“Dewdrops on the surface of the universe.” Father stared down her at her, his bright eyes shining despite being backlit. “That’s all any of us are, boop.”
It sounded off, like a digital alarm’s “beep.” Alaya tore herself out of sleep with the fury of a psych patient refusing their meds. Up and panting, she stared out the window of her quarters. There was no glass there, not even high pressure quartz. Displays projected those billion billion dewdrops across a section of her room shaped like a window.
When she’d moved in here, the captain’s quarters, Alaya had immediately redecorated. Writhing nude ladies grew old and she would have rather watched them cook or fix a broken recyke line than bend over like that. Now if they were real, that would have been different. Nope, she reset the projections to something more natural and soothing. In this case, one of her favorite captain’s chambers from one of her favorite shows as a kid, Spacegirl Rinna and the Quantum Team. Ridiculous and produced to sell a subscription to a toy schematic service which had gone out of business centuries ago, the show maintained a special place in her heart.
Oh but the show’s colors, Ayala had loved them. Soft lavender for her carpet, which of course had to be shag. Dark metal edging with royal purple walls. Textured like stucco, a material mother had talked about, but Alaya had never seen in the flesh. These she’d plucked from memories of the show’s episodes played over and over again through illegal Net access terminals.
There was no faulting the previous captain’s tastes in terms of comfort. He’d already installed carpeting in his ship and the nicest sheets credits could afford. Alaya had the place chemically cleaned and then had Gaz go over it again with her nanites. Her quarters had an actual, physical mirror, but Alaya kept away from it. She had an image of herself in her mind and the mirror seldom agreed. Today it would probably choose to point out exactly how badly she’d been hurt escaping Bahl-Mau IV.
And how many people I killed doing it. Hence the dream about her father. Sniffling came next, Alaya stared at the window and wished those dewdrops had been stars and not emblematic of the people she’d gotten killed. Both of her parents lived on the fringes of society not because they were ignorant or criminals, but because they’d been cursed with the same burden which afflicted Alaya.
Unlike her they’d left civilization behind and did their best to carry on without harming others.
How well did that work out for them?
She clenched her fists. The voices were new. Gaz and Isham had both pointed out she’d been badly hurt in the first explosion, then the follow-up explosions. “Brain damage,” “possible long-term injuries,” these phrases sent Alaya into a near panic.
Cybernetics kicked in and dosed her with a little dopamine and some serotonin to smooth out her mood. She took deep breaths and steadied herself. The ship they had was overkill for their little crew. It had enough hydrogen and they had a convenient advantage which would let them go on without the fuel.
The SenoAg had a shipboard hydroponics setup for the full crew, but the last captain had left it in the packaging. Typical tourist. It helped to hate him, considering Alaya had gotten him killed too. With any luck — if there was such a thing in the first place — he was just casting into his body and suffered nothing more severe than a financial loss. Who was she kidding? Given her luck he was some diplomat or other and Alaya had started a hot war with his massive Loop nation.
Grumbling about her misfortune, she stepped out of her chambers and into the main hallway. This she’d left with a nice, neutral white. Not stark, but a warm off white.
Six officer cabins, any of which could accommodate two people or even a family, plus four bunks which would sleep four each. It was a deceptively large ship to bear the name “coupe.” According to the literature she found on the computer, the main cabin was the owner’s room and the rest were for either extended family, guests, or servants. Madness.
Isham got a room, Gaz got one, and the Dhingri family took a third. With Gaz’s help Alaya had setup a system in the fourth room which would keep Kirk’s jar powered and his brain alive until they could figure out what to do with it.
McRory’s former chassis was an option only if they could find a cyberdoc good enough to manipulate his cybernetics without killing Kirk or breaking McRory. That was a tall order. Another option was to use Vora’s body and just replace the broken parts. A lot of those broken parts were in the skull.
By the time Alaya reached the conn, her mood had gone from despondent to downright angry. The chems clearly failed. Nothing was going their way and it was all her fault. All she had to do was not take this job. Or spend an extra hour looking into their target instead of rushing it. Or maybe just not pissing off Nissa.
“How are you feeling?” Gaz reached out to Alaya with the characteristic absence of expression. When had Alaya told her it upset her to see Gaz upset? I’d said something like that, right? Was that a selfish thing to say?
“Crappy.”
The conn opened with a panoramic view of space before them. When Alaya stepped into the room, it adapted to her preferences as the captain and provided the salient information with little variations across the screen. In the lower left quadrant she could see their local portion of the solar system. It was a portion of the outer asteroid belt called Donner’s Tide on the charts. A pair of lines indicated the expanded part of the Tide where they were headed, where Kowal was also headed: Cluster Riggon.
