CORDELIA PA
We made the old woman we’d rescued comfortable in the Gigolo Aunt’s sick bay, and I ran a handheld scanner over her.
“Well,” I said, “beneath that spacesuit, she’s definitely human.”
Gant made a farting noise with his lips. “What about alien parasites?”
“None I can find.”
“You ain’t no doctor, and seeing as you’re using a cheap piece-of-crap scanner, I ain’t all that fucking reassured.”
Spider laughed. “Better sleep with your cabin door locked,” he said.
Gant glowered at him. “On this ship, I always do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means fuck you, is what it means.”
“Boys.” I gestured to the recumbent figure on the table. “Can we please focus on this and leave the pissing contest for another time?”
They both scowled at me, but obeyed without further comment. I tried not to show my surprise. Perhaps Moriarty was right, and they were coming to respect my authority— or maybe they were both just relieved to have an excuse to back down without losing face. Across the bed, Lomax raised an eyebrow and gave me an appreciative nod.
Gant licked his lips with his unnervingly prehensile tongue. “She’s not base personnel?”
I shook my head. “I’ve run her through all the files and there’s no match. Whoever she is, there’s no record of her being here before the quake.”
“So, she appeared, and everyone else vanished?”
“Looks that way.”
“Do you think she ate them?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“She’s an old woman,” Lomax said. “She must have been washed up here by the quake.”
Gant waved his arms. “Is that even possible? You don’t know that. Where would she even have come from?”
I looked the unconscious woman up and down. “One of the other Plates?”
Spider made a face. “I don’t know about that, girl. Her spacesuit’s pretty old. Like a couple of centuries old. A genuine antique.”
I turned to him. “So?”
“So, you don’t generally see shit like that outside a collector’s fair.”
“What are you saying?”
He scratched his chin with long fingers. “They don’t make the parts for these suits anymore. You can’t even get the printer templates. Not unless you’re willing to put out serious money.”
“So she’s rich?”
“No.” His features scrunched in a frown. “If she was rich, she’d have a decent suit. She wouldn’t entrust her life to this antiquated piece of shit.”
I felt like strangling him. “What’s your point?”
Spider hunched forward and lowered his voice. “I think she’s been in the Intrusion.” He glanced at the unconscious woman as if reluctant to speak in her presence. “And I think she might have been in there for a long time.”
“So, it washed her up like a piece of flotsam?” All through my childhood on City Plate Two, I’d never heard of such a thing happening.
“Yah.” Spider pulled away. “It threw her up and it took our people.”
I felt something catch in my chest. “It took them?” I’d heard of ships going missing during a quake, but never individual people being taken from the surface of a Plate.
Spider gave a snort. “Well, they sure as shit ain’t hiding in the base. Where else do you think they are?”
“And my father?”
He looked at me and sucked his cheeks. Then he looked away.
“Yes,” he said. “Even him.”
* * *
I sat down with the Gigolo Aunt’s avatar.
“So, you must have been monitoring my father when the quake hit?”
The sad clown rolled her eyes heavenwards. “Of course, for all the good it did.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, baby. One minute everything was smooth and cool; the next it all went kind of ka-blooey.”
“But the captain. Did it take him?”
The Aunt appeared to think this over. “I guess it must have.”
“You guess?”
“We’re not dealing with phenomena that obey the fundamental laws of the universe here, you dig?” She spread her gloved hands. “Guessing’s all I’ve got.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between finger and thumb. “Okay, here’s my guess. The quake took our people and left this woman. According to Spider, her suit’s really old, which means she may have been in the Intrusion for some time. And if that’s really what happened, then maybe it also means there’s a possibility a future quake might bring my father back.”
“Seems logical, star-child.”
“But there’s no way to predict these quakes?”
“I’m afraid not.”
I took a deep breath in through my nose. “Then he might be lost for good.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Dammit.” I smacked the control console with my fist. We’d just begun to develop our relationship. We hadn’t had a lot of time together since I returned from flight school, but there’d been enough that I had begun to like him. I’d stopped thinking of him as a stranger, and had tentatively started to consider him a friend. I’d even called him “Dad” once or twice. My palms felt hot and prickly, and I wanted to smash something just for the sake of venting my frustration.
We should never have come back to the Plate system. When I found out my father was a glorified delivery boy doing the same rounds year after year, I should have found some way to convince him to go further. Surely I could have persuaded him to take a different contract in some other corner of human space? Maybe even push out into the territories beyond the edge of the Generality, where we could have traded all the way to the Rim Stars and back. Anything to be as far away from this stupid, gaudy artefact as possible.
I hadn’t even taken the time to find Mikey. Moriarty had been sending Uncle Caleb money up until his death, and had asked if I wanted to visit City Plate Two while we were in the system, but I’d said no. I was still mad at my half-brother’s betrayal. Faced with the loss of his sister, he’d run away and left me standing there. For all he knew, he might have been abandoning me to slavers, or worse.
I’d received word of Uncle Caleb’s death a few months before my graduation from flight school. Since then, I’d had nothing holding me to this benighted system. By all rights, I should be far, far away. And that’s what made this situation so damn infuriating.
