Rene spent the last two days of the voyage in a daze. The material of the compression capsule molded itself into a nautilus-shaped pocket as he hugged his knees and rocked back and forth like a schoolboy on the dunce’s stool at the back of the class.

Which was precisely how he felt. Having beheld the masterworks of the progenitors, blasted and scoured as they were by the Consanguicide which had blown away the galaxy of yore, Rene was forced to come to terms with his own existence.

For the first time in his life Rene understood the Fleet for what it truly was: the inbred scion of a noble house, a stunted, malformed imbecile that had torn free of its chains and shambled up out of the underground cellars where it had been kept locked up for decency’s sake. Now it was dribbling and drooling through the halls of an empty palace, with nothing to keep it company but the wind groaning amid the dusty eaves.

The sheer scale of the dead empire laid out before him was more than Rene could fathom. But he understood enough to know that the Fleet would never equal the faded splendor of the ancestor-gods, not in a thousand years, if at all. With that conclusion came the insidious question: if even the progenitors at the height of their power could not endure forever, then what hope could the Fleet possibly have?

Throughout his ongoing existential crisis, Rene tried his best to cling to the mission which he had assigned to himself. Sometimes he felt as though it was the only thing keeping his sanity afloat. To this end Rene kept the monomachete close at hand and maintained a constant vigilance over Zildiz. His prisoner was seated in the compression capsule opposite his own, awake and rested despite the incredible amount of damage her exomorph had sustained. Once or twice he caught her darting a questioning glance at him, as if there was something about him that was bothering her to no end. Finally she could take no more of it and spoke up:

“What are you looking at?”

“What are you looking at?” Rene shot back somewhat unintelligently.

“A smooth-brained fool,” she answered tartly, “And a stubborn one at that. You’ve seen for yourself now what your ancestor-gods were capable of. Compared to them, your Fleet can’t be much more than walking corpse, a sick joke. You owe them no allegiance.”

“What’s your point?” he said wearily, distressed by the ease with which she had peeled apart the layers of his thoughts.

“My point? My point?” she got up with alarming dexterity and angrily swung over to him on the railings, “What’s the point of dragging me halfway across the solar system on their behalf?”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Rene shouted, placing a hand on the sword hilt, “Would you rather that I had left you to the goddamned Leapers? Because we can still swing this ship around and drop you off back there, if you’d like!”

“Uh, actually,” Exar pitched in, “We can’t do that now, chief. Not until we stop to refuel our propellant tanks. Po Chai is less than a third of the size of Arachnea and less than a fifth of its surface gravity, but we’ve barely got enough steam to make a successful landing there as it is.”

“Stay out of this,” Zildiz told the sphere, lowering herself so that her head was level with Rene’s, “This is between him and me alone.”

“Why can’t you leave me be?” Rene said with exasperation, “I’m not in the mood for any of this. What is it that you really want from me, Zildiz?”

“I want…” she began, the corners of her amber eyes crinkled in evident confusion. Zildiz seemed to be having difficulty framing what she wanted to say next, “I want to know…”

“Spit it out, woman!”

“Why did you really save me, Rene?” she finally blurted out. Unable to deal with her unexpected forthrightness, Rene avoided the question.

“I’ve already given you my reasons,” he dithered, refusing to look her in the face, “The information you possess is of incalculable value to my—”

“Don’t give me that,” she cut in, “We both know I’m a dangerous liability. I pose more of a danger to you than Kryptus and his warband ever did. And the way things are going, your chances of survival are looking increasingly slim. As for your duty to the Fleet, your survival obviously takes precedence over mine.”

“You think I don’t realize that? You’ve been nothing but a royal pain in my backside right from the beginning!”

“Exactly!” she said, grinding him down further, “So why burden yourself further? Why did you give me your mask and consign yourself to narcosis? What are you playing at? The risk-reward ratio you’ve adopted is completely skewed—”

“Goddam you, do I really have to spell it out?” Rene cried, “You’re a human being, Zildiz! That’s all that matters to me. It’s all that’s ever mattered,” his voice broke as he realized the futility of that sentiment when weighed against the harsh light of reality.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Zildiz was left blinking rapidly, to stunned by his answer to think of a snarky reply. Rene shouldered rudely past her and retired to the aft of the craft next to the airlock which led to the ramp room. There Rene sat and sulked for a few hours until he got hungry, at which point he opened the pouch of cinnamon cubes and nibbled at them miserably. He could hear Zildiz’s stomach growling from across the length of the cabin, but when he glanced her way Rene found that she was steadfastly refusing to look at him.

Fine, he thought sourly. Be that way. He made a point of hogging all the food to himself and choked several of them down with bitter resentment, smacking his lips and scattering crumbs all over his dirty jumpsuit.

But eventually his sense of duty as a responsible captor won the day and he decided to leave a mild peace offering, returning the packet to the survival kit and placing the latter amidships in neutral territory.

