Sunward, page 3
“Perfectly,” she said. “I’ll let you know when I’m safely entombed.”
“You do that.”
“Meanwhile, may I have your name?”
I didn’t want to give up my name, but this kind of exchange was standard. “Tova Lir. Courier, Third Class. Captain and sole proprietor of the Needle. Guild number 93009.” Pause. “She.”
“You’re from Luna,” she said. “I can tell from your accent, and the way you dropped that pronoun last on the list. Lunar folks tend not to advertise gender.”
“Not as a general rule, no.”
“Thank you for answering my distress call, Captain Lir.”
I couldn’t say You’re welcome, because she wasn’t welcome, so I went back to work instead. Then I panicked.
Agatha’s body was trying to broadcast its own death announcement to the manufacturers. This would have been (a) premature, and (b) prophetic, since it would also trigger an immediate reset to factory default settings and erase every fragment of her that I had so far managed to reassemble.
After a few desperate hours of coding fireblocks and runarounds, I managed to coax her body into the bot equivalent of a medically induced coma.
“Ha!” I shouted, victorious.
“What are we celebrating?” Daris asked. She was back at the window.
“None of your business,” I said. “Do you have the data core?”
“As requested,” she said, “and I’ve chosen a coffin. Still trying to respectfully evict my predecessor.”
That reminded me of the corpse stashed in my airlock. I thought about honoring his final wish by tossing him outside, but decided against it. The body was still evidence—and a potential bargaining chip—even if the actual substance of that first-class message was null and void.
You shouldn’t have picked him up, Sparkles said.
We had to, I insisted. Always offer aid to fellow sailors in distress.
Even the dead ones?
Yes, I said. Even the dead still need to get where they’re going.
* * *
I put my suit and toolbox back into storage and stashed the data core in an isolation locker usually reserved for hazardous deliveries. Then I took it out again. The core was a dense ring of greenish metal.
Don’t, Sparkles said. Don’t even try. You’ll need help to safely crack it open—and you do know where to find that kind of help.
I put the core back inside the locker, sealed it shut, and threw myself at the preflight checklist. It felt strange to take the wheel alone. It felt stranger to see Agatha’s body still seated at her usual station. I reached over and strapped her in. Then I opened a hardwired comlink to the captive assassin.
“How are your new accommodations?” I asked. She had chosen a partially transparent coffin. Sunlight would have passed through it to touch the deceased. Now the living could peer out of it instead. I’d avoided making eye contact while bolting the whole thing to my hull.
“Cramped,” she said, “but acceptable.”
“Waste recycling still works in your suit?”
“Why yes, thank you for asking.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Now brace for acceleration.”
“Where are we headed?” Daris asked.
“Home.”
* * *
The first stage of the moonward trip was very fast, and the last stage very slow. I braked hard with Terra close and Luna occulted behind.
“Still there?” I asked Daris.
“Mostly.” Her voice strained like a cable stretched taut. “Coffins aren’t built for sudden changes of speed.”
“Guess not,” I said. “The usual passengers are more patient about getting where they’re going.” I made some minute course corrections and reminded myself that I did not care about her discomfort. “Brace for one more sprint in three, two, one.”
The engine blazed and then simmered. We drifted. Our momentum felt right. Our numbers all looked equally happy with me when I triple-checked. Current velocity would dip us into the Terran gravity well and then send us flying up the ramp on the other side.
“Nicely done,” Daris said. Apparently, she felt it, too.
“Thanks.”
“So you plan to tiptoe up to Luna quietly?”
“Correct.”
“That won’t matter.”
My voice was a study in casual indifference. “Is that a threat? Are you suggesting that shadowy enemies will spot me regardless of my exceptional piloting skills?”
“No,” Daris said. “I’m just saying that you don’t need to be this cautious. My commissions are exclusive. No one else will be looking for you.”
“Sure,” I said, unconvinced.
“Besides,” she went on, “Luna is closed.”
“Not to me,” I said.
“Respectfully, you don’t rank high enough for that level of special privileges.”
“Just watch me, first-class murderer.”
Her voice dropped a few degrees. “Information security specialist.”
“Same difference,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It is not. And your exceptional skills won’t magically conjure up an open port of call. There’s no docking at Luna. Emergency craft only. No other traffic can go anywhere near the ruin where the docks used to be.”
Her voice got rough around the edges.
“You were there?” I guessed.
“I was there,” she said.
“Do you know what happened? Why it happened?”
“I do not.” Those words closed the hatch of our conversation.
I climbed out of my chair to check on Agatha.
She seemed fine. Inert. Completely motionless and incurious relative to everything around her. Disconnected pieces lay jumbled inside her like haphazard scrap in a bucket, but otherwise she seemed to be fine.
I watched storm clouds and ashes roil over the homeworld. A permanent hurricane churned at the equator, which made the whole planet look like a lightning-bloodshot eyeball staring down the rest of the solar system. The big storm has lots of names—most of them demonic—but I like to call it Iris.
