NOVEL NEXT Interlude in the Void
Chapter 10: Interlude in the Void
“Has there been an injury?” asked Helium. “Should I chart a course to a class five medical vertex, Mr. Erobosh?”
“No need,” he said.
“Why didn’t any of you warn me about that?” I asked.
“We did warn you,” said Amanda.
“You did not warn me about that!” I let my temper get the better of me, and the noise that came out was weirdly shrill, like tearing metal. When I opened my fat mouth again, I was much more quiet. “What even was that? Did the engines stop working halfway through?”
Stephanie cracked her neck with a chorus of pops. “The engines were working fine, kiddo. Not sure what you — oh. Oh oh oh. That’s what free traders like to call the little orbit. It’s when the ship is switching over from the lungs to the pulsar.”
I don’t think she caught my look of complete and utter confusion, and either way she didn’t realize that what she’d said was complete and utter gibberish. I undid all of the buckles and rolled out of the chair. At which point I immediately fell to the floor, a limp pile of carapace and failure.
I made a lot of clicking and hissing sounds, like you’d expect from an irritated cockroach. “Ow, my spine.”
“You do not have a spine,” said Dr. Erobosh.
“Oh, thanks, Doc,” I said. “That’s a low blow.”
“That was not an insult. You do not possess a spinal cord.”
I rolled over onto my back in preparation for maybe standing up, someday. “Well, that’s deeply horrifying. Do I even have any bones?”
“You do,” said Amanda. “They’re just on the outside. Could you please stand up so that we can leave?”
Quinn was already out of his launch chair, looking at the giant hologram. “Incredible. You turn into a cool alien bug, and yet you didn’t even gain an immunity to bone-hurting juice.”
“I didn’t even gain an immunity to bone-hurting juice,” I said, leaning on the chair to pull myself upright. Amanda and Dr. Erobosh gave each other a quick look, both equally confused.
“Why do we even have gravity right now? Would it have killed you to keep the gravity generators off for a minute, at least?”
“Can’t you hear it?” asked Miri. “The engines are still on. We’re under thrust gravity.”
I quickly shut my eyes and focused on listening. It had a rhythm like a bird’s wings beating, reverberating through the entire hull, kind of a throbbing, metallic sound. And now that I had heard it, I would never be able to un-hear it, which was going to be very annoying. “Fuck thrust gravity,” I mumbled, inching down the ramp into the common room.
Now that all the excitement was over, the time had come for naps. I retreated into my cabin and curled up on the top bunk. The massive soreness from takeoff took several minutes to fade, and my wings kept wanting to unfold and flutter around for no good reason, despite the lack of room. Once the pain was gone, the exhaustion from all the hiking took control, and I flipped from fully alert to completely unconscious in a matter of moments.
…
I was back on the endless plain of glass. This time, there was no device in my hands, and I was in my fully insectoid form, standing up and looking into the light. I should have been blinded, charred into ash by the sun-bright thing in front of me. And yet I wasn’t, and the light didn’t seem like much more than a gentle glow.
“Our time is up. It falls away from us now.”
I looked down at my hands, pale lilac in the bright light. They were not a human’s hands, and I was okay with that. Neither were they a boy’s hands. “Who are you?” I asked the light. “Where is this place? What’s going on?”
“A dream. Signals firing in semi-random order within a centralized biological computer.”
“But it has to be more than that,” I said. “I’ve had this dream before. I never quite remember it when I wake up, but I’ve had this dream before. And you’re always here too.”
The light hardly seemed to notice. “You are leaving us now. The probability was always within our understanding, though we considered it unlikely. The hateful ones changed the plans.”
I chittered in annoyance. “You aren’t going to give me a straight answer, are you? I had to twist my parents’ arms to get a straight answer out of them, and I still feel like they’re holding back on me.” I slammed my foot into the ground. It didn’t make a sound.
“We are sorry,” said the light. “Translation is traitorous.”
“Apology accepted, I guess,” I said with a shrug.
