by Rachel Bach
Okay, I knew that wasn’t actually a viable long-term solution, but I didn’t care. Right now, I felt like I could take down a team of Devastators using only my teeth.
Rupert glanced over at me, lifting his dark eyebrows. “You look happy.”
“Just readjusting some priorities,” I answered, cracking my knuckles. “So where are we, anyway?”
“I don’t actually know if it has a name,” Rupert said. “We’re outside of Republic borders.”
I gave him a skeptical look. “What kind of doctor lives in open space?”
“You’ll see in a second,” he said as the final alarm sounded.
I grabbed my seat as the jump flash washed over our ship, bringing with it that awful feeling of being sucked back into reality as we left hyperspace and reemerged into the universe. I looked around expectantly as soon as the light faded, but I didn’t see anything that could give me a hint of what kind of place we’d arrived at. In fact, I didn’t see much of anything at all. We’d emerged into what looked like deep space. I didn’t see a planet or a moon or even a sun, just a wall of unfamiliar stars shining like little penlights in the deep, deep blackness. I was about to ask Rupert if the Kessel gate had jumped us to the wrong place when he caught my eye and pointed down.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not much of a pilot. Years of working on-planet and on-ship had taught me to keep my eyes straight. Unless my suit tipped me off, I didn’t tend to look down when I was searching for things because xith’cal didn’t normally spring up from under your feet. But space was another matter. Out here, down was as valid as any other direction, and when I followed Rupert’s lead, what I saw made me gasp.
Directly below our little ship was an enormous space station. Or at least, I assumed it was a space station. I’d never actually seen anything like the glittering structure hanging in the blackness like a work of art. From above, it was shaped like a galaxy with long arms radiating out in a spiral from a relatively tiny central hub, but when Rupert flew us closer, I saw that the spiral was actually stretched out. Instead of being a flat disk, the long arms were curved both up and down, so that from the side it looked like a sphere. It was the strangest, most beautiful setup for a space station I’d ever seen, but weirdest of all was the fact that every one of those long, gently curving tubes looked to be made entirely of clear glass.
Inside the clear tubes, people walked on the sloping surfaces at all different directions. Some tubes had gravity on the bottom relative to our position, but in others the people seemed to be walking upside down. Still others looked to have no gravity at all. I was starting to wonder if they were having some kind of malfunction when I realized that all the people inside those clear tubes were wearing the brightest, most ridiculously fluttery outfits I’d ever seen.
“God and king,” I muttered, leaning in for a closer look. “It’s that space church place, isn’t it? Nova’s home.”
“The Church of the Cosmos,” Rupert said with a nod. “They have several stations, actually, but this is their main facility.”
“And this is where your doctor is hiding?” I hadn’t meant that to come out quite so skeptical, but I just couldn’t reconcile the idea of a doctor who’d worked with Maat living in the same place that had produced someone like Nova. Then again, the Church of the Cosmos had also produced Nic, who’d been hard enough to run with Brenton, and their dad was supposed to be some kind of church leader who knew both Caldswell and Brenton, so I guessed it made sense that—
“Oh no,” I moaned, flopping back in my chair. “It’s Nova’s dad, isn’t it?”
Rupert nodded.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I cried. “I mean, why not just say ‘we’re going to see Dr. Starchild’ instead of ‘the doctor’ or whoever. It wouldn’t have put me off. I like Nova, remember?”
“Old habits die hard,” Rupert confessed. “We never talk about him. Dr. Starchild’s affiliation with the Eyes is a deeply held secret. I only know about him because I’m old enough to remember his departure. The newer Eyes have no idea the head of the Church of the Cosmos was ever part of our operation.”
I looked up at the glittering station in front of us. “Why is it such a big deal? I can understand the Eyes not wanting Dr. Starchild to talk about them, but why wouldn’t they talk about him?”
