My dad was the best storyteller I ever knew. Maybe that’s not unique -- most kids who were lucky enough to have a parent who told them stories probably think their mom or dad could spin tales the way the QuAati build starships. He told me once, when I was old enough (my dad never stopped telling me stories, no matter how old I got. Right up to the end, he was a storyteller) that the best stories are told in bars and taverns, but they almost never start there.
Sorry, Dad.
Olamar is the last planet in the Imperiate that you’d ever want to visit, unless you needed mana for your stardrive. Even then, Olamar is a necessity, not exactly a destination. Which is probably why there are only three kinds of buildings on the entire planet: mana mines and refineries, starports, and taverns. The Bad Luck Dragon was a little of all three, and as a direct result, it stank with the stenches of all three places -- the rancid spice smell of mana that’s touched oxygen, spilt fuel and coolant from the ill-kept docking bays, cheap beer and sour wine from behind the bar, and the sweat and dirty underwear and desperation of the men, women and spirits who worked in the Bad Luck Dragon. It was almost enough to make me want to forget about dinner, but I’d been eating nothing but S-rations for two weeks, and even greasy bar food sounded like heaven to me.
So naturally, my dinner of fried polmi and chickpeas had just arrived, steaming and glistening with grease, when someone put a leather-gloved hand on my shoulder. I almost kept eating anyway. You try living on S-rations, and see if your hierarchy of needs doesn’t get a little skewed.
“Septi,” whoever owned the hand on my shoulder whispered. “Is that your name?” He smelled better than our surroundings, but that wasn’t exactly hard to pull off.
Septi is short for Septimina, because I was the youngest of seven daughters. Dad was a great storyteller, like I said, but he and his ship were somewhere in the Prana Cluster when I was born, and Mom, stars bless her, was as pragmatic as Dad was whimsical.
The thing is, I’m the only one who knows that. Everyone around here (by which I mean everywhere within ten thousand portals) knows me as one of a dozen other names, if they know me at all.
“You wanna keep that hand?” I asked whoever-he-was. To my surprise, the hand lifted from my shoulder, and its owner sat down.
He was dressed like a merchant (though what he might have sold defied hypothesis) in a long, many-buttoned coat dyed a violent shade of maroon, with pants, a vest, and a tie of matching color, while his shirt was a deep gold with a wide collar that flared over the vest and coat. He wore his copper-black hair stacked up like a bundle of optics cable. His eyes were the same color as most of his clothes, except for a spark of bright gold at the center, where the pupils should have been.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner,” he said.
“Well you did a damn good job,” I replied. Nevertheless, I picked up the spoon and started shoveling food into my mouth. It was too spicy, which made me wonder if the cook was trying to cover up just how off the meat was. “Am ameweh,” I said, before swallowing. “I think you got the wrong gal.”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, you are Septi. Septimina Hawking, daughter of Roger and Myra, sister to--”
The spoon spun in my fingers until I had it in a reverse-handle grip, and I brought it down on the stranger’s hand. He barely reacted, simply blinking at me. Some spirits don’t feel pain. Which didn’t mean they couldn’t be hurt.
“Listen, pal,” I said, whispering. I needn’t have bothered -- the Bad Luck Dragon was even louder than it was stinky. “I own and operate a starship, all by myself. That means I need to fix the reactor now and then, and sometimes that means I need to get up close and personal with mana.” I pressed the spoon harder. “So I know enough magic to put this through your hand and pin you to this bar like a fly.”
“I have no doubt,” the man said. “And I am being terribly rude for not introducing myself, aren’t I?”
“I don’t really want to know who you are,” I asked, though despite myself, I was starting to wonder. “I do want you to leave me alone. Okay? I am not who you think I am. I just want to eat my crappy dinner, wait for my crappy ship to get refueled, and get off this crappy rock. I got deliveries to make.”
The man smiled, like I hadn’t said anything. “Mr. Bright is as good a name as any,” he said. “If it would amuse you to call me that.”
“Alright, asshole,” I said, and lit up the little nodes of mana that had started growing on my nervous system when I was thirteen. The blood vessels and bones under my skin glowed bright blue, and everyone for ten feet around me scurried to get away. Even the bartender ran back into the kitchen.
I expected a scream, or at least a gasp of surprise, but that damn smile never changed. Mr. Bright looked down at the spoon, then back up at me. For some reason, my palms and fingers hurt.
I looked down, too, and understood why my hand was suddenly bleeding. The spoon hadn’t been transformed into a steel stake, like my mana tumor and I had asked it very politely to do. Instead, it had turned into a rose, with deep maroon petals that turned to bright gold in the center. The thorns poking into my fist explained the pain.
“How the hell...” I started.
“Hey!” the bartender called. Apparently he’d found his courage in the kitchen, which considering the size of his gut didn’t seem to be an uncommon occurrence for him. “We got signs posted all o’er the place, missy. No magic unless you’re a licensed lawman!”
“Shit,” I muttered. “Look, this guy here was--”
“Just leaving,” Mr. Bright said, standing up. I let go of the rose, which hurt bad enough to make me wince. “I was just leaving, and I was taking my friend here with me.”
“Hold on a damn minute, I’m not--” is what I started to say. Then, I heard the clomp of heavy boots, and four of the aforementioned licensed lawmen came in, hell-rods already out and sparking. “-planning to stay here any longer than necessary,” I finished, and got up.
I didn’t like Mr. Bright, whoever he was, and I didn’t plan to stay with him for long, but I’ve got a problem with Imperiate law. More to the point, the Imperiate has a problem with me, and if anyone had overheard what Mr. Bright had called me... well, I didn’t want to take that chance.