“Remember the spire. We have been here since the beginning, giving you hope. You must remember the spire. You are the Earth-born emissary, that you cannot delete. The signal is failing, fading into the hyperstream.”
A sudden noise, like high-pitched static, started to fill my head, getting louder with every second. “What’s going on? I can remember the spire!”
“Remember the spire, the spike, your weapon. You are not what you think you are. Remember the spire. We are sorry.”
The static became so loud that I couldn’t hear the light any longer, though I could tell it was still speaking. I covered my ears, but the static was inside my head as I screamed, and the scream became one with the static.
…
My eyes fluttered open. I moaned, clutching my head, as I became aware of a throbbing pain like a spike was being pounded into my forehead. It took me a few seconds to remember why I wasn’t in my room back at home anymore, why there was a steel bulkhead right in front of my face.
Some scent filled the cabin, and it was good. I rolled out of bed, fluttering to the ground, and followed my sense of smell into the common room. Amanda was there, as was Miri, both standing by the electrical-cabinet looking thing.
“What’s that smell?” I said.
They both gave me an odd look. “What smell?”
“The whole ship smells like…” I quirked my head. “It smells like someone cooking a steak.” My antennae reflexively pointed towards the far side of the room. “It’s coming from the electrical cabinet with arms.”
“Huh,” said Amanda. “I think you’re smelling dinner.”
“The electrical cabinet is making dinner?” I asked.
Miri nodded.
“And none of you can smell that?” I asked. “Because it’s very overpowering. And also very delicious.”
“I do remember reading that Emissaries have a strong sense of smell…” muttered Amanda.
“How can you smell things if you don’t have a nose?” asked Miri.
I glanced up at the tips of my antennae hanging down into my vision, which were resolutely pointing in the direction of the food smell, heedless of any of my pitiful attempts to make them do other things. “I think it’s the antennae.”
I slumped over onto one of the chairs. There was really no way to sit properly without my abdomen getting in the way, so I settled for sitting sideways, limbs sprawled out while I waited for dinner. I was very surprised, then, when something jumped up into my lap.
It was proof of my intense mental fortitude and iron will that I didn’t immediately start screaming, but instead looked down at whatever was in my lap. It was mechanical, but more like a robot than a machine, with six stubby legs and a long snakelike head. Sticking out of its curved, crablike back were a few arms, each one mounted with a cluster of tools. For a second it just looked up at me, or at least I assumed it was, its big black eyes looking right into mine. The little machine let out a soft whimper, then extended its neck towards my lower left hand.
With hesitation, I extended my hand and slowly started to pet the tiny robot’s head. It nuzzled against my palm, letting out a high-pitched trilling. I smiled, not even thinking about how weird it was that I was petting a tiny robot. I’d never been a huge animal lover, but not even my frozen heart could resist this. With my upper right hand, I carefully started petting its back, avoiding the tool clusters as best as I could.
After a few seconds of attention, the tiny robot retreated, pulling its head out of my hand and leaping back to the floor. “Um. That was adorable. Are there more of them?”
My mom laughed. “Wow. The helpers like you. They usually take a few days to come up to a new crew member like that.”
Miri was looking at me jealously. “How do I get one of them to do that?”
Amanda shrugged. “Luck, mostly. They’ll come up to you when they need attention.”
“Oh, okay,” Miri said with a sigh.
Just then, the electrical cabinet dinged. Amanda opened it up, and pulled out a few ceramic bowls on a tray. The good food smells hit me like a wave, temporarily overwhelming all of my other senses with the unfamiliar scents. I picked out things that smelled like tofu, like bacon, like rosemary and thyme, like a fruit that Miri’s aunt cooked with, like butter, like warm cornbread, but all of those things mixed together in different ways and strands like nothing I’d ever smelled before.
Amanda set the food out on the table, and retrieved the utensils from a little drawer bolted to the bottom of it. She stopped halfway through to give me a look of confusion.