“Because of what he did,” Rupert said. “Dr. Starchild was with the Eyes from the very beginning. He knew enough to bury our entire organization, but he wanted out. When the Eyes refused to let him go, he loaded all that damning knowledge, and proof that it was true, onto satellites, which he then hid throughout the galaxy to use as blackmail. Unless they wanted the story of Maat, her daughters, and the phantoms sent to all the major news organizations, the Eyes had no choice but to let him make a clean break.”
I whistled, impressed. A stunt like that took serious guts. It was also surprisingly ruthless, though I could completely understand why the Eyes would never want his name mentioned again after getting shown up so badly. What I didn’t understand was: “How the hell is he still alive? This place is so isolated it would be an easy hit, so why haven’t the Eyes taken him out?”
Rupert chuckled. “Believe me, there are plenty of Eyes who think we should destroy this place, including our current commander. Fortunately for Dr. Starchild, they can’t afford to. He’s the only person left in the universe who understands exactly how the plasmex part of Maat’s prison works.”
A cold shiver ran up my spine. “And why is that?”
“Because he’s the one who built it.”
My eyes went wide, but before I could ask any more, a beautiful chime sounded over our com.
CHAPTER 7
Most announcement alarms were beeps designed to get your attention. This one sounded like a wind chime, a leisurely string of notes followed by a woman’s dreamy voice.
“Welcome, traveler. We are pleased to share space in harmony with you. How do you identify and what is your intent?”
The woman sounded so much like Nova I felt nostalgic, but my calm was ruined when Rupert answered. “My name is Rupert Charkov. I’m here with Deviana Morris to see Dr. Starchild.”
“The Solarium Dock is currently available,” the woman replied. “Abbot Starchild’s envoy will join you shortly. May you be as one with the cosmos.”
“Thank you,” Rupert said, cutting off the com.
The moment the channel closed, I whirled on him. “Why did you give her our real names? We’re on the run, remember?”
“Trust me, it will be much easier this way,” Rupert said, glancing over at the station map that had just popped up on my console, along with a blinking marker at the end of one of the long arms that I could only guess was the Solarium Dock. “We’re on a timeline and Dr. Starchild is an enlightened holy man with an entire religion clamoring to see him. This is the only way we have a hope of getting on his calendar in any sort of a timely fashion.”
“But I thought he didn’t want anything to do with the Eyes,” I said, confused. “Why would he make an exception for you?”
“Not me,” Rupert replied. “The important name was yours.”
“Me?” I said, eyes wide. “Why? Because of the virus?”
“If Dr. Starchild already knew about your virus, he really would be psychic,” Rupert said with a smile. “No, not that. I’m hoping he’ll let you in because Nova adores you, and if Dr. Starchild has a weakness, it’s his children.”
I hadn’t even considered that Nova might have told people about me. Now that I thought about it, though, I recalled she had written about me to Nic, so it made sense that she would have done the same to her father. But even if that was the case, I didn’t share Rupert’s certainty that the abbot of the Church of the Cosmos would make time to meet someone his daughter had mentioned in a letter. My virus seemed like a much more certain way of getting his attention, but somehow I didn’t think he’d respond well to a note informing him that I was carrying a plasmex disease that could wipe o
ut his entire station and oh, by the way, would he mind helping me with that?
At least I wouldn’t have to worry about infecting anyone here by accident. After weeks of living with the thing, I had ample evidence that my virus was not contagious unless it was showing. So long as I didn’t lose my temper, everything should be fine, and considering where I was headed, I didn’t think that was going to be a problem. It would be downright impossible to get mad on a station full of people who talked like Nova.
Our dock was set at the tip of one of the longest spiral arms, and like everything else here, it was weird. There were no doors or metal safeguards to allow them to shut down entry. Instead, the “dock” was just a hole in the glass covered in a shield to keep the atmosphere in and the radiation out. There wasn’t even a gun emplacement, which just struck me as dumb. How the hell a place like this survived in open space, I had no idea, but the glass where we landed was clean and unmarked by bullets or energy blasts, so they couldn’t have had much trouble with pirates. Maybe they were too poor for criminals to bother with?
