Shadow Run

by Michael Miller

I was doing everything I could. Wasn’t I?

  The question felt bigger in my skull, bigger than the containment hold, reflecting the expanse of space outside. I was doing what Alaxans had done for hundreds and hundreds of years before me. This could only be the right path. It felt right.

  …For the most part. And yet one arrogant offworlder was making me doubt myself.

  I wished I could ask my father. It had been his ship first, after all, and his father’s before him. I missed the days of sitting up here in a spare chair, my knees pulled up to my chin against the chill, as I watched my father pilot. I’d ask him every question under the stars. It was usually just me, since Onai—the thought of my oldest brother still made me wince—would be piloting the skiff, and Arjan was usually along with him, learning how. As the youngest, I’d been riding on the bridge with my father on short Shadow runs practically before the buckles fit tight enough to hold me in my seat during takeoff. So I’d known the moment his flying began to grow more erratic, when his eyes went from only darkening in the corners during his more daring moves to turning fully black and back again.

  If only he were still here. He would have been able to talk to me about everything from containment hold upgrades to suspicious strangers, and about this blackness that felt like it was eating me up from the inside out.

  He would have been able to, if the very same blackness hadn’t killed him. And my mother. And Onai. And my grandparents and all their other children. And my great-grandparents.

  Ours was a legacy of pride and tradition. It was also a legacy of death and madness. This blackness was deeper and darker and more dangerous than the hidden corners of space. And it lived inside me. In my blood and bone, in the fibers of my being.

  Shadow poisoning affected anyone exposed to too much of the energy for very long, but this…this was different. This was generations of exposure built up in our bodies, lining our cells and nerves like soot.

  And it didn’t only kill us. For some of us, it made us great before it did. And that scared me more than anything.

  It was in moments like these that I felt very small, very young…and very alone. It was, I knew, the same feeling that crippled Arjan and kept him from being able to lead as captain.

  And yet here I was. So I raked my hands back through my hair, threw myself down in my seat, and shook off the feeling of clinging darkness. It eventually stopped weighing on my shoulders, encroaching on the corners of my eyes.

  Darkness seemed to still be pressing on the viewport, though. It was actually the middle of our day—we’d fished throughout the night and the next morning—though it was hard to tell from the blackness of space.

  It was almost as peaceful as sleep. I paused for a second to watch the partial arc of the intergalactic portal float across my view. Once, it was a gateway from Alaxak to the rest of the galaxy, and even to distant galaxies beyond, but now it was still and empty as a doorway without a house around it. Unimaginably large, the twisted girders, damaged over the centuries from meteor strikes, hovered like broken ribs. Sometimes drones would collect in front of it in an attempt to travel through it using a technology that…well, that nobody understood anymore. The Great Collapse was named for its loss. Eventually, the drones would revert to other programing and disperse, leaving what remained of the ruins to float alone. I found it comforting in a way—civilization had imploded, but my people had endured. Our culture had existed for thousands of years before the Great Collapse and it would exist for thousands after.

  Even if I didn’t make it that much longer.

  My brother’s voice over the comm brought me back to myself. He was using the channel that piped only into the bridge. “Great flying, little sister.”

  I felt my eyes tear, despite myself. Arjan had been in this with me from the beginning. We’d both watched our parents’ loving gaze go dark and never change back, heard the chaotic nonsense that replaced their steady words of reason, and found them—finally—unmoving one morning over five years ago. After Onai followed my parents’ dark path less than two years later at age twenty-five, it was Arjan who had eventually encouraged me to take over their operation, even with me just fourteen and him eighteen. It was looking out for him and the crew that helped me keep my self-control. Without him, I wouldn’t be here, and yet I so often treated him just like any other member of the crew.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You too, really. Look, Arjan, when we’re done with this run, let’s you and me…go somewhere…different for a little while.” The words tripped awkwardly out of my mouth. “You know, like, away from Gamut for a couple of days. Maybe we could camp on the beaches on the northern sea, or in the equatorial forest.”

