CORDELIA PA
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
“I’m afraid I am.” Nick glanced to where the wind scything across the high plateau rattled the tough, dry stalks of a clump of reeds that had somehow managed to push their way up through the frozen snow. I hunched my back to its insistent chill. Even surrounded by the fur-lined hood of my insulated coat, my nose and cheeks felt scrubbed and raw. A hundred metres away, the Gigolo Aunt sat with her rear cargo ramp open, and I could see the black-clad figure of Spider supervising the unloading of supplies from the old freighter to the observatory. The observatory itself consisted of a large dome and half a dozen prefabricated habitation units arranged in a grid and anchored to the rock at the centre of the plateau. The dome and its attendant units had been painted orange to stand out against their cheerless surroundings. Instruments and aerials trembled in the wind. This remote outpost housed eleven scientists. For the past couple of circuits, Nick Moriarty had been building a relationship with one of them. Now he’d announced his intention to remain here when it came time for the Gigolo Aunt to depart.
“But, Dad, you hardly know her,” I protested.
Without removing his gloved hands from his pockets, Moriarty shrugged. He was looking beyond the plateau’s lip to the place where its foothills and glaciers sank to meet the horizon-spanning wastes of a frozen salt marsh—and beyond that, to the wall that stopped the contents of the marsh from spilling over the edge of the world and draining into space.
“Nevertheless,” he said, “I have to try, Cordelia. I’m due some leave, and you can pick me up on the next run.”
“But I’m not ready.”
“You’ll be fine. You’ve been to flight school for four years, and you’ve seen how we do things on the ship.”
“But the crew—”
“They’ll be okay with it.” He scratched the bristles on his chin with gloved fingers. “You’ve only got two more stops on this circuit. Thirteen days and you’ll be home. Pick up the next batch of supplies and repeat what we’ve done so far. In eight weeks you’ll be back here, and I’ll take over again. They’ll hardly even notice I’m gone.”
I shook my head. “I’m not so sure. Some of them have hardly said two words to me since I came aboard.”
He smiled. “They just take a while to cotton to newcomers. Underneath it all, they’re good people.”
“I’m so not at all happy about any of this.”
“Trust me.” He squeezed my padded shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”
“But I thought you were getting to know me.”
“I have been.”
“And it’s been great. We’re getting closer than I ever thought, ever hoped. But it’s early days. I’m your daughter. I’ve only been back a few weeks and you’re already ducking out to chase some woman?”
“I’m sorry, Cord.”
“Then stay.”
He looked genuinely regretful. “I can’t. There’s more happening here than you know. I’ve loved seeing you again, but now you need to let me go, at least for a little while.” He put his arms around me in an awkward hug. “You’re going to be okay, I promise.”
I hugged him back, still angry.
He said, “I love you, you know.”
“I love you too.”
I watched him trudge towards the warmth of the observatory’s refectory, his boots crunching the snow into compact footprints. After a while, I began to shiver. Feeling my discomfort, the coat activated its internal heaters, and their spreading warmth wrapped me like the ghost of an embrace.
* * *
The observatory dome had been situated at the exact centre of one of the Plates—an orange dot on a sheet of pristine white paper.
The Plate system lay on the frayed edge of explored space: a dim red sun close to the boundary of the Intrusion and attended by a single gas giant and a light scattering of asteroids. Two hundred years ago, humans had come in a small scout craft to survey the gas giant’s moons, searching for potential sites to found research stations to study the Intrusion. What they found instead, trailing the giant in its orbit, were the Plates.
Even at first glance, there could be no doubt they had stumbled upon manufactured artefacts rather than natural phenomena. The twenty Plates were arranged in an asymmetric three-dimensional formation, like giant tea trays set adrift in the void. They were all rectangular, all orientated the same way, and all contained within an invisible, cylindrical envelope of air measuring just over a thousand kilometres along its main axis and three hundred across its beam. Each of the Plates boasted a different surface area, and each had apparently been intended for one of a dozen different purposes—although all had fallen to disuse and ruin in the millennia since they’d been abandoned by their builders. Vast, labyrinthine cities encrusted the upper surfaces of some, while others had apparently been dedicated to farmland or industry. Their sizes ranged from a few square kilometres to a few hundred.
The one on which I currently stood held only this frozen wasteland, but it was the Plate closest to the Intrusion, and therefore the one most suited to the establishment of an observatory dedicated to probing and cataloguing its mysteries.
The Intrusion itself was an enigma—a region of space where reality had torn and curdled. Over the millennia, many of the races of the Multiplicity had come to study it. Some thought it was a wormhole, others thought it might be the result of a collision between our universe and another. They sat around its edge and took measurements that made no sense. They tried sending in ships, but none ever returned. They tried broadcasting messages into the rift, but their signals went unanswered. In desperation, some even tried religious offerings, but none of their rituals or gifts elicited a response.
In the end, all they could do was observe and wonder.
And that’s where I came in.
Twenty years old and fresh out of graduate training, I was happy to be out among the stars, even if the Gigolo Aunt followed a circular eight-week route, ferrying supplies and personnel to seven outposts around the periphery of the Intrusion. My scores in commerce and astronavigation had seen me placed consistently at the top of my class, and now here I was, suddenly promoted to a seat in a command chair held together with duct tape, with bits of spongy yellow insulation escaping through cracks in the shiny faux leather, trying to read status updates from a console so dinged and smudged I’d need an archaeologist to excavate its layers of filth and damage.