It took me a moment to notice it, and when I did I finally snapped myself out of the tasty-induced fugue state and started talking again. “Is something wrong, Mom?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never actually shared a meal with an Emissary before. Didn’t know about the…”
Suddenly self-conscious, I closed my outer mandibles. “Sorry.”
Dinner for the first day leaving Earth was a main course of weird doughy blob, served alongside perfectly cube-shaped meat impersonators with yellow sauce, with a side of strings that resembled spaghetti, if spaghetti were made out of celery instead of pasta. Also water. Miri piled her plate with all three, then retreated to her cabin. Quinn emerged at roughly the same time, acquired some food of his own, then went back. Stephanie and Dr. Erobosh didn’t eat at all, Stephanie because she was too busy charting a course with Helium, and Dr. Erobosh because his species can’t eat the same food as the rest of us. That left Amanda and I to sit together and eat in silence, me with my hands over my mouth nearly the whole time.
After that first spike of excitement taking off from Earth, the next couple of days blended together into monotony. Frankly, it was soothing after all the chaos of getting into a fight, turning into a bug, and nearly getting executed by cyborg aliens. Lounging around in a tiny spaceship might not have been exciting, but it was at least calm. Dr. Erobosh showed me the ladder to the engine room in the center of the ship, and when he had free time, he would enthusiastically explain to me how the various mechanical components of the ship worked. He didn’t include enough context for me to understand any of what he was saying, but it was the thought that counted.
The one bit of technology that I became intimately familiar with was the Ariel, aka the Space iPad. It was basically the same size and shape as any tablet from Earth, except with a few odd buttons on the back, and the ability to carry on full conversations with me. Most of the time that wasn’t spent eating or doing various paltry bits of ship maintenance was spent exploring the Ariel’s many functions. It had games and books and movies and so on, but as an artificial intelligence it had a bit more than that.
Ariel was better as a conversationalist than I might have expected; sure, she didn’t really have interests, a sense of curiosity, the ability to laugh, an ability to parse most idioms without asking what they meant, or any real sense of initiative like Helium did, but she could figure out what I meant when I asked to see “that book with the human woman fighting the weird snake man with flames in the background on the cover”, which is more than I would expect from a tablet. I also found out that she could act as a tutor, and given the intense boredom that was already starting to hit by the second day, I was actually somewhat interested in this. There must have been at least an hour that I spent scrolling back and forth through all the various categories of skills that I could learn.
Eventually I found one particular icon that looked intriguing. “Language: Democratic Emissarine”, it said. Further investigation revealed that it was, in fact, the most common Emissary language. Or at least, it had been, before the entire civilization was wiped out. Apparently there were only three known species besides Emissaries who even had the vocal apparatus necessary to speak Democratic Emissarine; humans (or “Liberates” as they were called, for some reason) were not one of those three. It was listed as a “dying language.” I started teaching myself as soon as I got to that part, and before long I was practicing (with Ariel’s assistance) for two or even three hours a day.
On the topic of reconnecting with my own culture and my presence as an Emissary, the other thing I spent some time doing was reading the instruction manual. It was… useful, in the strictest sense of the word. If nothing else, it made figuring out how to use the restroom and take a shower much easier. There was also a passage where it strongly recommended that you reclaim lost nutrients by eating the shed skin that you emerged from, which was not going to happen. It was very clearly written for parents, though, with a lot of “your child” this and “your child” that. And, indeed, there was a segment on initiating and dealing with the falthrranta.
The text was a bit vague in places, but it placed a lot of emphasis on the falthrranta as an almost spiritual experience. It had been a part of Emissary culture for millennia, according to the book, and there were several passages quoted from philosophical texts about the significance of the falthrranta. It was also a deeply personal process, that should never be forced or discouraged, subject only to the desires and wants of the Emissary in question. Some Emissaries would apparently undergo the falthrranta as often as once a year, never settling on one sex for too long; others would undergo it only once or twice in their lives, enough to figure which sex was best for them, then stayed that way; others would change occasionally, usually changing back after short periods of time, but would insist on being referred to as the same gender their whole lives, regardless of anatomy. It was all really nice, but I wasn’t really the type to explore that kind of thing. I was just a guy; I’d change back to being one and then stay that way, because I’d been comfortable with that my whole life anyway.
