Well, it certainly smelled like it.
Marat Plenty Zebulon didn't even have a permanent bedroom on the Zeb; that was about the extent his own ship trusted him. This cycle, they'd thrown him in a dinky closet down in the aquaculture quarter, where the heat of the reactor kept the tanks warm but also made it hard to sleep.
The smell of fish excreta was decidedly different from the smell of dead fish. It wasn't unpleasant, but it got into everything he owned.
Imagine his surprise when he found the captain of the Guard standing in his doorway, her shaven head silhouetted against the open cabling of the industrial zone.
...Right now, he could smell burning hair. He tried again to identify what the captain was holding and inhaled sharply before giving his reply. "The hell does that have to do with me?"
"She's been disowned and would like you to adopt her."
A small girl in a kombucha leather frock was pressing her face into Tallulah's tunic, apparently unwilling to face him. Her hair was so white it looked artificial.
He blinked, his mouth agape. "You know that's not the way we do things on this ship," he said, leaning against the doorway and pawing his jacket for a much-needed cigarette.
"Since when has tradition stopped you, Marat?" Captain Tallulah smirked, her chin upturned into the buzzing lights. "She keeps talking about you. To be sure, I don't see why that would be. 'Worldly' travelers such as yourself are dime a dozen."
Marat swallowed, his throat constricting. He realized instantly who this girl was and why she was doing this.
She'd seen him at the Council of the Seven on the day before the theft of the Ark.
"There's no reason for you to overturn the Council on such a small matter. Isaac is our strongest warrior."
"Know your place, trader!"
She'd stood on top of that bench and pointed her finger at him; mocked him along with the others and forced him back to his seat. He grit his teeth in anger at the memory, but forced himself to divest her from the humiliation he'd experienced that day.
Breathe. Come on, it's not a suffering contest.
Marat reached out a tentative hand towards the girl's hair. At his touch, she shook her head and buried herself further in the captain's dress.
Did she feel guilty about what happened?
No—it was more than that.
He'd seen her on the way to the escape pods that day. She'd been hurt in the fire, scared half to death. Marat was nothing less than the 'opposite' of that pain, the path not taken, ever glowing. But that didn't make him anything like a good parent.
"...I'm grooming her to replace me," Tallulah confessed. She plucked the little girl's arm away from her waist and showed him the shield she was wearing. "You know what that means for the Zeb."
"Yeah, no pressure, huh?" Marat thumped the wall, dejected. "This is insane."
Sighing, the captain tucked a gnarled hand inside Marat's jacket and stole a cigarette, painting the tip orange with the touch of a plasma lighter.
"You and I go back, don't we?" Her eyes welled up as she took a drag and exhaled into the light. "For what it's worth, Marat, I think you're a waste of space. I wouldn't be asking you if I could avoid it."
"You owe me," he spat, bunging a light off of her. "This whole shithole ship owes me. What do I get out of this?"
Tallulah smiled. "The satisfaction of raising the next captain?"
"I, um... I broke it."
Clearly.
Io had broken her nose at maneuvers today. A huge bandage was taped across the middle of her face. She'd run her Rehoboam into the superstructure again, and the harness wasn't tight enough to stop her from slamming into the console.
It didn't help, but Marat kneeled down and brushed her hair. It was very white and soft. She didn't struggle anymore. Why the hell would you bite me for combing your hair? The half-moon of teeth was still purple on the back of his hand.
He gripped her shoulders and tried to make out something like remorse in her expressionless face. Her figure was boyish and thin; an exemplary phenotype of the Reactor tribe, who rarely emerged from the depths of the ship. But regardless of where she had come from, the small shield on her shoulder told him where she was going.
"What am I supposed to do, daddy?" Io asked, staring at him blankly.
He scratched his head. How was a trader supposed to raise a warrior? What in the Serpent's name could he possibly teach her about flying a Rehoboam?
Could he even keep such an impulsive little girl under control? His former son Melchizedek was also in the Guard, but that boy never gave him trouble. In contrast, we've established that Io had set her mother's hair on fire so that she'd disown her.
...No. Maybe it wasn't what he could teach her, but who he knew.
"Would you like to follow me on the trip?" He asked nervously.