Well, fuck Mikey and the ghost of Uncle Caleb. I wasn’t that little girl any longer, and it didn’t matter where we were. My eyes were still different colours, but I was no longer a scavenger crawling through potentially dangerous alien ruins to recover artefacts that would make someone else rich. I had a ship to command. We’d lost a vital member of our crew, and it was my job to keep us together and keep us flying while we figured out whether or not we’d be able to get him back. And dammit, I was going to do my utmost to make sure we did. My father had entrusted me with the Gigolo Aunt, and I didn’t want to disappoint him, even if that meant accepting his loss and carrying on with what we had. The Aunt had a contract older than I was. She’d been skirting the periphery of the Intrusion for decades, providing a lifeline and ferry service for base personnel scattered all around the anomaly’s edge. They rotated in and out depending on the Aunt’s schedule; new specialists going in, old ones coming out. Many theses and research papers had been written in the ancient ship’s passenger lounge, between the crates of dehydrated rations and long-overdue scientific equipment. And, if Gant was to be believed, many long-simmering love affairs had been consummated (and many children conceived) in the exact same space.
Although Moriarty had a lucrative sideline in transporting illegal artefacts, the Gigolo Aunt itself was a beloved fixture of the communities clustered around the Intrusion, who knew nothing of his extracurricular activities. And now she was mine, and I didn’t want her. I didn’t want to be responsible for meeting her schedules and fulfilling her deliveries— especially now my father, who had put me through flight school and then given me a job, had been snatched from this plane of existence by the same cosmic anomaly that had provided him with employment all these years. I didn’t want her, but now that I had her, I knew I was going to do my damnedest to keep her flying.
But even as the thought formed, I closed my eyes in unexpected ecstasy. The Plates were singing to me, all twenty of them. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. We’d been back in the Plate system for two days, and this was the first time they’d impinged on my senses like this. Their baroque alien harmonies seemed to vibrate in my chest and stomach. Although I couldn’t understand the literal content of their song, the emotions their voices triggered were profound and unmistakable, and I laughed and wept at the same time, thinking of my vanished father and my dead mother’s outstretched arms. The Plates were welcoming me home, gathering me back into their care and giving thanks for the connection we had. They were singing my song—the song of Cordelia Pa. Buoyed on the wave of their refrain, I imagined soaring through the school of Plates, my arms and fingers outstretched like the wings and feathers of an eagle. As a child, this had been my dream. Back then, the dream had been a means of escape; now, in reality, it had become a homecoming. I had gone away as a child, as little Cordelia with the spiky white hair and odd, incompatible eyes, and come back as something else entirely—a new creature born from the stars and the kindness of my father, fused into the body of a young woman with a strange connection to an ancient technology.
* * *
Dreaming, I swooped between the Plates, naked to the vacuum of space. Without effort, I flew among them, and they surrounded me like a shoal of sparkling fish. I saw the alien vegetation of Zoo Plate stretched beneath me, the lights of Alpha and Command ahead, the darkened bulk of Night Town above. From beneath, the Plates were featureless squares of unadorned, semi-translucent blue. To the sides, I recognised the industrial tangles of the Factory Plates, the makeshift shelters of Shanty One, and the bright sunlamps and cultivated fields of Farm Plate Two. They were all there somewhere, hanging in three-dimensional formation. As I passed each one, I heard its whispered alien song in my head, greeting me and wishing me well. Arms and legs flung akimbo, I wove my way in and out of the gaps between them, banking and soaring like a hawk on the wind.
Finally, trailing the group, I found my old home, City Plate Two. It was a square of blue material sixteen kilometres to a side. Buildings covered its upper surface. Their height rose from the single-storey inhabited shacks at the edge to the kilometre-tall spires dominating the largely unexplored centre.
Somewhere down there, Michael would be hiding, and the body of my uncle would be lying in one of the buildings that had been repurposed as a communal mausoleum.
I scanned the streets for our old building, but from up here the blocky structures at the rim all looked the same. I couldn’t distinguish one neighbourhood from another, and felt my heart beating in my chest. I’d spent nearly my whole childhood and adolescence down there, on those streets. Now they looked so small and distant. I ached to reach out and touch them, to dive back into their familiar chill embrace, but I couldn’t. My arms had begun to hurt. When I looked at them, I saw the skin had started to split. As I watched, it peeled apart like a fraying sleeve and fell away. The steel mesh of the Gigolo Aunt’s black wings lay beneath, bloodied and glistening. I felt their weight pulling at my shoulders, eager to beat against the misty fabric of the hypervoid. Pulse racing, I watched them unfurl against the distant stars, and knew with horrified clarity that my home was lost to me, and I could never, would never, return.
Fog boiled from the darkness, a churning ring of emptiness with a vortex at its centre. I felt its blistering cold peel the skin from my face and tried to twist away. Squirm as I might, my wings flapped, vast and unbidden, and thrust me forward, headfirst and screaming into the void.
* * *
I sat upright, heart pounding in my chest. I had nodded off in the command couch, and had no idea how long I’d been asleep. For a moment, all I could do was try to steady my breathing. Sitting there on the Gigolo Aunt’s bridge, hugging my knees and waiting for my racing pulse to subside, I found myself wondering where Michael was at that moment. How could he have abandoned me like that, after all our years together, and all our scavenging expeditions into the city? I’d always known that, beneath all his bluster about getting out and getting away, he’d basically been all talk. I’d just never expected him to bail on me. We’d been a team. All those years, we’d had each other’s backs. And now…
I shook my head. It had been years. Right now, Michael’s whereabouts had to be the least of my problems. If we ran into difficulties with the repairs to the ship, we might freeze our asses here before we got it flying again—and I was not up for doing that.
I’d escaped the Plates once; I would escape them again.