“What is this symbol, Ascella?”
My aunt looked up from where she was fastidiously mixing the magical ink Zodians used for their tattoos. Her eyes curiously fixed on the book I held up so she could see the symbol I pointed toward. Her eyes darkened briefly as recognition dawned.
“That is the symbol of Ophiuchus, the 13th House of the Ecliptis,” Ascella answered carefully.
“But I thought there are only 12 Houses?” I asked, confused.
“There are now,” she answered. “But in ancient times there were 13. There are no more Zodians who venerate Ophiuchus, today.”
“What happened to them?” I said, curiosity blooming in my young heart.
Ascella sighed, realizing that my inquisitive nature would not be satisfied with half answers. She took my hand and started tracing out the patterns of my newest constellation tattoo with the magic ink. The ink itself was black, as all of my tattoos would be until I completed the pilgrimage and baptismal. Afterward, they would be imbued with the power of the stars and the color would shift to white like Ascella’s.
“The House of Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer, was once considered one of the most powerful Houses of Ecliptis,”Ascella explained. “Its worshippers were most often healers; however, some of the more devoted became great oracles who could sometimes divine glimpses of the future. Naturally, many of the other Houses sought wisdom and guidance from Ophiuchus, the result of which eventually led key leaders of that house to feel superior and consider themselves the ruling Ecliptic House.”
“But the Houses of Ecliptis always operate in harmony and balance,” I said passionately. “One house is never more important than the other. Nobody can rule another house!”
“Prescisely,” Ascella smiled as she ruffled my hair, admiring her work on the tattoo she had just completed. “I can see why Sagittarius calls to you, my free spirit.”
“So, what did the other houses do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “For as you mentioned, it is not the place of any house to govern another. The other houses were not concerned with Ophiuchus’ thoughts or ideals as long as they did not act upon them in a way that interfered with another house. Though there were some houses who were concerned about becoming unbalanced as a whole.”
“But something eventually did happen, didn’t it?” I guessed.
“Yes,” she said, and I could see my aunt’s gaze turn distant as if recounting an old legend. “There began to grow among that house a faction of believers who were fascinated by Boötes, a region of the cosmos known commonly as The Great Nothing, or the Void. And to a Zodian, the Void represented the antithesis of everything we are. We worship the light of the stars that bring life to all things; to us it represents the veneration of all matter and energy in the universe. The Void is the absence of light, a vast nothingness.”
“How could Ophiuchus be okay with that!”
“It was a slow descent, taking place over centuries,” she explained, wiping off the ink after it had soaked in the appropriate amount of time. “Ophiuchus’ worshippers slowly began to venerate the Void over their own House. Nobody really understands what they were seeking, what was so enticing to pull them away. There were whispers of immortality, of complete knowledge and power.”
As I reached to help Ascella clean up the table, my hand knocked the bowl of water over she was using to clean the ink from my skin. Water spilled off the table down to the floor in a seemingly never-ending stream of dark water. The water continued to stream supernaturally from the bowl until the floor was flooded with a shallow pool of dark liquid, a black slurry I was slowly sinking into. I looked into its midnight surface noticing that my reflection was no longer the young girl of the memory. Instead, my own adult face stared back at me with eyes swirling like black and purple miasma. I started to scream...
* * *
I bolted upright with a half scream, instantly regretting both the sudden movement and loud noise as I clutched my aching head. The dream felt all too real to me. I was laying on the floor of the control room like most of my companions.
After exiting the void portal, the viewscreen had been filled with the deep blue color of an ocean. The impact with the water was nearly instantaneous; luckily, we had come in at a low angle rather than hitting the ocean straight on. Most of the occupants of the control room had been thrown around or slammed up against the control screen. The last thing I remembered was mind-splitting pain before I blacked out.
I reached up to gingerly touch my forehead and winced. My fingers came away bloody, but I could tell the wound was only mildly concussive. Head injuries always bled a lot. With a twinge of sadness, I thought of Minerva and how much her healing would be appreciated right now.
The water from my dream wasn’t the only dampness haunting me, however. I noticed a thin sheen of water starting to collect along the floor. Thankfully though, this water looked more like the standard, clear variety. As I was lying on the floor, some of the dampness seeped into my clothes.
“What the hell did we hit?” Vomero said groggily. He also appeared to be just waking up.
