A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe Read online

  “And where are the closest docks?” she hissed.

  “Harvest or maybe Yearling,” said Cordell. “Nearest big world we could limp to is Carré.”

  “Carré!” Nilah repeated, furious. “That’s in the middle of nowhere!”

  Boots sucked her teeth. “I take it you’ve been before?”

  “Of course I’ve been before! I took the podium twice there.”

  “You gave a speech there?” Boots said.

  “I won two races, you blasted moron! Those people know me. They love me, and they’re going to get me to Taitu in time for the Cormir GP.”

  “So, wait, you’re happy to be going to Carré?” asked Boots.

  “No! … Yes! I’m not sure, but I do know I’ll be pleased to get off this rust bucket.”

  “If that’s your wish,” Cordell began.

  “Of course it is. Don’t be stupid,” Nilah spat.

  “You know you can’t trust anyone else, right?” asked Cordell. “It’s like Boots said, they can whack you anywhere in the galaxy.”

  She turned up her nose. “I thought I just asked you not to be stupid. Let me make myself clear: I was able to take over your ship once, and I can do it again. I’ve got an army of people looking for me and more money than god. So, if you’ll please kindly let me off at Carré, I won’t smite you in return.”

  Nilah held the steaming-hot cup of tea in her hands as she wandered the decks. There wasn’t much else to do on the bloody ship, and she certainly wasn’t going to help those scoundrels out with their daily chores. She was happy to be away from Mother, but she’d still been kidnapped and dragged to the middle of nowhere at the height of the season. Her comfortable lead over Kristof would rapidly dry up, and if she saw him wearing the Driver’s Crown, she’d tear this place apart.

  If she was lucky enough to see him wear the crown, that was. The crack of Cyril’s skull still echoed in her ears. There were still police scouring the galaxy for her—some of them corrupt. And what was the excuse they were giving for the bounty? Fleeing the scene of a crime? For the first time, the thought that she might not survive this settled into her bones, and she chased it away with another swig of hot liquid.

  Her remaining time in the sport was short. The oldest racer in the league was thirty-one, and there was already talk of him retiring. That gave her twelve chances to be the Driver’s Champion, and she’d have to do it five times if she wanted to beat the greatest driver of all time. She was already on track to be the youngest champion in history. This was a once-in-several-lifetimes opportunity.

  And the crew of the Capricious didn’t get it.

  The only tolerable member of the crew was the cook, who’d given her the tea leaves. He’d dug them out of his private stash and was extremely proud to share them with a Taitutian. The way his eyes glittered when he looked on his precious supply had been adorably disarming. She found the rustic blend quaint, though it scarcely compared to her usual fare in the Lang Autosport Hospitality Suites. Lang served real tea … but the cook had been so excited to see her reaction, she’d faked enjoyment.

  If Nilah had Cordell and his crew arrested, she’d make sure the cook got a box of the good stuff in jail. She owed him that much.

  She entered her new quarters—the converted brig—and brought the mug under her nose to calm her nerves. They may have given her a sleeping pad and access to toiletries, but it was far from comfortable. She didn’t have a window, massage bed, entertainments and stimulations, control over the scents and temperature, or precise lighting. She’d asked the captain for access to Orna’s supplies so that she might craft a few passable alternatives, but he’d refused. The force field that had formerly kept her confined to the cell was removed, but it left a large, open space where anyone could come and go as they pleased.

  And it still smelled a little like her vomit.

  At least they’d slid a dividing wall between her area and Boots’s. All Boots did was glare at Nilah when she was around.

  Was Boots in her quarters now? Nilah hadn’t checked the other side of the brig to see. She started in that direction and paused. Why did she care if Boots was there? Then again, Boots was the only other kidnapping victim. Maybe they could talk. Nilah ached for some decent conversation, but she could settle for Boots.

  She poked her head around the corner and spied her flatmate sitting on a cot, fingers tightly woven together, elbows on her knees. Was she angry or sad? Perhaps both, Nilah decided.

