Medusa in the Graveyard (The Medusa Cycle)

by Devenport, Emily

 

  That settled, I wondered who else would need to speak to me, now that I wanted to sleep. No one else volunteered, so I let myself drift, feeling assured that everything was under control and that, for the time being, we were safe.

  We weren’t safe. Not remotely.

  * * *

  I remember having vague dreams, the sort that occur in bits and pieces, as if the brain can’t be bothered to stick to one story line, let alone come up with something coherent. I enjoyed those fragments. They took no effort, and after the very long party and its aftermath, I felt I deserved a break.

  Famous last words.

  “You’re in big trouble,” said a voice.

  I opened an eye. On the bunk where Mirzakhani was supposed to be sleeping, I saw Baba Yaga sitting on the edge with her booted feet barely touching the floor. She puffed her pipe, then blew a ring at me. “Is this any way to treat a guest?”

  I sat up. The sleeping quarters still held the bunks that should be there, but the people I saw should not be there. Besides Baba Yaga, the Woov who had first caught my eye at the party perched on the edge of Cocteau’s bunk. Jay Momoa sat across from her.

  He waved. “Hi. Thanks for inviting me to your dream.”

  “I don’t think it’s a dream,” I said.

  “You’re half right,” said Baba Yaga. “These surroundings are a dream, but we three are real.” She pointed at the others with her pipe. “Not the most conventional mode of communication, but it will do.”

  “You’re doing this?” I said.

  “No,” said Baba Yaga. “Queenie is.”

  said Queenie.
  “Who?” I said. “The Weapons Clan?”

  That provoked a startled response from Jay. “Wait—what, now?”

  said Queenie.

  That was the ghost Wilson had detected. I had thought it was Timmy’s ship. “They’re after me?” I said. “What did I do?”

  “You’re on your way to talk to the Three,” said Baba Yaga. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “We have been hearing rumors about you for decades,” said the Woov. Her voice was musical, though she had a slight lisp. “If we have, they certainly have.”

  “All right, Auntie—” Jay said. “I’m here—because…?”

  “We need you to look at the intruder before Queenie destroys it,” said Baba Yaga. “I suspect you have laid eyes on one like it before. Tell us what you know about that one.”

  Jay shrugged. “I think I can do that.”

  Baba Yaga got to her feet. “Well, then. To the bridge.”

  She moved steadily, if not quickly. I fell in behind her, with the Woov and Jay bringing up the rear. We made our way to the bridge, past the exercise room and Captain Thomas’s office, both of which were empty.

  “The next time I end up in one of your dreams,” grumbled Baba Yaga, “I must remember to bring my cane.”

  “The gravity field is pretty light,” I offered.

  “It’s not a question of gravity. It’s a question of confidence. That cane is topped with an iron skull. It can be used as a weapon.”

  When we emerged onto the bridge, it was also empty, though the screens were alight. They revealed schematics of the alien ship that hovered just beyond the viewing windows. Nothing seemed to be moving out there, making me wonder if Queenie had somehow suspended time.

  The ship was a graceful thing. At least, that’s what I thought when I first saw it, but the longer I gazed at it, the more uneasy I felt.

  “Watch out,” warned Jay. “They design mind traps into everything they make.”

  I blinked and made myself look at him instead of the attacking ship. “Everything?”

  “Yeah. They pretty much hate everyone.” Without the pheromones (or whatever) that made his physical presence so alluring, Jay was still a handsome man, but he seemed more like a regular guy. He stared briefly at the craft, then looked away and nodded. “From the Si Clan. It’s their emblem and their damage.”

  I was going to ask him what he meant by damage, but then I felt the irritation in my psyche, the feeling of having been twisted in some way I couldn’t quite comprehend, and I remembered what Jay had said about the mind traps.

  Baba Yaga turned to the Woov. “You have heard. Do you believe?”

  “Yes,” said the Woov. “I will bear witness.”

