Salvage

by R J Theodore

  When Ketzali het Parantu had departed with her new passengers and turned their bow in the direction of Fall Island, Talis faced the dark shape in the ratlines above.

  “You couldn’t have sounded your voice in favor of our plan?”

  Onaya lifted her wings in a shrug and resettled them with a shudder. “You appeared to have things well under control.”

  “You were listening, then.”

  “And I know you lied to their captain. You have no intention of providing them with the simula.”

  “Call me paranoid. How long do you intend to stick around?”

  “I want a simula, and I will have it.”

  “Of course.” Talis glanced around to see if Dug was above decks. They still had ships to salvage or destroy, and if Onaya was going to hang about, she’d have to face him sooner or later. Dug might let her get away with lying to another captain, but if his goddess gave them the direct command, would he want Talis to cooperate?

  “Make yourself at home, then. You’ve got a loyal follower on board who hasn’t had a visit from you in two years. Might want to say hello.”

  Onaya shrugged again, then flew off, not up to hide in the rigging, but off into the darkening skies.

  Talis glared after her, then went below to help secure their new cargo.

  Chapter 26

  Annie!” Emeranth was so relieved to see her old friend, the facade of detached Empress she’d maintained was forgotten. She rushed to embrace the girl, dodging the dressmaker who had entered the royal chambers first.

  Annie nearly dropped the supplies that loaded her arms. She looked skinnier than Emeranth remembered her. How had it only been a few weeks since they’d last shared one of Catkin’s lessons in the court?

  “Your Highness.” Annie’s voice trembled in terror, as though Emeranth was about to get her a spanking. “You look so grown up.”

  Emeranth had maintained the austere dress and styling of her hair. The one time she had run out of the few simpler dresses she had, and appeared in the audience chamber in one of the more youthful frocks, she’d felt as though no one had taken her seriously at all, even with her curls trained in the sleek wrapped braid.

  They had announced that she was going to be coronated soon. If her parents were still alive, she could remain a princess until they retired.

  She’d sent for the dressmaker at once. No one had dared deny her. The princess would of course, need a dress for the ceremony. Certainly, they told her. Something as beautiful and sweet as her, they assured Emeranth.

  Certainly not. She wanted the people who came to visit her to recognize her as an Empress, not a princess. They needed to believe she could do her job. Because when she knew they believed in her, she believed it a little more, too.

  But the dressmaker had brought far too much pastel and frippery with her. Annie’s arms were loaded with bolts of pink satin and reels of flowery, delicate lace. It was leaned up against the footboard of her bed for her to look over and make her choice.

  “None of this is right.”

  “Your highness?” The dressmaker sounded horrified. “I was told you only had one appropriate dress for court.”

  Emeranth fought the urge to pout and stomp her foot. She didn’t do either of those things anymore. “Clearly, someone did not deliver my instructions along with your invitation.”

  Had it been Lita? Or someone else in the chain of messengers that ordered the gown?

  The dressmaker looked extremely uncomfortable. “Please tell me your pleasure, Your Grace, and I will send the child to fetch new supplies without delay.”

  “Go yourself.” Emeranth would love a few minutes alone with her old friend. “You are stronger, your stride is longer, and your assistant looks in need of a moment by the fire and refreshments.”

  “Of course, Your Grace. What style of dress is it that you desire?”

  Emeranth opened the wardrobe between the room’s two picture windows. This was her parents’ chamber, and the gowns within the wardrobe were her mother’s. Sleek, low-waisted, with skirts that brushed the floor without excess bulk. Simple accents. High scooped necklines, and delicate buttons. Desaturated colors. Pewter, evergreen, and wine. Practical. Elegant. Stately. Everything Emeranth needed to be.

  “I want ten gowns in this fashion, and the appropriate undergarments.”

  The dressmaker paled. Obviously, someone had given her very contrary instructions.

  “Yes, Your Grace.” The dressmaker gathered up the bolts in her arms and hurried from the royal chamber as though it were on fire.

  Emeranth sent Lita for a cup of warm milk for Annie, then led her friend to the velvet armchair by her hearth and wrapped a blanket around the girl until only her shoulders and head were visible. “Annie, I’m so glad you came. It’s been awful.”

  Annie burst into tears. She tried to speak, but her throat seemed too small for her words. Emeranth hugged her, ignoring the tears and snot that soaked the shoulder of her dressing gown. She tried to make soothing sounds, to reassure her friend. She gave her one of her father’s handkerchiefs from the top bureau drawer, and sat at her feet, her hands massaging the girl’s knee. Annie had always been tender, but she seemed so small and fragile now.

  “Annie, what is it? What’s happened?”

  It took several more sniffles before Annie could speak, and her gaze kept flitting to the room’s various doors. “My father is missing.”

  Emeranth stood up in a single motion. “I will have him found immediately!”

  But Annie grabbed for her hand. “It was the aliens. The Yu’Nyun.”

  At that moment, Lita returned, brought a ceramic cup and saucer to the stand beside Annie’s seat, and then took a position on the other side of the hearth, well within earshot and clearly attentive. Emeranth closed her eyes, then squeezed Annie’s hands to settle her back into her seat. They couldn’t talk about it. Not here. Emeranth pulled the foot puff up to the chair and sat with her friend, forced to be content with holding her hand, in place of the promise that she would fix this.

