Ashfall Prophecy, page 14
I felt a bit of tension behind my eyes as well. It made sense that the Denzans all had headaches. They were more sensitive to the Etherazi’s physics-defying forms than any of the other species. There was no doubt that what we just encountered was Etherazi-related, but it hadn’t been one of the creatures itself. More like a shadow. Like going into an empty room and smelling perfume, so you knew someone just left.
“Has that kind of thing happened before?” I asked over the comm. “Like, a little Etherazi toot or whatever that was?”
“No, Syd,” my uncle replied. “I’m not sure your scientific lingo is up to snuff, but regardless. That’s a new one to me.”
“I’m sure there’s a rational explanation,” Batzian said.
Why was Batzian, of all people, sure about that? And why did he seem so chill about this? When he first got on the comms, he’d almost sounded excited . . .
Just then, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to find Aela, restored to their exo-suit, standing behind me. They must have floated back in while I was focused on the anomaly.
“That was strange,” Aela said.
“You felt it, too?”
Aela shook their head. “An Etherazi’s signature doesn’t disrupt my molecules, but I was able to observe the temporal distortion from a distance. For a moment, that rock there was part of the planet again.” The wisp pointed to the boulder that the Vulpin were finally hauling inside. “White-hot and raging.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, look.” Aela pointed to some very real scorch marks on the inside of the loading dock that hadn’t been there before. “All of you winked out of existence for a moment or you surely would have been incinerated.”
I blinked. I guess the whole thing was a bit more serious than some mild déjà vu. “Well, thanks for telling me that. I’m not freaked out at all.”
“Oh,” Aela said. “I thought you would be.”
“I was being sarcastic, Aela.”
“Whatever that was, it certainly was not a coincidence,” Aela continued. “Just like it was not a coincidence that we came to this place and found an old friend of your uncle’s prepared to help us. What are the odds of that, Syd? Astronomical. I have heard it said—small universe—when something odd occurs. The universe is actually enormous. Impossible to comprehend. Random, but not where you are concerned.”
I held up a hand. “Okay, Aela. You did it. You’re freaking me out.”
“Think about it, Syd. A previously undocumented phenomenon clearly related to the Etherazi just happens to take place in your immediate vicinity? We Ossho have an intuition for events of intergalactic importance. I told you that I had that feeling about you. And it seems I was more correct than I even realized. The universe bends around you.”
The first time Aela brought that up, back on Denza, as a reason to stay close and observe me, they’d wanted to get in my head to see what it was like when I bonded with Goldy. At the time, I was pretty freaked out by my vision of planetary destruction, but—I can’t lie—I thought it was pretty cool to have some great destiny. I’d come to the Vastness to look for my dad, but I’d also come in pursuit of something bigger than my transient life on Earth. But now that I understood what it was actually like to have the fate of the universe hang on you, I felt like I could crumble at any moment.
I looked past Aela at the endless darkness beyond the loading dock. “I didn’t ask for that,” I said quietly.
“No,” Aela agreed, resting a hand on my shoulder like I’m sure the wisp had seen other organics do. “But here we are.”
“What if the universe doesn’t just bend around me?” I asked Aela. “What if it breaks because of me?”
“Normally, I would write that off as organic hubris,” Aela replied. “But you are thinking of the vision the Etherazi shared with you.”
I nodded. “What if I can’t stop it? What if I become that version of myself?”
Aela was quiet for a moment. “We Ossho live in the present and catalog the past. These experiences are measurable. Quantifiable. The future is but a dream, Syd. It is not real until we make it so. I have seen your past and I know your present and I have observed nothing that would make you capable of such a malevolent act.”
I breathed out slowly. “Thanks, Aela. I hope you’re right.”
Apparently, Aela wasn’t the only one who’d realized that trouble followed me around, because an hour after the gold wave passed over the station, Ezziah summoned all of us to her office. She sat perched on her cybernetic legs, her one remaining hand thoughtfully pulling at the fur on her chin. On the vid-wall were station security images of that day’s cosmic event playing out in super slow motion, so we could all witness the time-space continuum pulling itself apart and then fitting back together. If you looked really close, for a moment as the wave crested over it, Unstable-J3 seemed to be a whole planet, a perfect marble of undisturbed stone.