  “I think it’s called a ‘vacation,’ and I’m not surprised you don’t know the word.” I could hear his grin. He hadn’t teased me like this for a long time. “Sounds amazing.”

  I grinned back, even though he couldn’t see it.

  “But you know,” he added with a yawn, “going to sleep sounds nearly as amazing.”

  I was also tired. Dangerously tired, where control slipped away faster than Shadow from a net, and a laugh burst out of me. “There’ll be time enough to sleep when we’re dead.”

  My laughter hitched. That eventuality might not be too far off for either of us, if Onai was any indication. I cleared my throat and pushed the button to comm the entire crew. “Let’s get back into position, everyone, in case there’s another flare worth running.”

  Voices came back to me in sleepy assent. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t hear from Nev. He was probably asleep standing up.

  “Eton and Telu, eyes out for any drones or asteroids headed our way. Nev, get me a count on our remaining empty canisters—”

  “Um…Captain?” Nev’s voice was unsteady as he interrupted me—but not from tiredness. He sounded more anxious than he had at the sight of the drone.

  “What?”

  As if answering for him, a red light flared on the dash, followed by the piercing buzz of an alarm. Panic rose in me at the same time, until I forced it down and scanned the feeds as quickly as possible.

  Someone had pressure locked the cargo hold.

  “Nev!” I shouted into the comm. “What’s going on?”

  “A few of the canisters—the panels might be fried, because I didn’t see any Shadow, but they’re saying they’re losing pressure.”

  Another pulse of fear ran through me. If he was trapped in the cargo hold with leaking canisters…I would not lose a crewmember this way. Even if he was new, even if I found him strange and infuriating, I could not watch his skin bubble and blacken. Even if he was lucky and only came into contact with a concentration of Shadow too weak to burn him, he would still fall into madness faster than an airship into the gravitational pull of a planet. I would no more be able to stand watching his eyes turn black than the rest of him.

  And I wouldn’t risk the rest of my ship. Leaking canisters could blow us all to hell. I would vent the cargo hold into space before I would let that happen, but that would of course kill Nev.

  “Nev, get out of there now.” If he was stuck in there, maybe I could reach for the Shadow and try to direct it…and risk killing myself. “If you’re locked in, I can manually override—”

  “I’m out. I was the one who put the pressure lock on.”

  I let out a massive breath into the comm. “Thank the ancestors.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to stay in there,” he said with some humor. “And I didn’t want anything leaking into the rest of the ship.”

  Maybe I’d been too hard on him. He’d not only saved himself but tried to protect the Kaitan. “Good work. Get away from the door and strap yourself in in the mess. Arjan, get the skiff back on board. We need to get those canisters offloaded, now.” I couldn’t keep the rest of my words from coming out clipped, even though I knew it was the right thing to do. “We’re headed back to Alaxak.”

  The Kaitan’s bow parted the icy gray waves as I landed in the ocean and then taxied in
to Gamut’s small harbor. As far as I knew, our planet was the only one where ships docked almost exclusively in water. No one had the money to build industrial landing pads, and the permafrost was too unstable otherwise. The ground couldn’t take the force or heat of a ship’s thrusters for long before turning into a bog.

  I wished we were taking off instead. I wanted to feel caught between gravity and the plasma jets, between ice and fire, my back mashed into the seat. That tug-of-war with me at the center would mean I was moving. Here on my frozen planet, movement never came without a fight. And if what I still felt in my gut was right, this was a catch worth moving for. We should still be out there.

  But no, we were headed in the opposite direction of the call I felt. The knowledge tingled on my skin, crackling along my nerves, pulsing through my bones, pounding through my entire body, a comm speaker shouting now, now, now.

  Shadow was calling to me.

  “Let’s get this done quick, hey?” I was so distracted as I pulled up to the pier that I forgot to catch the local accent I often muffled for the benefit of my offworlder crew. The dockworkers outside reacted quickly to our arrival, tossing heavy lines to secure us to massive cleats while steam hissed from our hull, still hot from reentry.