As soon as Rupert set the Caravaner down, the station’s gravity took hold, making me feel like I’d lost fifty pounds. That wasn’t surprising considering what Nova had told me about this place, but I didn’t know what to expect as Rupert and I grabbed our stuff and headed out. Something gaudy and weird I was sure, but when we left the plain glass enclosure of the landing dock, walking through a set of clear sliding doors into what looked like a garden, all I found was beauty.
The tube was about twenty feet in diameter, and it was filled with flowering trees. Spindly, alien trees with dark trunks and blue-green leaves rose up from planters set along the tube’s edges like sculptures, their roots set not in dirt but in clear balls of hydroponic gel that in turn were bolted onto gyroscopic platforms, which made sense once I remembered what Nova had said about her home’s love of flipping gravity around.
They smelled nice, too. Most space stations smelled like chemical sanitizers, which wasn’t bad when you considered what that many people living together in a small space would smell like without them. By contrast, the Church of the Cosmos smelled like leaves and sweet flowers, and it glowed. At first I thought the trees were bioluminescent, but then I saw the tiny lamps embedded in the trunks, using the tree’s own energy to power their soft, bluish light. This eerie brilliance combined with the sweet scent and the majestic sweep of the stars visible above our heads and below our feet through the tube’s crystal-clear walls made me feel like I was walking through some sort of heavenly garden, and it was so distractingly lovely I didn’t even notice the woman coming until she spoke.
“Salutations, visitors.”
I dragged my eyes away from the glowing trees to see a woman in an impossibly bright yellow dress striding toward us through the trees. Unlike Nova, who was pale as flour, this woman was dark skinned with close-cropped curling black hair, but she had the same serene, dreamy expression on her face as she drifted to a stop. “I am Solara,” she said, her voice as soft and cool as the light from the trees overhead. “Spiritual guide and priestess of the oneness. It is my great pleasure to share space with any friends of Novascape’s. I understand you seek to harmonize with Abbot Nebulon Starchild?”
I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. Nova’s dad’s name was Nebulon? I guess that was better than Galaxior, but still … Nebulon Starchild.
Just thinking about it was enough to give me the giggles something fierce. Thankfully, Rupert was there to cover my ass. As soon as he saw me start to lose my composure, he stepped in to save the conversation. “Yes, Priestess,” he said, smooth as silk. “We’d like a meeting with him, if possible. Do you know if he has any time today?”
“We do not indulge in the illusion that the infinite flow of time is divisible here,” the woman said. “But I would be happy to guide you to the abbot’s place of refuge. If events align such that he is not otherwise occupied, I’m sure he would be delighted to share in oneness with you.”
Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure this place was going to be as safe for my temper as I thought. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You don’t use clocks, so you can’t make us an appointment, but you’re going to take us to the abbot’s house and he’ll see us if he’s not busy?”
“That is the basic summation,” the woman said, completely unfazed by my sharpness.
I gaped at her. “How the hell do you run a space station with no clocks?”
Rupert elbowed me, but the woman only smiled wider. “This is a place of healing and freedom, Deviana.” She raised her head, looking lovingly up at the stars. “Here we can only surrender to the infinite, for it is only through surrender to that which we cannot change that we free ourselves from the illusion of control and, in doing so, find true peace.”
I boggled at her when she looked back down, but rather than explaining what the hell she’d just said, the madwoman gave me a wink. “It always works out in the end. After all, we are always exactly where we are meant to be. Now”—she turned around—“if you would care to follow me, I can lead you to the abbot’s. Normally we let pilgrims find their own path, but the station can be confusing if you’re not used to it.”
“And we’re not pilgrims,” I reminded her.
“We are all pilgrims on the path of life,” the woman said dreamily, walking off down the tube. “This way.”
