The moment heavy hatch doors slid shut beneath the cargo platform, filling in the 20 centimeter gap the platform and the bay's grated flooring, Terra realized the ship was infused with influence. Worse, she felt some of it gathering around her in the now unmistakable presence of a system about to look into her mind to screen her. She was caught unprepared, but quickly altered her talents to hide her reality sense. Sly had given her the strong impression over the past few days that if she could only hide one thing, it should be that.
"Starmer, eh? So you're the runaway everyone in port wouldn't stop yammering about." Captain Surith said, her eyes focused on an invisible place close to her face that indicated she was reading a system screen Terra couldn't see. Which meant that the system feeding it to her wasn't Sly.
"I thought world systems weren't supposed to spread their influence into harbored ships." Terra said warily, to buy some time. Her eyes darted around, searching for Sly in the few shadows of the tidy and well-lit cargo bay. She needed to grab him and run.
Unfortunately for that plan, the only person she spotted besides herself and the captain was a man around her height with incredibly pale skin and a platinum blonde crew-cut pinching the bridge of his nose.
"Another stray?" The man asked his captain in a long suffering tone. His was the voice that had called back earlier, which must make him Jenkins.
"This one's got a sizeable bounty on her head." Surith informed her crewman. Her deep voice rolled with good humor as she said it.
Terra gave up the futile search for her familiar and let herself shift out of her disguise, back to her usual form. She hoped revealing herself fully now would show some good faith after she had blatantly lied to the woman a minute before. "Yes, that is my bounty, but I swear I'll work hard and earn more than the bounty is worth. Please don't turn me in."
The exasperated man released his poor nose to pin her with a stern look. His eyes were a startlingly bright blue. "You had better." He then turned on the captain to continue his lecture. "Ruby, we can't keep taking on extra mouths like this."
"Why not?" The captain asked with a shrug of her shoulders that rolled like the crashing of a wave through her back muscles. She set her crate down. "It gives Laurie something to do when we don't need patching up."
Terra picked up the crate she had put onto the platform before and moved it next to the one Surith had just laid down. "So...you're not going to try turning me in?" She asked, wanting to make sure she wasn't just hearing what she wanted to hear.
"Honey, I wouldn't waste the time."
While the captain went back for the last crate, Jenkins took it upon himself to elaborate. "The Chariot has much more lucrative work to be doing than cooling our jets here to chase down a handful of credits. The fines for rescheduling take-off alone would eat up a tenth of what we'd make off your head. Not to mention the actual contracts and objectives we'd be putting off."
"Wait, objectives? As in... explorer objectives?" Terra asked. Then something clicked into place and she spun to look at the Captain with surprise. "You're a champion too?"
Surith grinned at her and tossed the last crate into place, causing her crewman to wince. "Me and half the souls aboard this ship. Not bad deduction for 5 Brains. Slow on the uptake though. Jenkins, why don't you get her settled in?"
"We could still drop her out the hatch." Jenkins suggested dryly.
The captain laughed loudly while heading out of the cargo bay. "If you wanted to do that, you should have caught that cat." She said without looking back. The hydraulic doors of the ship shut behind her a second later.
Terra felt like she'd been picked up in a whirlwind. "Is this normal for you?" She asked.
Jenkins ran a hand down his pale face, the cheeks of which were flushed just from talking. "More or less. Strange things always seem to happen when you get more than one champion on the same planet. The Captain enjoys excitement, so she tempts fate by collecting you together into one ship."
"You're not one of us?"
"Goodness no. Nor would I want to be. Ruby's an old friend, so I signed on to handle logistics and resource management for her. I'll take a secondary bond with the Chariot once it seeds a world."
"The ship?"
"Yes. The ship is her familiar."
As he spoke, he led her through the ship. The cargo bay had been all smooth, silver surfaces with black metal shelving against the walls and crates neatly lined up in rows on the grated flooring. The halls had a different feel. They were lined with a bouncy red carpeting made of a material Terra couldn't name that squeaked like rubber under their shoes. The walls, which arched inwards at their zenith, consisted of a matte-black, metal paneling. All along the panels, inlaid lines of alien crystal pulsed and glowed with influence. The layout gave the impression of integrated circuitry.
[That's exactly what it is.] Sly's synthetic voice confirmed into her thoughts distantly. He sounded distracted.