"Y-Yes." She nodded. "I want to go."
He stuffed her suitcase full of identical dresses. For now, the girl had little identity beyond a future killing machine, although he was hoping to change that through the magic of travel.
He had friends in the Imperial Navy. He could arrange for her to try out all the latest weapons systems, go to trade fairs, maybe even some mercenary work. But more than that, he'd show her how people lived, dressed and ate outside these pressurized walls.
The two of them floated down the docking shaft into the foyer of the Silver Needle.
Patricia's eyes were wide, but somehow she managed to keep her hands to herself despite her obvious infatuation with the little girl. For once she began to prepare her own tea; she'd have her fun later, once they were underway, but it some kind of feminine instinct told her this was a sensitive time.
"...Why didn't they listen to you?" Io asked, staring at the unfamiliar liquid in the teacup. "Why would they bully you, daddy?"
Marat stroked his chin and thought carefully. The young girl's eyes had lost something of their innocence. She wasn't genuinely curious. She wanted an easy, comforting explanation for something deeply wrong with the world.
After what must've seemed like ages to her, he arrived at a one word answer.
"It's politics," Marat said.
"Po-luh-tiii....?" Io stumbled on the words.
"I'm gonna have to teach you to read, aren't I?" He ruffled her hair. "It's, um,"
Don't fuck this up.
"When you don't let people do what they're good at."
The girl tilted her head, looking more confused than she'd been before. He tried to think of an example.
"You know how Melchizedek is good at orbital transfers."
"Bi-elliptic." She mouthed. "Hohmann."
"What if he had to go through the Council every time he plotted a course?"
...The little girl went pale. Her eyes were wide and she was looking past him. She was already shaking, trying to look strong.
That had been a mistake. Io's heart was very, very fragile right now. He couldn't afford to hurt her. Tallulah would space him.
"I-It was just an example," he flailed. "What if he had to ask all of the cadets who didn't know anything, and they all had to agree?"
"Mmm." She exhaled and calmed down slightly.
"And they'd been doing it the wrong way for years."
"Oh nooo."
"And what does he have to do to get his point across?"
"What?"
"He has to be nice to them. And that means he can't tell them the truth."
Her eyes lit up and she balled her fists against her chest as if she'd just discovered something profound.
Marat didn't think he had a particularly unique point of view, but maybe that's just what his daughter wanted to hear; for better or worse, she wanted to be like him. But he wasn't the best person to explain what he knew in his gut—he'd certainly oversimplified.
With any luck, she'd find something to temper it and come to a kind of moderation. Some day. Eventually.
Until then, there was tea.
By sunset (although you couldn't see the sun anymore), the science frigate of 1-Heliotrope had entered the attested vicinity of the comms dish and entered a kind of wandering motion, tracing lazy ellipses until it found itself confronted with the rim of a natural crater about 2 li across. Ice and ironsand blew over the ring of ejecta in tumbling spirals as the frigate approached the towering ridge.
Io watched under the main display with one arm tucked behind her back, sipping the aged bing cha from a simple steel camping mug and trying not to swallow the leaves. Grandma-style, some people called it, although she'd never seen a grandma make it that way. She looked over to the skipper: "The wind's picking up. Let's bring this thing down next to the rim and wait for dawn."
"Aye aye." Fredda plugged in the parameters and bit her lip as she took in the sight of the crater. "...Man, this type of dish would've been an antique even when the Emperor was born. D'you reckon the military still listens to these protocols?"
Io shrugged. "Fuck if I know."
From a game-theoretic standpoint, the equipment was still fitted on capitals and there was a good chance other people were trying to bypass the blockade with these solar pulse arrays. If she were a Tian Lung officer who'd just lost contact with King's Seat, that's what she would doing right now.
More than that, they had to. She needed to tell her father she was alive.
No—this wasn't working. More than anything, she needed his advice.
The science frigate inched forward on rugged wheels some 4 meters across towards the ice shelf in the wind-shadow of the solid ejecta.
Io wrapped herself in a bloated softshell and pulled up her rebreather—not because the air was thin, but because there was no telling what the storm was kicking up or what the abrasive chaff would do their lungs. It was still biting cold and the noise of the wind filled her ears like a permanent shout, threatening to blow her off her feet. The first students on the ground waddled ahead and shined their torches into the ice shelf, checking that there was nothing solid in the frigate's way as it used its reactor heat to melt its way into the cliff.