  “Good.” Baba Yaga turned to me again. “The Woovs are tolerated by the Ancient Races much more readily than we are. They will report these transgressors to the people most able to do something about them. It will help our effort, Oichi. You people of Olympia have already paid whatever cost it took to build your ships. I will relay that opinion to the Weapons Clan.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m—glad we could help.”

  “You’ll help a lot more before this is over.” Baba Yaga puffed her pipe. “By the way, Oichi, the Si Clan would be happy to take you and Ashur prisoner and kill the others. If it looks like that may happen, I advise suicide. You don’t want to be their guests.”

  “Wait—” I said, “Queenie can stop time! Right, Queenie?”

  said Queenie.

  “Just so,” said Baba Yaga. “Queenie! We have seen. You may do your work.”

  said Queenie.

  In a flash, I was back in my bunk with my eyes shut. They flew open when I felt what was outside, coming for us.

  I sat bolt upright in my bunk. “Enemy ship!”

  * * *

  “Holy crap!” Narm yelled from down the hall. I scrambled out my bunk and ran for the bridge.

  In my dream, the alien ship had hovered outside the window as if the universe were static. In real time, it moved, and the way it moved was almost as bad as the way it looked if you let your gaze rest on it too long.

  “Don’t look at it!” I warned as I buckled myself into my seat.

  “She’s right,” said Captain Thomas. “Use your displays.”

  Narm said, “Twenty-seven seconds to interception!”

  What did interception mean between two spacecraft? That the Si Clan was about to crash into us? Their ship began to shift, to grow grinding teeth. I couldn’t look away as it opened jaws to take a bite out of us.

  I sent, hoping she might hear my last words.

  Light flooded the bridge. Queenie interrupted, and through the windows I saw the form that was casting the light. It reminded me of the harness Fire had worn, with its predatory outlines that now resembled a bird of prey more than an insect. It focused those two points into one beam of energy that slammed into the attacking ship.

  “We’re jumping!” Thomas reported. “Hold on to your hat!”

  The hole formed around us. Beyond its lip, the other ship struggled to escape from Queen’s Fire. It looked like it was vibrating apart. As it began to lose cohesion, I felt the damage that Jay had recognized, the mind trap woven by the Si Clan, beginning to unravel and lose its power over me.

  It shivered, seemed to melt, and then disintegrated, just as the hole closed itself around us.

  The stars stretched, focused again, and we were out.

  “Report, all stations,” Thomas said calmly.

  “No damage to the hull,” Cocteau’s voice sounded on the PA. “The drive is operating normally.”

  “Life support is optimal,” reported Mirzakhani.

  “Minis are okay,” said Wilson. “Ashur, too.”

  Thomas waited for a long moment. “Anything else?”

  “Well,” Lee’s voice sounded over the PA, “my butt is still intact.”

  Thomas grinned. “Likewise. I guess we beat the devil.”

  I still had
spots swimming before my eyes from the intense light. “Queen’s Fire destroyed their ship.”

  They stared at me, and I wondered if we had seen the same thing.

  “All the way from Maui,” said Captain Thomas. “If that’s where she is.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking, that in a way, Queen’s Fire had been right there with us. The manifestation of her power was what it must be like to see an Angel of Vengeance in action.

  Thomas frowned at me. “I heard you shouting on your way up here. How did you know about the Enemy ship?”

  I was glad I had a good, if somewhat edited, answer. “Queenie told me, through my brain implant. She warned me not to look directly at it.”

  I saw no point in talking about the dream. In retrospect, it sounded pretty kooky.

  “Are we allowed on deck now?” called Kitten.

  Captain Thomas raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you mean on the ceiling?”

  Her jovial attitude put me at ease. She wouldn’t be acting that way if we were still in danger.

  “Have they ever attacked anyone, this far in-system?” I said.

  Thomas shrugged. “Beats me. It seems kind of unlikely.”