I gave Rupert a long-suffering look as I hoisted my armor case onto my shoulder. Since the gravity was so low here, I was able to carry it easily. Good thing, too, because the curving tube seemed to go on for miles. We passed several more gardens of lit plants, but we also walked through places that looked like classrooms filled with people in plain robes. Sometimes these people were listening to lectures given by men and women dressed like our guide; other times they were just sitting, staring off at the stars.
I also saw people using plasmex. Before Nova had made her cards float for me, I hadn’t actually believed it was real, but lots of people apparently had it here. I saw several people levitating objects on their own, and I passed an entire class of children playing a color guessing game that apparently involved reading each other’s minds. Considering all that, then, it wasn’t surprising that I also saw phantoms.
Once I’d gotten used to the strange glow from the trees, I noticed the tiny ones everywhere. There were larger ones, too, phantoms as big as my hand drifting in and out of the tubes like fish swimming through a reef. Though I didn’t see any more phantoms in lines, thank god, all of them seemed to notice me when I passed. Some even tried to follow, but I picked up the pace, determinedly ignoring them as we followed the tube in toward the nexus of the station.
The longer we walked, the more I understood the reasoning behind the station’s strange construction. By building in spiraling tubes rather than a more normal spherical, ring, or cross-shaped setup, every part of the station had an unobstructed view of the stars. Also, the tubes made you feel like you were walking through space rather than through a structure, which definitely fit the Church of the Cosmos’s mission statement. Finally, building in tubes allowed each one to maintain its own gravity environment, a fact I learned the hard way when we reached the place where our tube met the station’s center.
As soon as I stepped over the threshold, the gravity vanished like a rug tugged out from under my feet, and I would have gone tumbling if Rupert hadn’t grabbed me. The center of the station was a huge, open space that, as I’d just discovered, had no gravity at all. Every tube on the station looked like it fed into this place, which seemed to be an amphitheater of some kind. There was even a floating dais at the center, just the sort where an enlightened religious leader would sit while preaching to his followers, and I realized I’d just entered the church part of the Church of the Cosmos.
I don’t have a lot of experience dealing with zero G outside of my suit. While I was struggling to get a leg up, our guide flipped over graceful as a mermaid, pushing off the wall with practiced ease to fly across
the space to an unassuming door that was set into the church’s roof. “Don’t fight the air,” she called when she saw me struggling. “Just use your surroundings.”
Like hell did I need this bitch to give me flying instructions. Gritting my teeth in frustration, I got myself angled the right way and kicked off, making it more or less on target. Rupert followed with his usual effortless grace, which I normally loved but found highly annoying under current circumstances. Our guide gave him an impressed look as she opened the door and stepped inside. The moment her foot was through the door, she dropped like a stone, falling up a long tunnel to land neatly on the carpeted ceiling, which I now realized was the floor of a well-appointed waiting room.
At that, my annoyance at being the worst flier was replaced by overwhelming dizziness. “I think I’m going to be sick,” I whispered, grabbing Rupert’s arm.
“Just close your eyes,” he said, brushing a kiss over my hair.
I obeyed, squeezing my eyes tight as Rupert helped me through the door. I didn’t open them again until we’d cleared the long tunnel and my feet were firmly planted on what I decided would now and forever be the floor. When I managed to crack them open at last, the first thing I saw was our guide looking at me with sympathy.
“It’s all right,” she said softly. “You’ll learn to let go of your expectations eventually.”
I shot her a killing glare. I didn’t want to let go. Things like up and down and clocks that she called restrictions I called useful, and I’d about had it up to here with her cosmos nonsense talk. But before I could get myself too worked up, Rupert squeezed my hand tight, a pointed reminder to keep it cool. After a deep breath, I decided he was probably right. Virus aside, there was no point in blowing up at someone who didn’t get angry and wouldn’t fight back.
“This is the entry to the abbot’s private refuge,” the woman said, holding out her hands. “You may wait here if you desire convergence.”