There was no light anywhere else: the world around them was a wall of black. No telling what would happen if she got lost. Io threw one foot over the other into craters of snow that threatened to suck her in, sticking close to the bow of the frigate as she watched those two lowborn wave it forward with their torches; the scrawny one with pink pigtails, she almost remembered her name.
What the hell is this...? She'd never been so cold in her life; her hands felt numb even through the gloves; even her tears had turned to snowflakes and she hadn't the dexterity to wipe them. As the frigate buried itself deeper into the ice, Io collapsed with her back to the wall and hugged herself near the mouth of the passage, her breath coming out in clouds, white tube lights on the ceiling illuminating the way deeper into the shelf, away from the complete and swirling darkness outside.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
A place like this was lonely even with other people. It felt like the earth itself was rejecting them.
A couple of students in heavy climbing gear wanted to go back out and look at the dish, as it wasn't too far. Do you want to come. She said okay, despite herself; but I'll have to trust in your expertise as I'm really no good at this. One of them she noticed was that pale and heavyset Vesta: Nouri Al-Kaf.
"A pleasure going up with you!" The marine captain shouted against the wind. "You're in good hands, leader! If you freeze I'll make sure to carve you into a swan!" She grinned.
The climb took them less than half an hour, but Io saw her life flash before her eyes. Wiping ironsand out of her snow goggles, pulling herself up the cord and chasing the only light she could see: the lantern dangling from Nouri's backpack. Looking back over her shoulder, she could see students waddling around the entrance, the lights on their backs like fireflies as they laid down cabling and reinforced the passage.
"I wanna put a trench about a click out from that entrance!" Nouri shouted. "Then another one three clicks out! Maybe some turrets! What do you think, we're gonna be out here for a while!"
Io nodded furiously. Her teeth were chattering and she couldn't speak, but more than that, she trusted the marine captain to do her job.
Finally they were past the rim, gazing out over the crater itself. Io's heart was in her throat, her ears ringing from the howling gale. The moon revealed itself through the eye of the storm and picked out a scene of total devastation.
An immense truss that would've held the actual electronics lay broken in the center of the dish. The smooth concrete parabola had been shattered as if by explosives into hundreds of titanic pieces, some overturned or lying on their edge in the icy substrate.
On the fragment closest to them was a grid of red painted letters in various dialects, most of them unrecognizable. The pigment looked fresh. Io flooded her torch over the one most similar to modern Huang, which read clearly in tree-sized ideograms:
You are not welcome.
"The mission will continue. If anyone—or any thing—attacks us, I will protect you to the best of my ability. That is all."
Fredda had nudged her to stand up at the morning mess, but that was all Io had to say. She could feel her classmates' expectant eyes on her over the instant coffee and bannock, but the thought of staying in the cafeteria made her nauseous. The mood was suffocating. She brushed past Fredda and into the stark fluorescents of the corridor, her boots slipping slightly on a galvanized floor that was always wet from snowmelt.
She retired to her quarters on the frigate and splashed water onto her face, meeting her own eyes in the green glass mirror as her chin dripped into the brushed metal sink. Io always had a miserable resting expression, with deep tear and laugh lines that made her look about a decade older than she was.
It inspired pity in the others, even if their words said otherwise; she hated this, she hated that she couldn't hold the cheerful face she'd always shown to the Guard and her little brother. Her ice-white hair fell over her eyes in a way that made it harder to tell what she was thinking. Maybe that was better. What was wrong with her?
She smeared her face into a towel and looked over the small bed set into the wall. This was a more coherent dwelling than her actual dorm on the Academy, built from the ground up with all the trappings: a blow dryer set into the wall and a little smart mirror that wrote the time in crisp blue letters.
Two scrolls from the Zebulon hung from the top of the bunk, broad enough that they acted like a kind of blackout curtain while she slept. The endless prayer bore the marks of brushstrokes; it must've taken a few months for the elder calligraphers to illuminate in full.
It was a shame she didn't read a single word of Ecclesiastical.