  Which meant that the Si Clan had taken a big chance. I couldn’t call myself an expert, but I had spent enough time with Timmy to suspect that they didn’t risk that much unless they thought it would pay off. They were afraid of what Ashur and I could do once we reached Graveyard, of whom we might talk to—and of who might talk back.

  Yet I doubted that was all of it. Something Baba Yaga had said about the Three came back to me.

  They are powerful tools. They should be properly used. We cannot simply bury our heads in the sand and hope that no one else will do so.

  The Si Clan might have found Ashur and me very useful, had they captured us. Another level of urgency had just been added to our mission into the graveyard.

  * * *

  My call had awakened Medusa, which was heartening. When Captain Thomas briefed her about what had happened, I waited to see some change in her demeanor, some sort of acknowledgment that we had good reasons to seek the help of the Three. After all—enemies! Implacable aliens! Creepy, shifty, mind-altering ships! Right?! I wanted her to say, I was completely wrong, you were totally right, I forgive you! Can you forgive me?

  Medusa looked troubled. “So it appears we have attracted the attention of enemies so terrible, their very name reflects hostility. We are doomed to stir up trouble.”

  “Don’t blame yourself for that,” said Captain Thomas. “These Enemy Clans have a long history of trouble. If they see you, they’re going after you. That’s what they do.”

  “Now they have seen us.” Medusa’s gaze met mine, and I looked for blame there. I didn’t see that, either.

  Unfortunately, I also saw no trace of the affection I missed so much. At least she seemed more like her old self. She said, “How long, Captain, before we arrive?”

  “A little under twenty hours before we make our final approach,” said Thomas.

  “Thank you.” Medusa cast me one last, troubled look, and then she flowed off the bridge, down the hall, back into Thomas’s office.

  “Get some sleep, if you can,” said Captain Thomas. “In twenty hours we’ll be entering a gravity well, and the way these things usually go, the time zone we end up in is going to be the most inconvenient one possible.”

  I nodded. Though it looked to me like Narm and Thomas wouldn’t be resting, not for a while, at least.

  I went back to my bunk. Ashur sat bolt upright in his. He wasn’t upset. He didn’t look scared, either.

  he said.

 

  Ashur leaned back and stared at the bulkhead as if it were a field of stars.

  I marveled at his sense of adventure and wondered if I would ever sleep again.

  PART FOUR

  A PLAGUE OF SCARECROWS

  16

  Whistling Past the Graveyard

  My mind still works in cycles, but three days after we landed on Graveyard, I would begin to think in terms of days. Three days after we had landed, three days since we had entered the canyon—but I had come unstuck in both time and space, so it wouldn’t be three days at all. It was a million years ago—and it had yet to happen.

  My hubris is substantial, but I couldn’t have predicted everything that would happen. Certain entities that had goaded me into my actions may have seen it—after all, time itself seems to have been constructed to support particular outcomes. They pushed me to the limits of what I’m capable of feeling—admittedly, not as far as most would go. For me, however, it felt too far. I had done all I could. I had walked to the end, and beyond.

  Can you believe it? I still didn’t see how much farther I could fall.

  * * *

  Merlin fell toward Graveyard. Nothing can make you feel anchored to space and time better than a gravity well. I was ill prepared for the experience, yet all I could think was—if Graveyard had not hosted the ship graveyard, no one would have named it Graveyard.

  The world below us was alive, a wonder for which no movie could have prepared us. Blue oceans covered most of its mass; white clouds swirled in its atmosphere. Brown and green landmasses peeked out from under the puffs and wisps.

  The horizon curved the wrong way.

  “Look down there,” said Cocteau. “That’s a hurricane. See the eye wall, in the center? Very well defined. That will be quite a storm, once it hits land.”

  Ashur looked half excited, half alarmed. “We’re going to be landing in a hurricane?”

