Aetherbound

by E. K. Johnston

  Most were dressed in jumpsuits, though the colours of these varied widely, and most had the same short hair Pendt was used to seeing on the Harland. There were a few, though, who were different. The women wore clothing cut to highlight the shape of their bodies, and then men dressed with sharp lines and hard corners, as though they could change their shape with fabric. They were clearly not on their way to buy engine lubricant or barter for additional berth-space on the docking ring.

  The station boasted any number of places where food, alcohol, and various entertainments were peddled, and Pendt imagined that it was to these places the interestingly dressed people were headed. Looking down at her plain jumpsuit, she realized that she would stick out if she followed them, and since sticking out was the last thing Pendt wished to do, she withdrew into a corner to consider her options.

  She was not going back. She didn’t care how she was dressed in comparison with everyone else. They would get her back on the Harland when she was dead, or they would drag her kicking and screaming. She had already crossed the line, hoarding her rations and expending them on her hair and nails. That would earn her the punishment to end all punishments. There was nothing else they could do to make it worse.

  Her calculation had been very precise: enough change to look different, but enough saved that she could change herself back. That was the first rule, and the one by which the Harland flew, only spending what a thing was worth, and never a fraction more. Food, oxygen, clothing, it didn’t matter. She had only ever had exactly what she needed to survive. She could alter herself further, she had the calories for more æther work, but then she’d be stuck unless someone bought her a drink. Pendt did not like to rely on other people. Other people were usually awful.

  Or, at least, her family was awful. Maybe here it would be different. She could smile and make conversation and hope for the best. Pendt wasn’t used to hoping for much of anything at all, but, well, she had already come this far. She could go a little further.

  She looked out at the crush of people walking past the little oasis she’d found in the corridor. They were all moving quickly, eyes forward, target acquired. No one was watching her. She could do whatever she wanted. So she closed her eyes, and reached inside.

  The jumpsuit was made of plant fibre, harvested from the hydroponics bay and treated so that it was tear-proof and fire-retardant, but it was still a plant. She tightened the weave of it around her stomach, hips, and below her knees. It was nowhere near as eye-catching as the people she’d seen, but at least she no longer wore a shapeless bag. Next, she changed the colours: deeper green for the bottom half and lightening until the collar around her neck was white. She detached the sleeves and stuffed them into her bag; it went against her nature to discard things.

  And then, using the last of her expendable calories, she added the slightest tinge of green to her newly darkened hair. It was ridiculous, a useless reason to put forth the effort, but she found she didn’t care.

  Pendt rejoined the crowd and followed the crush down to the level where the entertainments were. Down was an awkward concept for a space traveler. It was possible that she was traveling sideways and standing on the wall. Still, her mother had once told her that it was best to take advantage of direction while she had it. Pendt usually ignored most of her mother’s advice, but this particular idea would probably prevent an existential crisis, and Pendt was all about preventing crises today.

  Brannick Station thronged with people. They were loud and they had little respect for one another’s personal space as they jostled through the wider colonnades of the station’s public market area. Pendt knew from the blueprints she had stolen out of her brother’s desk that the station had more than one public sector. This one was simply for the most itinerant travelers. If you wanted to stay, you needed to go up a few levels and submit an application. If you were rich, there was another level altogether.

  Pendt put her hand on the wall and felt the quiet rumble of the structural integrity generators. They, like all the rest of the station’s life support, were tied to the Brannicks, making them lord and master of everyone and everything on board. Pendt didn’t imagine she would ever come to their attention. She had no lord or master now and didn’t plan to ever again.

  There were a few details to work out, of course. She would have to find a job and a place to live. She wanted to be independent of the Harland, and she had to bet on them leaving before they missed her. Once they were gone, there was no way her aunt would expend fuel to come back for a useless member of the crew. The neglect that had caused her so much pain as a child worked to her advantage now. She just needed to stay away long enough for them to go, and then she would be free. Surely someone on this station would have need of a cook. Pendt looked down at her bare arms. It didn’t seem likely anyone would hire her for her sense of fashion.

  The colonnade seethed around her and she moved along with the flow of the crowd. There were shops selling everything Pendt could imagine and more than a few things she couldn’t. She’d never seen so many things before in her entire life. The Harland’s sharp austerity seemed colder than ever. This was probably the reason her aunt forbade anyone from leaving the ship the rare times the Harland was docked somewhere. Her aunt walked a hard line and forced everyone to walk it with her. She said it was necessary for space, which was dark and death and completely unforgiving, but Pendt was starting to wonder if maybe she just hoarded her family as much as she hoarded their calories.

  Speaking of calories. It was time she found some, before she started to feel light-headed. She hadn’t done this much æther work on purpose in her entire life, and she had no idea what the aftereffects were going to be.

