We spent the next few days in our own particular version of domesticity: training, reading, slowly introducing Sho to the various modern devices and conveniences that were part of day-to-day life on non-pulsed worlds and starships—not that Scheherazade had a great deal of those, given how spartan Jane kept her interior. Jane broke out her wrench set and removed two of the rear jumpseats in the cockpit so that Sho could wheel his chair inside and join us when we were within; she didn’t want him to feel like there was a part of the ship where he wasn’t welcome, or where we could go to discuss things without him hearing.
Oddly enough, I was the one who suggested he also spend some time training on the rear turret—you would have thought Jane would have made the suggestion, but she didn’t seem to think Sho was as inclined as I was toward violence. Which—maybe fair, but I remembered Jane training me on the guns when I’d come aboard, and having just a little bit of control over my fate when we’d inevitably gotten tangled up in a fight: that had helped. Plus, we’d swapped out the old railgun setup for a laser module, and lasers were way easier to learn on.
The turret wasn’t the easiest thing for Sho to get to, given his condition and the fact that you had to climb down a ladder to even reach the thing, but he proved quite adept at it—I guess his mother hadn’t spent all her time carrying him around, and he was pretty capable of making his way down without the use of his legs, as he’d shown when he’d crawled all the way from the shower to the cockpit.
Once inside, Schaz called up simulations for him to “fire” at—he wasn’t actually firing anything, of course: the turret was incapable of operating in hyperspace. I wasn’t even sure what would happen if we tried. Quantum physics was never my strong suit.
In short order he was at least proficient—as far as “massive weapons attached to starships” go, the turret was fairly simple to use, point and shoot, with an overlaid HUD tracking targets and the angles of incoming enemy fire, as well as indicating how much he would have to lead a moving vessel.
You’d think Schaz would just handle firing all the guns herself—and she could, in a pinch—but the truth was, having organic beings do the shooting actually made us more dangerous to an enemy. AI always fired in exactly the same manner, chose exactly the same targeting parameters and threat prioritization; any half-skilled pilot would know how to game those. Having a sentient being at the gun meant that we were more unpredictable, forcing the enemy to react to something beyond AI pattern recognition.
Jane also tried to get some basic information out of him as to his gifts, but unlike me, who’d come to her with my talents mostly fully developed, Sho engaged his unconsciously; things just . . . powered up around him, if they could do so. Schaz actually had to adjust her drive baffles to compensate for the extra juice he was constantly adding to the core. Of course, that meant that if it did come to a dogfight—and let’s be real; whatever happened on Valkyrie Rock, it almost went without question that somebody would be shooting at us—we’d have a hidden advantage with that extra bit of power; our shields would regenerate just a little faster, our lasers’ heatsinks would drain just a little quicker, our engines could maintain thrust just a little longer.
Jane didn’t talk any more about her past. Sho didn’t speak of his mother. I didn’t mention all the killing I’d done on Kandriad, or the nightmares it was still giving me. On a ship this small, there were some things you just didn’t talk about, otherwise they were all you would talk about.
Soon enough, we were approaching the end of our cruise, ready to drop out of hyperspace and enter the system with the former mining asteroid full of terrifying cultists who would think we were some kind of ship of the dead. Hooray.
When we were about an hour out from our destination, Jane retreated to the airlock for a moment, then returned with her various cans of camouflage from the armory, setting them all out on the kitchen table. “Just . . . hold still,” she told me, leaning in with a can full of glittering gold camo paint—what sort of world had foliage that color, I had no idea, but Jane was always overprepared.
I sat at my chair, trying not to squirm as she set about painting weird designs on my face, meant to make me look more demon-y. Schaz and Sho both chimed in with unhelpful comments as she worked—which was easy for them to do, since we’d already decided Sho wouldn’t be leaving Scheherazade. It was safer that way. Besides, fur was much harder to apply war paint to.