Before the jump, Mica had gone through Io's things and scolded her for leaving the scrolls behind on the Academy. The scrawny girl's back shuddered with effort, her thin arms barely able to lift the painted rolls of linen and the solid wooden bolts they wrapped around.
"I... Io, these are your ancestors' words!" She keened, grimacing at the weight. "Have you no shame!"
"...I don't have ancestors," Io muttered, staring at a portrait on the wall of the hallway: an older Vestan lady staring back through browned egg tempera. "Not in the sense that you people do."
Mica smirked. "Yes you do, dumbass. It's not about blood. Who raised your seven parents, and who raised them in turn? Why, going just two generations back gives you 49 family members to look up to!"
With a grunt, she shoved all several pounds of linen into Io's arms as if expecting her to carry them all the way to the next waystation.
Io stumbled back, nearly toppling from the weight. "I can't even read these," she whined.
"It doesn't matter." Mica exhaled before carefully twisting her body as if she'd just flicked a barbell. "Keep their words on your tongue and they'll keep you safe, even if you don't understand them. Only when you've memorized them do you have the right to put them away. Got that?!"
Fuck, that girl had some issues.
From the way Mica ate breakfast alone (or with Nouri, oddly enough), the rest of 1-H didn't seem to like her. It was easy to imagine why, what with all the little snooty rituals, which in Io stirred something like maternal instinct but in a downtrodden lowborn was likely to inspire a kick to the head. She'd feel terrible if the other students started bullying Mica for that very same conscientiousness.
Whatever the case, her ancestors' words were keeping her safe from straylight that came under the door. Io had trouble sleeping when there was any light at all.
Before long, she'd poured herself into a pair of heavy leggings and zipped herself into a white snow puffer, her nose wrinkling from the electric heat. She remembered the message on the broken comms dish: You are not welcome. Even though she herself had come from a community that had isolated itself from the rest of the Huang, the only thing she felt for the native inhabitants of this planet was disdain.
First of all: they threatened the safety of her classmates. Nobody left a message like that in good faith.
Second of all, and more importantly: they were getting in her way.
There was a part of her that believed that giving into some other tribe's superstitious beliefs (and that was the only possible explanation) would have been a capitulation to her elders; that old crone, the Council of the Seven... Io wasn't going to be bound by the decision of an unaccountable cabal, let alone one that didn't have the decency to talk to her face-to-face.
They'd set her up to fail, and she'd ruin them by doing it anyway.
She looked at the time. Most of the class would be surveying the extent of the damage to the dish. Fredda specifically was going to have a look at the control tower on the far side of the rim.
Mica she'd told to take a literary core and explore the surrounding wastes. They'd need a source of loose aggregate if they wanted any hope of gluing the dish back together, although it seemed impossible within the four-month timeframe. But she was sure someone would figure out the trick.
"Hoss?" Ema's voice came from the door of the bedroom. "You'll want to see this outside."
"Coming!" Io shouted back.
Because she knew Ema wouldn't betray her—and partly because she thought Ema would enjoy it—Io had given her a very special secret assignment with the literary cores: a kind of spy program.
Because she had realized over her morning coffee that there was a traitor in their midst.
The sun was high above the snowy wastes beyond the crater. The weather was notably clearer although grey twisters still flashed in the far distance, forming a shifting wall that affected tropospheric communications with the south.
Io and Ema waddled past the entrance in their puffers, breathing the now dust-free air and surveying the scene around the frigate. The marines had dug out a shallow trench and placed a row of brickish, gently rotating turrets just before them, apparently filled with birdlime shot that would allow them to take prisoners if needed, or simply leave them to die of exposure. If the locals came back, they were in for a hell of a surprise.
"The weather's nice," Ema breathed a cloud between her gloves, a fresh look of determination in her eyes. "Let's do this, hoss. For Lin's sake."
Lin, she recalled, was bound to contact the merchant navy when their window came around. If Io and her class didn't manage this, then they'd probably be reporting to Student Council President Vineta Yellowknife by the end of the year.
"Do you and Lin go far back?" Io asked.
"...Not really, to be honest."
Ema's brow furrowed as she sat on one side of her literary core, with Io taking up the other. "Onward," she said to the automaton.