  From his station below me, Basra glanced up through the metal grating of the bridge floor. “I’ve already commed the cannery to let them know we have a situation. They’re sending a containment van to get the canisters, and they’ll be geared up, so we won’t even have to enter the cargo hold. That shouldn’t take more than an hour, and they estimated decontamination might take another two or so hours, if there is any.”

  I blinked. I usually couldn’t get them to respond so fast or efficiently. Maybe Basra had sweet-talked them somehow. “Nice.”

  “The only downside is they can’t offload the rest of our catch now, since they’re at processing capacity for the moment.”

  In which case, it was doubly impressive they were coming so soon. “No problem. We can fill all the way up and deliver in a couple of days.” I shrugged. “I guess that means whoever wants to can grab a nap. And we can all sleep for a few more hours after we lift off again, since we’ll have to wait on the blasted drone traffic.”

  The cosmologists had predicted particularly heavy drone activity between us and the Alaxak Asteroid Sea over the next six hours—exactly in our flight path. The automated mining drones always got in our way, trying to blow up the ship whenever they felt I got in their way. Usually I maneuvered around them, but not even I would risk heading into that many. Still, we’d be back fishing sooner than I’d expected.

  “What is this, free time? Are you getting soft?” Telu laughed from her own station. “Excuse me while I get right on the sleep. I wouldn’t miss this date with my bunk for the galaxy in a glass.”

  “Not sleeping in your chair, for once?” I asked, attempting to return her teasing tone, even though my fingers were drumming on the dash. “What’s the occasion?”

  “More than thirty minutes to catch some shut-eye is an occasion. Plus”—she grinned up at me—“did you notice how fast I had that drone chasing its own tail? Any time I can stick it to the royals is cause for celebration.”

  She had reason to hate the royals, one royal family in particular. The Dracortes owned the mining drones. Their programming was impossible to change—not even the Dracortes knew how anymore—but temporarily rerouting them wasn’t impossible for a hacker like Telu.

  Not that hackers of her skill level were common. Her family was nearly as old as mine. She never seemed to be able to point the way to Shadow as well as Arjan or I could, but she definitely had the much faster reflexes gained after generations of Shadow exposure, even if she employed them in a different way. She was to drone hacking as I was to piloting, meaning she was one of the best damned hackers on all of Alaxak, and maybe beyond.

  I gave her a tired smile. “Good job today,” I told her. “We’re fishing hard, but you’re as sharp as ever.”

  Her eyes grew softer behind all their edges. “Thanks,” she murmured.

  When she stood, I added, “Set the cams outside the cargo hold to record if they detect motion.” When anyone but my crew was on board, I liked to be cautious—and even among my crew, I didn’t trust Nev yet.

  “Already did,” she replied, giving me a knowing look, one that would be more of a deterrent than cameras to thieves or saboteurs, if only they could see it. “I set an alarm too.” She gave me a smirk, following fast on the heels of her death-stare, as I’d always called it. “Don’t you sleep in your chair, either, hey?”

  I wasn’t sure if I would be sleeping, but I didn’t want her to worry about me. “I won’t.”

  Telu had only just left her station and I’d barely settled in to wait, when there was a commotion on the stairs leading up to the bridge. Eton’s voice rose—no surprise, in these sorts of situations.

  “I said, you don’t get to bother the captain. That’s not part of your job, as I would have explained to you in unmistakable terms if I’d been the one to hire you. No, scratch that, I just wouldn’t have hired you in the first place.”

  I stood from my chair in a rush, irritation practically dragging my body upright. I knew whom he was talking to, because Eton had disapproved of my snap decision to hire Nev practically straight off the dock. I almost couldn’t blame him: Nev was an unknown element with no fishing experience, but Arjan had found Nev and approved of him enough to recommend I give him a shot. Besides, there was no one else under such short notice—it wasn’t like Gamut was a bustling hub of commerce. I expected Eton to grumble—which he had—but to second-guess me in front of Nev and the rest of the crew was a step too far.