When Jane was done—and starting to work on herself—I took a look in the mirror; the ultimate design was actually kind of . . . pretty, gold and gray in a sort of tessellating waterfall design. What Jane had been working on for herself was significantly creepier: purples and blues in the shape of dozens of different eyes. It was good work, though—I would have confused us with demons, which was sort of the point.
With that taken care of, we all crowded into Schaz’s cockpit again as we approached the far edge of our destination system. We dropped out of hyperspace—right into a sort of pulsating veridian fog, already inside the nebula.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, disgusted. “First the gas on Kandriad, now this. Is there . . . have we stumbled into some kind of fucked-up theme, here, Jane? Are you doing this on purpose?”
She smiled at that—the effect of which caused a few of her drawn-on eyeballs to seem to wink at me. “Nah,” she said, the stick in her hand as she maneuvered us through the gas of the nebula, hopefully toward where we were going: I couldn’t see a thing out the viewscreens—beyond “green,” I mean. “The universe just hates you.”
I sighed. “You might not actually be wrong about that,” I said. “After all, I can never seem to—” The witty rejoinder I’d been preparing went unspoken as our destination appeared in the viewscreen.
A massive rock loomed out of the mist, first not there, then there, fully formed. It was honeycombed with metal structures and tunnels, like it had been imprinted with circuitry; in several places on the crust large machines sat silent and still, remnants of the mining operation that had once toiled within.
Jane slowed Scheherazade to a stop, just outside of orbital range. Then we just . . . sat.
“What are we doing?” Sho whispered. I understood the inclination.
“We’re waiting for the locals to see us,” Jane replied, not exactly whispering back, but her voice lower than it usually would have been. “That’s only polite, giving them time to decide whether we’re dead or demon.”
“Shouldn’t they have picked us up on scans?” I asked, then felt stupid for asking; of course they hadn’t, just like Jane hadn’t picked up Valkyrie Rock on our own scans. Something about the nebula threw off long-range scanners.
Which also meant the strange ship with the armored guy we were chasing could have been right behind us, and we wouldn’t have known it. Not a comforting thought.
Jane just shook her head. Abruptly, a searchlight cut on, sweeping through the mist from the exterior of the asteroid to focus on Scheherazade. Jane had set a comm channel open; a voice came through, almost sibilant. “This is Charon, operational AI for Valkyrie Rock,” it said. Jane frowned at that, but didn’t answer. “You are advised to dock at the indicated bay.” Our consoles flashed as the AI flagged one of the gaping holes in the asteroid’s surface. “Please land your ship, shut down your power, then await the greeting party that will decide your intentions.”
With that said, the comms shut off abruptly; not much of a conversationalist, this Charon. Jane was left narrowing her eyes at the viewscreen, not happy about something.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“This isn’t . . . the AI shouldn’t have greeted us,” she said flatly. “It should have been one of the priests, with a series of questions to sort out our intent.”
“Are you just annoyed that you’d memorized the right answers, and now you don’t get to use them?” I asked.
“No,” she shook her head, then backtracked. “Well, yes. But not just that.”
“You think crazy armored glowing guy is here already?” We really needed an actual name to put on this asshole.
“Possible,” she allowed. “But if so—if we’re right about him setting off the nuke on Kandriad to cover his tracks, he hasn’t done the same thing here, and he could have: the asteroid is powered by a fusion reactor, and it’s not hard at all to convert a fusion reactor into a fission bomb.”
“It terrifies me that you know that.”
“I know a lot of things that would terrify you. Regardless of whether he’s here already or not, though, we’re here to find him, which means we need to get on board.” With that said, she leaned over the controls again and kicked Schaz into motion, guiding us gently toward the docking bay.
As we got closer, I could see the strange designs the cultists had carved into the surface of their home, probably with mining lasers: all sorts of swirls and spirals, tiled frescoes and massive raised reliefs depicting scenes of death and wandering. It wasn’t the most comforting thing in the world to see as we drifted out of the fog, the muraled surface of the rock looming closer and closer, then swallowing us whole as we entered the docking bay tunnel, the mouth of which had been carved into overlapping rows of hideous gargoyles. As the tunnel closed in around us, it was impossible—for me, anyway—not to look up and notice that the grimacing statuary looked a hell of a lot like teeth, giving the impression of a fanged maw closing around us as we entered the interior of the asteroid itself.