“I’m pretty sure it was an ocean,” said Cash. “Or a super-rich guy’s swimming pool.”
“Are any of the systems still online?” I asked.
“Only two emergency protocol systems,” Vomero answered, doing a quick scan of the control panel. Although, I suspected he didn’t really need to check the control panel to read the ship’s system messages. “There’s the ship status update function and something called primary containment. It looks like whatever that is has a power supply separate from the ship. That’s all the information I can access about it, though.”
“Can you reroute it to at least get the doors open?” said Dick. “I hate feeling like canned tuna stuck in this room.”
Dick walked to the control room door and started pushing the button that normally opened it. Nothing. I could feel the walls start to close in on me and took a few deep, calming breaths. I hated feeling trapped. The dizziness from my head injury wasn’t helping, either.
“I can’t do anything with any systems,” said Vomero. “We basically are sitting in a giant metal can. But hey, at least it’s a giant metal can that gives us constant detailed updates on just how screwed we are!”
Vomero kicked the control dais in frustration.
“Guess we’ll have to do it my way, then,” said Cash as he nudged Dick away from the door.
Cash lodged his fingers into a crevice near the door jamb and braced his other arm against the frame. With a grunt, he slowly began to pry the door open. It gave way inch by slow inch at first, relinquishing its hold with a torturous metal-on-metal screech.
“What do you eat for breakfast, man?” Vomero said, incredulously. Cash simply grinned as he pushed the door the rest of the way open.
More water flowed in through the opening. Apparently, the rest of the ship was also flooding.
“Vomero,” I said, already feeling better now that the door was open. “Does that status update thing mention anything about widespread flooding?”
“There seems to be water pouring into the mechanical areas underneath the ship,” he said.
His eyes seemed to scan the air as if looking over some read-out nobody else could see.
“That hit on our underside must have opened a hole, or maybe the impact did. We’re kind of tilted nose down, which is why we seem to be taking in more water here in the control room. Looks like the passenger and cargo areas are largely unaffected, so far.”
As everyone began to file out of the control room, I glanced around the floor for Matthew.
“Where’s the kid?” I asked.
Everyone paused and glanced around.
“I had assumed he was knocked unconscious in a corner like most of us,” said Dick, but a quick search of the room revealed he was nowhere to be seen.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Had he died? Had opening a portal for so many people or such a large transport been too much? I didn’t know how void portals worked—nobody did, really.
Void worshippers were almost an urban legend to my people. Nobody I knew had ever actually met one and some even believed there were none left, that their kind had died out long ago. Hell, even I wasn’t completely sure that Matthew was a void worshipper. His power had felt both familiar and alien to me at the same time, and the swirling purple/black mist in his eyes, the dark matter energy, a portal filled with miasma, these were all tales I had heard as a child but never witnessed for myself.
None of the other people in the room seemed to care much. They probably assumed he was just another random kid who happened to have a teleport power. Either way, it didn’t much matter right now. It seemed he had disappeared, and there were more pressing matters at hand.
“If I was him and could teleport around,” said Cash, kicking his foot through the now ankle-deep water in the control room, “I wouldn’t have stuck around for this shit, either.”
* * *
“Water and technology don’t mix.”
Vomero was crouched over an access panel in the hallway floor trying to get the passenger cabin door to open. Cash was pounding a metal pipe at the door seam, trying to wedge it in for leverage. I leaned against a wall to steady myself, my head wound pounding with each blow to the door.
“Neither does violence,” Vomero continued with thinly veiled disgust directed toward Cash’s brute-force methods.
“Not true,” Cash shot back, winded from driving the metal pipe at the door repeatedly. “Violence mixes with everything.”
“Of course, you would think so.”
“That sounded an awful lot like an insult from someone who has opened exactly zero doors,” said Cash, finally punching through the door seal to gain leverage with the pipe. He let out a satisfied grunt. “Looks like it’s 2-0, lizard man.”
Cash finally pried open the door to the passenger cabin, and I let out a sigh of relief. I think I would have passed out again if the pounding had continued. Noticing my distress, Dick slung my arm over his shoulder and placed a steadying hand around my waist. I didn’t really like relying on someone else to stand on my own feet, but it was that or fall on my face at this point. Somehow, my body was also acutely aware of the way his shoulder muscles felt beneath my arm, and I felt a tingling feeling at my side where his hand was placed.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Skye! What the hell is wrong with you? You've slept with way sexier guys than this. You can barely stay conscious, and you’re horny for some maybe-murder you just met?