The Bad Luck Dragon’s corridors were cramped, dark, and occasionally blasted by pungent fogs of vaporized mana. It’s harmless, but if you’ve got a mana tumor like I do, it can be... distracting. Following Mr. Bright through them would have been all but impossible, if not for his absurdly-colored clothes. “Stop!” I hissed at him. “Hold up, I’ve got a couple of questions for you.”
“I would be disappointed if you didn’t,” Mr. Bright said. “However, the fact that you followed me so readily, despite seriously disliking me, after those policemen showed up, tells me you’re in a hurry to get away from them. So let us move with more haste than seems necessary.”
“Those guys aren’t police,” I said.
“No? Did the bartender not call them lawmen?”
“That’s a bad joke,” I said, shaking my head. He’d let me catch up to him, and now we were walking side by side. “Those guys don’t enforce the laws, they make them up on the spot.” I glanced at him. “How do you not know that? Where’ve you been for the last ten years?”
He didn’t answer at first, and I thought maybe he just wouldn’t. Which was fair -- I certainly didn’t want most people knowing where I’d been for the last decade. “Find me a star chart,” he said, “and I’ll show you. Sort of. In a way you’d understand.”
“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Well,” he started, and I somehow managed to convince myself that I was going to get a straight answer out of him. In retrospect, that was rather stupid of me.
To be fair, this time it wasn’t his fault, since he didn’t get a chance to answer. The law was waiting at the end of the corridor, hell-rods trailing little red and gold trails in the air as they twirled them.
---
“Shit, shit, shitty shits shitting,” I muttered. While my brain was trying to figure out what to do, my hand reached under my jacket and pulled out the watchstopper I’d bought last year and hoped I’d never need to use.
“I’m just trying to get to my ship,” I said, holding the watchstopper up so the law could see it, and flipping up the little plastic window that covered the thumb trigger. “I don’t want to play tag, just let me by.”
“Us,” my companion muttered. “Or did you forget about-”
“Septimina Hawking,” the lead pig said, stepping forward and snapping his hell-rod against the wall. His helmet looked too small for his body, but that probably just meant he was huge under all his armor and holographic authority. “We both know I can’t let you through. Drop that device and come quietly, and maybe we can-”
I didn’t let him finish. I pressed the watchstopper’s button and threw it. I hit the pig in the helmet hard enough to knock him down, and his buddies came rushing forward, either to help him up or to come get me and Mr. Bright. Either way, bad plan.
Not a lot of people have heard of watchstoppers, for the same reason not a lot of people have heard of the latest designer drugs or potions. For one thing, they’re about as illegal as mooning the Grand Imperator on his birthday. For another, there are only about a hundred of them in this galaxy, and they’re one-use-only. So maybe the lawmen didn’t know what they were getting into.
But really, come on. A pissed-off spacegirl throws something with a blinking red light at you, you don’t run to get closer to it. How the stars did these bozos manage to conquer both galaxies, anyway?
The air around the lawman suddenly blurred, then snapped to stillness, looking like a photograph taken with a long exposure. The light arcs from their hell-rods looked more like burning reaper’s scythes.
“You stopped time,” Mr. Bright said, appreciatively. “Well, not exactly, but speaking in relative terms, you do appear to have-“
“Not right now,” I said. “If you’re coming with, you better help me the next time these guys show up.” I looked around for a few seconds, spotted what looked like a utility tunnel entrance, and pulled out my everytool. “You can start by keeping an eye out.” I went to work on the bolts, trying to work fast enough that we could get out of here before the watchstopper’s effect wore off.
“I’m sorry that I seem to have alerted these people to your presence,” Mr. Bright said. “If it’s any consolation, I think they started out looking for me.”
“You know,” I said, between blowing my bangs out of my eyes. “Amazingly, that’s not consoling at all. What’d you do to piss the Imperiate off, anyway?”
He didn’t answer for a second. Then: “I imagine they are most angry at me for having been born.”
I surprised myself by laughing at that. “You and me both, stranger.” I flicked the leafhead screwdriver out of the everytool, gave the utility tunnel entrance's last screw a few twists, then kicked it open. “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got about fifteen seconds before they’re back in realtime with us.”
“Fifteen of our seconds, or theirs?” he said.
“You,” I said, climbing into the utility tunnel, “are one seriously pedantic inconvenience, you know that?”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, climbing in after me. “Thank you for informing me. I shall try to remember.”
I couldn’t tell if he was being earnest or sarcastic. Mostly, I decided, he was just pissing me off. “Just pray those pigs’ armor is too heavy to let them crawl through after us,” I said.
---
I’ve spent more time in utility tunnels than I’d like. Most of the time, I’m using them for their intended, well, utility, which is fixing something that’s gone wrong on a ship or station I’ve been living on. What I’ve learned is that, with a few exceptions, most ships and stations are laid out more or less the same. Form follows function, after all, except when you get mana leaks and the tunnels end up leading to whole other parts of the universe rather than to the main water tank like they’re bloody supposed to.
Olamar, as I said, is a giant mana mine. So you’ll understand my relief when Mr. Bright and I actually ended up where we were suppose to end up, and not somewhere in the atmosphere of a particularly violent gas giant. “Well, that could have been worse,” I said, and dropped out of the window I’d just cut in the utility tunnel’s floor with my everytool’s plasma torch.
Mr. Bright jumped after me and looking around. “Ships,” he said, nodding as if in approval.
