Crudrat, page 11
She squeaked, surprised and unusually clumsy for a crudrat.
The alien glanced over at her and grinned. Maura wondered if she would ever get used to seeing that furry face come over suddenly human looking like that. His head was now a perfect sphere of fur, no matter that he grinned, his expression was one of perpetual surprise. That halo of white somehow looking like the high arched eyebrows of shock would on a human.
Turning back to his controls, the alien gestured to one side of the cockpit where a bunch of cloth straps were tied-off, their ends floating. Maura, whose feet seemed to have drifted upwards of their own choice, pushed herself over, all ungainly and bumbling, and untied a couple of them. Then she swam back to her original niche and used them to lash herself to the hull. The white bones that made up the ship’s chubby frame were not attached completely to the outer skin but were fixed point-by-point with synthetic coils. This meant that the unattached parts in between were ideal handholds for steering a wayward body around in free float. Maura used one of them as a mooring point for her weightless self, lashing the cords about stomach and shoulders and affixing them best as possible behind her.
Only after she’d secured herself did she hear a rapid-fire chittering of annoyance emanate from the main cabin of the skiff. She craned her head around in time to see a tumbling blue puffball of lashing tail and affronted dignity go rolling past.
Fuzzy glanced at her but was too busy with his piloting to take ticks to see to the cause of her laughter.
Maura faced forward in time to watch the spaceport enter the screen as the alien flipped his ship about in a quick twisting maneuver.
She’d never seen her spaceport from the outside before. There it floated, her whole world right up to until now. It looked like some huge sphere of wound-up metal cords and plastic chunks. The metal cords would be the harvesters wrapping around the habitation center in coils and twists. Their funnel mouths open every which way to space, breathing in the fuel that scythers would eventually cull to usefulness. That whole mess of a spaceport spun, creating the artificial gravity within. It was ugly. A piece of kit that if Maura saw lying gutterside she’d not bother to scavenge. She was not sorry to see it twist out of view as the alien brought his pudgy skiff around, pointing it away from Wheel space, towards some far distant ice planet.
The skiff shook again, not so bad now that it was out of gravity, but still reacting to more shooting. Some of the military boats had mobilized to follow them out of dock — a small swarm of almond shaped space beetles trailed them through the blackness.
Untroubled, the alien seemed more comfortable now than Maura had yet seen him. His thoughts and movements floated easily in three dimensions, his skiff dipping and swaying not just side-to-side but up and down as well, relaxed as could be. It made for a hard target and a harder mark, but it also made Maura’s stomach take new interest in bile production. Sure she could flip and dip herself – any time, any tunnel, any blade – but having the ship do it for her took a certain toll on her internal organs.
“How many hits can this ship of yours take?” She swallowed down nausea.
“Not many more. This one may have to put you to returning the fire. You ever shot a ship’s cannon before, little blue?”
Maura looked at him like he was crazy. “I’ve never even been on a ship.”
He goggled at her, black eyes wide. “You were born in space?”
“Near as I can tell. Don’t have much memory before crudrat life, but that would look to be the truth of it. Can hardly see why my ex-family'd fly me up from planetside just to dump me.”
The alien tossed his head in amazement. “Ah well, now would be the time to learn. See that screen there, flip it up.”
Maura found a small flat screen in front of her and flipped it into place, horizontal like a table. It generated a three dimensional spherical image, at the center of which was their floating boat, a snub-nosed blip of green. Always at the center, a cone of red emanated up from its top, taking a wedge out of the display sphere. Zooming into and out of the display area, bobbing towards and then away from Maura, were various blobs of yellow light.
“Those bits of yellow are enemy fighters,” the alien explained. “The red is dead space, since the guns are mounted underneath us, and my whale won’t fire through herself. A smart enemy will try to say inside the cone, but you Wheel rarely fight smart.”
One of the yellow blobs spit out a little beam of light which arrowed towards their green blob at the center of the display. Fuzzy nosed his whale down and to one side, and the shot missed. All the enemy blobs of light moved up and to the opposite side in front of Maura.
Maura’s stomach took up occupation somewhere near her right ear. The three dimensional image was making her even more queasy.
“Now what?” she asked.
“See those two coils? Put one each around the front part of your finger and thumb. Should be on your head-hand, not your heart-hand.”
Maura found two ring-like metallic coils on wire tethers attached to the base of projection screen. She slid them on, as directed, pulling them tight ‘round the tips of her forefinger and thumb. She assumed by head-hand he’d meant the hand she used most, for eating and dressing and the like, which in Maura’s case was the left.
“That is your firing solution, little blue, when you clasp the two rings together.”
“Really?” Maura was all interest. Experimentally, she pinched the air in front of her nose, the rings made a faint tink.
Fuzzy gave her a withering look. Despite that fact that there were other ships around, and that he was focused on flying, he was very nonchalant about explaining things to Maura. “It will not work until it is turned on and your hand is inside shooting space. Also it won’t work inside the red cone.” He was speaking quite quickly.
“Right.” Maura carefully pushed her tethered left hand into the bottom sector of the display image in front of her. Nothing happened. The blobs of light still buzzed around, some going straight through her hand.