Another, less scathing thought suddenly occurred to me. The last time I had felt this aroused near a man was on a job to Kaal-Naal. It was considered a type of vice-city mainly due to the copious amounts of sexual exploits available to its tourists. The species of humanoids who inhabited that planet were...amorous...to say the least. They naturally produced an intoxicating pheromone that they used to build a thriving economy based on sexual tourism.
Dick helped me to a nearby bench and moved away to survey the cabin. I watched him walk away with suspicion, deliberately keeping my eyes on the back of his head, not his ass. Sure enough, the farther away he walked, the calmer my hormones felt.
That smug, sneaky bastard. He’s using pheromones on me!
Groaning in frustration, some of which I admitted was still sexual in nature, I took in my surroundings. The hole in the side of the ship revealed a vast blue ocean as far as the eye could see. It was daytime outside and the sky was a lighter shade of blue with peaceful looking wispy clouds streaming across it.
“What a beautiful place to die,” I grumbled.
“Don’t worry, ma’am. Nobody’s gonna be dyin’ today. Not on my watch.”
Ryuuk glanced my way from where he sat nearby, checking the pockets of a satchel as if making sure everything was intact. My eyes pointedly looked over the dead bodies surrounding us. Some had been injured in the initial attack; others had died in the pursuit.
“Well...” he said, noticing my skepticism. “I mean. Nobody, else.”
As he secured his gear, he continued to mumble to himself something about how that hadn’t really been on his watch on account that he was indisposed in the bathroom, but if it had been his watch, they wouldn’t be in such a predicament.
“You know I can still hear you, right? And for the record you were only indisposed for the first 10 minutes of this nightmare shit show.”
“Luckily for you and everyone else, my deep-seated sense of honor won’t let me take that personally. Also luckily for everyone, these trusty ole’ wings survived unsullied. So, Ryuuk will go out and save the day by finding us a suitable place that’s not sinking into the ocean.”
With that grand declaration, he walked over to the hole, satchel slung low on his hip opposite his revolver, and flew off. I wasn’t sure if I hoped he would come back or not.
The slight tilt of the transport and the fact that the passenger cabin was situated higher up on the ship, meant that the water outside hadn’t yet reached the breach hole. That was at least some good news. Once it reached the hole, I had a feeling we would sink like a rock. The whole ship was slowly filling up with water from underneath, however. So, our time was limited to find a solution.
“Does anyone have a way to go under and patch the holes filling up the ship?” Dick asked. He, Cash, Vomero, the old man from earlier, and a couple other passengers who had survived were discussing options. Although, the tone of frustration being passed back and forth made it sound more like arguing.
“Don’t look at me,” said Cash. “I’m not going anywhere near that water.”
“Oh, so Mr. Big and Beefy is afraid of a little water?” Vomero sneered.
“That explains the smell,” I offered weakly from my seat.
“You’re not helping,” Dick said, glancing between both Vomero and me.
“I am not afraid,” said Cash. “It’s just impractical. I’m 98 percent lean, hard muscle. I’d sink like a rock! Also, have you looked down there. You can’t even see the bottom. It goes on forever. There could be all kinds of shit down there just waiting to take a big old bite out of delicious-looking me.”
“It’s physically impossible to be 98 percent muscle,” Vomero rebutted.
“Really?” said Dick. “That’s what you got out of it?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Vomero. “Sinking isn’t the biggest problem.”
“I formally disagree,” I chipped in again.
“Same!” Cash agreed.
“Listen! Even if we stop the ship from sinking, we’re still stuck in the middle of wherever this is floating in a beat-up tin can,” said Vomero. “Getting the power working again is the biggest priority. Then it wouldn’t matter if we are sinking, the ship would pump itself out. Hell, we might even be able to move or send out a distress signal.”
“And how do we go about doing that?” Dick asked.
“Well...I didn’t say I have a solution,” Vomero admitted, deflating a bit from his earlier tirade. “I was just pointing out that you’re focusing on the wrong problem.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a life raft?”
