CORDELIA PA
I woke to the sound of hammering, and checked the time. With a curse, I rolled off my bunk and slipped on a white vest and a pair of olive cargo pants. When I opened my cabin door, I found Spider in the corridor outside, levering open an access panel in the floor.
“Hey, dude, do you know what time it is?”
“Yeah.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Fixing shit.” He spoke around the penlight held in his teeth. “What does it look like?” His tools were at his feet. He wore a stained green overall over a filthy white vest, and had his dreadlocks wrapped in a patterned yellow scarf.
I rubbed my eyes. “Isn’t it kind of early?”
“Early?” He took the torch from his teeth, and turned towards me, taking in my uneven, dishevelled hair and rumpled t-shirt. “Jesus. You remember the quake, right?”
“Quake?”
“The reality quake.”
I frowned. My head felt gauzy and unclear. “We were in a reality quake?”
The man scratched his beard. “Big one, too. Blew all the lights on the cargo decks, wrecked the AG unit in the shuttle…” He grinned. “Don’t worry, those things also fuck up your memory. You were there with the rest of us when it happened. Then you threw up and went to bed.”
As he spoke, I began to recall the events of the previous evening, but they remained slippery and difficult to grasp. “Why didn’t anyone wake me?”
“Didn’t see the point.” Spider shrugged. “Didn’t think there was much you could do about it.”
Leaving him to his repairs, I climbed up to the ship’s bridge, where I found the pilot, Gant, crouched over the navigation console, perched on the edge of his chair like a gremlin on a toadstool.
“How are we doing?” I tried to peer over his shoulder at the display, but he waved me away with a webbed, three-fingered hand. “Get outta my face, lanky.”
“Excuse me?”
The little creature blinked both sets of eyes. “You heard.”
In the aftermath of the reality quake, our first priority had to be establishing the space-worthiness of the Gigolo Aunt. She was our ride, and without her we’d be stuck here in the centre of the Plate, helplessly at the mercy of any rebounds or aftershocks that occurred as the Intrusion’s outer limits contracted and settled back to what they had been before the quake. I sat on the bridge and fiddled with my new earring while Gant, Lomax, Brof and Spider ran through their checklists, testing first one system and then another. I couldn’t help them; I’d been trained to run the day-to-day affairs of a commercial interstellar vessel, not roll up my sleeves and dig into its guts. And as acting captain, I needed to show faith in my crew; I couldn’t stand over them as they did their jobs. They’d only resent my interference. If I wanted them to feel my trust, I’d just have to sit here and wait for their reports. Besides, they were all so much older and more experienced than I was. In theory, that shouldn’t have mattered, but in practice it certainly did. I felt like a school kid who’d accidentally wandered into the staff lounge. They all knew so much more than me. They’d been with the Gigolo Aunt for years, and Gant never missed an opportunity to remind me of the fact.
“You can memorise all the technical specs for a vessel like the Gigolo Aunt,” he said, “but still not have a damn clue how it actually functions. We’ve been modifying this ship since before you were born. There are some fixes and workarounds here that date back decades, to the original owners. Trust me, the best thing you can do right now is shut the fuck up and leave us to it.”
I scratched at the stubble on the side of my head. I hated feeling like a gawky teenager. I was a hundred times more qualified than anyone else on this boat, but over the past few weeks I’d discovered my qualifications meant little to seasoned spacers who’d earned their knowledge the hard way, in the school of life-or-death survival. What did I have to offer in return? While I’d been grubbing around the fringes of an alien city, these guys had been out here dealing with everything the Intrusion had to throw at them. There was no way, even with all the extra hours I’d put into my studies, that I had anything new to teach them. Quite the reverse.
One thing I could do, though, was talk to the ship.
“Hey, Gigolo?”
The avatar appeared on screen. Today she’d dispensed with the clown make-up and instead wore a black polo neck top and a pair of wraparound sunglasses. “Hey, Cordeeeelia, what’s shaking?”
I frowned. “Can you give me a current status report?”
“Sure thing.” She seemed woozy and unfocused. If she’d been a human, I’d have assumed she’d been smoking barracuda weed.
“So,” I prompted, “how are we?”
She gave a beatific smile. “We’re groovy, baby. Everything’s groovy.”
“Any contact with the observatory?” I was hoping Moriarty might come back and take charge, but so far we’d heard nothing.
“Radio signals are scrambled. I’m transmitting, but I don’t know if they’re receiving.”
“Is it safe to go outside?”
“Things might still be a little unstable, you know? There might be aftershocks, and all kinds of bad stuff.”
“So we can’t just walk over there and see if they’re all right?”
She gave a little shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe. Ask Lomax.” I called up a view from one of the external sensors. The bright orange buildings of the observatory appeared unchanged. The snow still looked like snow; the salt marsh still looked like a salt marsh. Although this was my first visit to the Plate system since leaving four years ago, I still knew all their names by heart. Currently, in the sky above the observatory, I could see the glimmering stars that were Night Town, Farm Plate Two and The Plain of Clocks. Whatever havoc the ship had suffered during the reality quake, at least the Plates seemed to have endured—as they had endured here for millennia.
I used the internal comms system to contact Lomax. “Okay, I’m going over there.”
“Are you sure?”
I gave a shrug. “I’m not doing any good here.” Moriarty could have his ship back. All I wanted now was to get away from here and find myself a nice job somewhere on a real planet, with ground that didn’t move and physical laws that remained reassuringly constant. Maybe I’d just forget about space altogether and go back to school, or get a job in a restaurant or bakery, doing something simple and meaningful with my hands instead of following the whims of my overqualified brain.
“All right.” Lomax looked dubious. “But I suggest you take Spider with you.”
“Why?”