The alien made a quick course correction, spinning his ship nose over tail. The stars whirled.
Maura swallowed hard.
Then he reached over with one furry white paw, and tapped some kind of code into the edge of her projection screen.
Maura’s hand began to tingle and it was suddenly hard to move it though the image, as though there were extra gravity just there. A slight metallic smell sifted through the weightless air, like fresh blood or shaved metal.
“Magnetic drivers,” Fuzzy explained. “Now all you need to do, little blue, is get your fingers around an enemy fighter. Don’t miss, the whale doesn’t have ammunition to spare.” With that terse admonishment, he went back to his woozy piloting.
Maura bit her lip. Her brow creased, bringing blue eyebrows together.
It was harder than it looked. The Wheel ships, blobs of light, moved very fast into and out of the spherical tracking space, following not only their own trajectory but also shifting whenever Fuzzy steered his whale one way or the other. Maura quickly realized she had to glean the tune of her companion’s movements, sense where Fuzzy might be going next, watch his shoulder muscles out the corner of her eye. Otherwise she lost all grasp on the blobs. It was a tad like reading blade movement. Once she’d got him down, she’d could space one variable.
But catching the blobs between thumb and forefinger was mighty hard. The first time she missed, clinking the metal rings together sharply on emptiness. The metallic smell spiked and the skiff shook once around them. She caught a flash of something off to one side of the view screen and the shot waffled harmlessly into space.
“Sorry.”
Quoin Fuzzy ignored her.
More determined, Maura tried again. This time she managed it, catching a blob of light right between the metal rings on her fingers. She didn’t get to see the shot actually occur on the view screen, but something significant happened as the alien skiff shook and the blob she’d pinched blinked out of existence.
Fuzzy gave her a look of surprise. Second attempt and a successful outcome was apparently impressive.
Maura, concentrating hard, went after another blob of yellow. This one skittered off screen with slippery speed before she could pinch it. She dove in again, hand tingling and sluggish. It was like trying to catch crud dust in a multifold air tunnel, particles spinning this way and that, air blasting several directions at once.
A blob streaked down in front of the nose of the whale. On Fuzzy’s viewing screen an almond shaped armiger skiff appeared, scyther riding its back like some tubular parasite, guns mounted just below. Fuzzy dived their skiff. The Wheel ship followed. Maura reached over, through the red cone on her display, into firing space and caught the yellow blob neatly. Her coiled rings chimed. The metallic smell wafted forth. The whale shook, and right before their eyes a Wheel fighter silently exploded in a flash of blue flame.
Quoin Fuzzy zipped them through the spinning wreckage.
“Very pretty,” he commented.
Maura tried not to think about the fact that she was actually killing people. “How much longer before they give up the chase?” Her hand was back in motion, hunting down the next pinch.
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“How long ’til we get out of Wheel space?”
“About ten more ticks.” He jerked the skiff to the left sharply.
In front of Maura all her yellow blobs zoomed to the right. “Then it will be eleven ticks before they give up,” she replied, confident.
A flash came from one of Maura’s blobs. “Enemy fire,” said Maura, because it seemed the right thing to say.
Fuzzy twisted their skiff again, but not soon enough. The whale shuddered and whined.
“How come we can take the hits and they can’t?”
Fuzzy gave her a look suggesting she best not ask again about his people’s defensive tech. Still not entirely trusting? I can suss to that. I’d be making a good Wheel spy, except sequensors don’t have that kind of imagination.
She voiced his unspoken order: “Shut your trap Maura and kill things.”
She went for another shot. Only four blobs of light still remained in and out of her display image. One seemed to have sussed the red cone trick, and was shadowing them from safe space directly in that zone. Must be a pretty good pilot, for he was sticking close to Fuzzy’s rapid course changes. Ironically, this meant he couldn’t shoot at them. Steel Spoke fighters had gun mounts on their forward tips only, not underneath like the alien’s skiff.
Maura pinched at a different blob, but the target slid out from between her fingers. Another wasted shot.
“Sorry.”
“This next is your last shot,” was his only reply.
Maura snapped her mouth shut and concentrated.
Pinch. Another silent blue explosion out of sight-line and only three blobs were left.
Maura relaxed slightly. She was surprised to find her stomach seemed to be back in its normal location. Fancy that. She slid the metal rings off of her fingers leaving them to dangle until she was told what to do next.
Something chittered at her. The murmel had managed to float his way into the cockpit. He was lashing his tail about as a kind of propeller using it to steer as best aspossible through the weightlessness. He bumped into her ankle. At which point he wrapped all four paws and tail, solid as crud-glue, around her foot. Maura let him.
She watched the alien as he piloted. Fuzzy’s hands moved and danced as they steered, jumping between four levers, and the ship slid about in response. There was a liquid beauty to it, and Maura, who until then would never have called the alien graceful, was impressed.
Then the yellow blip shadowing them in the safe cone of space above dropped back and took one last spitting shot.
Quoin Fuzzy rolled the skiff over and the shot missed by a speck.
