me some better moves.”

  “With pleasure,” Callie said. “Let me get the gravity turned back on again.”

  “Wait!” Elena glared at Callie and sailed through the room toward Sebastien, getting her arms under him. “You’ll crack his skull.”

  That didn’t sound like a bad outcome to Callie, but she went to Elena’s side and helped her maneuver Sebastien’s body, so when the gravity came back on, he would only drop slightly, and not break any bones. “Sorry, sorry,” Callie said. She spoke into her comms: “Gravity, please.”

  When the gravity returned, they bent their knees to take Sebastien’s weight, and lowered him gently to the floor.

  Elena gazed down at him. “I know he’s just a monster to you, but Sebastien is a good person, Callie. Or he was. I knew him.” She touched the spider’s legs, penetrating deep into his skull. “Do you think we can save him? Make him the way he used to be?”

  “Ashok has some ideas about removing the implants, and Stephen will help. If we can get Sebastien to the White Raven, we can try. Now that he’s not awake to mess everything up, Uzoma should be able to get us out of here–”

  “You found Uzoma? They’re all right?”

  “They seem to be coping better than Sebastien did. But before we can go, we have to do something about… that.” Callie nodded toward the hangar beyond the wall of glass. She forced herself to look at it, though it made her guts clench. Hundreds of ships being constructed, all full of mind-altering brain-spiders.

  Lantern hurried in from the corridor, followed by Ashok and Uzoma. Elena ran up to the latter, as if to hug them, then stopped short. “Sorry. I know you don’t like to be hugged.”

  “Thank you for remembering. I am very pleased to see you all the same.” They reached out and squeezed Elena’s hand. Uzoma’s gaze went to the wall of windows. “I think the fleet is nearly done.”

  “Even without Sebastien to launch them, they’re a loaded gun pointed at our solar system,” Callie said. “We have to assume these are primed and ready to launch.”

  “We could try to erase their navigational data,” Ashok said.

  “Then it’s just a loaded gun pointed at anywhere. I thought I could just leave them behind, but… I’ll be seeing those spiky ships in my nightmares forever if we don’t do something about them. Lantern, is there anything your people can do?”

  “We do not destroy Axiom facilities. We merely sequester them, and only destroy any forbidden artifacts that make their way into inhabited space.”

  Callie chewed her lip. “So we can do Uzoma’s plan. Open up some hangar doors and fire everything we’ve got on the White Raven inside, and hope it blows up real good. But will it be good enough?”

  Ashok went to the glass. “I bet we’d die trying anyway. These ships probably have automated defenses we can’t even imagine, so they’d probably shoot back. And r
emember, if they perceive us as a threat, they’d could just open a bridge right in the middle of the White Raven, and we’d be turned into meat and metal confetti.”

  “Oh, hell,” Callie said. “The emergency systems. If we attack, they’ll just kill us and go… wherever. Maybe to that prison planet we saw, or maybe… who knows where.”

  Ashok nodded. “Lantern and I were talking, though, about failsafes. You know how your personal teleporter won’t send you into a wall or whatever, and won’t open inside a person, or a building? The bridge generators on those ships don’t have those kind of safeguards. They’re meant to be used as weapons as well as transport. So we were thinking, what if we can convince all the generators on all those ships to open bridges all at once, with the other ends of the bridges distributed all over this whole station.”

  “Whoa.” Callie looked at the hangar. She remembered the starfish ship being torn apart by a single portal opening inside it. Multiply that devastation by hundreds… “I think that would do some damage. Lantern, are you willing to help with that, given your whole non-interference stance?”

  “The consequences would be disastrous if the Axiom realized that someone had deliberately destroyed this station, but there are hundreds of thousands of such stations throughout the galactic cluster, and there are sometimes malfunctions and accidents, after all these years. Occasionally a program malfunctions, and there is a disaster. I have taken the liberty of wiping the past few days of data from the station’s central system, so even if the wreckage were discovered, nothing would point to our involvement, and it would likely be ruled an accident. The station records indicate there are no members of the Axiom slumbering on this station who might wake or be alerted. This place is abandoned, and could be destroyed without much chance of discovery. I can break with doctrine in these circumstances.”

  “Let’s do it,” Callie said. “We’ll get off the station, then set the whole fleet to blow. Can we do that with a timer or something?”

  Ashok glanced at Lantern, and Lantern fluttered her tentacles. Ashok said, “Sorry, cap, it’s not that easy. It’s not like there are no safeguards in place here. The Axiom weren’t stupid. The station has ways of protecting itself. There’s a… Lantern says it’s like a force field that prevents the bridge generators from opening up in here, for obvious reasons. There’s a way to override the field, but you have to physically break a connection way down in the guts of the station. It’s a pretty crucial part of the infrastructure, too, so there are automated systems in place to repair it. We can’t take those systems offline, they’re too integral, so you pretty much have to break the connection, disable the field, and then trigger the ships to set off the portal apocalypse before the repair-bots can undo the damage.”

  “So it’s your basic suicide mission.” Callie nodded. “We’ll send someone who’s not alive, then. We’ll get Shall in his repair drone to go down there–”

  More head-shakes. Uzoma spoke this time. “The only way to access the relevant area is to squeeze through one of the same tunnels you took to reach Elena. Too small for your drone. We considered commandeering one of the station bots.” They inclined their head toward the quiescent wireframe polyhedrons. “They’re adaptable in terms of shape. But they’re also physically incapable of damaging the ship’s critical systems.” A shrug. “Safeguards.”