I stomped back to the ship and locked myself in my cabin, where I shaved one side of my head and swore at my lopsided reflection in the mirror. Goddamn Moriarty. Goddamn him to hell. How could he be so irresponsible? How could he go off and leave his ship in the hands of somebody like me? He was supposed to be my father. He’d put me through flight school, but couldn’t he see I still wasn’t ready? I was the youngest on board by at least a decade. Couldn’t he control his libido long enough to first ensure his new second-in-command had the confidence of the crew? I was the newbie foisted upon them by her father. They hadn’t seen me for four years, and had no reason to trust or respect me. How was I supposed to lead them while he stayed here? For all I knew right now, they might mutiny, declare their captain lost and strike out for the Rim Worlds… But I doubted it. Every one of them had a corporate employment contract, and I would have been surprised if they’d trade that sort of security for a life on the run, with the attendant legal penalties hanging over their heads.
That didn’t mean Gant and Spider wouldn’t give me hell, though.
It was so unfair.
I ran my fingers through the stubble on the side of my head. It felt soft and prickly. I slicked the rest of my hair back with gel, and almost laughed at the asymmetric look of it. As a final touch, I printed a gold pirate-style earring and clipped it to the ear on the shorn side. Then, staring at my reflection, I drew myself up, feeling suddenly calmer. With my unusual eyes, I’d always been an outcast of sorts. This latest act of self-disfigurement had taken some of the urgency from my anxiety. After the past four years spent chasing grades and cramming for exams, I felt strangely liberated by the catharsis of self-sabotage.
Over the past weeks, the rest of the crew had treated me as young, naïve and inexperienced—the new girl with one eye brown and the other pale blue. Maybe when they got a load of what I’d done to my hair, they’d treat me a little differently.
Or maybe they’d just think I’d gone batshit crazy.
Perhaps I had. Out here, in the peripheral shallows of the Intrusion, weirder, more fucked-up things had happened.
Like Mikey abandoning me at the port, four years ago.
* * *
I gathered the rest of the crew in the ship’s main lounge.
Once, long ago, the riveted metal walls had been given a coat of white paint, but the paint had yellowed over the years to scuffed and grimy sepia, into which generations of travellers had scratched their initials and grievances. Condensation dripped from the cracks between the ceiling tiles and made little puddles on the metal deck.
Lomax stood at the airlock, biting her nails. Gant was perched on a stool, his webbed toes gripping the edges of the seat. Next to him stood the Druff engineer, Brof, and its human assistant, Spider. Spider wore a frayed woollen cap, and always seemed to be chewing on a toothpick.
Gant was the first of them to speak. He was an amphibious hobgoblin from a squalid swamp planet on the outer edge of the spiral arm. He had pointed ears, a loose, frog-like mouth, and skin that smelled like a stagnant pond.
“So,” he said. “He’s really gone and left you in charge?”
Everyone in the lounge was watching me. I reached out to pat the nearest bulkhead. She may have been old, but the Gigolo Aunt remained tough and sturdy.
“That’s right.”
“But you’re a child.”
“I’m twenty years old!”
“But are you experienced?”
On the dented wall screen, the Aunt’s avatar appeared. She presented as a human female and was dressed as a sad clown.
“I have just received confirmation from Captain Moriarty,” the clown said. “And Acting Captain Pa is correct. She is now the ranking officer on board this vessel.”
Gant swore under his breath. Spider laughed and shook his head from side to side.
“Look,” I said, “he’s not leaving forever, okay? Just taking a sabbatical. He’ll be here waiting on our next circuit.”
“You promise?” Gant leaned forward on his stool.
Beside him, Spider gave a snort. “Don’t be so needy, crazy frog. Let the man do what he needs to do.”
Gant flipped him an obscene gesture, and glared at me. “Well?” he demanded.
I sighed. But before I could comment, the air changed around us. The lights stuttered and the engines faltered.
“What the hell?”
My stomach went light as the gravity wobbled. The air stank of cinnamon and hot plastic. Somewhere, a mission bell clanged; a child screamed; a dog howled. I could taste colours. My body temperature went up, and I seemed to be looking at everything through the wrong end of a telescope. For one terrifying, timeless instant, everything turned to transparent ice—my hands, Gant, and the walls around us. I could see stars through the skin and bones of my fingers…
Reality snapped back into place and all was exactly as it had been before, save for the indignant alarms sounding in the corridors.
“What?” My mouth wouldn’t work properly. I had fallen to the deck. My tongue flapped like a beached dolphin. “What was that?”
Gant turned both his sets of eyes on me. “Reality quake.” He made it sound like the most obvious, commonplace thing in the world. “A big one.” He checked the ship’s systems on his wrist terminal. “We only caught the edge of it, but it blew all the lights on the cargo decks and fucked the shuttle’s AG unit. And I think our jump engines might be boned.”
“Is it over?” I asked.
“We’d better hope so.”
I checked my own interface. Reports were starting to come in from the outlying stations. As Gant had said, the quake had been unusually large, radiating out from the Intrusion like a tsunami rolling across a low-lying archipelago. Hands shaking, I rose from the floor. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
Gant grinned at me. The tufts of hair on the tips of his ears were tawny in the emergency lighting. “What’s the matter, newbie? Going to puke?”