Then all the yellow blobs disappeared off of Maura’s display. Some invisible barrier had been crossed, they were out of Wheel space.
“Are we now in your people’s territory?” Maura watched the alien's dancing hands slow and his shoulders relax a tad.
“No, little blue. This is Cotyla space, but at least they aren’t Wheel. So long as we pursue our own business and not theirs, we will be left to our own devices.”
Space flight was overly calm without fighters blobbing about or the whale shaking itself something fierce. They followed a smooth steady course, and it felt almost like not moving at all.
Quoin Fuzzy checked some of what Maura assumed were read-out instruments. They were mostly circular shapes, showing degrees of colored fullness.
At Maura’s obvious interest he tapped at one. “Flush capacity and fluid levels, tells us about how many times the scythers need to be cleaned, before a refuel.”
That’d be the alien skiff’s main limiter on space travel time.
Fuzzy pointed to a collection of about fifty smaller circles all half full of blue. “DMP for ship’s scythers, tells when flush is required. We’ll probably have to flush before we hit enough void to fold, all that maneuvering through real space means a high amount of build up.”
Maura translated DMP to crud in her head, but had no idea what fold meant.
Fuzzy tapped a different readout. “Average fuel levels inside the harvesters.” That one was nearly full. While they’d been maneuvering and shooting at Wheel fighters, the whale had been hard at work collecting dark matter and processing it. “Looks like we have enough to fold.” The alien sounded pleased.
“What’s fold?”
He looked at her, head cocked to one side. “The quick way to get around.”
Isn’t that what they had been doing? Getting around quickly?
“You do know that the distance between stars is too vast to cross in a lifetime? We need a way that’s faster than light. This one doesn’t know Wheel tech, but Kill’ki use dimensional folding. It is,” he paused, “uncomfortable, but efficient.” He pointed to another dial which seemed only to flash either red, blue, or white and not indicate a percentage of any kind. “We cannot be in proximity to other matter when we fold, even dark matter. It,” he paused hunting down the right word for it in space-tongue, “wrinkles things. We must find void, truly empty space, to fold.”
The dial in question suddenly went from blue to flashing white.
“Ah.” Fuzzy yanked the ship into a tight spin to keep it fixed at that one point. The dial continued flashing.
“Excellent.” He looked back at the DMP build-up dial. It was about three quarters full. “Best flush first.” He looked at Maura and her murmel, “Ready?”
Maura had no idea what she was readying herself for so she simply nodded.
“Flushing.” He flipped a switch.
The hull walls of the ship, which Maura had thought stiff and solid, shimmered, and then went to a semi-transparent liquid state. Suddenly, there she sat, surround by a frame of white bone and the absolute nothingness of a watery space peopled by watery stars. Through those liquid walls, from nose to tail, ran multiple blue veins. The part of Maura’s brain that wasn’t terrified figured there must be about fifty or more, mini-scythers used to both steer the whale and fuel it. As she watched, the blue began to slowly disappear, starting at the front of the ship, until there were no veins visible at all. Maura had the feeling that she could reach out a hand and punch straight through that thin veil of liquid wall and out into the vacuum.
It was downright petrifying.
The murmel appeared to agree with her assessment. He screeched high and distressed, clutching her foot even tighter and burrowing his little face into the nook between her anklebone and heel.
Maura choked on her own breath.
Then the alien flicked the switch back up and the walls around them became solid black and fabric-like again. Maura stopped herself from retching. She felt she would never trust in the solidity of walls again.
Fuzzy, utterly unruffled, was looking at his read-outs. “Good.” The DMP was at empty, the fuel was almost full, and the void detector still blinked white.
He flashed Maura a grin of pure delight. It was getting easier to cope with those bursts of human on his alien face. “Let’s bend us some dimensions, shall we?”
Maura, after the whole flushing debacle, could only stare at him, knowing that her pupil would have dilated fully from looking through walls into the dark nothingness.
He did not wait for a reply. An apparently blank part of the control panel slid away to reveal an innocent looking pad of numbers. He tapped in a sequence. The pad spun about, presenting a single large button on its backside.
Fuzzy pushed the button down hard.
And Maura’s whole universe ate itself alive.
11
With the harvesting of dark matter came the understanding of light and its purpose. From there it was only a short time before humans determined how to hurl matter across space. It has yet to be determined if this was a good idea.
~ Introduction to The Application of Dark Matter Theory, A Primer by T.L. Prozzer
Until the moment the stars took her to rest, Maura would never forget her first fold. It was like having her brain removed out of her skull, twirled about on the end of a piece of string, stretched a bit, then reinstalled, backwards.
It began with a sensation of space-stuff moving all about her, not air, but actual reality-crux. It seemed to want to collapse, trying to cram itself against other parts of itself, and in so doing drag the Maura-being, from skin to blood to bone, with it. She became the tiniest thing in the universe, a fraction of fractions, closing inwards until she was nothing more than a pinpoint, one single dimension, a speck adrift in space. She was divided down to a square root of herself – negative matter.
Then she was back, almost simultaneously, and herself was everywhere, flattened and drawn, stretched beyond all limits out over the entirety of the universe.