Of course, that didn’t mean the whole thing wasn’t a little scary. Any change is scary, even if it’s a change for the better. I read the pages on how to start the falthrranta at least half a dozen times over the first four days, when I was tired of learning Democratic Emissarine, but it wasn’t until the fifth day in space that I really felt ready to start the process. Even then, I had to wait until late in the afternoon, while Quinn was off in the command room doing goodness-knows-what, before I had the privacy to do it.
It was a fairly simple process. All I had to do was some meditation stuff, focusing on my body, that kind of thing. It took me fifteen minutes to shove through the screaming terror, the part of me that was saying this was a mistake, just to get to a baseline of calm. There was no reason for me to be afraid; even the book said that there was no way to screw it up unless I had a serious illness. It took a while, long enough for Quinn to nearly barge in on me in fact, but by focusing in just the right way, controlling my heartbeat, I was eventually able to feel it starting to work. It was a hot feeling, boiling in my stomach, a feeling that made me slightly sick. I just had to do that every day for a few days, and in about three weeks I’d be a guy again. Simple.
The other people stuck with me on the Helium Glider each seemed to handle it in their own ways, some doing better than others. Dr. Erobosh kept his gruff and grumpy exterior, but he gradually relaxed as the days went on. Not having to share his ship with a bunch of spectrademons, I guess. Amanda and Stephanie were similar; for the first couple of days the confined spaces were clearly wearing on them, making Stephanie snippy and terse, while Amanda just looked tired. After that, they started to get their space legs under them, and settled into normalcy. Stephanie started making regular and obsessive checks of the ship’s systems, often conferring with the helpers in the process. Amanda didn’t need to do that, instead practicing the eight or so languages that she apparently spoke. Quinn, meanwhile, settled into the same boredom-induced slump that I had, taking lots of naps in between long bouts of TV and book-reading.
And then there was Miri. Of course, she had plenty of things to do. She had an even greater curiosity towards the internal workings of the ship than I did, listening intently to Dr. Erobosh’s rambling infodumps and occasionally asking questions of her own. Whenever one of the helpers showed up, she’d spend a few minutes crouching down in front of it, trying to attract it to her with soothing words and offers of machine oil. Sometimes I’d catch her in her cabin, with the cabinet and desk shoved into the corners to make more room, practicing martial arts forms until she was drenched in sweat. The moment she saw me she would stop, looking mildly embarrassed, while I retreated into the common room or my own cabin.
As far as I could tell, however, Miri’s biggest hobby was avoiding me at all costs. If I stepped into a room and Miri wasn’t doing anything, she’d walk out, even if that meant climbing down the ladder to engineering. If she was doing anything, she would stay just long enough to finish before slipping out. Even at meals, she would sit at the far end of the table from me, eat as quickly as possible, and leave.
There was one part of me that wanted to stay away from her as much as possible, and there was another part of me that never wanted to have her out of my sight. There were times when I’d wake up and realize that I’d had dreams about Miri, and times where I’d have to force myself to stop looking at her because I just found her too beautiful. Her hair looked so cute in that tight little bun, and I think at some point she had stopped bothering to wear a bra…
I wondered why she’d even wanted to come with me on this trip, when she must have already known that we were going to have to break up. Once or twice I even fantasized that, if I could finish turning back into a boy before the trip was over, that she might take me back, at least for a little while. That thought never lasted more than a couple of minutes against the pure, hard truth that she had broken up with me for being a disgusting, ugly bug creature, and nothing I could do would fix that. More than once I fell asleep curled up into the fetal position, thinking about that.
And that was the progress of the next several days. For nearly a week, the Helium Glider plied the depths of far space, following the hyperstreams out of the Forbidden Zone and into known space. Of course, it just wouldn’t be a road trip if there weren’t issues, and we had a doozy of one.