Out of the corner of his eye Rene watched and waited. Eventually Zildiz walked over and opened the kit. She took out the pouch of white cubes, sniffed at it dubiously for a moment, then tossed it aside and took out the packet of fire starters and started scarfing down as many of the brown lumps she could cram into her mouth.

“Hey! Are you nuts?” Rene yelled, rushing over to her, “Don’t eat that! It’ll kill you!”

Zildiz backed away like a cornered animal, continuing to gorge herself while she glared poison daggers at Rene. Sensing trouble, Exar tried to defuse the situation:

“What seems to be the problem here?”

“The savage is eating our fire starters,” Rene gesticulated. Exar took a moment to process this, then slowly replied:

“Er, no she isn’t. Those are the ration cubes.”

“What are you talking about, Exar?” Rene said, holding up the white cinnamon cubes for the sphere to see, “These are the edibles!”

“Boss, I don’t mean to be rude,” Exar said, “But do you mean to tell me that you’ve been snacking on the scented fuel tablets all this time?”

“WHAT?”

Rene stuck a finger down his throat in a panicked attempt to vomit out the contents of his stomach.

“They’re for cooking purposes only, Rene,” Exar told him, “But don’t you worry—Exodus Industries made them all nontoxic for precisely this scenario. You’re basically eating a high energy solid fuel that also happens to be a low dose antibiotic and food additive. Zero calory content, though.”

Zildiz was chuckling now as she ate. Rene rounded on her in outrage:

“You knew! You knew all this time, didn’t you? And you let me eat those blasted things anyway? You ungrateful bitch!”

He stormed over to her and snatched the brown lumps out of her grip. Smiling wickedly, Zildiz shrugged and washed down her supper with a pull from the water flask.

As revenge, Rene devoured the remaining white food cubes and pointedly ignored Zildiz for the rest of the trip, instead turning his attention to his surroundings.

It soon became apparent that the shuttle wasn’t as squeaky clean as his first impressions had led him to believe. The upholstery of the padded railings was worn thin in many places, the fine threads beneath poking through the layers of strong black strips that someone had used to seal up the tears. Rene peeled up a few strips of the curious binding and discovered that the inner side of it was smeared with an adhesive several times more powerful than the stuff which covered Leaper silk. In fact, much of the cabin’s interior was simply plastered with the strips, as if the person in charge of maintaining the vehicle had been in a hurry to make repairs, and to hell with the aesthetics. It had been used to stitch up everything from the insidious spiderwebbing cracks spreading out from the corners of the crystal display panels next to the pilot’s chair to tiny holes present the bulkhead itself—once when Rene had placed his good ear next one of these perforations, he could have sworn that he heard some air whistling out the sides of it.

That sound and the horrendous implication it came with had instantly pickled his prick in salt water. Surely these thin strips of fabric were not the only thing standing between him and empty space?

Like every good child of the Fleet, Rene knew about hard vacuum through the Log of the Void Trekkers. It had been a favourite topic of the Book of the Stewards, a segment of the Log written during a time when onboard shortages and the resultant unrest had forced the crew to make some difficult decisions. The crisis was only averted when some of the honoured saints had chosen to serve the greater good by volunteering to walk out the Midnight Door.

That authors of that book had made certain to describe their deaths in lurid detail. Thanks to them Rene knew exactly what to expect if ever he found himself on the wrong side of an airlock.

Mouth and nose frosted over by the last breath he would ever exhale, lungs erupting from rapid decompression, tissue and blood vessels lumping up in ugly black-and-blue embolisms more hideous than any leper’s hide—the only silver lining there was that he would probably black out from oxygen deprivation long before those other token inconveniences got him.

“Say, Exar,” Rene asked in an offhanded sort of way.

“Hmm?” the sphere answered, sounding preoccupied.

“What happens if there’s an emergency aboard?”

“Define ‘emergency’.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Suppose there’s a breach in the hull?”

“That would depend on the size of the breach,” Exar said pedantically, “Those roider cowboys used to have a saying: ‘If the hole’s the size of your head, then you may as well be dead. But if it’s the width of your thumb, you needn’t be so glum, chum!’ Of course, that’s not a totally accurate way of assessing the situation. But you get the idea. If you think you’ve spotted a leak, just don’t panic. There are always tiny leaks on every ship, it’s unavoidable. The bit of duct tape you’ve been so busy picking at isn’t one of them. It’s just there to cover up some cosmetic damage on the cabin interior. In the event of actual decompression, you’ll probably have a few seconds to plug up the holes using the extensor patches located under your seats.”

“And if I don’t?”

“In that case, look on the bright side! You won’t have to worry about it for long.”

Somehow the pathfinder found scant comfort in that pronouncement. Shaking his head at the folly of spheres and Gallivants in general, Rene resigned himself to the fact that he was to be starved of proper conversation all throughout this long and strange voyage through the cosmos.

#