  All of it.

  Chapter 27

  Talis changed from her ‘looking the part of a Bone captain’ garb, back into slim fitting leggings and top to wear under the descent gear, then made her way below.

  They’d reached another Yu’Nyun ship. According to Sophie’s tablet, this one was almost fully operational. It complained of damaged propulsion and ballast systems, from the looks of things, but seemed otherwise intact. It remained to be judged whether that would mean more or less danger for them during the drop.

  She found Sophie crouched amid the alien crates they’d moved into the reclaimed cargo space, digging through the haul and making an inventory, or at least attempting to identify everything. She hadn’t changed into her gear yet.

  “About ready to go again?”

  Sophie looked up, eyebrows arched and concern tugging at the edges of her mouth. “Captain, look at this.”

  She held out a large glass ampule filled with a thick, pearlescent silver liquid. It had a rubber seal on both ends. In her other hand, she held a metal syringe that was clearly designed to hold the glass.

  Talis leaned closer, not sure what she was supposed to see. “Some sort of medication?”

  Sophie shook her head and placed her hand on the edge of a tray full of the ampulla and several more syringes. “I don’t think so. We found it in their weapons storage. I thought this crate would hold more of their rifles or pistols or something.”

  “Poison, then?”

  “Or something.” She held up a second tablet. “This one was in there with them. Seems to be some kind of lab report. I can’t figure out half the words, but it’s not like the tablet we have. Not as many menus and won’t connect to mine.”

  Talis crossed her arms and frowned. “I didn’t think the bony bastards had room for m
ore secrets. So we need to figure out what this stuff is, huh?”

  Sophie nodded. “Assuming the Yu’Nyun survivors in Diadem escaped with a few of these, it would help to know what they’re for. I was thinking . . .”

  “I don’t like that tone. What?”

  “Kirna and Amos might be able to help us figure it out.”

  “Really? Back to Heddard Bay?”

  Sophie shrank in on herself a bit, and Talis stopped short of expounding the reasons she didn’t want to go back. Wasn’t like Sophie didn’t know what it meant to her to finally get off that rock. Wasn’t like it didn’t mean the same for all of them.

  “All right. We’ll talk about it. But if there’s anyone else on the planet who might help, let’s consider all the options.”

  Sophie recovered enough to smirk. “Well, there’s Meran.”

  Talis shook her head in mock disbelief and headed back out toward the salvage platform. “Come on. Get changed, and let’s get this over with.”

  Talis and Sophie stood in a small, glossy white cabin where two coffin-shaped containers leaned together against the far bulkhead. On Scrimshaw’s starship, they had been arranged like standing monoliths in the center of the room. Control pedestals set up like altars before them.

  They were no less intimidating in their disarray—creepier even—as the narrow beams of their torchlights choreographed inky shadows around them. The ship’s lighting was powered down to save energy, Sophie surmised, and they chose to leave it that way so as not to trigger any energy drains that might cause the lockdowns that had trapped other crews.

  Sophie gave Talis a meaningful look. Simula. They didn’t need to shout the word through their helmets, or say it at all.

  Simula. Just like Meran.

  Beyond the weapons, high definition view screens, or vacuum-crossing ships, these were the real prize of the Yu’Nyun fleet, far enough beyond any level of technology that they might as well have been the gods’ own alchemy. Yu’Nyun-shaped bodies made of silicone gel wrapped in some sort of smooth membrane, programmable to take whatever form the operator desired.

  Backward-engineer one of these things, and it would change the world.

  In the hands of well-meaning people, the simula could perform dangerous jobs so people wouldn’t have to risk their lives. Like mining, either on the cracked lunar fields or in the depths of Rakkar volcanos.

  If it was about money, there would be plenty of that. Simula would be highly sought after as a status symbol. An exotic accessory, expensive to obtain, and rare.

  For the politically aimed, an army of the things could fight wars for those who commanded them. Probably too expensive for that. Probably those with political aims would believe a simula was more valuable than a soldier’s life. But they’d make effective bodyguards, no doubt. Or assassins.

  They could even run salvage, probably without the suits. Probably put Talis out of work.

  In the worst-case scenario . . . Well, it had already happened once. In the worst-case scenario, give a simula the power of one of the gods’ rings, and they’d all have to deal with another Meran. Talis tried to imagine one or two more of that woman’s fractured pieces running about and shuddered.

  But someone had to have one of the other four rings to do that again. And that task was no more simple a matter than scavenging the dangerous alien ships. The Veritors were trying. Onaya Bone was trying. But so far, none had succeeded. And here they stood before two of them, all because Sophie had learned to use the alien tablet that had behaved, so far, like a skeleton key for the alien ships. Who else had one of the tablets? The Bone temple. Perhaps Zeela. And the Tempest would soon if she deemed them worthy of the lot they had locked up in their cargo hold.