'Where in the blackest of holes are you?' Terra asked in her thoughts.
[Communing with the Chariot. Pay attention.]
When Terra returned her attention back to Jenkins, he was explaining the layout of the ship and what amenities were in which direction. It seemed the ship was laid out similarly to the ones she was accustomed to. The helm was at the front of the top deck, with the recreation and mess halls located to the aft. His and the captain's cabins were the only living quarters on that deck. The middle deck contained gunning pods and viewing chambers along the outer edges. The inner part of the mid-deck hosted the general living quarters and infirmary. The lower deck had the cargo bay and engines to the rear, escape pods on the sides, and most the rest of the deck consisted of maintenance rooms full of reactors, piping, wiring, and power cells. There only room that he expected she would have any interest in on the lower deck was a VR chamber he pointed out near the lifts.
"Maybe not. I've never used VR before." Terra admitted as they stepped into the lift tube.
"Really?" Jenkins asked in a tone that was simply curious, rather than disbelieving. He had mellowed out considerably once the captain left. "I thought that bounty was for the administrator's heir?"
"Yeah, well... interacting with my father's system was something I avoided at all costs." Terra said. "Was the bounty really being talked about that much?"
"It was around us." Jenkins ran a hand down his face with weariness. "We've got five champions aboard- you'll make six- so there was a lot of scrutiny on us after reports came in that you'd gained a system seed. They ran three or four extra screenings on any of us that stepped off the ship. It put a significant damper on our land leave. I suspect Ruby was keeping an eye out for you out of spite."
That would explain why the woman had been so quick to bring Terra aboard, if she had suspected who she really was. Though it had sounded like the captain would have happily accepted anyone with a system seed.
Jenkins got out of the lift on the middle deck and led Terra down a small hall with four doors on either side. "These are most of the crew cabins. I'll put you in cabin 5 for now. If either of your neighbors has a problem with that, I'm sure I'll hear about it."
Cabin 5 was the second door on the left. Terra imagined keeping it empty had been done on purpose to put a buffer between rooms 3 and 7. "I won't make much noise." She promised.
"Good."
The room of the cabin was smaller than her apartment had been, but much better furnished. A set of bunks was built into the back wall, each full sized bed having a meter of headroom and a black out curtain along the cubby entrance that could be pulled shut for privacy from roommates. Each sleeping cubby had a stasis shelf with a light strip at the head of the bed and panel storage at the foot. The side walls of the room were like the walls in the hallways with the addition of a large tap screen across from a built in couch. The door into the room was set up in a recess beneath more shelving. A desk was built into the shelving just in front of the couch, a smaller tap screen installed within the alcove for use there. Two narrow pull-out closets were built into the slender section of shelving on the opposite side of the doorway to the desk and couch.
Jenkins told her to make herself comfortable in one of the beds for take-off and that someone would come to finish showing her around after they escaped orbit. He then left for the helm.
Terra hadn't left her homeworld in nearly four years, but she remembered the precautions for take-off well enough. She shrugged off her bulging backpack and managed to shove it into one of the narrow pull-outs by indiscriminately pulling out clothes and dumping them unsorted and crumpled into the bottom draw of the closet. She shoved the closet back into its alcove just as the taps in the room activated to display the 2-minute launch countdown.
Accessing the upper bunk was a simple matter of climbing the ladder-like insets at the foot of the cubbies. She crawled into the low space, then flopped over onto the bedding with a bubbling feeling in her chest. She stared up at the ceiling, a large panel of which was yet another tap screen for the Chariot. It continued to tick down the seconds until take-off.
Curiously, Terra reached up and touched her fingers to the screen. The countdown shrunk down into one corner, allowing a user interface to appear. The Chariot's look was not what Terra would have expected based on what its champion was like. The controls and displays had a fantastical feel to them, all dancing diagram lines giving the impressions of crystals and arcane circles. There was such heavy integration of icons into the system's interface that it was one-step away from using them as a pictographic language. Even when she pulled up her own screening result from earlier, things such as the stat names were shown only as icons. Her name, skills, and talent- she was relieved to see she had successfully hidden her second talent without notice- were at least written out in the universal script.
She only had time to look at welcome screens and her results before the intensity of relative gravity during the launch forced her arms down. Terra closed her eyes and focused on breathing through the minutes of discomfort.