  “Well, good thing the captain hired me instead of you, hm?” Nev retorted, his voice far more calm than Eton’s but no less loud. In spite of his being a source of plenty of irritation himself, the words made me smile. He already understood what Eton apparently still didn’t.

  That alone made me call out, “Eton, let him up here. It’s fine.”

  Nev stepped lightly onto the bridge from the top of the stairs, and Eton followed with much more force, his steps ringing over the metal grating.

  “Yes?” I asked Nev politely enough, ignoring Eton. I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see him, but I had invited him up here.

  Nev smiled—a nice smile with those too-white teeth. “We haven’t had much time to get formally acquainted yet, Captain. I hoped we could take advantage of this unfortunate mishap with the canisters, and that you might let me apologize for losing my temper earlier. Please allow me to buy you a drink.”

  Eton practically choked, while I had to snap my own mouth closed. “You…want to buy me a drink?” I stuttered.

  It was definitely the first time in my life anyone had ever offered me that. I had to fight down a hysterical laugh. Didn’t he have any idea who I was? It wasn’t even that I was the captain, but more what I was.

  Nev’s smile didn’t lessen. “I’m pretty sure that’s what I said.”

  Eton finally found his voice. “There’s no way in blazing hell the captain is going with you.”

  I turned on Eton with the same incredulity, except this time my words were deadly quiet. “Are you trying to speak for me, now?”

  “Qole, look at him!” He threw his hands at our new loader. “This character was apparently skulking around Gamut for days asking questions about you! He’s some offworlder here for his own reasons. He doesn’t know the first thing about catching Shadow.”

  “Like you once didn’t, you mean?” The reminder made Eton snap his mouth closed and fold his arms. I crossed my own arms and stood right in front of him. The difference between our relative sizes was probably especially obvious since I came up to his shoulder, but between the two of us, I knew which one wasn’t backing down. My voice stayed low, my words measured. “I think I’ll have a drink with Nev. We’ll be back in less than an hour.”

  Eton made a thunderous noise of exasperation. “Telu
, do you hear this?” He looked down through the floor.

  “Telu’s getting some rest,” I said.

  “Like we all should be. Hey, Basra, Arjan! Can you talk some sense into Qole?”

  Unfortunately, Arjan had joined Basra at his comm station down below, and the two of them were looking back up at us through the floor, watching the scene on the bridge play out. Oddly, Basra had his hand on my brother’s arm. Now that I thought about it, I’d been seeing them together more and more, when we had the rare bit of downtime.

  “Qole, I’m not sure that’s best—” Arjan began.

  Basra cleared his throat loudly, interrupting him. “This is a negotiation you can’t win, so don’t even bother. Let’s get some sleep ourselves.” He swept away from his console then, firmly guiding Arjan alongside and adding over his shoulder, “I’d advise against killing Eton, however, Captain. We need him.”

  Typical Basra, ever aware of the value of everything—and everyone. I didn’t think he let things like feelings cloud his judgment. He even preferred identifying as a he, for the most part, not because he felt more like one, but because of the slight edge it gave him when haggling—something I could at least understand as a young female captain, with my every move challenged or underestimated.

  Yet it raised the sudden question: What was between my brother and him? Basra had joined our crew a couple of years ago, following Arjan, Telu, and Eton, in that order, and I’d never quite figured out why. Of course we needed a trader to deal with the Shadow once we’d caught it, and he was a trader, but I’d had no idea what he was doing on Alaxak. He kept closed-mouthed about his past, much like Eton—much like anyone from off-planet, really—and so I hadn’t pressed him. But as it became clearer and clearer that Basra was no ordinary trader, gender fluidity aside, I’d wondered. And now, as I glanced down at him and my brother before the door closed behind them, their hands nearly brushing as they left the crews’ stations, I really wondered.

  First things first. I was apparently having a drink, of all things, with our new loader, of all people. As absurd as that was, it would be worth it if it would teach Eton a valuable lesson. I was too wired to sleep, anyway…and maybe the tiniest bit impressed that Nev hadn’t dived for his bunk first thing himself. I started away from my control console, heading for the stairs, and Nev turned to follow me.