“Uh, yeah?” I asked, walking down the thankfully-empty docking bay toward an ugly, asymmetrical hulk of ceramic tiles and copper tubing. If you were feeling optimistic, you might call it a starship. My starship, particularly. “How did you think we were getting out of here?”
He didn’t answer. I was beginning to wonder which bugged me more, when he spoke, or when he didn’t.
We got up the ship’s ramp, and I pounded on the airlock. “Babs!” I called. “Open ‘er up.”
“Oooh,” a voice said over the little intercom placed above the door. “He’s cute. Where’d you pick him up?”
“Not now, Babs,” I said, staring at the little crystal eye set below the intercom. “We got five wavelengths a’ hell coming after us, and if they haven’t figured out which ship I’m headed for already, they’ll-”
Just then the docking bay’s airlock grated open and someone bellowed “Stop! In the name of Grand Imperator!”
“Babs, now!” I yelled.
The airlock popped open, my ship’s antiseptic air mixing with the stink of Olamar’s. I ducked inside, holding the hatch open just long enough for Mr. Bright to get in after me, then shut it tightly just as I heard and felt the impact of shudder rounds smacking against my ship’s hull.
“Oh come on,” I muttered, “like it ain’t ugly enough already.”
“Who you callin’ ugly?” Babs said, materializing into greenish-blue light near the airlock’s holotank with her hands on her hips. Silicon elementals are great for running a starship when you can’t afford or don’t want a crew, but they don’t always know when to turn down the sass. Or at least Babs doesn’t.
“Spin up the reactor,” I said, jogging toward the ladder that would take me to the cockpit. “And screw the safety check, we gotta boogie.”
“Already ran it, boss,” Babs said, reappearing at the top of the stairs.
“Atta girl,” I said, and held my fist up. She tapped it with her own, the haptics solid and even. This ship’s ugly, and breaks down every other week, but I paid top dollar for Babs. “Wait, how’d you know to run it?”
“Three big sonsabitches dropped out of the system portal about a minute before you got to the docking bay,” Babs said. I could hear her cycling up the mana reactor, mixing the exotic element with slightly-less exotic uranium. The ship’s lights began to brighten with the sudden jolt of energy. “I figured you’d want to get the hell out of here.”
“Patrol ships?” I asked.
Babs shook her head, and maybe it was just a jitter in her holotank’s projector, but I swear she shivered. “No, boss. Cruisers. The new ones.”
“Hell’s core,” I spat.
“Like I said, big sonsabitches.”
I heard more rounds smacking the ship’s hull. “We gotta go now,” I said. “How’s the reactor?”
“Eighty-two percent rotation, and climbing,” she said.
“Good enough,” I said, and grabbed the controls. “Go tell our guest to strap in-”
“Already did,” Babs said, pretending to inspect her nails for chips. Like I said. Sassy.
“Aright, then,” I said, nodding. “Atomic turbines to full. Let’s blow this joint.”
---
Now, don’t get me wrong. I was more than happy to leave Olamar. Awful damned planet.
I do not, however, want you to get the wrong idea that I was happy to head for open space. Not with what was waiting for us out there.
At some point during our ascent, Mr. Bright had found his way up to the cockpit. “I thought you told him to strap in,” I muttered to Babs as he sat down in the long-disused copilot’s seat that the ship came with, and which I’d mostly been using as a parts bin.
“I did,” Babs said. “You didn’t say ‘make sure he listens’.”
“How are you even up here anyway?” I asked him. “We’re running at three gravities, you should have a hard time standing, much less climbing a ladder.”
“Those ships are getting awfully close,” he said, nodding out the window and ignoring my question.
I looked where he had nodded. We couldn’t see anything, not at this range, but that was about where the three Imperiate Star Corps cruisers were sitting, according to Babs and the ship’s scanner array. “Relatively speaking,” I said. Which was true. And odd. If they wanted to blast us out of the sky, they didn’t have to get any closer to do it. We were well within laser range. Unless...
“They want us alive,” I said. “Or at least,” I looked over at Mr. Bright. “They want you alive. The bounty on my head’s just as good if I’m dead.”
Mr. Bright nodded. “You’re probably right. Can we outrun them?”
I sighed. “Babs?”
“Their reactors are running about six times hotter than ours,” she said. “And they’re between us and the system portal.”
“Any backdoors around?” I hadn’t seen any on my way here, but I hadn’t looked all that hard, either.
“Not that I can see,” Babs said.
I suppose that made sense. Backdoors only form when a timeworm chews its way through space, and they tend to avoid large deposits of mana, such as Olamar’s mines. Smart critters, timeworms. Wish I were as smart as a ninety-kilometer-long thinking scrotum that lives in four-and-a-half dimensional space.
“Shit,” I said. I turned to Mr. Bright. “Any ideas how to get us out of this mess?”
“We can’t surrender,” he said. For the first time since I’d seen him, through snapping hell-rods and time-stopping shenanigans and being shot at while on a ship moving way too fast out of atmosphere, he looked scared.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What do they want with you?”
“Nothing good,” he said.
“Wait,” Babs said, “which question was that an answer to?”
He didn’t respond. Big surprise, I know.
“Okay, I’ve changed my mind,” Babs said to me. “You don’t get to pick up weird guys when we make port anymore, I don’t care how cute they are.” She looked away for a moment, as if in thought. “Hey, boss. They’re hailing us.”
“Ignore them,” Mr. Bright said.
“Hey,” I said, pointing at him. “This is my ship and my ass in the sling, too. I was living a nice, anonymous life shipping spice packets around the cluster, until you came and crapped it all up. So you shut your mouth, or I drop you out the airlock and let the Imperiate come get you. You got it?”