“Our business is done,” Ezziah said. “It’s time for you to return to your ship and forget this place exists.”
My uncle stepped forward. “If this is about today’s . . . event, Ezziah, I assure you, we have no idea what that was. We’d never knowingly put your station in any kind of danger.”
Ezziah’s eyes flicked across us one by one. I tried to see our crew from her perspective. A Denzan spy who’d stolen an institute ship, his hybrid nephew with hair tinted suspiciously close to the cosmic shock wave that had everyone freaked out, an injured human, a corrupted Ossho wisp, a Vulpin outcast, and Melian. Well, she was pretty normal, anyway. I could tell by the way the claws on Ezziah’s mechanical hand flexed and unflexed that she’d come to feel like her denmates down on the loading dock. We were a bad omen. Or, at best, a bet that wasn’t worth taking.
“Forget it, Captain,” I said to Tycius. “We should be moving on anyway. We all got what we wanted out of this little stop, didn’t we?”
Ezziah cocked her head. “Actually, I’m still waiting on my payment.”
“Right, right,” Zara said. “Almost forgot.”
“I’m sure you did, den Jetten,” Ezziah replied with amusement.
With a flick of her wrist, Zara sent a half-full vial of the antihuman toxin straight at Ezziah’s head. One-Left didn’t even blink as her cybernetic hand plucked it precisely out of the air, the claws ticking sharply on the glass. She held the container up to the light for a moment, then stashed it in a compartment on her robotic forearm. Finally, her gaze slid back to Tycius.
“I should tell you that shortly after that event, as you called it, our scanners picked up a Denzan vessel heading in this direction.” Nice of her to withhold that bit of information until after we’d paid her. I opened my mouth but shut it when Ezziah glanced in my direction, anticipating my complaint. “No, I didn’t sell you out. But unless you intend to cross paths with your friends from the institute, I suggest you return to your ship. I’m planning to roll the Torrent at the top of the hour, hiding us from whatever prying eyes you’ve attracted. You should be gone by then.”
Tycius nodded slowly, then bowed at the waist. “It was good to see you, Ezziah.”
“It was a pleasure, Ty.” Ezziah’s smile was sincere, but quickly hardened. “But next time you need a place to hide, don’t darken my docks.”
“Understood.”
“Hold up,” I said. “It was a Denzan ship that popped up on your scanners? Not, like, a Vulpin mercenary ship that looks like it got hit by a missile?”
“Now, that sounds like a hell of a story,” Ezziah said. “But no. It’s a Denzan SDV-class. Not sure what it’s doing out here. Don’t care to find out.”
“SDV?” I asked.
“Science and discovery vessel,” Melian said. She elbowed me. “The top of the hour is in like ten minutes, Syd. We need to get back to our shuttle.”
Ezziah flashed her fangs. “Nice to see one of you learned to tell time at that fancy institute of yours.”
With that, we were given the boot. Ezziah planned to spin her station beneath the rocks on Unstable-J3’s outer orbit, which would make it impossible to access without an extremely skilled and suicidal pilot. None of us felt particularly inclined to test her willingness to do that before we got clear, so we speed-walked from her office back to the docks.
“I actually kind of liked this place,” Hiram said wistfully.
“You liked getting wasted with Zara three nights in a row,” Melian said.
“I guess I did, yeah,” Hiram replied. “Just a human and a Vulpin having a blast on their semester break. Sounds like a comedy-vid.”
“Sounds like a horror-vid,” Zara replied.
While the others bantered, something nagged at me. I moved next to my uncle.
“If the Torrent picked up this Denzan ship, shouldn’t it have popped up on the Eastwood’s scanners, too?” I asked.
My uncle narrowed one of his eyes, then immediately got on the comm. “Batzian? Do you read?”
“Yes, Captain?” The voice came back a half second later, like Batzian had been waiting with his finger on the receiver.