When the pressure lifted from her limbs, her heart rose higher. She was free. Really, actually free. When she had escaped her home, it had only been into a bigger prison. She hadn't been able to leave the city. Now she had left not only the city, but the whole planet. Her father might rule B15-Terra, but in the Interim and on other planets, Terra was her own person past the age of majority. He could not hunt her down out here with his measly bounties and if he tried to follow her, whatever method of control or capture he could have used to force her back home would bring the ire of the Interim down on him.
Terra almost hoped he would try. She'd like to see how he liked it when a force beyond his control refused to reason with him.
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
The Interim stood for many things. The simplest explanation was that it was the empty space between worlds and stars. The complicated explanation was that it was a system like entity that existed throughout that vest emptiness. The Interim's influence was far more vast than any world system, spanning the entire universe, but it was proportionally more abstracted. While each world system had unique quirks and showed favor to certain individuals, the Interim was a sterile, clinical thing. It did not communicate in any kind of personalized way and made no bonds with mortals. It had tenets it enforced with the high-handed, inflexibility of other natural laws. The Interim did not interfere with worldly matters, but anything that fell in between was subject to its laws.
One of those laws was that personal autonomy could not be violated. Knowing the history of original Earth, Terra imagined if the Interim hadn't enforced that law, the universe would have been rife with inter-stellar slavery and sapient trafficking. Those issues still existed on individual worlds, but in open space, only those who had been mind-washed, mind-controlled, or broken-willed could be traded. The Interim was too impersonal to differentiate between personal choice and coercion. However, anyone with the will to ask for freedom within its influence would be set free, one way or another.
With that in mind, Terra did something extremely foolish. She reached her consciousness out of herself, attempting to call to the Interim.
'I will always want to be free. Do you hear me? I will never let someone chain or cage me. I will never willingly go back to my homeworld.'
She hadn't really expected the Interim to react to her. She was just one tiny mortal in its entire vastness after all, champion or no. And she had never felt more than the lightest tingle of its influence when she travelled through space before.
As soon as her mental call had left her mind though, she felt threads of influence thick as rope reaching out to her. The Interim's influence was like nothing Terra had felt before. If Ajax's influence had been a snake, what she felt now was a blazing star. She could feel Sly reaching out to her, but whatever he tried to do or say was pushed back like a leaf in a torrent.
There were no words. No windows. No interface as she would have described it. There was only an intense feeling of offering. She had no way to quantify what the offer was, except that she knew down to her bones that it was an assurance of the freedom she had asked for.
She should have taken the time to think about what she was doing. To consider that entering into a contract with the Interim when she had no idea what the terms were or the entirety of what was being offered was foolish.
She didn't.
'Yes.' She answered.
Until that moment, the worst pain Terra had ever experienced had been when her father's system was pulled from her mind and the days that followed. That paled in comparison to the flash of agony that blazed through Terra for the short time it took the pain to knock her out.
----------------------------------------
[Do you have any idea what you have done?]
Terra was not awake. She was floating in some dark, shapeless place, blocking out the pain. Despite the place clearly not being physical or real, Sly still manifested in the shape of a bristling cat to glare with his electric green eyes. He didn't have anybody to glare at since Terra was not real in this place, she was just sort of... all around. So that was where he glared, turning his head slowly to cover every angle with his judgement.
"Umm... no." Terra admitted. She did not take shape herself. She was subconsciously afraid if she gave herself a form in this place, the pain she had run away from would find her again. "I... entered some kind of contract with the Interim, I think?"
Sly's tail was switching back and forth behind him with agitation. [How many times have you heard of someone making a contract with the Interim?]
"Lots? That's what all the objectives are, aren't they? Contracts with champions to earn potential."
[Those are made with the system seeds. My kind. Not yours.]
"Well how many then?" Terra asked, assured enough that her pain wouldn't find her again in this place to start feeling defensive.
[You've never heard of it, because it isn't supposed to happen. If you didn't have your reality sense, you wouldn't have been able to do it at all.]
Terra couldn't help making a huffing noise of shock that ruffled Sly's fur from all sides. "Are you telling me I shaped the Interim's influence? I don't think I can Hack the whole damn universe, Sly."
[Of course not. What I am saying is a mortal mind isn't capable of communicating directly with the Interim without that talent, in the same way a child can't interact with a world system.]
"Oh." Terra whispered as realization hit her. "You're saying what I did would have scrambled my brains."