One of the old Terran space elevators was still functioning. Every month it climbed up through Iris’s relatively tranquil eye. Then it rested at Zahir Station, the semi-abandoned Counterweight in geosynchronous orbit. No crew or passengers ever rode the Ghost Elevator. Only cargo. Twitchy algorithms inside it still liked to trade, offering random detritus of Terran archeology in exchange for living things. Plants and animals. Seeds from Martian greenhouses. Fish from the sea of melted ice inside Luna. I had only swapped deliveries once at the Zahir Station depot—a place that rests directly in the glare of a planet-sized eyeball. The air inside it smells like bad filters and abandoned hope.
No one knew what happened to all the biomass that the Ghost Elevator brought down. Maybe those critters are thriving in some habitable pocket of the world—or maybe they’re rotting in a warehouse while algorithms mindlessly accumulate more fish. My opinion on the matter shifts depending on whether or not I’ve had coffee.
“Want some coffee?” I asked the assassin.
“Thank you kindly,” she said. “Void-black and sweet if possible.”
“Incoming,” I told her. “Blue tube. Hook it up to your helmet.”
I piped espresso into the coffin and then savored a small metal bulb of my own.
* * *
The downwell side of Luna was sunlit, bright and pristine. The homeworld and its only moon liked to gaze at each other, so old treaties insisted that Luna should look the way it always had from a Terran vantage point. We still honored those treaties, even though no one was looking. People lived practically everywhere except for Terra.
Lunar settlement began on the upwell side and then burrowed down. Interior cities grew to become the most populous places in the solar system—and that was before we found enough buried ice to make our own cavernous sea.
We approached the upwell side of Luna.
“Brace yourself,” Daris said.
“I won’t fly too close to the docks,” I promised.
“You won’t need to.”
She was right. Even from a distance I could see huge searchlight beams and silhouettes of wreckage in the dark. It was a relief to turn aside and dive into deep craters.
A secret hatch opened to let us through.
“What’s this?” Daris asked.
“Private hangar,” I said. “Family owned. One of my mothers is the current chief executive administrator of the Independent Lunar City-States.”
The assassin almost choked on her own surprise. “Your mom is the queen of the Moon?”
“She really hates it when people call her that.”
“Does this make you a princess of the Moon?” Daris asked.
“No,” I said. “It absolutely does not.”
“Why would Lunar royalty find work as a third-class courier?”
“It’s a family tradition,” I said, “from the other side of my family.”
* * *
Corvus Nest met me as soon as I disembarked. He looked as pale as a cave fish and bearded like a bewildered knight errant, just like always. Mama CJ was the one who’d first adopted him into our household, but Mama Dee was happy to keep him around as the steward of the hangar.
Nest cleaned his hands with a rag before signing. Then he skipped hello to pull me into a lanky hug. I squeezed him back. We’re alive, said that hug. Wreckage might be scattered all over the surface, but we’re still alive.
Both of us stepped back to give each other room to talk.
“A body might visit their mother,” he signed. That was the literal transition, anyway. He meant, Go and find Mama Dee immediately.
“A body might.” I had to think about each word and gesture separately before putting them together, which gave my hands a halting accent.
“Her Majesty worries,” he said.
“She didn’t call,” I pointed out.
“And you did?” he asked, knowing the answer already.
I cracked my knuckles, hoping to break any adolescent petulance that might creep into my voice. “I’ll go see her straightaway. Direct from here. But first we need to talk about my ship.”
Nest glanced at the Needle. From the outside it looked more like an icicle. Or a stalactite. A thing grown in glittering caves rather than built in the Lunar shipyards—which didn’t exist anymore.
“Does a body have a body bolted to the hull?” he asked.
“Yes,” I told him. “There’s a body in that coffin. She’s breathing, though. I’ve got another stashed in the airlock. That one isn’t breathing.”
Nest exhaled hard enough to make his whiskers flare.
We signed in his native Starling, and the word “body” meant way too many things in that language. It might refer to the living or the dead. It might mean someone specific or no one in particular. It might encompass the full membership of a group or guild. It might signify the middle, the majority, or even the entirety of anything at all. A body could be a hull, a chassis, an entire planet, or a whole lot of water in one place.
Daris noticed us noticing her. She waved through the transparent coffin lid. Nest waved back. Then he took the oil rag from his pocket and spent some time scrubbing his fingers so he wouldn’t have to say anything else.
“Haunted,” he muttered to himself, which probably meant a whole bunch of different things to someone raised on an isolationist plague-ship. My limited fluency wasn’t up to the task of unpacking that word.
Nest’s ancestors had built an ark—the Starling—and set sail for the Oort Cloud. Apparently, they nursed a powerful and puritanical distaste for every sunward world. Maybe they also worshipped dark matter or distant stars. I was fuzzy on the details. Nest didn’t like to talk about it.
A nasty virus had swept through the Starling. Every child born of infected parents was immune to the disease. Every one of them was also deaf. No one aboard knew any of the existing sign languages. No one had access to the stream, either, because their parents had deliberately launched without ansibles. The new generation of Starlings needed to build their own language from scratch—which they did. They came of age, wrested control of the ship from their elders, and turned around. Nest was one of them.