"Cutting nails, breaking steel." The machine jerked slightly as its wheels overcame their natural stiction and started its circumnavigation of the crater.
"My mentor... Couldn't take care of me anymore." Ema stared wistfully at the twister-infested sky. "Lin heard a rumor about a surviving descendant of House Cairnbrae and proposed to us on Auriga. I owe her for room and board, pretty much: nothing more, nothing less."
"Don't you have any parents to stay with?"
"I never met mine."
Io grimaced, her stomach sinking. She wondered if she hadn't made a mistake in prying while they were on class business. She just wasn't equipped to handle awkwardness like this.
But Ema simply smiled at her, and patted the inscribed head of the literary core with a gloved hand.
"You're wondering why I kinda flipped out when that robot died. I mean, broke." She pursed her lips and looked aside. "I was... raised by automatons, actually. I never met another person until I was 12."
"That's a thing?" Io gasped.
"Yeah, it's like Diane said: House Cairnbrae hasn't been around for a while. I don't really know much about us, or how we're supposed to act apart from the whole... Lamb's Eye thing." She tugged at her puffer illustratively. "And I know that we wear a boy's uniform. It's kinda sick, actually."
"Do you wanna talk about it?"
"...Not really." Ema hunched forward on the core, demurring with her chin on her palm.
She was pretty when she did that. Her body became shapes squishing on shapes, warm and complicated.
The literary core brought them a few hundred paces clockwise from the science frigate, in front of a small passage that had been melted into the ice by a cargo spider.
Ema spread her arms and twirled on her feet. "Here we are, buddy! The smallest room in the house!"
"Ha, fucking ha," Io groaned. The mush-room. She lit the way with her flashlight out as they worked their way into the smooth, dripping tunnel.
You see, Io considered herself something of a mushroom connoisseur. She found champignons (like the ones they'd served for dinner) to be the lowest of the fungi, bland and destitute, and that you really wanted the richness of mycorrhizals for your mushroom soups: morels, porcinis, maybe even truffles. Nevertheless, Io had been very suspicious that only one champignon had been prepared for last night's dinner, and that none had been cooked for breakfast.
Something was going on with the inventory. It didn't sound like an urgent matter, but if she couldn't prove that her classmates were completely loyal, then her plan to restore the comms dish was on shaky foundations.
Eventually, they came to a larger terminal chamber supported in the center by columns of ice. Within the walls, her torch picked out tall, opaque shapes that were neither rock nor ice; a shade of dull brown that suggested dried meat.
Ema pointed at a stack of empty plastic cartons lying against one of the pillars.
"T...These were full of mushrooms a moment ago." Ema looked back, eyes welling up with guilt.
"I believe you," Io said. "I don't think you would've had the time to eat all of them."
"Oh, fuck offfff," Ema groaned. "Says the so-called mushroom connoisseur." With a frown, she reached past the torch and pinched Io's belly.
"W-Wha—" Io nearly dropped the torch.
She'd probably intended this to be slightly painful, but it had a different effect entirely. Io couldn't help but think of the time she'd found herself in Ema's room after Tyumen. She felt butterflies in her stomach and looked at Ema as if she'd seen a ghost. This was such a terrible time. They were in a secret passage dug out by a possible traitor, who could be back any minute—
"Aah!" Both of them shrieked as familiar pair of spectacles turned the corner on one of the pillars.
"O-Oh, welcome! Hey, you two—I'll get back to that control tower in a few minutes. I was just mulching these for spores."
A puffer-coated Fredda gestured to a blender full of brown fluid that had clearly been stolen from the mess, as well as a series of petri dishes lined up single file on a plastic table, white threads blooming across the agar.
"Sorry... I didn't think to ask," Fredda scratched her neck bashfully. "We'd collected those microgreens from the farms anyway, so I thought we had a little buffer to tide us over while I took the liberty of expanding our reserves."
"W... What is this place?" Io waved her torch at the tall shapes in the ice. From a certain point of view they looked like legs of ham, or even corpses.