[Worse than that.] He assured her while the fur along his spine finally started to lay down. [You'll still be in a lot of pain for the foreseeable future... but there won't be lasting harm. Obviously, you can't tell anyone about this.]
"So what did I agree to?" Terra asked. She should have been more worried about what her side of this bargain was going to be, but she couldn't bring herself to care. The promise given had been for freedom, so whatever it was couldn't tie her down somewhere she didn't want to stay. She felt certain of that.
[I don't know.] Sly answered her sullenly. [A pact with the Interim is private between you and it. Unless you choose to share the details with someone, only you will know.]
"Even though you can just read my mind?"
[I can't see everything inside of you. There are places even a system cannot reach. Unless that system is the ultimate power in the whole universe that you invited into those deep places to make whatever changes it felt like.]
"I get it, I messed up." Terra finally let herself take on a physical form, appearing as she normally liked to. She looked around the shapeless void they were in. They didn't even stand on anything, they were just floating. "Where are we?"
[Your subconscious. I woke you here to yell at you.] Sly explained, taking the chance to glare directly at her. He then asked her: [Do you know what happens to me if you die?]
The thought had never occurred to Terra, but she was pretty sure the subject had been covered in her lessons once. She closed the eyes of her imagined body and tried to remember way back to her system propagation lessons from her childhood. The subject had never come back up in her studies after her screening, which she knew now must have been her father's influence. "I... think we weren't sure? I'm guessing you'd just find another champion?"
[I'd cease to exist.]
"Oh. Oh! Oh no..." Terra understood then that she hadn't just risked herself with what she had done. She had risked him. "Sly, I-"
[Don't bother.] Sly cut her off. He turned and began to walk away from her through the void. [It's time for you to wake. Your friend is worried.]
"What friend?" Terra asked, but she got no answer. Instead, the darkness closed in on her until the body she had imagined for herself faded away again and the pain returned.
----------------------------------------
"Terran? Terran! What happened?!" The female voice calling out to Terra was not one she immediately recognized.
She swam back to consciousness slowly with a lot of groaning in pain. She put her hand to her skull which felt like it was trying to split into a million different pieces.
"Should I get Lauria? She's the doctor. I'll go get Lauria!" The female voice from down on the floor continued fretting through Terra's unresponsiveness.
"No, wait. It's... just a migraine." Terra said, deciding she would have to lie. She still wasn't very good at that even after years of doing so out of necessity. She forced her eyes open to look down at who had come into her cabin.
The young woman was near her in age with light skin and curly red hair. An anxious smile and rich brown eyes graced a chubby face that pulled at Terra's memories. Searching her memories for this woman was like having a word on the tip of her tongue. She was certain she knew her and that when she remembered from where it would feel like it should have been obvious, but she just couldn't place her.
"I'm sorry, who are you?" She gave in to asking, rather than continue thinking in circles while her head was pulsing painfully with each heartbeat.
The woman's smile widened even as her eyebrows knit together further than they had been before. "Cassiopeia Dromedan. We met when we were children."
The girl Terra had drawn as a princess with herself. The one who she had never seen again after her eighth birthday.
"Oh, stars!" Terra cursed, hurrying down from her bunk in order to meet the girl she had once wanted to befriend properly. Without their parents staring over their shoulders dictating how they should interact. She reached her hand out and put on her best open smile, the kind she had used with clients and friends, not the carefully tempered thing she'd used at social functions. "It's good to meet you again. I go by Terra now."
Cassiopeia's concern finally started to ease, though she didn't take Terra's hand immediately. "So that isn't just a disguise? I thought it might not be, because of the drawing you made me. I didn't get a good look at it, but that was supposed to be us, right?"
"Yeah."
Instead of taking Terra's hand at the confirmation, the redhead wrapped her in a tight hug. "I knew it! I'm so glad Captain found you!"
"I'm pretty sure I found her." Terra wheezed. Her arms were trapped within Cassiopeia's vice-like hug, but she managed to tap the fingers of one hand against the shorter woman's side.
"Well, I'm glad either way!" Cassiopeia said before releasing Terra. She only stepped back about half a step. "You always looked so miserable when we were children. I worried about you a lot after my family stopped getting invitations to your planet."
The way she said it made Terra feel guilty that she had almost never thought about any of the Dromedan family after they left her life. "Well, I'm fine now. What are you doing here?"