This came from the old man who had been listening to Ryuuk’s story earlier. Everyone turned to look at him with mixed reactions. Vomero looked at him like he had just suggested they grow tails and swim away. Dick stared in confusion as if just noticing he was there and wondering where the hell he came from, and Cash gave him a placating smile, the kind you give a senile person who can’t help but ask useless questions.
“Sorry gramps, they don’t put life rafts on space transports on account of there’s usually not any water in space,” Cash said in an appeasing tone.
“Seems like an oversight given the situation,” the old man mumbled as he shuffled off.
“Although...” I said, staring thoughtfully at the back door of the passenger cabin, “there could be something in the cargo area we could use to either fix the ship or get out of this sinking hunk of metal.”
“It’s worth checking out,” said Dick.
As he and Cash moved toward the back door to pry it open, Ryuuk returned, alighting gracefully at the breach. He stepped inside and promptly slipped on some debris, face-planting into the floor.
“Did you find anything?” I asked.
“Um...well...yes and no,” Ryuuk said, mustering his dignity as he picked himself off the floor.
“Are you always this difficult?” I said in exasperation. “Yes or no, which is it?”
“No, I didn’t find an island or any sort of land around, and I flew a long way,” he said. “What I did find, or more accurately seem to attract, was some of the local indigenous life forms.”
Despite his forced casual tone, Ryuuk’s statement caught everyone’s attention. I pushed myself to my feet, willing my head to stop spinning. If there was trouble, I wasn’t going to be much help, but I also wasn’t going to die sitting on my ass.
Cash, Dick, Vomero and I approached the breach cautiously, peering out to see who had followed Ryuuk to our crashed transport. There were about two dozen amphibious looking humanoids that seemed to be spread out about 20 yards from the breach side of the ship. They seemed to be bobbing in the water waist-deep, and I could just make out the outline of their legs paddling beneath the surface to propel them upward. Some held sharp looking tridents, others brandished long, club-like sea shells. I wasn’t worried about such primitive looking weapons but their numbers were concerning.
“What the hell do they want?” asked Dick.
“Maybe they’re waiting for us to sink so they can come kill us and loot our corpses,” answered Vomero. We each shot him a would-you-shut-up look.
“What?” he said. “You asked.”
“Again, you’re not helping,” Dick responded through gritted teeth.
“Don't worry guys,” said Ryuuk. “I think I have a way to communicate with them.”
He had been rummaging through his satchel and pulled out a small data tablet.
“I have a book somewhere on here....Oh, yes! Total Recall: Jack Trader’s Compendium of Indigenous Species. This feller was a bounty hunter and knows everything about thousands of cultures and species. Let’s see here...it says we just take a photo and the book searches it up for you.”
He aimed the tablet at the breach, and we all scrambled to get out of the way so as not to get caught up in the scan. After taking the scan, he waited for the search to stop and read under his breath to himself.
“Well!?” said Cash, who had not been known for his patience. “What does it say?”
“Here!” Ryuuk said. “This says it’s a sign of friendship.”
Ryuuk stood at the breach and made a scooping motion with his left hand, bringing it toward his abdomen and then up to his chin. The mermen, for lack of a better description, became instantly agitated and began shouting in a language that sounded like guttural gargling. I guessed it probably sounded more effective underwater. I also guessed that it sounded equally as menacing underwater.
“Give me that,” I said, snatching the tablet from Ryuuk’s hands.
“Merdudes?!” I said incredulously. “The book calls them Merdudes.”
“Minus 10 points for creativity for Mr. Trader,” Cash said, sarcastically. “Sounds like something I’d come up with.”
“Exactly,” I said. “What kind of cultural expert refers to an indigenous water species as Merdudes?!”
A gif on the current page showed the sign marked “friendship.”
“Well, at least you actually did the sign right,” I said.
“Guys!” called Cash. “I don’t know what he said to them, but I don’t think it had anything to do with friendship.”
The agitated “Merdudes” were now circling into a formation and advancing with weapons raised toward the transport.
“Oh shit,” said Vomero. “They’re coming, and they look pissed.”
“What did I say?” Ryuuk said defensively.
I tossed him back the tablet, pulled out my blaster, and braced against a nearby wall to steady myself.
“Knowing you,” I said. “You probably just told them to go fuck themselves.”