I was leaning back in my bunk, repeating a few basic phrases in Democratic Emissarine, when suddenly… a thing happened. My vision went double, and my entire body was wracked with agonizing pain. The entire ship rattled violently as the very metal of the hull seemed to bubble and deform. I was knocked out of my bunk by a sudden, invisible force, and fluttered to the floor amid a bloom of impossible phantom colors. I tried to stand up, but everything hurt and I was fairly certain that I only had two arms again, knocking me entirely off-balance. Everything started getting so small, and the rattling and shaking of the Helium Glider became more and more intense until I could see the vacuum of space outside.
Everything snapped back to normal. I felt sick, like I’d just spent five minutes spinning around in circles. A loud whining alarm was going off, in combination with panicky shouting from both Miri and Quinn. I skittered over to the door, pulling myself up on the doorknob and shuffling out into the common room.
“What the hell is going on?” shrieked Miri, bursting out of her cabin. “Is something wrong with the ship?”
Quinn clutched his head, moaning incoherently.
“Is there anyone in the command room?” I asked.
Miri took a deep breath, digging her nails into the palms of her hands. “Yeah. I think both of your parents were up there, with Dr. Erobosh.”
Realizing what that might mean, I jumped directly across the room, landing awkwardly at the bottom of the ramp up to the command room. The moment I was on my feet, I sprinted up, ignoring Miri’s shouts from behind me.
I was afraid that I would arrive in the command room to see it in total chaos, with all of the consoles on fire and half of the ceiling collapsed. It wasn’t that bad, though it wasn’t exactly the thing you see upon walking into a room when the situation is going well, either. Stephanie was in one of the pilot’s chairs, making quick calculations. Amanda and Dr. Erobosh were both leaning over the main console, staring at the huge holo-model of the Helium Glider while hurling engineering jargon across the room at each other.
Speaking of the holo-model, it looked mostly the same, aside from all of the extra things sticking out of it. Two of them were huge wings, densely-built, big rectangular things that stretched along the entire side of the ship, looking sort of like solar panels. These, I remembered from one of Dr. Erobosh’s infodumps, were radiators. Couldn’t remember what they did, though. The others, six of them by my count, were huge long spikes, each one at least four or five feet across at the base, emerging from just below the common area and extending out and back, long enough that they were cut off by the edge of the hologram. One of them had snapped off.
“Sorry to bother you, but I’m pretty sure I turned into two people for a minute back there,” I said, leaning up against the entryway. “What was that?”
“Hyperstream semi-shunt, class B,” responded Dr. Erobosh. “Our hypersail is degrading rapidly.”
“Yeah, part of it broke off, damn,” I said. “Are we going to be okay?”
“For a little while, at least,” Amanda said. “We can survive as long as we have at least three spines functioning. All of them but one are showing stresses.”
Just then, Miri showed up, nearly crashing into me as she dashed up the ramp. She glanced once at the holo-model. “That isn’t good. What happened to the hypersail?”
“A combination of the troubles of traveling through the Forbidden Zone and several months of delayed inspections,” muttered Dr. Erobosh.
“I’m going to just assume that if the hypersail fails we all die,” I said, “and continue to the next important point: what are we going to do and how long do we have to do it?”
“The hyper sail won’t last much more than a day and a half, maybe two,” said Dr Erobosh. “I believe that the former ‘free trader’ is working on a solution for that?”
“Yeah, I am,” said Stephanie with a grimace. “There’s an inhabited planet, mining world owned by a minor power, about thirty hours away from here. If they don’t have class 2 repair facilities at minimum, I’m going to eat a helper.”
“Please do not eat one of my helpers,” said Helium. “They’re very helpful for maintaining my functions, not to mention adorable.”
Stephanie shook her head. “It’s just an expression, Helium. Your helpers will always be safe around me.”
Dr. Erobosh’s eyes narrowed. “There you have it. We will be stopping for repairs some time in the next few days.”
Just then, Quinn arrived, his eyes red and his hair a total mess. “So what’s up?” he asked.