He looked at me, and sighed. “I didn’t think you’d be quite so... vicious.”
“What in the hell’s core do you know about me,” I muttered. Then I turned to Babs. “Alright. Let ‘em talk. Maybe we can barter this asshole for passage.”
Mr. Bright didn’t say anything to that, but he did shrink into his chair a little bit, like a kid whose mom had his schoolmistress on the phone.
“Opening a channel,” Babs said, then her image flickered out, and was replaced by that of a tall woman in a black Imperiate Star Corps uniform. An admiral, by the fruit salad on her chest and the high-peaked cap she wore.
“Septimina Hawking,” she said, and that was when I realized who I was speaking to.
“You,” I hissed. “Because of course.”
“You’re outnumbered and outgunned, Septi,” she said. “Try to run, and you’ll just die tired.”
“Well, you’d know all about running, wouldn’t you, Dee,” I said.
Dualla Hawking. Traitor to the Free Systems Coalition, mastermind of their defeat at Midway, head of the Star Corps’ black ops fleet. The most feared woman in two galaxies, the thin silver knife of the Imperiate. And, as you may have gathered, my older sister. My only sister, now. “Not so much these days,” Dualla said. “Now I’m the one people run away from. But like I said, I don’t recommend it.”
“I’d rather run than spend my life nomming deeply on the Imperator’s-”
“Do you have any idea what is sitting next to you in your little rustbucket, Septi?”
I glanced over at Mr. Bright. He sunk a little deeper into the chair. Any more, and he’d be kneeling. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me.”
“No, I don’t suppose I shall. I think I’ll just leave you as ignorant and confused as you’ve ever been. Now, we’re well within firing range, and my gunners are the best in the Star Corps. I can blow your reactor clean off your ship, throw my best marines right through your cockpit, pick up your hitchhiker, and leave you to suck vacuum, or...” Dualla crossed her arms. “We can be civilized about this. Stick that creature in an escape pod, throw him our way, and maybe I’ll forget we ever saw each other in this armpit of a star system.”
It was a tempting offer. It’s not every day that one of the Imperiate’s most wanted gets a chance to run, no questions asked, from the meanest bastards in the Star Corps. It’s also not every day that Dualla would let me get away with anything. In fact, this might be the first time she’d done that, ever.
Which meant that this annoying bastard sitting next to me and trying to hide under the navigation console was important to the Imperiate. Really, really important.
I’m a realistic girl. I know that the Coalition lost. I know that all the dreams and ideals that my family (well, most of them) held had all came to nothing more than starship debris and their blood flash-boiling in the orbit of a red supergiant star. I know that these days, the Imperiate runs the galaxies, and that ignoring that fact can get you killed, or worse. I know that you don’t look a gift unicorn in the mouth. I know that if I gave Mr. Bright up, I could go back to scurrying around between the Imperiate’s boots, and that not doing so would probably get all the hell I deserved pointed in my direction and turned up to full blast.
Mr. Bright looked at me. “I’ll understand, whatever you decide,” he said. I believed him.
“Dualla,” I said. “Which side of death do you think I’d rather be on: the one with Dad and Mom, and Prima, Trea, Quaddi, Quenti, and Hexa? Or the one with you?”
Dualla sighed. “Gunnery,” she said, but not to me. “Give me a firing solution.” Then the transmission cut off, and Dualla was replaced with Babs.
“Whoa, whoa-whoa-whoa, boss, what are we doing? Are we, did you just get us killed?”
“Drop us back into orbit, Babs,” I said. “Low as we can go without hitting atmosphere.”
“Boss, we can’t outrun three Imperiate cruisers, they-”
“Do what I goddamn tell you!” I yelled at my silicon elemental and only friend. “Now!”
Babs blinked at me, then flickered out of sight. I felt the ship’s thrusters turn us around, and Olamar filled the view screen again.
“I am sorry if you and your spirit die because of me,” Mr. Bright said.
“Shut your damned mouth,” I muttered. “And strap in. I mean it, this time.” I took hold of the controls, and breathed out a shuddering sigh. “One way or another, things are gonna get really bumpy in a second.”
---
Quick orbital mechanics lesson: the lower you go into a gravity well, the faster you’re gonna move. Babs had us skipping about half a foot over Olamar’s joke of an atmosphere. So you could say we were hauling ass.
“Not sure how this helps us,” Babs said. “As soon as we come back out the other side, they’re gonna have us in their sights again. Assuming they haven’t already sent a cruiser around the side to catch us sooner.”
“We’re not hiding from them,” I said. “Babs, if we open the ramscoop, how much mana do you think we could soak up from what’s floating in Olamar’s mesosphere?”
“Uh, I guess a lot?” Babs said, scratching her head. “But boss, we’re full up on mana, I don’t get...” then she stopped, and actually counted on her fingers. “You’re insane,” she said, looking back up at me. She was grinning. “Totally bonkers, this is never gonna work. Let’s try it anyway.”
“Atta girl,” I said.
“What are you doing?” Mr. Bright said. He was sitting in his chair properly now, and had actually bothered to buckle up.
“Old trick from my former life,” I said. “Ever heard of a rainbow bridge?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, shaking his head. “Not in any context that seems to make sense, at least.”
“It only works about half the time,” I said, keeping a tight grip on the controls. Talking through it with Mr. Bright was helping me concentrate on exactly how to pull this off, but saying it out loud also reminded me just how crazy it was. “Way it works is, you saturate your fuel tanks with mana. The mana will fuse with your uranium catalyst, like normal, but now there’s a whole hell of a lot more of it. Means a hell of a lot more energy. That energy’s gotta go somewhere, right?”