One of the old so-called bohemian clusters. If space was the mythical Old West of the American contingent, then the bohemian clusters were the wild lands. Along with the places pirates frequented, ancient map makers would have emblazoned a skull and crossbones on such a locale. Here be danger. At least there was precious little chance she could blow the whole cluster up. Please let that be true.
Gaz’s face hadn’t changed and Alaya needed the help of a coprocessor to tell her what they’d been talking about. “Cheer up Gaz. At least this place doesn’t use credit.”
“Can you feel the other ship?”
Alaya closed her eyes and touched her implant, the one she’d received from her mother. Reaching out to her flagship like this was a subtle use of the implant, unlikely to mark their location in the solar system for anyone who might be looking. But it was still best to keep such uses to a minimum. The implant pulled her in the same direction as their ship’s sensors.
A knock on the conn’s door sent Alaya jumping. Gaz just admitted their guest. It was Isham, skin back after losing most of it to the fire which had messed Alaya up. He had a neutral look on his face too. “Recyke and medical are back up.”
“They were both down?” This was the first Alaya had heard of this.
Isham had her attention, so when his eye flicked over Alaya’s shoulder toward Gaz, she missed whatever Gaz had done. Isham sighed and walked away. “I think you should just tell her, obviously.”
“What are you keeping from me?”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Gaz folded lower, as if she’d gained a new kilo on the weight she bore on her back. “For a SenoAg, this ship has some serious faults. Recyke’s broken three times since we started, medical once, and I don’t how many times the kitchen’s gone out.”
“Ugh. I’ll check the specs and stuff later.”
“You need to rest and heal…”
“I’m the most qualified technician aboard this ship and her captain. I can take care of…”
“As your friend,” Gaz laid a hand on the back of Alaya’s, “I am begging you to rest and heal. If we can’t get you an implant, your brain needs downtime to mend.”
Gall rose up in the back of Alaya’s throat. She wanted to shout Gaz down, to force her to wallow in her share of the blame, the torment, the pain Alaya felt. But that wouldn’t do anyone the least bit of good. “How long?”
“We’ll reach the first patrol line in seventy-two hours.” Gaz’s eyes flicked out the door where Isham had gone. “Or you could go talk to Marcus.”
Deep sigh. Father had loved magic. But father had seen the good in everything, in everyone. Magic hadn’t saved him, it had barely made their lives better. Alaya wasn’t a fool, it was real. And she wasn’t afraid, not exactly. She just didn’t… “Maybe.”
Gaz’s eyes flicked to the polished white floors. “That means you won’t.”
“It means maybe!” Anger felt better than shame. “Look maybe I will go talk to him right now!” She charged out of the conn, knowing she could have taken control of the ship the moment she felt like. Rather than head to speak to Marcus and all that entailed, Alaya made a turn back to her room and the simulation rig.
Gaz would be really mad if she learned about this. Alaya put the headband on and logged into the system, ignoring the jolt of pain which shot behind her eyes. It made her dizzy, have to rock forward and back before she could find her balance seated. And then her somatic body vanished.
It reformed in her favorite weremouse digital avatar. The ship had a private, personal network. And a decent library of media. But Alaya hadn’t come for that. Standing in an old fashioned ice cream shop, the kinda with soda stands and tubs for scooping ice cream, Alaya knocked on the employee only door and waited.
“Come in.” It was a welcome voice, one of the few she’d managed to save from Bahl-Mau.
“Hey Kirk.”
Simulated apace gave Kirk a massive series of advantages. For one, he lived a high cycle count life. Normally, the somatic body and physical sense limitations governed how quickly a person perceived time. But locked in a jar and fed through the simulation, Kirk experienced time at about the scale Gaz said she could.
When she walked into the room, she found an incredible old wooden library around her. The lighting shifted to electric sconces on the walls which separated long lines of leather bound tomes of various size and color. Dark blue velvet and blue dyed suede dominated the room, gave it a veneer of upper class excess.
The stacks were arranged like the spokes of a wheel and at the center sat Kirk. He wore a blue smoking jacket and set a book down beside him which disintegrated after hanging in the air for a moment. “‘Laya! It’s good to see you and bad to see you.”
Alaya frowned. “Bad? How?”
He snorted. “You’re supposed be getting better.” Kirk hadn’t lost his accent, but what amounted to several years’ time spent reading, studying and practicing meant he’d accumulated a fair amount of knowledge. Though she’d never been jarred, Alaya had an inkling of what Kirk had gone through. “I said you’re not supposed to be here.”
The second time he spoke snapped Alaya out of her distraction with his voice. “I just wanted to see someone.”
“Someone who might not yell at you for screwing up your brain?” He stood up with the instant motion Gaz could manage in the real world, ending up less than a third of a meter from her. “Picked the wrong guy!” Kirk actually pushed her out of the simulation.
Alaya ended up on her back with the simlink device offline in her hand. “Well fuck.”