  “What?” called Boots.

  Nilah straightened and strode around the divider. “Nothing. Just seeing if you were here.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  Nilah grimaced. “All right, now. No need to get spiky about it.”

  Boots sat back. “I’ve got every reason to be annoyed. I should be back on Gantry Station.”

  “Tell me about it.” Nilah took a sip of her tea, which had a subtle sweetness like honeysuckle with a strange, savory aftertaste. She still didn’t love it, but it was growing on her.

  The woman regarded her with trepidation, but softened. “Yeah. I guess we both got a raw deal, kid.”

  Nilah laughed. “This will wreak havoc on my contracts. I’ve probably lost a million argents on this.”

  Boots’s face soured. “Maybe some of us got it worse than others.”

  “Thanks for understanding,” said Nilah, before she realized Boots was being sarcastic.

  Boots scowled. “It’s not easy to be back here.”

  “Because you gave them a barmy salvage map?”

  “No.” Boots met her gaze. “Lot of bad memories locked up in this bucket.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Not your fault.” Boots grabbed some kind of food bar from her nightstand drawer, unwrapped it, and took a bite. It looked like pressed protein garbage, but smelled heavenly.

  “What on earth is that?” asked Nilah.

  “Ration bar,” Boots mumbled through the chewing. “Used to eat three of these a day when I was on a mission. High protein output, tastes pretty good, makes you poop on the regular.”

  “It looks awful. Why does it smell so good?”

  Boots smirked and held it out for inspection. “Never seen one of these? The eggheads at High Command found a way to enchant them like the hoteliers do. It’s specially engineered to stimulate your appetite, even if you’re pinned in a firefight. Want to try a piece?”

  “No, thank you. I can’t spare the calories.”

  “For one bite of a ration bar?”

  Nilah set down her mug. “I’m carefully regulated at fifteen hundred a day with an excruciating regimen. If I stray even a little bit, it changes the aerodynamics of the car. The engineers have to work so hard to shave each kilogram of equipment, so a little fat from me is unacceptable. If you’re not a racer, it’s hard to understand.”

  “Must be tough when you’re away from your chef. How do you know what to eat?”

  “On this ship, who knows? That cook doesn’t know what ought to go into my meals. He may be able to prepare a few dishes from my homeworld, but the ingredients make all the difference. It’s about quality.”

  “Yes, of course. Quality,” said Boots.

  Nilah deflated, catching the sarcasm. “All right. I see. You think I’m pampered, but I’m not.”

  Boots chuckled and leaned back against the wall, folding her hands behind her head. “No one called you pampered.”

  “But you think it.”

  “You’re like some kind of exotic animal. Can you even eat food if it costs less than a thousand argents?”

  Nilah rolled her eyes. “Healthy food doesn’t have to be expensive, you know. You can eat well for five hundred argents a week.”

  “That’s expensive, lady. My income is three hundred on a bad week, before you take out rent.”

  “If you owned your own house, you could install a few modcons to reduce the cost of cooking.”

&nbs
p; Boots squinted at her.

  “Okay,” said Nilah. “I take your point, but I’m really not pampered. I run twenty kilometers a day in addition to some severe aerobic workouts. I spend three hours a day in the simulators, which are grueling on the neck and back, then it’s off to the press junkets.”

  Boots shrugged. “You work hard. I get it.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. If you want the best athletes, you’ve got to treat them like prized beasts. Spend a week in my shoes, and you’d be too fat and drunk to get around the block, much less the track. I don’t work half as much as you, and that’s the way I like it.”

  Nilah blinked, stunned.

  “But you’re pampered as hell,” Boots said. “Let’s be real, here.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Nilah leaned against the divider. “You know, it’s nice to talk to someone around here who isn’t completely ridiculous.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. God, yes. The captain, for example? He’s so wrapped up in all this war stuff with the Arcan flags everywhere.”

  “Most can’t let it go.”