"Captain and Jenkins sent me to show you around and introduce you to the others." Cassiopeia explained.
"No, I mean, what are you doing on this ship?"
"Oh! I'm travelling with this group in search of a system seed. I want to be a champion. Is it true that you already have one?"
Before Terra could answer, spider-silk thin lines of influence peeled away from the crystal wiring of the walls in all directions and converged around Terra's shoulders. There the lines wove themselves into the feline form of Sly. When the framework was in place, his full physical manifestation resolved itself. The cat familiar proceeded to walk himself around Terra's neck, putting on a show of his graceful body and sleek, silky fur. He circled twice before settling down languidly.
While Terra was tempted to push him off for his dramatics, Cassiopeia's hands had shot up to cover her mouth while her eyes went wide and starry. "Oooh! It's so cute!" She crooned, stretching up on her toes and leaning in to get an even better look at him. "Does it have a name?"
[I'm not cute.] Sly grumbled.
"His name is Sly." Terra said, thinking it sounded much more sinister and immature compared to "the Chariot".
[Or immature.]
"Hi, Sly! I'm Cassie. Can I pet you?"
Sly lifted his nose and turned his head away from her.
"I'll take that as a no." Cassie said wistfully as she leaned back. The smile had never once left her face. Terra remembered that had been what she'd liked about her as a kid. That the girl was always smiling no matter what.
After ensuring Terra didn't have anything she needed to do first, Cassie took her around, showing her the ship in detail. Everything was where Jenkins had said it would be, but actually navigating through the halls and lifts was much more helpful for solidifying the layout into Terra's mind.
Along the way, they occasionally ran into another member of the crew.
The first person they encountered was someone Terra had already heard mention of multiple times and the only one they sought out. Lauria Silver was the ship doctor and self-assigned cook to whom they'd gone for some medicine for Terra's splitting headache. She was an elf with a long braid of hair that started black at her roots and faded out to white at the tips. Her figure was plump for an elf with curvy proportions. She was one of the other champions, her familiar taking the form of an arm-brace device not unlike the kind of personalized taps utilized on certain planets.
After they parted ways from her, Cassie told Terra that Lauria had a brother who'd come along to protect her, even though he was just an ordinary person like herself but without any interest in getting a system seed. He mostly worked on ship maintenance.
The second person they encountered had been an incredibly tall man from a race Terra had never heard of called Breminth. According to Cassie, the two and a half meter tall man with golden, leathery skin and no hair was apparently short for his kind. He'd introduced himself as Varse fer Karse, which turned out to mean Varse, son of Karse. The hand he'd taken hers in had borne three extremely long fingers and a thumb, each with three joints instead of two. When she had looked down, she had realized his feet were configured in the same way, but appeared more talon like. He'd been a friendly, but terribly shy man. Also a champion, his familiar came in the form of a vaguely humanoid robot the size of a small child that he called Dinky.
The last person they passed on Terra's little tour had not stopped to speak with them. He was the only mortal person that Terra had been able to sense within the ship before meeting him as he had two cybernetic prosthetics. His left hand and most of his left leg from the knee down had been replaced, though whether from choice or necessity she could not tell. The force of the influence flowing through those devices told Terra that he was someone much more powerful than herself. Someone she should not make an enemy of, even if the one look he had give them had been full of disdainful superiority. His skin had been tattooed more densely than any client Terra had ever worked on, but the ink had glowed like the lines on the walls or Sly's eyes.
"That was Devon Solkin. He's Fourth Order, and only with us until his familiar finds a world it is happy with. It lives in his cybernetics and tattoos most of the time." The last detail wasn't really necessary, but Cassie had proven to be obsessed with all system seeds. She had gushed in particular about how amazing it was that Captain Surith's familiar had merged itself with her ship. "It's almost like it rooted a ship instead of a world!"
[She's not entirely wrong, though a ship isn't big enough to actually take root in. The Chariot will never metamorphize within these walls.]
Besides Lauria's brother, there was only one person Terra hadn't yet met at least in passing. Cassie had spoken about her and her familiar on the way back to Terra's room, but by that point Terra's head was pounding again and she couldn't concentrate. She figured there'd be plenty of time to meet and get to know everyone better later.
For now, all she wanted was to take another dose of her pain medication and sleep. Once Cassie finally stopped chattering and left her in her room, that was exactly what Terra did.