  She picked the establishment playing the loudest music, because it made her stomach rumble with something other than hunger, and she found that she liked the sensation quite a bit. She observed, circling the dance floor like a cat, as people at tables drank brightly coloured concoctions that smoked or bubbled or frothed, or sometimes did all three at once. Placed along the bar at regular intervals were tiny dishes filled with round tabs that Pendt thought might be edible. Her suspicions were confirmed when she saw a woman with spacer-short hair and a bright red bodysuit take a handful of them, and eat them all at once.

  Pendt’s mouth watered. She didn’t even care what they tasted like. She had never seen anyone eat anything so carelessly, ever. Even when her brothers tormented her by flaunting their larger portions of food in her face, there was a sense of desperation, of gratefulness, to their behaviour. To eat and not care who was watching or how much you chewed or how many calories were left for others was a dream. Brannick Station was some kind of paradise.

  Pendt slid up to the end of the bar, hoping to avoid the server’s notice for as long as possible, and helped herself to one of the tabs. It was salty, but more than edible, and Pendt took a handful to put in her pockets in case the servers chased her out when they realized she didn’t have any money. These would give her enough calories to hold on until she found a more reliable source. A little voice whispered that she could change back, if she wanted. That it wasn’t too late, and she could go home, but she didn’t listen. Home was behind her now. She was never going back to the Harland again. She ate four more of the tabs in a single mouthful, breaking them with her teeth and dragging the sharp edges along her tongue.

  She was so focused on the little cup and the balls that she didn’t notice the two figures that came to sit beside her until they were perched on the stools. They didn’t flank her, so she didn’t panic entirely, but they definitely noticed her, and Pendt didn’t like what followed when people noticed her, particularly when she was eating. They were between her and the main exit, but she thought that she could lose them on the dance floor, if she needed to. She was smaller than they were, and had spent a lot of time moving through small spaces. She took a quick glance sideways to get a better look at them.

  One of the
figures had an open face—the sort of mark that her aunt liked to trade with—and was already smiling, half lost in the music. It was striking, to see someone so relaxed. Pendt didn’t think she had ever been that comfortable in her life, let alone in a crowd. A part of her ached, wondering what her life would have been like if she hadn’t always been so afraid. She was going to change that now too.

  The other boy was all lines and angles, his nose like the prow of a grounding-ship and his face shaped to cut through atmosphere with no resistance. He had the face of someone who was listened to, but unlike her brothers, he didn’t seem made cruel by it. Neither of them looked to be much older than Pendt’s seventeen years, and she hadn’t made herself look older when she changed, so maybe they just thought she would be good company. For some reason.

  The first boy was looking straight at her, the way her aunt did when she was about to administer a judgement. Pendt was no stranger to direct confrontation; it just always went badly for her. She braced herself for something terrible, but when the second boy spoke, his words held none of the venom she was so used to taking.

  “Now tell me,” he drawled, helping himself to the tabs Pendt had left in the cup, “what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  “HIGH, HIGH HOPES FOR A LIVING”

  As dying breaths go, the Stavenger Empire had a good one. They made sure they didn’t go into the dark alone. Unwilling to cede power, even in death, the Stavengers took a large portion of the galaxy with them when they went, and made life challenging for all those who remained.

  The empire used up the last of their grain-mages by making æther locks. Each station was locked to the genetic code of the station’s ruling family and controlled by the Y chromosome. If either code or chromosome was ever absent from the station, all functions ceased. It wasn’t just that the Nets and Wells wouldn’t work, the lights and the air recyclers and the heaters would cease to function too. To leave a station un-ruled was to kill it. The rebel leaders could no longer command from the front, and their sons’ every breath was the future of the station’s entire population.

  * * *

  • • •

  The stations had been almost entirely united. The leaders of each family rallied their people to battle, and the people were willing to fight for them. No one could have anticipated the deterioration of the æther, and even after magic became unreliable, no one imagined the Stavengers would sacrifice so much for control they had already lost.

  Records were essentially unobtainable, given the distance and political situation, but scholars on Katla Station estimated that more than a thousand gene-mages, called grain-mages by the Stavengers, would have been needed to make the gene-locks. Part of this was because it was a huge and intricate piece of magic. The other part was that they had to do it simultaneously for six different targets: Brannick, Enragon, Katla, Skúvoy, Hoy, Ninienne.

  In the space of a few breaths, thousands died and each station became irrevocably locked to its ruling family. The full extent of this was not understood until the emergency messages from Enragon reached the other stations. The entire ruling line had been leading the rebellion from the front. When the lock went into operation and there was no Y chromosome to operate it, the entire station had instantly gone dark. Everyone who lived there died as soon as the oxygen reserves ran out, if they didn’t freeze to death first. No one had been to check.

  And no one could, either. The Nets were part of the lock too, and without an Enragon to activate the Net on the station (or an Enragon to make the jump himself and turn it on automatically), the station was unreachable except by old-fashioned sublight travel, and that was going to take some time.

