Jane eventually emerged from the cargo hold with a goddamned wheelchair in tow, huffing and grunting as she lifted it up the ladder from the cargo area belowdecks. Where the hell had she found that thing? It was collapsible, motorized—Sho’s eyes absolutely lit when he saw what it was.
“I know we promised you your legs back, and that will happen, Sho,” Jane told him, pulling the thing apart. “But obviously, we’re not going to be able to take a direct route to Sanctum—”
“Hunting down the thing in the armor comes first.” He nodded. “Absolutely.”
“Right.” She smiled, just a little, liked the steel she heard in his voice. “So until we can get your legs fixed up, I wanted you to at least be able to get around Scheherazade on your own. Esa?”
I nodded, and moved to help him into the chair as Jane held it open. Sho treated the metal contraption—a thing you’d be able to find in most hospitals on every non-pulsed world, and even on a fair bit of them that had received only light doses of pulse rads—like it was an absolute wonder; I hadn’t seen a wheelchair in his train car back on Kandriad, either because that sort of thing was too far up the tech tree for his people to fabricate it, or simply because he and his mother had simply been too poor.
He zoomed around in the thing like he was a natural. Thankfully, Scheherazade’s interior only had one actual cabin, and all its furniture was modular, meant to be fitted up inside the walls when we weren’t using it, so there was plenty of open space for him to get around.
While Sho was busy testing out his new wheels, Jane and I crowded around the kitchen table, Jane reaching to activate the holoprojector, bringing up the star maps of this sector of space. Tracking a ship through hyperspace was relatively easy, provided you had a visual record of their jump—which we did: all you did was calculate the exact trajectory they’d exited the system, then plotted that course out and out and out through the surrounding emptiness between the stars until you hit something of note; there was no such thing as “turning” in the middle of a hyperspace jump.
The problem was, since we didn’t know what the hell the armored thing’s ship was capable of, we didn’t know what its range was, or how fast it was moving—Scheherazade was capable of staying in hyperspace for a week or more, but if he could keep going past that, we’d have to drop out, cool the engines, and hope we could catch up.
“There.” Jane reached out, tapped a green dot on the holoprojected map, just inside the red line on his projected course: where we’d have to break off the chase, at least momentarily.
I squinted at the map, opening up the text box of Schaz’s database to read what sort of information the Justified had collected on the system. “Not much there,” I said doubtfully. “Gas giants, an asteroid belt, a weird nebula at the edge of the system—”
“And that weird nebula’s where he’ll be headed,” Jane said, her voice still confident—whatever it was she knew, it wasn’t in the Justified’s general archives. I swear, sometimes she kept secrets just for the hell of it. “There’s a station inside, a former mining asteroid, hollowed out, repurposed.”
“And you think he’s going there because . . .”
She shrugged. “Process of elimination. There’s nothing else on his course but that system, and in that system, that’s the only one thing with any kind of population.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “You said this asteroid had been ‘repurposed,’ ” I said. “Repurposed for what? And does it even have a name?”
She nodded at that. “General sustainability—don’t worry, it’s not like they’re building war AI, or anything like that. And the name of the station is Valkyrie Rock.”
“What’s a valkyrie?” I asked. Even in our shit situation, she smiled at that; my general curiosity always amused her.
“A valkyrie is . . .” She paused, trying to stare at the map and answer my question simultaneously. “It’s a thing from an old human myth; a sort of spirit creature that roams battlefields, and takes the honored dead to the afterlife. Only those who fought, and died, as warriors, though; those as strong, or stronger, than the valkyries themselves. And that’s the thing about Valkyrie Rock; the inhabitants are . . . they have kind of a thing. About death. Hence the name.”
“What kind of a thing?” I asked. That didn’t sound good. In point of fact, it sounded bad. Very bad. Having “a thing about death” was up there with “a thing about feeding outsiders to superpredators” in terms of unsavory habits various cultures could develop that might have a direct impact on our sanity and well-being.
“They think it’s already happened.”
“What?”
“They think they’re dead; that everybody’s dead. They think we’re . . . ‘living,’ for lack of a better term . . . in the afterlife. That this, all of it”—she waved her hand, I guess to indicate, you know, existence, though really she was just gesturing at Schaz—“they think it’s all a kind of purgatory, a place of testing and punishment. I’m not sure which afterlife exactly, but . . . yeah. Valkyrie Rock is a gathering place for those who think they’ve already died.” She turned, slightly; caught my expression, which must not have been pleasant. “It’s a big galaxy, Esa,” she said, almost defensively. “People believe a lot of strange shit.”
“So . . . what does that mean?”
Jane shrugged. “So long as we obey their rules, we should be fine. Just—no mentioning the outside universe; as far as they’re concerned, Valkyrie Rock is the only ‘real’ thing in existence, and everything else is just the shadows and fog of the afterlife, there to test them, to trick them. To draw them from the true path.”
“And their other rules?”
“I’ll go over them before we dock.”
“So do you think he’s . . . one of them? The armored guy, I mean—is he one of these . . . ‘thinks he’s dead’ people? Cultists? Types?”
She thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “I doubt it,” she replied, taking a sip of her coffee. “The locals aren’t unfriendly, per se. For a bunch of theoretically dead people. Plus, they don’t really give a damn about the outside galaxy, because, again, they think it doesn’t exist. So sending out a . . . terrorist, or an assassin, or whatever the hell he was—it’s not exactly something they’d do.”
“So they’re not liable to be exactly pleased to see him. Or us. Whichever one of us gets there first.”
“Well—that depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“What kind of demon they think we are.”
“We’re demons now?”
“Like I said—nothing else is real to them. Anything from the outside galaxy is just a . . . projection of the afterlife, there to test them, or punish them. If we’re the latter, the kind they’d want to appease into leaving them alone, we’re golden. If we’re the former, tricksters and shapeshifters, there to tempt them into believing this universe is real—”
“That’s when they kill us with fire.”
“About right, yeah.”
“Jane?”
“Yeah?”
“What the fuck is wrong with . . . with . . . with . . . with everyone?”
She sighed, didn’t answer me. Sho, meanwhile, had wheeled up beside us—he was staring at the holoprojection with the same kind of fascination he had for all the new tech he hadn’t been exposed to on Kandriad. “Why would he be going to a place like . . . like that?” he asked, scrutinizing the projection of the nebula Jane had brought up. Apparently, he’d been listening.
I shrugged. “Why would he be on Kandriad?” I asked. “I mean, no offense to your home planet, Sho—”
“You called it a ‘shithole’ about an hour ago. You also said, repeatedly, ‘fuck that place.’ ”
“Well. Yes. Because fuck that place. Point is, whatever this guy is after—we don’t know enough to figure out what he wants, why he might be going . . . anywhere, really.”
“Hopefully, we’ll be able to find out on Valkyrie Rock,” Jane shrugged.
“Or he’ll be waiting for us when we disembark, and resume trying to murder us.”
“Or that.”
“Or the locals will be trying to murder us, because we’re demons.”
“Also a distinct possibility, yes, though one we can hopefully mitigate down to ‘unlikely.’ ”
Sho was looking back and forth between Jane and me. “And this is . . . what you two do,” he said, sounding caught somewhere between awe and shock.
“Pretty much,” I agreed.
“I . . . I was kind of hoping the Justified would be smarter,” he said, sounding more than a little disappointed.
I had to laugh at that.