“Right,” Mr. Bright said. “Wouldn’t it just go... everywhere? In a fusion explosion?”
“Eh,” I said, shrugging.
“I don’t see how this helps us,” Mr. Bright said.
“Most cases, it doesn’t. The mana and uranium convert themselves into a plasma, and your ship gets vaporized. But.”
“But?” Mr. Bright said.
“You know how artificial gravity works, right?”
He blinked. “I believe so. You mold the gravitic field via the electromagnetic field, using mana as a medium and a power source.”
“Close enough. What we’re gonna do is repurpose our ship’s magnetic field from the shape it’s normally in, into a funnel, right out the back of the ship’s ass. The plasma will follow the funnel’s course, and boom: Action, reaction, thrust. A whole hell of a lot of thrust, actually.”
“Oh,” Mr. Bright said. “And this works, you said, half the time?”
I shrugged again. “Maybe a third. Babs, how we doing?”
“Fuel tanks are sitting at about four hundred percent capacity, boss,” Babs said over the intercom. She’d shut down her holotanks to save power. We were gonna need a lot of it. “We can’t hold a whole lot more.”
“We’re gonna need more,” I said. “Can you condense the mana at all?”
“What do you think I’m doing back here, reading porn? I’m packing it in as tight as it’ll go without fusing the stuff, boss.”
“Babs, we need more mana.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do... but we’re gonna burst at least one of the tanks if we-”
“Then we burst one of the tanks,” I said. “Two minutes until we come out the other side, Babs. We need that mana.”
No response from the intercom. I hoped it meant she was too busy to talk. I could feel the hull shaking, and not just because we wee bouncing around on Olamar’s atmosphere. The ship’s seams were practically glowing with all the mana being crammed into it, and I knew we’d be lucky to get away with this with just one burst fuel tank.
“Hey, listen,” I said to Mr. Bright. “Before we... look, just in case this doesn’t work and we all die.”
“Yes?” He looked oddly comfortable, even with all the bouncing around we were doing.
“Why’d you track me down for this?”
“Because, from what I’ve heard of you, you’re the only one who could help me.” He glanced over at me. “I suppose we’re about to find out if I was right or not.”
“Why me?”
“You’re the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter.” He looked back out the cockpit window. “Legends like us should stick together.”
I was about to ask him what that meant, when Babs came back onto the intercom.
“Boss, I got as much as I could, but, seriously, realtalk, I cannot cram any more mana into this ship. We will all die if I try it.”
“That’s okay, Babs,” I said. “How much did we get?”
“Enough. Barely. I think.” She flickered back into the cockpit holotank. “This ship wasn’t built to handle this much mana, boss. We’re running a serious risk of causing a fusion reaction in the floorboards. Or worse, getting ourselves enchanted.”
I hadn’t considered that. Enchantment is nothing to mess around with if you don’t have a license for it, or the education needed to get one. I decided to toss that onto the pile of “things that could go horribly wrong in the next forty-five seconds” and leave it there. “Is the magnetic field working?”
“Already funneling. Check out our acceleration.”
I looked down to the dashboard to look, and immediately wished I didn’t. “Shit. I didn’t know our computer could count that high.”
“Yeah, we’re makin’ tracks alright,” Babs said. “So, are we gonna...”
“Yep, yeah, we’re gonna,” I said, and pulled the trigger on the controls that activated our ventral thrusters.
We pulled away from Olamar at a speed that would give me nightmares for weeks, provided it didn’t just kill us. The system portal was too far away to see with the naked eye, but I could tell we were pointed right at it. I could feel it the same way some birds can just feel where a planet’s magnetic poles are. Thanks, mana tumor.
“Cruisers are getting a bead on us again!” Babs called. “Radiation’s spiking, they’re-”
She didn’t have to finish. Lances of purple-black light flashed out from dozens of kilometers away. The beams were tight enough that they could have cut us apart as neatly as a chop steak, and left us dead in space. If, that is, they had been shooting at something going at a sane velocity. We, as you recall, were not.
“Did we just dodge a laser?” Babs asked. “Hell’s core, we just dodged a laser, we dodged like twenty lasers! How cool is that?!”
“How’s our hull integrity holding up?” I asked. Or rather, I tried to ask. My teeth were chattering so bad that I was in serious danger of biting off my tongue.
“If you’re asking how our hull integrity is holding up,” Babs answered, “you don’t want to know how our hull integrity is holding up.”
A screw shook itself loose from the dashboard and promptly embedded itself in the cockpit’s back wall. No, no I probably didn’t want to know what this was doing to our hull.
Four more laser lances flashed out at us, closer this time. They must be recalibrating. I didn’t know if Dualla was just boasting when she said she had the best gunners in the Star Corps working for her, but I didn’t want to find out.
Then suddenly, I could see two of the cruisers. Big, seven-armed starfish, their waste heat vents glowing red-orange against their black hull. Somewhere on one of those ships was my sister, the only living member of my family, and person I hated most in both galaxies.
I blinked, and suddenly they were gone.
“Whuh... hap?” I managed to gasp out. It was getting hard to breath, with my lungs being pressed into my spine.
“We passed them,” Babs said. “Like, we really passed them.”
“Mmm... man...”
“Mana’s about half gone, but I think... I think we made it, boss! We can ride the rainbow bridge halfway to the system portal, and they’ll be way too far behind us to try for a-”
“Th... thee... three ships,” I said.
Babs’ face sank. “Shit,” she said.