  “I understand that, but we’ve got some real problems here, and he’s awfully cavalier about them. He’s not equipped to handle this, and we should be figuring out who to call for help, not … whatever the hell he’s doing. He hasn’t been a soldier for twenty years, but he acts like he’s got it all under control.”

  Boots’s face darkened. “Cordell has dealt with his share of ‘real problems’ in the past. If he says he’s got it under control, he does.”

  “I’m sorry, mate, but some washed-up nobody from a forgotten world scarcely qualifies as an authority on—”

  “None of us forgot about our home,” Boots said, derailing Nilah’s train of thought. The woman leaned forward, her voice firm. “You may bust your ass to get in shape, but it’s just so you can drive in a circle for a couple of hours on end. Big deal.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Athleticism is a worthy—”

  “I flew sixty-three sorties with the captain, and I’ve killed more than my share of folks with skin in the game. Clarkesfall lost ninety percent of its population, including my family and all of my friends. The other ten percent were the lucky punks like me who made it offworld. You’ll have to excuse us for failing to give a damn about racing.”

  Nilah swallowed, her tattoos flooding the room with green light. She took a step back. “Perhaps we got off on the wrong foot.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Okay. I can see that … and … I’m sorry.”

  Their eyes locked for a long series of breaths. Finally, Boots tore another hunk off her ration bar and chewed. “You don’t seem like the apologizing type.”

  “Yes, well …” Nilah grimaced. “I … was out of line. This is my first kidnapping, and I don’t know how to behave.”

  “And you only think about yourself. Don’t bother blaming your circumstances.”

  “Boots—”

  She held up her hands. “A little selfishness is probably good for a racer. Not saying it’s always a bad thing. It just makes you completely intolerable.”

  Nilah looked at the ground. “Yes. I deserved that for my comments about—”

  “About the death of my home planet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good talk, Brio. You can leave now,” Boots said, wadding up the ration bar wrapper and tossing it at Nilah’s feet.

  “I really am sorry.”

  Boots’s jaw tightened, and Nilah stood to leave, unfamiliar shame burning in her breast.

  “Okay, kid, don’t just …” came Boots’s voice behind her. “Look, I know you’re just scared. We all are. I’m betting that’s why you want to get back to the race so bad, isn’t it? You may think you can go back to your old life, bury yourself under a pile of wealth, and make all this disappear, but you can’t.”

  Nilah turned back. “I’ve never cared about anything as much as standing on that podium and getting the crown. I test myself and push harder than anyone for weeks, so I can prove that I’m the fastest. Hitting the track with two dozen of the galaxy’s best is the most addictive feeling there is. There’s the strategy, the huge team … everyone has their hopes invested in you to bring home gold. Until you’ve matched wits at that speed it’s hard to explain.”

  “I’m an ace, kid. I think I know what it’s like to fight it out at high speed.”

  “Then you see why racing gets me out of bed before day cycle and keeps me up every night. I’ve spent every day since I was five years old working for this. So I’m not merely frightened. My dreams are at stake.”

  Boots chuckled. “Well I’m ‘merely frightened,’ and I don’t mind saying it. If you have any sense in your head, you’re going to learn to get along with the crew.”

  Nilah pulled up an empty transit case and sat down across from Boots, happy for the opportunity to talk with the only other captive. “Okay, then let’s start with you. Tell me about yourself.”

  “What’s to tell? You already know most of the important bits. Forties. Veteran. Had a show back in the day on the Link.”

  “Yes, I remember. Looking for—”

  “Finding Hana,” corrected Boots. “It was about the, uh, Chalice of Hana and, you know, finding it.”

  “I take it the Chalice wasn’t an ordinary cup,” Nilah said, trying to lead her in a talkative direction.

  Boots sat up. “Yeah. It was an artifact from the Renwick Dynasty. You drink from it, and you get to cast the barrister’s mark, but on a level few ever could. Most folks never heard of the spell.”

  Nilah narrowed her eyes. “We have barrister’s marks in the PGRF. The magical compulsion keeps everyone from breaking their contracts.”

