1
Over the course of her military career, Niko Larsen had awoken to all sorts of conditions, including firefights, battlestorms, unexpected evacuations, and last-minute musters. This was, however, the first time she had awoken to the cries of a panicked bioship.
“Captain Captain CAPTAIN!”
The words came from all around her, nearly blasting her out of her bunk. You Sexy Thing might have been a supra-intelligent being, but right now, it seemed reduced to far below that by panic. “They’re INSIDE me!”
Niko rolled out of her bed in one easy motion and didn’t bother with anything other than a gun and its belt. Still strapping it on, she raced down the corridor toward the central control room. The other members of the crew were less awake, startled faces appearing in doorways as she flashed past.
Her mind flipped through possibilities as fast as her footsteps. How could someone have gotten aboard? The ship was docked, but still double-locked. Surely the ship would have alerted them the moment someone tried to cut their way in. Was this the blow from Tubal Last she’d been expecting, or some other entirely new threat?
She hit the doorway running, prepared for anything except what she saw …
A perfectly normal control room, in its usual status. The bumps and bubbles of indicator lights played in their familiar flickering patterns, one of the Derloen ghosts nosing along the surface of a bank of controls, another following after it.
“What…” Niko said, looking around. She took a breath and holstered the gun in her hand. “What exactly is the problem, Thing?”
“I can’t see them but I can feel them! There’s one on the main panel!”
“The ghosts?” Niko said with sudden interest, watching the worm of light crawl along the panel. “They’re magic, Thing. You shouldn’t be able to sense them. You couldn’t before.”
The ghosts had not come with the original ship, nor had their installation been Niko’s idea. One of her crew members, the prophet Lassite, had insisted on bringing them along from the space station TwiceFar when they had vacated it in a hurried confusion of explosions. But mechanical beings had the disadvantage of not being able to perceive magic, and so far, the ship had in fact refused to believe that the ghosts existed or that Lassite had any power whatsoever to perceive the future.
Niko’s second-in-command, Dabry Jen, appeared in the doorway, looking calm and unflustered. He had, Niko noted, taken the time to dress, although he also had made his gun, currently held in an upper hand, a priority, just as Milly, behind him, had. “Captain?” he said.
“Stand down, Sergeant,” she said. “The ship seems to be able to perceive the ghosts for the first time.”
Dabry’s eyebrows rose, but he made no comment.
“They feel wrong,” the ship said with certainty.
“What changed? When did you notice feeling them?” Niko said. “And what happened to cause all the screaming?”
“I was learning to imagine,” the ship said apologetically. “Gio and Atlanta were explaining it to me, and then I started trying to imagine things, and I did that for a while and I couldn’t stop anymore and then I felt it and I knew I wasn’t imagining.”
Niko knuckled her forehead. “What time is it?”
“The fifth hour.”
“Goodness,” she said. “I had a whole three hours of sleep that time.”
“Do something!” the ship demanded. “I want to stop feeling this wrongness.”
“I’m not sure I can,” Niko said. “Dabry, go roust Lassite.”
Sessiles slept deeply and it was no surprise that the little priest hadn’t appeared yet. Niko reflected with a touch of sourness that despite claiming to be a prophet, he seemed to be absolutely oblivious to what was going on. Perhaps he considered it too insignificant to note.
When Lassite appeared, the ghosts abandoned their exploration of the console and began to curl around his arms. Derloen ghosts were all that was left of a Derloen when they perished, and they were not particularly intelligent, but they did seem drawn to the person that had brought them on the ship.
Lassite, if pressed, could not have said why he brought them in the mad rush that had been their evacuation of the exploding space station. He had never envisioned the ghosts when seeing the Golden Path, the vision that had driven him through all his early years, the insistent prescience that had brought him to Niko, the individual destined to walk that path and change the universe as a result. But he liked them.
He said, “What is the problem?”
“Your ghosts are bothering the ship.”
He shook his narrow, snakelike head, the motion barely visible under the red hood he habitually wore over his plain black robe. “That is not possible.”
“I feel something,” the ship said. This emotion, it thought, might be sullenness. It was a mix of anger and stubbornness. It found dealing with the Sessile the least pleasurable of any of its crew, and sometimes actually unpleasant. But Niko would have objected to the disposal of any of her crew.
Lassite said to Niko, “I will keep them in their bag for now. I do not believe they find that space unwelcome. Is that acceptable?”
“Very well,” Niko said before the ship could reply. “I don’t see where anyone can object to that.” She looked around herself; the problem with being inside the individual at which you wanted to quirk an eyebrow was that you had no specific direction in which to quirk.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Cat Rambo