After the Starlings rejoined the rest of us, their signs spread fast and far. This was the first language born after the Terran diaspora, so it offered new ways to speak and think about life in the void. Plus, it’s always useful to be able to communicate in ways that don’t require atmosphere. I made sure that every baby bot who traveled with me learned some Starling.
Nest stuffed the rag back in his pocket. “A body might not be comfortable breathing in a coffin.”
“It isn’t up to code for passenger transit,” I agreed, “or prisoner transport. Can you make me a brig instead?”
“Prisoner?” His hands looked surprised. “Aren’t you too kind for such work? I imagine that Tova Lir would just unlock the doors, look away, and let every prisoner loose with a lecture and a promise.”
“I am not kind,” I said. “I’m very mean. And I’m definitely not unlocking this prisoner. She’s an information containment specialist. First class.”
Nest made eye contact and gave me a long look before answering. “There are stories about the specialists,” he said. “Scary stories.”
“I’ve heard them,” I said. “I also stumbled across an earlier victim of her current assignment. He’s the corpse stashed in the airlock. Now I seem to qualify as information that needs to be contained. So I can’t let her go, and I can’t put her into anyone else’s custody without risking a data trail. Her commission might fall to another assassin.”
Nest sighed. His whiskers fluttered. “The same thing might happen if a body conveniently disappeared?”
“Indeed,” I said.
“Then you have a haunted ship.”
“Guess so,” I said, “but I couldn’t leave a body drifting. Build me a brig?”
“That’s a temporary solution,” he said.
“Everything is,” I countered.
Nest started to puzzle his way through the work in his head, which shifted his voice and posture. “I’ll be needing more hands. Time to call up the pit crew.”
“Thanks, Nest,” I said. “There’s one more thing.”
“Of course there is.”
“Please don’t let any of your crew disturb my copilot.”
“Why?” he asked. “Might there be something amiss with Miss Agatha?”
My hands froze up. I tried to crack my knuckles, but they were already cracked. “Swimming. Fragments.”
The old man tried to pull me into another hug.
“No.” I moved back so he could still see my hands. “She’s not gone.”
He hesitated. “A body is something that baby bots need. You know that. None of them recover after scattering themselves.”
“She will,” I insisted. “She’s stable. For now. Just let her be, okay? I know someone who can help her.”
He nodded slowly. “My crew won’t disturb the child. Now go visit your mother. Leave me to care for your haunted ship.” His gnarled hands softened around the word “haunted” this time.
* * *
I strapped myself into an elevator pod and dropped several dozen klicks. That brought me through the upper mantle and layers of metropolis, straight to the downtown offices and residence of Dian Lir, chief executive administrator of the Independent Lunar City-States.
The secret hangar above us was built as an emergency exit for the executive branch, but I’ve found it more useful as an emergency entrance.
Local time was early in the morning. Most of Luna synched their clocks to the ground floor of the Ghost Elevator, directly below Zahir Station, because that was (probably) the ancestral point of exodus for our founding population. I tried to keep Needle tethered to the same clock and calendar, but I didn’t try very hard. It was too easy to drift into my own haphazard time zone of unscheduled naps instead.
Mama Dee probably hadn’t slept much at all.
Extra security prowled up and down the hallways, which was both unsurprising and unsettling. The rangers glared at me. They also waved me through checkpoints, so I didn’t need to summon up familial authority and ask if they knew who my mother was.
Not the one who used to be a first-class courier? Sparkles asked. The one lost at sea?
No, not that one, I said. She was Mama CJ Lir. Short for Cellarius Jenny.
Sounds like a pirate, Sparkles said.
She was absolutely not a pirate. My other mom is the one who rules Luna—and by “rules,” I mean that she serves as the executive function of Lunar civilization’s kludged-together brain. Which is impossible. She does it anyway.
I found her in one of the fancier conference rooms. Algae swam through a mosaic of water-filled ceiling tiles, lighting up the whole place with the bluish glow of their tiny, bioluminescent bodies. The room looked like a nice spot for formal events in fancy dress, but now it was a place of frantic work. Staffers either rushed through or else stood around like sleepwalkers, paying absolute attention to whatever they were projecting inside their eyelids and heedless of whether or not their bodies were in someone else’s way—and everyone was in someone else’s way. No one knew how to move through any of this, but all of them were clearly determined to figure it out.
I clocked a complete lack of bots working among the staffers and interns, which was odd. In that moment the absence of mechanical people registered as a background itch rather than a blaring alarm.
Her Majesty stood in the center of the room. Everyone and everything else moved in erratic orbits around her. She was reading a hard copy of info that must have been too sensitive to share via public transmission—and all transmissions are essentially public. She glanced up and noticed me. Part of her posture visibly unclenched. Then she nodded and went back to reading the printout. Wait, said the nod. Hold tight while I deal with the life-and-death decisions right in front of me.
I leaned against the polished stone wall and wished for coffee.