“Has the Eastwood picked up any ship traffic in the area?” Tycius asked.
“Yes, Captain,” Batzian replied. “And before you get angry or take us on the run, I really think we should hear him out.”
In the message, Arkell sat in a captain’s chair with his wiry legs stretched out in front of him. His light blue hair was still thinning across his scalp, and the one side of his face still drooped like melted butter from his days as a bomb maker, but the Eastwood’s old chief engineer somehow looked more invigorated than I’d ever seen him before. There was a surprising brightness to his dark eyes. He wore a sleeveless uniform patterned in black and red and emblazoned with the brick-wall logo of the Merciful Rampart. Arkell’s dorky old-man-summer look definitely wasn’t meant to show off the guns. It was meant to call to attention to his right arm, which had once been entirely bound in the obsidian metal the Denzans used to signify their shame. Now it was pale, wrinkled, and free.
“Greetings, Tycius,” Arkell said in the recording. “Or is it Captain Tycius now? And first mate Sydney Chambers, yes? This is Captain Arkell of the SDV Cavern.” He grimaced—or no, wait, that was an attempt at a smile. “It seems here, at the end of an era, all of our stations have risen. I know that you are on some kind of foolish errand to the Ossho Collective, and I have no intention of stopping you. But I would request that you give me the courtesy of a meeting. I believe we can help each other. And Sydney . . .”
Arkell leaned forward, getting uncomfortably close to the camera.
“We have an old friend of yours on board.”
16
How could we resist an invitation like that?
Back on Earth, there were occasions when my mom had to deal with shady characters, usually to score us some new identities. We’d roll up to a dead part of some city underneath an overpass or take winding roads out into the country, where there were more abandoned barns than people. Out in the middle of nowhere, we’d find our contact—usually some creep in a truck with tinted windows.
Our meeting with Arkell felt like the space version of that. It was three days’ journey into an empty part of this largely empty system. No planets, no wormholes, not even any space junk. Just our two ships floating in all that nothing.
Based on its lusterless hull, dented plating, and propulsion system that Hiram had said looked retro, the SDV Cavern was an older model than the Eastwood. Not that our ship looked all that spectacular after getting shot up by Reno and then half-assedly patched by the Vulpin. Structurally, the two ships looked pretty much identical to me, with one major exception. A bulb-shaped attachment that was half as big as the main ship sat atop the Cavern. It reminded me a bit of a cement mixer or a hot air balloon. That was the only part of the Cavern that looked recently updated.
“Any idea what that thing does?” I asked Tycius.
He shook his head. “SDV-class ships are built to the specifications of the research they’re conducting. I don’t know what sort of mission the Cavern was on. Looks like the ship was sitting in dry dock for a while before now. Never seen anything like that contraption on top, but I’m sure Arkell will delight in telling us.”
Tycius and I were seated next to each other in the shuttle on our way to meet the Cavern. Batzian and Melian sat across from us. We’d decided to keep this visit strictly Denzans. Well, the Denzans and me. I don’t think Batzian would’ve let us leave him behind, anyway. He’d showed up at the shuttle with a bag slung over his shoulder and his sister in tow, even though we hadn’t actually invited either of them. My uncle raised an eyebrow but wasn’t inclined to waste energy debating the matter. This wasn’t like when Reno was running the ship for the institute. Rules and chain of command were more like suggestions now, and everyone, including Tycius, understood that.
“What’s with the bag?” I asked Batzian. “We aren’t going to a sleepover.”
“It contains our personal effects,” he replied. Batzian was making a big show of keeping his voice level, but he couldn’t stop his leg from bumping up and down as he turned to Tycius. “I should tell you now, Captain Tycius, that we plan to stay on the Cavern with Arkell.”
“Seriously?” I replied, leaning forward. “Arkell always treated you like dirt.”
“He treated me like a student,” Batzian countered. “He didn’t—he didn’t consistently put my life in jeopardy.”
I felt my face getting hot. “So what? You’re buying into his Merciful Rampart shit now? Want to send all the humans back to Earth?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” Batzian said. “But I do think their ideas might have earned a second look after—after everything we’ve seen.”