  “Could I cut the cable and then teleport out?” Callie tapped the device on her wrist.

  “Maybe?” Ashok said. “The range on the teleporter is limited, and the station is big, and the connection we need to break is inconveniently located. If you teleported from that spot, out to max range, you wouldn’t get clear of the explosion. Well, not explosion. What would you call it, Uzoma?”

  “A series of violent disruptions of space time.”

  “Right, that,” Ashok said.

  Callie shrugged. “So I cut the cable, set off the portals, crawl out of the tunnel fast, run faster, and then teleport out to max range. Is that possible?”

  Ashok hmmed. “Possibly. It’s hard to tell how fast things would happen. Would the wormholes interact with each other, and if so, will that interaction have a dampening effect, or an amplifying one? We’re eyeballing this, guesstimates all around, but maybe you could do it in time. If you were really fast. Like an athlete. And lucky. Like a… lucky athlete.”

  “I’ll do it,” Lantern said. “My life is forfeit anyway. You have already condemned me to death, and this way I would die in service to a greater good.”

  Callie shook her head. “If I was still planning to execute you, I wouldn’t trust you on that kind of mission anyway. But you’re not going to die by my hand, Lantern. There will be justice for Meditreme Station, but I won’t get it by killing you. I’m going to settle things with your superiors.”

  “I know what we did was unforgiveable,” Lantern said. “But I hope you can see we had our reasons.”

  “They might not be the reasons you think, though,” Elena said. “Sebastien told me some things… You should look into the deep archives before we go, Lantern.”

  Callie wondered what that was all about, but she shrugged. One thing at a time. “You don’t get to volunteer for this, Lantern. You have to raise the little ones in the incubators. If you died, I’d be stuck raising a bunch of baby squidlings, and that’s too much like a comedy immersive for real life. I’m the captain. I’ll do the deadly mission of death.”

  “Cap, with all due respect to your fitness level, you’d have to crawl backwards out of the access tunnel before you could even start trying to run–”

  “Perhaps not.” Uzoma went to one of the screens and began manipulating data, spinning spatial models of the station. “She could, perhaps, go forward, and drop down to this larger tunnel used by the bio-drones. Then, if she could hitch a ride on one…”

  “That could work.” Ashok joined them at the panel. “If we direct a drone to wait for her here…”

  “You two figure that out,” Callie said. “I’m a quick study, so just tell me what to do when the time comes. Lantern, open up a hangar door so we can get in touch with the Raven, and get the rest of you off this station.”

  The alien scurried away to comply.

  Elena touched her arm. “Callie, you don’t have to do this. Risk your life? I asked you to help me, to save my friends, and you succeeded beyond my greatest hopes. You’ve done enough.”

  Callie shook her head. “I can’t leave this place just sitting here. It’s too dangerous. Besides, I’ll be fine. I’ll cut the thing, activate the stuff, ride the kaiju, teleport out, you’ll rescue me – it’ll be fine. I’m not in this for the noble self-sacrifice.”

  “Don’t die,” Elena said. “Promise me.”

  “I can’t–”

  “Just say it, Callie.”

  “OK. I promise not to die.”

  “Good. Now you can kiss me, and then you can go be brave.”

  * * *

  Lantern got the ship-building machines shut down, and even though they’d been working in vacuum and therefore hadn’t made any noise, it still seemed more peaceful without the falling sparks and flashes of welding and the ceaseless motion of metal beyond the glass.

  Uzoma and Ashok went over Callie’s route with her about six times, and loaded a crude but efficient map into her helmet display, then tried to go over it again, until she told them to stop, she got it, she understood. They all walked across a covered catwalk, through the silent hangar space full of lethal black spheroids bristling with spikes and fins, all of them filled with silver brain-spiders. Like hideous egg sacs, waiting to burst. Callie shuddered at the thought.

  They opened a hangar door and established communication with the ship. Things on the Raven were fine. Ibn was asleep, and Robin was drinking all the coffee, the latter against doctor’s orders. Shall came over in the canoe with spare environment suits and they got Sebastien bundled up safely. They brought the bio-drone as close as they could to the hangar door and transferred the incubators as g
ently as possible, Shall taking great care to load them into the canoe. Once everything was stowed and shipshape, Callie hugged Elena, said her farewells, and stood before the hangar door as the last of them climbed inside the transport.

  Shall squatted on top of the canoe, clinging with magnetic feet, and spoke to her on a private channel. “I don’t like this. Something could go wrong. I should come with you.”

  “You wouldn’t fit in the hole I have to crawl through, and anyway, you’re in a valuable piece of machinery. I don’t want you getting blown up. Go away.”

  “Callie–”

  She turned her back on the hangar and headed toward the interior of the station, surrounded by the ships that would soon tear the whole place apart. “Be ready to pick me up in forty-five minutes.”

  “I wish I could be there to keep you safe.”

  “I keep myself safe. Don’t worry, I’m not going to die.”

  * * *

  Thirty-seven minutes later, Callie thought, I am going to die.