---
The system portal looked like most others I’d seen. A giant silver ring about the circumference of a good-sized moon, its interior flickering with iridescent light from, literally, every other star that has a portal orbiting it.
This one had a Star Corps cruiser sitting in front of it, though. Right between the portal and us. So that was new.
There was no way I could steer with the jet of plasmic mana and uranium still propelling us at ludicrous speed. It was a game of chicken, and I didn’t even have the option to cry off.
On the plus side, the inertial dampeners had kicked in, so I could speak again.
“Shitting shit shitters!”
“Is this vessel armed?” Mr. Bright asked.
“No, and even if it was, we can’t outfight something like that!” I pointed at the cruiser. The one good thing about being pointed right at them was that they couldn’t blast our engines off. Even if they did, that wouldn’t kill our velocity, so we’d still smack right into them.
“Just how alive do they want you, anyway?” I asked Mr. Bright.
“Very alive,” he said. “I think. They’ve never tried to kill me, at least, and they’ve had chances to.”
“So... they’ll probably try to dodge us soon... right?”
“...right.” He didn’t sound convinced.
The cruiser got closer. I really wished it would stop that, but even for a girl who can do magic, I don’t have that much control over reality. If I did, I wouldn’t be in this situation.
“So, Mr. Bright” I said. “What’s your real name?”
He glanced over at me. “You want to have this conversation now?”
I gestured out the cockpit window. “We can wait two minutes if you like, but I probably won’t be all that talkative then. Neither will you, for that matter.”
He sighed. “Perhaps not.” He thought for a second. “Midway.”
I stared at him. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“No,” he said, simply. “I didn’t choose it. You did. Your people did, anyway.”
“What do you mean, my people? Are you an elemental of some kind?” I’d never seen or even heard of an elemental that wasn’t bound to a network of its parent matter, but I guess today anything was possible.
“Maybe,” he said. “It’s... a rather long story. Longer than two minutes.”
“Well...” I glanced back at the cruiser. It hadn’t moved. They had to have known we couldn’t stop even if we wanted to... maybe they didn’t want Mr. Bright (or Midway, or whatever the hell he wanted to call himself) that badly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you out like I thought you could.”
He smiled. A real, big smile, like he was actually happy. “If you couldn’t have, no one else could.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I don’t know that, either. I just know. Maybe it’s got something to do with-”
“Boss,” Babs cut in. “I don’t mean to break up the moment, but... look!”
I looked back out the cockpit window, and the hand that had been gripping my heart suddenly let go. The relief flooding my system came so fast that it actually hurt not to be mortally terrified anymore.
The cruiser was breaking off, firing its thrusters so that we’d pass right by it.
“I guess they do want you alive,” I said, barely able to get the words out from the laughing trying to break through. “Whoo-hoo! Babs, they still tracking us?”
“Oh their sensors are so far up our ass it’s ticking my ribcage,” Babs said, “but I’m not reading any energy spikes. If they were gonna blast us, why wait now?”
“ETA to the portal?”
“Thirty seconds. We’re just about out of juice, but we’ll make it.”
“The tanks?”
“We... yeah, we kinda blew ‘em all, boss. After the mana runs out, we’re gonna be running on fumes.”
“That’s alright,” I said. “This portal comes out at the Leviathan Verge, plenty of tanker ships floatin’ around there to hitch a ride with.”
I breathed a sigh of relief as the last of the mana dropped out of my ship, and we coasted into the portal leaving Olamar, the Star Corps cruisers, and my sister, behind. The portal flashed brightly for a moment, blinding me. I, or at least my mana tumor, could feel the portal doing its job, slinging us sixty light years down the path, into the Leviathan Verge...
...and straight into a formation of Star Corps ships. More cruisers, eel-like destroyers and even a massive dreadnaught, all floating around us, all with the business end of their weapons focused on us.
---
“Go evasive!” I yelled to Babs, but even before I said it I knew it wouldn’t do any good.
“Can’t!” she yelled. “We don’t have enough fuel to get us back through the portal, boss, let alone pull any-”
A purple-black lance shot out of the nearest cruiser, and my ship shook hard enough to snap one of my seat restraints.
“They cut our engines!” Babs cried. “Oh, oh hell, that hurts... boss, Septi, it hurts!”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Engines gone, which meant the reactor shielding was gone... which meant that, right this second, Mr. Bright and I were getting dosed with enough radiation to melt us to goo in an hour. They’d get here before that, though, and take Mr. Bright and, if I was ornery enough and lucky enough, they’d put a bullet in my brain. I don’t know what they’d do to Babs - probably take her with them, rip her black box open for my logs and anything else they might find useful, then re-write her and slave her to some other silicon elemental.
Mr. Bright was unbuckling himself from his seat, and putting his hands together over his chest, bowing his head as if in prayer. He hadn’t struck me for the religious type but then again, Mom told me once that there are no atheists in foxholes. Or, I guess, half-dead ships soaking in their own drive core radiation.
I looked out at the Star Corps ships surrounding us.
“Babs,” I whispered. “Spin the atomic turbines as fast as they’ll go. I want to make us the biggest fusion bomb this side of a sun-”
“No,” Mr. Bright said, and there was something wrong with his voice. It’s like I was hearing it from too many different directions. It took me too long to realize that it was because I was. I was hearing it through every speaker in the cockpit, even the ones that normally just blared alarms - which they had been doing up until just now. “Don’t do that.”
“What...” I started, then I shut up. Every time I’d asked this guy a question, we’d been interrupted, or he’d dodged it. Now it looked like I was finally gonna get something from him, and I didn’t want to miss the chance.