  Swallowing her misgivings and forcing aside the branching consequences of what they were doing, Talis thrust the sharp end of her sally bar into the seam of the first sarcophagus. It took a few chipping whacks to loosen the seal so she could flip the bar and use the angled end to get it open the rest of the way.

  The body lay, perfectly posed with arms folded in front of itself, within the sarcophagus’s shadows. Talis stood back, panting and waiting for the resulting steam to clear from her helmet. She wondered how much of the thing had to be intact for what she was planning.

  They had a pair of hand trucks if they wanted to take them whole. But that was the last thing Talis had in mind for the simula. She dragged the inert body out of its case and put one heavy boot upon its back, then flint-lit her welding torch.

  Sophie looked like she wanted to stop her, but she had the good sense to curl her hands at her side rather than try it. Engineer’s sensibilities be damned; Talis didn’t want to let any more of these things roam free across the world.

  She strapped the Yu’Nyun-shaped bust to her pack by its neck. It dripped some of its viscous filling onto the floor panels.

  They steered their loaded hand trucks to the functioning lift. Two alien bodies guarded the simula compartment even in death and snagged the wheels. Talis kicked their limbs out of the way, so Sophie wouldn’t trip on them, and felt a rush of adrenaline. She struggled to slow it, to calm her breathing, struggled to get her mind back in the moment.

  But before she suppressed the memories of her last visit aboard a Yu’Nyun ship, she recalled a near-forgotten detail of that day with a small sharp intake of breath. She motioned Sophie to follow her back into the cabin.

  “Look for a hinged circular thing,” she said, holding her hands up to approximate the size of the device. “Like a crown.”

  They sallied the lockers built into the bulkhead, starting nearest the door. Sophie reached into one and slid something out. “Woah! This?”

  The circlet she withdrew looked like it was fit for a queen, delicate in her gloved hand. Like all things Yu’Nyun, it was ornate beyond reason. Gleaming white metal looped with sculpted patterns on the outside. Inside, it was lined with the same glassy black material the aliens used in their control panels. Four rounded contacts protruded from the inner sides and behind the triangular centerpiece that would fit down between the eyes of a simula. Talis didn’t know how it worked, but she knew from the way Meran had frozen, mid-motion after simply seeing the thing at a distance, it could override a simula’s behavior. Make it docile.

  “How many are there?” she asked Sophie, coming around and swinging the compartment’s door open until it hit the bulkhead.

  Shallow trays that pulled forward on slides held eight of the circlets, each nestled into a formed depression lined with soft gray fabric.

  “How many did Eneil’s list call for?” Sophie pulled her gaze away from the circlet in her hand to glance at Talis’s sleeve where the inventory list was hidden.

  Satisfaction crept from the corners of Talis’s mouth, filled her head, and spilled down her shoulders.

  “It didn’t.”

  They loaded up her pack with all eight of them, then found another eight in a second cabinet.

  Sixteen circlets. But only two simula on board. With the gods’ luck, it was just a coincidence, and not a sign that there had been other simula, already claimed.

  Talis couldn’t paint a box around it yet, but she felt an idea forming, coalescing like mist into a solid thing. It displaced the anxiety she’d been gnawing on since they boarded that first alien ship. She zipped up her pack with a quick, decisive motion.

  Not that the presence of simula on board was anything remotely innocent, but the additional presence of more of the strange liquid in their seamless syringes, again in proximity to the weapons lockers, cast a very unsettling mood over their salvage operation.

  They took it all with them. Talis didn’t know where she’d hide it yet, but she couldn’t get answers about it if she left it all below to be destroyed, and merely hoped that had been all of it.

  “Anything else on your wish list?”

  Sophie look
ed up from securing the latest crates to the tow platform. “Would be a shame to leave behind that pretty battery, Captain.”

  “Not exactly something that slips into a pocket, you know.”

  The last ship’s crystal had been reduced to shimmering powder in its wreck, with shards no bigger than a fingernail trimming.

  As they returned to the deck lift, Sophie called up the location of the crystal’s atrium, a housing that spanned ten decks. Talis wished they could pass on this prize. Something about knowing she was almost done made it harder than ever for her to clamp down on the waves of discomfort she felt in the confined alien space. Im Ufite Rantor’s high-end descent gear might be as comfortable as possible for an operation of this extent, but she still felt like a double-packed saltfish.

  It was a small relief when the lift opened onto the atrium. True relief would come when they could put this business behind them.

  Balconies ringed the central cavity of the Yu’Nyun ship, and perforated metal catwalks reached in spokes toward the center. Their torchlights cast oversized shadows that played across the railings on the far side. They might have been exploring the inside of a cave, if not for the reflective white and black contours of the bulkhead. Echoes bounced in the open central chamber, making it sound as though someone else moved in the dark space, behind the railings, out of sight.

  They had overshot their destination, entering on the third balcony from the top. The crystal should have reached toward the ceiling of the central atrium, but the space before Talis and Sophie was empty.

  Cursing, Talis stalked to the edge of the balcony and cast her light toward the distant bottom of the chamber, expecting another blackened bulkhead and heap of crystalline sand. She’d about had it. If that was all there was, she’d scoop some of the dust into an envelope and buy Sophie a bucket of glue when they got back to civilization.