Might as well see what Marcus’s kids are up to.
At least if it felt like it was her own idea, Alaya could pretend not to be grumpy about it. Besides she adored those girls. Tammy was easily the cutest five-going-on-six year old Alaya had ever met and Beth’s seriousness and precocious manner made her a pleasure to talk to.
Fuck Marcus and his stupid religion.
Alaya practically chanted the words on her way toward the Dhingri quarters. The kids wouldn’t hassle her in the least. She hesitated before she knocked on their door. What did Alaya need other people for in the first place? Before… before everything it has just been her and her parents. Since then it’s just been her and Gaz.
But she knocked anyway. Watching over a pair of cavorting rugrats would probably cure her foul mood.
“Come in.” Marcus’s voice on the intercom beckoned her as the door opened.
Incense, sandalwood and jasmine blossoms filled the air. Of all the systems Alaya had familiarized herself with over the years, odor production had been one she’d skipped. Gaz could have gone on at length about how the whole thing functioned.
It was pleasant enough, but Alaya preferred the purified air fresh out of a reproc. Or one of those water-air generators where what came out was elemental, free of any form of contamination. They made her sleepy.
Oranges and browns dominated the Dhingri area of the ship. Soft fabrics appeared to drape the walls and faint chanting added itself to the fragrant atmosphere. All of it, even the color pallet, set Alaya’s teeth on edge.
Marcus sat in the center of the room, wearing a red-colored robe. He smiled up at Alaya beatifically. “Good to see you, Alaya.”
“Where’s the fam, Marcus?”
His smile widened into a cheek splitting grin. “Beth and Tammy adore you.” The power in his smile lost a single watt. “But you hardly come around. It’s been… days.”
“I haven’t been feeling well.” Damn.
“Oh,” Marcus came to his feet with a move far too quick and smooth for someone with no cyberware in his legs or spine, “then you came to see me?”
Fuck no. I came here for some escapist cuteness therapy with a pair of kids who’ve never snuffed a guy. Marcus had probably never killed anyone either. Not so sure about his wife, Yiska. Maybe she was wrong, but Alaya bet Yiska had killed at least one person in her life.
Marcus took her silence as uncertainty. “My door is always open. To everyone.”
“Really?” It came off more hostile than she’d intended.
“It’s hard for some outsiders to accept, but my faith demands I serve those who need it most.”
“Then why didn’t you save more people on the station?” Alaya blurted out the words, not even aware of how deep her concerns ran herself, not until that moment. He just fucking nodded. Alaya had to clench her fists and press them against her sides to keep from punching the idiot, from leaping atop him and beating him until he shut up. “You don’t understand.”
“You feel guilty. I do too.”
“Fuck.” He did understand. It hurt more than if he’d assumed she was just uncomfortable with magic.
“And you are uncomfortable with magic.” Marcus said the words and echoed Alaya’s thoughts exactly.
She stepped away from him, eyes widening as she did. “What…”
“I am not reading your mind. Daikinis, friendly spirits, whisper pieces of the future into my ear. They tell me what to say to keep you from running.”
Alaya loathed the idea of anything knowing her future. All of them ended the same way. Who’d want to know the details? Marcus didn’t speak. “What are they telling you now?”
“To listen.”
What the fuck do I say to that? “I don’t trust you.” Marcus nodded, as if he agreed. But he didn’t speak. “Magic makes me uncomfortable.”
He looked right at her chest. Not her breasts, not her collarbone, but straight at her heart. Where the dragon implant coiled and waited. No doubt in Alaya’s mind. Marcus could see the mark upon her skin as surely as Alaya could feel its presence.
“I know what you’re thinking.” He hadn’t spoken, or given much up in terms of body language. But if he knew about the tattoo, his thoughts would be easy to guess. “If I have such a mark, why distrust magic?”
“It sounds like trust is very important to you.”
Why do I feel like I’m talking to Nissa? Alaya narrowed her eyes. “Like I said, I don’t trust you.” Once again, he remained silent. “This was a fucking waste of time.”
She turned on her heel, anger building in her along with confusion and a haze from the drugs speeding her recovery along. With a flash, Marcus was next to her. This time she knew he hadn’t moved with impossible cyborg speed, her digitals confirmed it. She’d blacked out.
A tiny tap of his hand. That was all. The contact was gentle and brief. It stilled Alaya’s balance and cleared her head. I need to lay down and rest. She blinked at herself. It was the first reasonable thought she’d had since she woke up: stay in bed. But she couldn’t help but turn back to Marcus. “Why?”
He smiled and raised his shoulders. “It’s what you needed and the Daikinis wanted. Consider it a gift.”
Stumbling away, Alaya floated along on clouds of heavy gases back to her quarters. She hardly recalled laying down, she didn’t remove her dock clothes. The one’s she’d been wearing nonstop for the last week.