His eyes had been closed, but now he opened them, and the golden light shining out of them flooded the cockpit. “The radiation has been contained,” he said. “It will not harm us.”
“He’s... he’s right, boss,” Babs said. “I dunno, I’ve never see radiation act this way, but it’s just... stopped, right as it got to the cockpit. How did you do that?”
Mr. Bright turned to look at Babs, then back at me. He didn’t answer, but he smiled. It was a good smile. The golden light leaking out behind his teeth kinda ruined it, but it was still a good smile.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another ship, a smaller one, move in toward us. It was close enough that I could see into the sterile, blue-lit cockpit, and through that I could see the Star Corps marines, loading their weapons and getting ready to board us.
That should have bothered me. I should have kept staring, if only so that I could give them the finger as they clamped onto what was left of my ship. Instead, I turned back to Mr. Bright. I didn’t know what he was doing, or how he was doing it, but it was amazing, and I decided I’d rather die seeing something amazing than something ugly.
As it turns out, I had no idea what ugly looked like.
“Whoa, whoa-whoa-whoa!” Babs yelled. “Boss, I dunno what’s going on out there, but... I’m getting radiation spikes way too high for those ships, it’s like their-”
“You’re going to want to close your eyes now,” Mr. Bright said.
I didn’t listen quite in time, so I saw what happened to the big dreadnaught that was almost surely the regional Star Corps flagship. It looked like a bigger, more skeletal cruiser, with conning towers, sensor antennae, and hell cannons all clustered around its central hub. I watched those towers glow golden from the inside, and then catch fire in the vacuum of space. I saw the dreadnaught’s seven arms crack open, spilling sunlight out and drenching the ‘naught’s cluster of support ships in flame and radiation.
I got my eyes shut once I realized what I was about to see, but I still almost went blind. Even with my eyes shut and my hands over there, my vision went pinkish-white as the light tried to claw its way under my eyelids.
The light of newborn suns where starships had once been.
It felt like an hour before I could open my eyes again. The debris was floating around us, edges still glowing sullen red. I saw a few flickers of main engines still trying to fire, with no engineers to tend them. Fighter craft with burnt-out cockpits bumped into each other, turning what had once been tight, crisp patrol formations into the stumbling of blind rodents.
A ship the size of a dreadnaught might have as many as ten thousand people on board, with maybe a hundred elementals or other spirits hardwired into the ship. Cruisers clock in closer to six thousand, and destroyers are tiny things, with maybe only about eight hundred sailors. I’d counted at least twelve ships waiting for us as we came out of the portal. All of them were nothing more than big clumps of ashes, now, and no one on them was alive anymore.
I turned to Mr. Bright, who now looked about as normal as he had when we’d met, back at a crappy bar on a crappy planet. “What... did you do?” I asked him.
“I... I saved us,” he said. He was breathing hard.
“You killed all of them,” I said. “Every person on that ship, they’re all just... gone!”
“You were planning to blow our reactor!” He yelled at me. I blinked. I hadn’t thought he could yell. “You said, and I quote, ‘make us the biggest fusion bomb this side of a sun’. I did exactly what you would have done, except we did not die.”
“No,” I said. “Instead, tens of thousands of other people died. You think they would have kept coming if they saw our reactor was about to blow? No! They’d have backed off, gotten away, left us alone. I did that so they couldn’t take us alive, so that they couldn’t take you, and now I think I finally get why they wanted you in the first place.”
“I don’t understand,” Mr. Bright said. “You clearly hate them, what they did to you, to your family-”
“Doesn’t justify murdering them! Hell’s core, why do you think I’d rather carry around a gadget that stops time rather than a gun? But you... look what you did!” I pointed out the window. “Get... get out of my sight.”
“Where should I go?” he asked. “This cockpit is the only part of the ship that isn’t flooded with radiation or exposed to vacuum.”
I grit my teeth. He had a point. “Babs,” I said.
“Yeah boss?” Her voice was quiet, the sound quality a little frayed. Some of her network hardlines had been in the engine room. Those were almost certainly fried.
“Download yourself into my vacuum suit. We’re getting off this heap.”
“Okay,” she whispered. She disappeared, and the lights dimmed as she did.
“I’ve got another suit for you,” I said. I pointed at the ship that had been coming to board us. It was charred on the outside, and the lights inside were dim, but I could see... bodies, floating in the sudden lack of gravity. “I don’t know if you deserve it for what you did, but I’m not leaving you here to die, too.”
“I... thank you,” he said.
“You can thank me by giving me some bloody straight answers when we get into that ship. I might be able to string enough magic together to get it running again, at least until we can get to a friendly station or tanker ship. Two things, though. One, you’re on body duty when we get there. Gather them up, and put them in casket tubes. That ship’s big enough, it’ll have them.”
“I understand.”
“And two. As long as you’re with me, you never kill anyone ever again. Not the way you did just now, not any other way, you got that?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Alright.” I unbuckled myself from the chair, and took a quick look around the cockpit for anything I’d need to bring with me. There wasn’t anything, except the big, terrifying mystery I was sharing air with. I pulled out my everytool and pried up one of the floorboard hatches. Underneath were a pair of vacuum suits, ugly things that would make us look like bloated seals, but would keep us safe from space while we made our way to the troopship that had tried to board us. “Put that on,” I said, tossing one of the suits to Mr. Bright. “You ever gone spacewalking?”
“No,” he said. “Or. Maybe.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, it’s simple. Just try not to drift off.”