  Time was something the dying rebellion did not have. Now that they were isolated from one another, it was difficult to organize anything. Furthermore, the gene-lock made it so that the inhabitants of the stations lived in fear of their rulers leaving. No one wanted to die gasping in the cold dark of space, after all. To maintain order, the stations reorganized so that the right chromosomes were always in residence, ensuring the lights stayed on and station operations could continue, albeit on a smaller scale.

  The Stavenger forces were also recalled. They took male hostages from each family—except the extinct Enragons—and returned to their home solar system to rebuild. There was always a threat hanging then, that someday the Net would activate and a Stavenger army would be let in by the station’s own, however unwillingly. It also limited the number of available cousins. Thus the stations and the remnants of the empire reached some tentative, unhappy peace while the æther healed.

  Generations later, just after Fisher and Ned Brannick turned eighteen, their uncle was diagnosed with a terminal liver condition. They had never met the man, but his illness impacted their lives tremendously: He was the family hostage, and now he was dying. The empire was merciless, demanding that a Brannick be sent to replace the one they were losing. Fisher couldn’t go himself, and Catrin Brannick refused to let her other son be taken either. In the end, she and her husband, Ned the Elder, went, he to provide the hostaged genes and she because she wouldn’t be separated from him.

  This left Brannick Station in the control of Ned, called Brannick the Younger since he and his father shared a name. Though he had been raised in anticipation of this day, Ned was not entirely prepared for it. Fortunately, he had his brother, and the two of them worked together to keep everyone on their station alive. Ships came in and ships went out, occasionally the Net was required, and as long as no one looked too closely, it seemed like everything was fine.

  Ned and Fisher had dreams, of course. Imagined futures where they did other things and served themselves instead of a station full of dependents. They were too well trained to do anything but quietly make the occasional pointless wish that things were different. They had jobs to do and people who relied on them, and they would do their duty, as every Brannick had always done.

  The space station gene-locks were a method of control. The limits they placed on travel were a feature, not a bug. The best way to quell a rebellion is through immobilization. If you shut down a movement, the kinetic energy builds up until it explodes, and then your problem is over.

  More or less.

  9.

  BRANNICK STATION

  ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THIS was Fisher’s fault. There was no way it could be. Generations of despotic rule by a far-off empire literally ensured it. And yet, here was Fisher: at fault.

  The problem with coordinating the sublight ships arriving at Brannick Station was that nothing happened for long stretches of time and then everything happened all at once. There hadn’t been a shipment from the mine run in three years, and now two ships were due to arrive at the same time. Brannick Station was in good shape, but not good enough to deal with the off-loading of two shipments’ worth of ore at the same time.

  Fisher’s teeth ground together as the docking schedule flashed across the screen and refused to change of its own accord. There was nothing for it: He would have to inform the overseers that they were going to need emergency overtime to get the job done. At least the station could still afford to pay fair wages. The problem was that there were fewer people around to do the work.

  Ned swung into the seat behind him, thirty minutes late for the start of the duty shift as unavoidably as usual. This, Fisher did not hold against him. Ned could barely cross a hallway these days without two dozen station residents shouting for him. The perils of being the Brannick; a burden that Fisher would never share, even though they both carried the name. Getting from their quarters all the way to Brannick Station’s main working offices was something of a challenge.

  “Good morning,” Fisher said. “We have a labour shortage.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Ned replied. The mug he held was steaming. Fisher could only hope it wasn’t too packed with artificial stimulants.

  “We’re about to feel the pinch
again,” Fisher continued. “We’ve got two mine-run ships coming in within, as far as I can tell, thirty-six hours of each other.”

  “Names?” Ned leaned forward, his eyes suddenly bright again as his focus narrowed. It was a dangerous look.

  “The Harland and the Cleland,” Fisher said, on alert. “You recognize the names of ships now?”

  It wasn’t an ill-meant jab. Ned really was trying, and there were a lot of ship names to remember. Fisher would rather Ned remember station operations. He could ask the database for anything outside of that.

  “I recognize the ones I’m helping coordinate,” Ned said with nothing even remotely resembling subtlety.

  Fisher resisted the urge to vent all atmosphere from the room.

  “Which ship is full of rebels?” Fisher called up the manifest for both ships. Whoever had forged the records had done an amazing job. Even knowing what to look for, Fisher couldn’t tell which was the fake.

  “The Cleland,” Ned said. “You’re not too angry?”

  “I would have appreciated a bit more time to work on a cover-up,” Fisher admitted. “I hadn’t told the foreman about the overtime yet, but it was the next thing on my list.”

  “I’m sorry, Fisher,” Ned said. “I did mean to tell you.”

  Fisher took a long look at the boy in the other chair. There were dark circles under his eyes. Ned was exhausted and there was very little Fisher could do to help.

  The same rules that kept Fisher from running operations on Brannick Station kept Ned locked into them. Though they were twins and Fisher was thirty-eight minutes older, Ned had the necessary chromosomes for the station’s gene-lock, and that meant he had become the Brannick when their parents had been called away by the Hegemony. It was antiquated and stupid, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it.