  “Yeah,” said Boots. “So, like, I flew a lot of escorts during the last days of the Famine War. One of the final ones was guarding this culture ark into orbit. Basically, my people knew they might get bombed to glassy smithereens, so they smuggled out their most precious treasures.” She motioned like she was picking up a box and dropping it onto a starship. “This particular ark, the Saint of Flowers, contained our most powerful artifact, the Chalice of Hana. This thing was used to sign interplanetary treaties for crying out loud. It was supposed to go to Taitu for safekeeping, back when we thought we could trust you people to have our backs.”

  Nilah nodded and ignored the insult. She vaguely remembered some of these details from the show.

  “Except the Saint of Flowers never landed at the Taitutian banks. It diverted through a couple of jump gates and went AWOL. Anyone who wanted to find it was going to need to do a ton of sifting through historical data and information requests. I’d gotten good at looking for the fates of dead relatives after the war, filing with various refugee agencies and archives … so I thought I’d take a crack at the data trail. I followed the jump receipts and fuel purchases, and when I figured I’d hit a dead end, I found a docking receipt for slip time, but the time had never been cashed.”

  “So the Saint of Flowers paid for the dock, but never landed there?”

  “Exactly. Given his cargo, he couldn’t call for help, either, for fear of bringing bandits down on Clarkesfall’s precious cultural heritage. But after the war, there was no planet, so there wasn’t a heritage to preserve—just a ship full of dead soldiers floating somewhere around a half-dead star: CGS-280. I ran the numbers, and we had a few million years before that red giant ate everything in its system. I figured an enterprising sort could team up with the right salvager and make a fortune. I found a producer, Gemma Katz, willing to follow me around and pay for the story.”

  “So you found the Chalice?”

  “Yeah,” said Boots. “We did.”

  Nilah crossed her arms. “Then why aren’t you rich?”

  “Because my partner murdered Gemma when we finally got to it. Stetson Giles. What an asshole. He was soft on me, though, on account of us fighting together. He held me at the end of a slinger and made me sign a contrac
t with him that I’d never do anything to harm him, even if it meant sending cops after him.” Boots sighed heavily. “That artifact was going to be my ticket, even more than the show. I could’ve made a fortune negotiating treaties between planets and corporations. We were going to start a company, and I was finally going to get to cast magic.”

  “Do you know where Stetson is now?” asked Nilah.

  Boots nodded.

  “But you can’t tell me?”

  Boots nodded again. “Can’t tell anyone.”

  “Is that why you wanted the Chalice? Because of your, um, arcana dystocia?”

  Boots shook her head slowly. “I ain’t got to talk to you about my physical burdens.”

  “No, sorry. You’re right,” said Nilah. “It’s just, I don’t know much about it. You’re the first … one of you I’ve met.”

  “What’s to tell? Everyone gets a cardioid, and I didn’t.”

  “I thought you couldn’t live without it.”

  “You can’t. Magi die when it’s damaged. Docs still don’t have a clue how I’m alive.”

  “It starts that soon?”

  “Yeah. Mom said the scanners went crazy when I was born. Said I was dying, but … I had a healthy set of lungs and I used them.”

  “So can they tell … you know, before a child is born?”

  Boots looked at the ground. “No. If my parents had known when I was in the womb, well, I wouldn’t be standing here, I think. I used to get sick a lot, and every time my crippled magic came into play, Mom would get inconsolable. Doctors have always been doom and gloom about my condition, but when I look at you magi … I don’t see most folks doing anything so damned special. What else you want to know?”

  Nilah smacked her lips. “So you don’t have any family. Any friends?”

  Boots chuckled. “Sure. Loads, all over the place. No drinking buddies, but as it turns out, I can drink alone. You?”

  “Me what?”

  “You got any pals?”

  “I have a few. I don’t do much recreational drinking, myself.” She found her face growing hot. “I mostly hang around with celebrity types, you know; my publicist arranges for me to be seen with them.”