“Oh, come on,” I replied. “You’re just being a pu—”
My uncle put a hand on my leg to cut me off. “We’re operating outside the jurisdiction of the Serpo Institute, so I’ve got no real authority to stop you,” he said to Batzian. “You’re both valuable members of the crew, and I hope you’ll reconsider.”
Tycius was being way more diplomatic about this than me. Not that I really blamed Batzian for wanting to get the hell away from us. From me. It was the smart thing to do, even if the alternative sucked. I’d been so focused on Batzian, though, I hadn’t seen the storm clouds gathering in Melian’s eyes.
“My brother doesn’t speak for me, Captain,” she said sharply. “I’m not leaving the Eastwood.”
Batzian turned like his sister had slapped him, which I kind of wish she had. “Melian—”
“Don’t you think this is something you should’ve talked about with me first?” Melian asked, her eyes going wide and staying that way. She kicked the bag at Batzian’s feet. “Before you stuffed my things into a duffel? Did you sneak into my room to do that?”
“I would’ve talked to you, but first you were on the Torrent and then . . . This is a good opportunity for us. We’ve probably been expelled from the institute, but Arkell has connections. And it’ll be safer with him than on the Eastwood.” Batzian tugged his ponytail as he floundered for the right words, which I knew he wouldn’t find. “You haven’t been thinking straight, Mel. None of us have.”
“Oh, so I’m out of my mind now? You have to lead me around like a pet so I don’t get myself into trouble? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Please, calm down,” Batzian replied quietly, looking down at the floor.
“Did you really just tell me to calm down? Are you serious right now?”
“Can we discuss this in private?” Batzian said, hazarding a glance over at me. I did a terrible job of hiding my smirk. “Later?”
“We could’ve discussed it in private back on the Eastwood,” Melian shouted. “But now there’s nothing left to say!”
I think we were all pretty relieved when the shuttle docked with the Cavern and we could escape the postargument awkward silence.
I’d expected the interior of the Cavern to be similar to the Eastwood, considering that both ships were of Denzan origin. However, where the Eastwood was like a floating hotel, with its mellow lightning and curated plant life, the Cavern was like a state-of-the-art hospital. The lights were bright enough that I needed to squint coming out of the shuttle, and the air was so antiseptic clean that it stung my nostrils to breathe. The whole place buzzed with ozone, the little hairs on the backs of my hands standing up.
The last time I’d boarded a spaceship with Arkell waiting to greet me, he’d been stooped and grumpy, called me a mutt to my face, and rudely jammed my universal translator into my ear. This time, Arkell stood tall, like a weight had come off his shoulders—which, with his arm unbound, it literally had. At one of the schools I’d briefly attended on Earth, there was a biology teacher who everyone made fun of because he’d gotten divorced over summer vacation, come back to school with a Ferrari, and started always trying to high-five the students. This remodeled Arkell reminded me a lot of that guy. It was disconcerting to see his scarred face rearrange itself into a smile.
“Tycius, Sydney, I am glad you decided to come,” Arkell said. He strode forward confidently with his hand extended to my uncle.
Ty had bickered constantly with Arkell aboard the Eastwood. Arkell had served on our vessel as part of his rehabilitation for trying to blow up the wormhole to Earth, and Ty never believed that he was even close to reformed. Ironically, only now did Arkell actually look rehabilitated. I wondered if this was what the old version of Arkell was like, before he’d become the Denzan version of a felon.
“Arkell,” Ty said, clasping his old colleague’s hand for the briefest of moments. “We’re here. Now, what is this about?”
Arkell ignored the question and stuck his hand out to me next. “Sydney. I am relieved to see you are well after our last encounter.”
“Yeah. You tried to help me with those Vulpin,” I said, limply shaking his hand since it was just hanging out there. “Thanks, I guess.”
“I should be the one thanking you,” Arkell replied. “You have done a great service for our people by clarifying the relationship between Denzans and humanity. I hope we can put our differences behind us and work together going forward.”