The carvings and designs continued on the inner walls of the tunnel; one by one lights came up, just ahead of our passage, until we’d finally reached a large, circular chamber at the end. At least that was familiar: a docking bay was a docking bay the whole galaxy wide, complete with various hanging machinery and stacks of sealed crates filled with repair materials.
Jane set Schaz down in the very center of the bay—no alarms or klaxons were sounding to alert the natives to an aggressive presence, hopefully a good sign—and we stepped out of the cockpit, letting Sho wheel forward, to the comm station. “If you need to reach us, press here,” Jane showed him a button. “But try not to need to. We’ve got Justified encryption, so the cult won’t be able to hear what we’re saying, but chances are they’ll still know we’re talking, and that will make them nervous. We don’t want to make them nervous.”
“I mean, we kind of do, right?” I asked, a little nervous myself. “Shouldn’t . . . shouldn’t demons make them nervous?”
“We want to make them ontologically nervous, not ‘draw guns and fire’ nervous,” Jane answered. “There’s a difference.”
“A difference I might understand if I had any idea what ‘ontology’ was,” I grunted in reply.
“It means . . . don’t worry about it. When the priests arrive to greet us, just remember: don’t look at them. Don’t speak to them. If you’re asked a direct question, bare your teeth and breathe in, deeply. Let me do the talking.”
“Funny how we always seem to default to that.”
“Do you know how to convince a bunch of cultists that we’re demons from the great beyond, sent to test their faith, and further that we’re the type of demons who shouldn’t be trifled with, rather than the type of demons that should be thrown into an airlock and then sucked out the other side? Then further still, how to convince them that there is a threat coming to invade their home, and we need their help ambushing and capturing that threat, so that we can take him alive?”
I took a deep breath, then let it out. “No,” I said with a sigh. “No, I do not.”
“Well, then. Let me do the talking.” She’d unsealed Scheherazade’s loading bay as we had that little discussion; she strapped on her revolver and a few knives, gesturing for me to do the same, but that was it for armament. No body armor, no larger guns.
“If we have to defend ourselves, I’m going to feel fairly naked without Bitey,” I told her.
She grinned at that. “Then I’ve taught you well,” she said. “Still, if it comes to that, feel free to throw your teke around: that ought to seem fairly demonish.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
“You know what I mean; quit being a teenager.”
“I am—”
“I know, it was . . . just get ready.” Jane sealed the inner airlock behind us; through the window, I could see Sho, turned to face us in the cockpit. He raised a hand in a wave. I waved back, then turned to face the outer door, fitting my shoulder holsters on and dropping the semiautomatic handguns Javi had given me into the rigs.
“Ready?” Jane asked, one of her hands resting on the butt of her gun; that was comforting.
I nodded, taking a deep breath in and facing the outer door. “Ready,” I said. Under my breath, I started muttering to myself: “I’m a demon. I’m a demon. I’m a demon. I’m a gray-gold afterlife demon, and I’m here to track down an asshole or devour souls, so you better be willing to help me with the first if you don’t want the latter to get done to you. The longer I have to wait for the asshole to appear, the more peckish I’m going to grow, so you’d best get ready.”
“You don’t have to convince yourself, Esa,” Jane told me—I could hear a smile in her voice, even though I wasn’t looking at her. “Just them. I also don’t know that a demon would use the word ‘peckish’ to describe her all-encompassing hunger for mortal souls.”
“Shut the fuck up, Jane, let me get into a . . . demon-y kind of a headspace.”
“Among other things, I also doubt a demon would call themselves ‘demon-y.’ ”
“Just . . . just . . . you know?”
She grinned at that—it never ceased to amuse her when I utterly failed to articulate a thought—and reached out to open the outer airlock.
Welcome to Valkyrie Rock.