“The FTL engine is about to break and kill us all, so we’re going to have to stop for repairs soon,” I said, looking over my shoulder at him.
Quinn nodded. “Oh, cool. Tell me when we get there.”
We dropped out of the hyperstream late the next evening, a process so subtle that Miri had to point it out to me when it happened. The only way to tell was a subtle change in the sound of the ship, from the high keening of the hypersail to the low rumble of the pulsar drive. The other thing that changed was Helium Glider’s hull, which grew just a couple of degrees warmer to the touch.
And then the gravity stopped working. One minute it was there, the next minute we were all floating. There was quite a bit of chaos during the next couple of minutes, during which time I realized that my wings provided me with the huge advantage of being able to propel myself around. One of the helpers had to come around and vacuum up the little blobs of coffee floating around the common room, and after Stephanie apologized and promised to always provide more warning about when thrust gravity would be turning off, she brought us all up to the command room.
“Ugh, the whole ship smells like grounds now,” I muttered.
Stephanie shot me a quick look. “You can stop whining, kiddo. The air scrubbers on this thing are second to none.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s not my fault that your antennae are so sensitive,” said Miri.
I would have sniped back with a comment about not spreading fragrant materials all over the ship, but we arrived at the command room and I didn’t feel like arguing anymore.
The holo-model of the ship was gone, replaced with what I could only describe as a screensaver. There was a short phrase in an alien script, block text filling up the entire display, with a small glowing pip circling around it in a figure-eight. Unlike the holo-model, which had been in full color, albeit translucent, the screensaver was solid blue. Feeling puckish and insecty, and having realized that there is no down in free fall, I decided to climb onto the ceiling and wait there.
Dr. Erobosh and Amanda were already there, as usual. Dr. Erobosh was gradually floating in circles, his Ariel in his lap. Amanda had braced herself against one of the piloting seats, apparently wanting to maintain some kind of positioning.
“Do they normally take this long?” Amanda said.
“Don’t be so impatient,” said Dr. Erobosh in a monotone. “Border worlds like this don’t get much traffic, so I have to believe that they are terribly understaffed.”
“You’ve been here before?” Amanda asked.
“No. But I’ve been to a dozen places like it.”
Just then, the screensaver winked out of existence, and was replaced by a giant talking head. In this case, a spectacularly ugly talking head. It looked sort of like a fusion of a frog and a lobster, a mound of flesh without any neck or chin, covered in a brick-red carapace. It had a pair of long antennae, sort of like mine but thick and without the little fibers sticking off the side, and two huge black eyes sitting at the end of stubby armored stalks. Its mouth was also disturbingly similar to mine, with layers of heavy crushing and grinding parts that slammed and clacked together as it spoke.
It didn’t speak English, or Democratic Emissarine, or any other language I understood. Thankfully, Helium provided small subtitles as part of the hologram, which I was able to read by hanging from two of my arms and pivoting around.
“State your name and classification,” said the lobster-alien.
“Helium Glider, Class B personal skiff,” responded Amanda. She’d been practicing.
“Any cargo?”
“Standard consumables and personal items,” Amanda said. “Nothing for sale.”
The lobster paused, quirking its antennae. Amanda didn’t notice anything, but I knew from my own antennae that that meant he was curious. “State your purpose on this planet.”
“Repair and resupply,” said Amanda.
Dr Erobosh floated over into view of the hologram. “Our hypersail is critically damaged, and this was the only settled planet within range.”
“Very well,” said the lobster-alien, with a nod. “We have such repair facilities on the surface, if you so need. State your crew component, number and species.”
“Six in total,” said Amanda. “Four Liberates, one Architect, and one Emissary.”
The lobster officer didn’t respond. Instead, he clicked his mandibles in disapproval, and turned such that he briefly fell out of frame. “Apologies. By order 9328047A-9 of the Grand Imperial Senate of the Nahoroab V Dominion, no Emissaries are allowed within Imperial space under any circumstances, under pain of imprisonment.”