  “No,” said Captain Thomas. “That’s way over on the other side of the landmass we’re headed for. Where we’re going, the weather is warm, partly cloudy, chance of light morning showers. Which reminds me—get ready for some serious time lag. We’ve already been awake for several hours, but where we’re going, the sun is just rising. It’s going to be a long day.”

  Day. Night. Morning. Afternoon. Those are words for time on worlds that rotate on an axis much bigger than the one Olympia spins around, planets that can make monster storms.

  I recalled hurricanes from my mother’s nature database, which included every kind of storm that could be found on Old Earth. Even if there had been no music or movie databases, my mother’s recordings of nature would have kept people captivated for hours at a time.

  Still, the database wasn’t like experiencing a real hurricane. Even now, the storm hardly looked real, because we were seeing it from orbit, not from a beach on which the winds were blowing at two hundred kilometers an hour. From our perspective, it didn’t even seem to be moving.

  “Are you ready to fly in atmosphere?” asked Captain Thomas, as if that were the most fun anyone could possibly have. I patted my harness. I was bundled so firmly in it, I may as well have been under arrest. Each of the Minis nestled in special webbing that had been improvised, all of them fitting into one seat made for humans. We people who weren’t made of biometal also wore g-suits.

  Captain Thomas strapped herself into the pilot’s seat; Wilson took the position beside her as copilot, and Cocteau sat nearby at a station that would serve as backup in the event both pilots were disabled. The rest of us were just along for the ride.

  “You’re going to feel about three g’s during the landing,” warned Captain Thomas. “You’ll see a glow outside, too—the heat of friction generated by contact with the atmosphere.”

  “That’s my favorite part,” quipped Narm.

  “Two forces we’re going to experience,” continued Thomas, “are gravity and drag. The drag refers to air resistance. That helps slow the ship to a safer speed. Merlin has a blunt-body design, and that creates a shock wave in front of us that helps keep the heat at a distance.”

  “How much heat?” worried Dragonette.

  The captain shook her head. “Don’t worry about it
. Epatha Thomas spares no expense when it comes to insulation. So sit tight, Olympians. Merlin is going to show you some magic.”

  She gave me the impression it was all going to happen in five to ten minutes. Instead, we sat for quite a while, while Thomas used thrusters to turn Merlin so her tail pointed at Graveyard. Once we had achieved the proper attitude, the tail thruster fired. That may seem as if it would cause us to blast away in the wrong direction, but we were moving so fast, it served to slow our speed of descent.

  Once that thruster shut down, we let gravity take us.

  We’re falling, I thought, from kilometers up, just falling into the gravity well. It was a little hard to get my mind around that, because the only sort of fall I had ever experienced was the kind you suffer when you trip. The magnitude of our descent strained my imagination.

  It went on longer than I expected, maybe twenty-five minutes. Periodically, Thomas fired thrusters to turn us, until our nose was facing Graveyard again. What a bad moment to remember the name of this place, I thought.

  Wonder preempted my fear. The world filled our eyes now, and though I loved Olympia, though it remained a glory and a wonder, at that moment I understood that there is nothing in this universe more beautiful than a living world.

  Aft steering jets fired to keep us at a forty-degree attitude. Then we hit the air, and we were flying. The windows glowed red. I was scared, but it was the good kind of scared. Captain Thomas remained so calm, I knew we were in good hands. This explained why she became more confident under pressure. When Merlin started to shake, and Narm hooted with joy, I just went with the consensus.

  Captain Thomas pulled our nose up to slow descent further. We seemed to be headed straight for the horizon now.

  I couldn’t believe we were there, that this amazing thing was happening to us. This was an entire world, with a gravity well, with atmosphere that had made the windows glow red from friction.

  Once that glow faded, and we had slowed and descended further, we flew through real clouds, and they were gigantic and fluffy and—towering, as they could never do inside Olympia, perhaps up to twelve thousand meters, according to my research. For a breathless time, we flew inside one of those clouds, and mist obscured our view. Then we emerged again, and I could see landforms.