"Ah, ah those." Fredda adjusted her glasses. "It's some kind of frozen forest; trees in a fairly early stage of decomposition. When I made them into woodchips, the mycelium just ran right through them." She waved at a row of man-sized bags hanging from pitons; their insides full of clumpy white homogenate, casting massive shadows on the far wall that gave Io the fright of her life. "So you take that substrate, add the dark, moist and sterile environment created by the melt bores, and it's pretty much an unlimited source of mushrooms!"
"O... Oh, that's fine then." Io let out a deep breath. This little bastard...
"I sense some sarcasm—but trust me!" Fredda thumped her chest and grinned. "By the end of this mission, mushrooms are gonna be pretty much all we'll have to eat! We're gonna be having mushroom stew, mushrooms on toast, mushrooms risotto, tagliatelle ai funghi..."
"That sounds amazing." Io found herself drooling and wiped it on her sleeve.
"I know, right?!" Fredda hopped up and down girlishly, the most intense display of emotion Io had ever seen from the boffin. She nearly slipped on the ice, but flailed her arms and managed to catch herself on one of the pillars. "They should call us 1-Hericium! That's Lion's Mane, by the way."
"...I don't feel so good," Ema said, raising a gloved hand to her face. She seemed to have thrown up in her mouth a little.
"Hoss, you're just going to let her off with a slap on the wrist?"
"Yes," Io smiled, leaning back on the literary core as it moved. "Fredda is a mycology expert. Makes sense, since she was running the hydroponics thinghy in the dorm."
"A-And how does that change the fact that she took our food without telling anybody?" Ema had an incredulous look on her face, which understandable, given that she was just told to find this person as if she'd done a crime. "Like, what if it didn't work?"
"I would've given her permission. If she knew that, then it's fine for her to have done it anyways. To bring it up when you know better than everyone else is just politics."
"Politics?"
"Yeah." Io cleared her throat. "So like you said: You were raised by automatons. How would you feel if your experiences were up for a vote? Do you think you'd be up to giving them a presentation about literary cores?"
Ema looked at her feet and grumbled. "...I'd be pretty fucking annoyed. I do know better than that Tian Lung kid at the very least."
"See, now you get it!" Io smiled.
"Y-Yeah, that does kind of make a sick kinda sense." Ema nodded weakly.
Io was glad she agreed. She'd noticed it back on Tyumen: Ema more or less avoided speaking of things she didn't understand. Unlike some other people.
"And where there's politics, there's rituals!" Io shouted to the wastes. Her voice echoed back from the edge of the crater a few seconds later.
"Yeah!" Ema punched her fist into the air.
"Scrolls, dogma!"
"Y-Yeah!"
"Ema, are you even listening?!"
She noticed Ema was staring intently at her, her cheeks reddening in the midday sun. "...You're cute when you get hyped about things," she breathed, placing her hand on Io's and squeezing it gently. "Is this politics?"
Io felt the heat grow across on her face. She drew herself closer to the other girl as she realized how far they were from the others—her hands sliding lower on Ema's leggings. "This is something else."
Little Bear had been there when her auntie set the charges on the Perpetual Calendar. She'd been there when hellfire lit up the sky and scattered a fixture of her childhood to the four winds.
They hadn't wanted her to stay back, but she'd been training for this all her life. Little Bear knew how to shape the plains ice to stay both warm and undetected.
She'd watched them erect shifting towers that were probably automatons. Little Bear gritted her teeth resentfully; if the Southern Council could agree on anything, then the lensmakers might've been allowed to build their lithography workshop and put them on even footing with the Returners. But it was 'proscribed in the canon of the Immortal King.' Pah.
To make matters worse, they hadn't gone home as expected: no, there were people milling about with leveling tools. Whoever prophesized that they'd go for the Calendar hadn't anticipated that the Returners would try and rebuild it.
Idiots. A simple oversight. And also, very dangerous.
But by far, the strangest thing Little Bear had seen today was two girls kissing.
They were on top of each other now. Touching each other all over, a tangle of limbs.
Don't undress. Idiots. You'll freeze to death.
The white-haired one turned her head and met her gaze.
Little Bear dipped back into the foxhole, her heart racing. They might've caught the reflection from her spyglass. But she'd been fast—hopefully they'd think it was a trick of the light.
Anyway, were they allowed to do that?
Could they... make a baby?
She was too far from home to ask the chieftain now.
Little Bear would have to find out for herself.