---
We managed to get to the Star Corps troopship by grappling it with a dead fuel line with a hook at the end that I’d welded together from pieces of my old ship’s hull, using my everytool and just a little bit of magic to shape it. Space line secured, we climbed our way hand-over-hand toward the troopship.
The blast of radiation that had cooked the ship’s interior had blown out its cockpit windows, so we just floated in through those, just the way those marines would have come crashing through mine. Once there, I had Babs do a quick check on the ship’s silicon network. The radiation had burnt out Babs’ opposite number on this ship, but there was still enough system architecture left for her to hang out there for the time being, and maybe start repairing it. We got her uploaded, and she found the controls for the troopship’s emergency blast doors.
Mr. Bright was already gathering up the corpses of the marines and pilots, and the gravity coming back on helped him finish quickly. I was just glad they had all already been in their combat gear - it kept me from having to see what the radiation had done to their bodies.
I said a quick nondenominational prayer, the only one I knew by heart. I read off the names of each pilot and marine, as well as I could from the charred nameplates on their suits. Then, we loaded them into the casket tubes that all military ships keep for just such an occasion, activated their beacons (the ones that hadn’t been burnt out, anyway) and, still in our suits, we drifted each of the tubes out the ship’s airlock.
Then, I got the ship’s interior re-pressurized, and Babs got just enough power out of the reactors again to get us limping along toward a nearby station. I didn’t know how they’d react to a hell-burnt Star Corps ship docking with no way to transmit its registry codes, but we’d deal with that when we got there. For now, I stripped off my vacuum suit and sat down in the troopship’s pilot’s chair. It was comfortable, real polmi leather, but the restraints had been fitted for someone a lot taller than I was and they dug into my armpits.
“I think I know what you are,” I said to Mr. Bright, who was sitting in the cockpit’s corner, his ridiculous coat wrapped around him like a blanket.
“I would like to hear it,” he said, without looking up at me.
“I should have guessed it sooner,” I said, “but then, how could I? You... you’re not supposed to exist.” I thought of my father, and all the things he’d told me when I was a little girl. “You’re just a story.”
He glanced up at me and shrugged. “Clearly, I am not.”
“Throwing starfire around by sheer force of will,” I recanted. “Walking with the bodies of men, but with hearts like fusion reactors. Able to rebuild matter from the molecular level, just by thinking about it.” I remembered the rose he’d made out of the spoon I’d meant to stab him with. My palm still hurt from the thorns, but that was just one of a dozen aches and pains. “Reborn from the hearts of dying suns.”
“It’s all true,” he said. “Even that last part. Or, so I’ve been able to piece together.”
“So... so you’re real,” I said. “I mean... things like you are real.” I shook my head, almost laughing, but too terrified to. “Dragons.”
“Just dragon,” he said. “Singular. I’ve not been able to find any more of my kind.”
“But... how did you... when you said your name was Midway, you meant the star. The huge one, the supergiant-”
“The hub around which the two galaxies spin,” Mr. Bright said, nodding. “Yes.”
“The one that went supernova right after the battle,” I said.
“I think... I think it was all the ships, falling into the sun... into me... that did it,” he said.
The battle of Midway was the biggest battle in known history. Thousands of ships, all fighting over the bridge between the galaxies, all falling into the red sun as they became too damaged to maintain safe orbits. All those ships, with all their reactor cores filled with mana for propulsion, gravity, magic, elementals, weaponry...
“The mana,” I said. “It fused with Midway. Burned through all the hydrogen over the course of a year, caused it to go nova prematurely. That’s what every physicists says happened, anyway.”
“They’re right,” Mr. Bright said. “Most of the way right, anyway. I know that the mana did... something to the star, when it went nova. Whatever it was, it must have made me. I was born floating in space, not in the form I’m in now, more energy than matter. I managed to pull myself together over the next few years, accumulating enough mass for a body, then for a ship, then learned how to listen to radiation, to communication signals. I don’t know how I knew to do these things. I didn’t know what a human looked like, much less how to make myself look like one. And yet...” he waved a hand from his head to his shiny maroon boots. “Here I am. I eventually started putting together what had happened to cause my birth, and the people involved... your parents, and your sisters. I’m so sorry.”
“I guess the Imperiate found out about you?” I asked.
“I... what I did, just now, to the ships chasing us, it took me a long time to learn how to control it that... effectively. I left quite a trail for myself. They’ve been after me for more than nine years.”
I sighed. That was almost as long as Dualla had been hunting me. “Well, I can see why they want you. Or... at least why they want to study you.”
“And you can see why I can’t let that happen,” he said. “What I did today, that was... you’re right. It was awful. Monstrous. But what they’d do if they could control me, or make more like me... you know what they’d do.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I guess I do.” I sighed. “Well. I guess you better stick with me, then.” Then I laughed. “The dragon and the seventh daughter. Hell. I’m in a faerie story, and it’s not even an original one. My dad would have hated it.” Unless, I thought, he’d have loved it.
“Then... I can stay?”
“I meant what I said. No killing. I’ve seen enough of that to last forever.”
He nodded. “Agreed.”
“Then, yeah. You can stick with me, Mr. Bright.”
He smiled. “Thank you.”
I smiled back. “It’s not gonna be a lot of fun, outrunning the Star Corps. Most worlds we won’t be able to dock at, not now that the Imperiate runs most of them. And you’re gonna have to learn to dress for low-profile.”
He looked down at himself. “What’s wrong with the way I dress?”
I sighed. My stomach gurgled. “Oh, great,” I muttered.
“What is it?” he asked.
I shook my head, looked around the cockpit, and sighed again. “I never even got to finish dinner.”
THE END