Chapter Twelve

Riston

Terra-Sol date 3814.253

Pax ships were built with permanent residence in mind, and the constant strain of long-hauls made the ability to self-maintain the ship a necessity, so the spaces on board Pax Novis—and, Riston assumed, all PCCSs—were built to accommodate the slightly taller than average figures of those who grew up in artificial gravity. Although technology and medicine had nearly eliminated most of the debilitating conditions and mutations early space travelers had to contend with, certain realities were unavoidable. One was that artificial gravity hadn’t yet matched an Earth-like planet’s, and it likely never would. Those who grew up in artificial’s seventy-percent-of-norm gravity were, on average, noticeably taller than those who grew up planetside.

Riston was several inches shorter than the average the engineers constructed the ship for, and ze still felt claustrophobic in this crawl space.

They were inside a passage on the outer edge of the ship, the one shoved between the dual walls of the hull, and Riston hated it. Tink never seemed bothered by these areas of the ship, the ones usually only accessed in emergencies, and today was the same as always. The petite girl blithely moved with the grace and unconcern of one born to space. Not Riston. Ze hated this section. The conduit’s walls felt thin, like they were made of foil instead of true metal. Riston jerked uncomfortably every time ze brushed the cold metal. Even knowing the surface was stronger than it seemed, ze still felt like this whole column could break and send them both out into the black if ze hit the panels too hard. Ze gritted his teeth and kept climbing despite the discomfort traveling down zir spine like a trickle of ice water. They couldn’t leave until the work was done. The discomfort and inaccessibility of this section were exactly why the group had voted it a likely spot for the ship’s new resident ghost to use as a thoroughfare. Tink’s sensors had to be installed at precise points along this whole corridor. Thankfully, they only had a couple more to go before they could move on. Riston would be plenty pleased to be in pretty much any other area of the ship.

“Why do you think they fixed the power glitch?” Tink asked as she installed a heat triggered sensor on one wall.

“What are you talking about?”

“The thief or the stowaway.” She stopped working and glanced back at Riston. “We need to make up a name for them. It’s confusing to keep calling them them.”

Riston hadn’t been stumbling over the same verbal confusion, but it took zem a moment to pinpoint why. “I think I’ve been calling them a ghost in my head without realizing it.”

“Seems a little unnecessarily creepy, but…” She considered it, shrugged, and went back to work. “I didn’t fix Novis’s power glitch, and neither did anyone on the crew. Ghost is the only option left, but I can’t figure out why someone in their position would bother.”

“Because if your goal is simply to destroy things and cut off communications, why go to the trouble of fixing anything.” Riston couldn’t believe ze hadn’t seen that logic flaw before. It seemed so obvious now. Had Cira asked herself this question already? Probably not if she was still blaming everything on Riston, Tink, and the others. It was excruciatingly tempting to message Cira and explain everything—including Tink’s question—but ze wouldn’t. First, they needed proof, not just stories and promises. Hopefully, they’d soon have data from Tink’s array of sensors. What ze wanted most, though, was a prisoner. Proof didn’t get more irrefutable than that.

“They’re not just cutting off comms.” Tink’s quiet words broke into Riston’s thoughts. “Pax Feris is gone.”

“And you think someone blew it up?” Riston shook zir head. “There was no debris.”

“With enough explosives, a few modifications, and the right power flow, it’s theoretically possible to vaporize a ship. There might not be any debris to find.”

“You know the weirdest things sometimes, Tinker,” Riston muttered, slightly disturbed by the image she’d presented.

Tink snorted. “Not weird at all if you knew who I grew up with.”

The bitterness and the weight of her words made Riston look at her. She was so young, but she’d clearly lived through just as much as ze had. Suddenly, although not for the first time, it seemed like an unforgivable crime that ze didn’t know anything about her past. “I’d be interested in hearing that story one day if we get through this. If you want to tell it.”

Her hands stopped and her eyes closed. “If we get through this, I just might do that.”

“It’s hard to believe anyone could vaporize Feris,” Riston said just to change the subject. Ze didn’t have a strong enough grasp of the physics to be sure of what ze was saying, but it seemed to make sense. “Pax Amitis maybe. That was a small, quick-run ship. Feris is the second biggest in the fleet. It’s practically the size of a station.”

After a moment of consideration, Tink conceded. “Not impossible, but you’re right. The probability of one person being able to do that to Feris is low. But…” She huffed, frustration clear in the sound. “But what else would Ghost need to fix the power for?”

“Help me catch them, and we can ask for ourselves.”

“If you think someone like Ghost will tell us anything, you’re fooling yourself,” Tink muttered.

“Am I?” Riston found zirself wondering again about who she really had grown up with.

She finished adjusting a setting on the sensor and then turned to zem, her expression far more serious than any eleven-cycle-old should be capable of. “If you got caught, is there anything someone could threaten you with that would convince you to turn Cira in?”

An insistent no was on zir lips. Ze held it back. There was nothing they could threaten zem with, but what if ze wasn’t the only one caught? If someone held a knife to Tink’s throat and demanded information in exchange for her life…or Greenie’s…or Treble’s…or Shadow’s.

Riston swallowed and tried not to let zir voice shake. “There are a few things, yes.”

Surprise widened her dark eyes, and then she seemed to catch the implication. She tilted her head, her short black hair swinging with the motion. “Fair. I’d give up a lot to save you, too.”

“Let’s hope neither of us has to test the theory.”

She nodded sharply. “But the point still stands. Someone willing to risk sneaking onto a Pax ship is loyal to something—an ideal or a person or I don’t know. Something. I’ve met people like that before. It’ll take a lot more than we have to break through that kind of allegiance.”

“Especially since our weak points are all on this ship, but theirs won’t be. If they’re smart, we won’t even be able to find their names let alone anything else.”

“Then here’s hoping they’re not as smart as they seem,” Tinker said dryly.

“I’ll drink to that.” In fact, right now Riston was wishing for at least a little of the alcohol the kitchen staff distilled. Instead, ze asked, “How much more time do you need here?”

“Almost done.” The sensor she was installing was hidden in an alcove under a bundle of exposed wires, and she spent another minute making minute adjustments and checking the outputs before they left.

Since this was Tink’s plan more than zirs, Riston let her direct them through the hidden byways of the ship. She directed, but ze led and then ze served as watchdog and assistant while she got lost in her work. Riston was the one left listening to the ship itself.

Only because ze was listening so closely did ze hear the murmur of conversation coming from an adjacent passage. Ze tensed and stilled. Fear and instinct screamed, “Abort! Retreat! Get Tinker out of here!”

“You’re lying.” The sharpness and the flat denial in the words stopped Riston. “No. Can’t be true. How’d you even hear that?”

Curiosity began to overcome both caution and instinct. Riston was dangerously short on current information, and there wasn’t anyone to reach out to for more. If lingering here could mean learning something important, ze had to know. Ze put a finger to zir lips and motioned for Tink to stay where she was.

“It’s true. I was with Halver when the message bounced back from Pax Portis,” the second voice returned, a tremor of anxiety running through their tone.

It made Riston’s heart stutter, and it decided zem. No way was ze leaving. Ze eased forward, searching for a way to see who the speakers were.

“You said three, though?” The first voice was slowly filling with fear. They sounded vaguely familiar, but without seeing a face, there was no way to be sure who was speaking. “In one day? How do you know? Did it come down from the PCGC?”

“No, Halver… He sent messages out to every ship in the fleet and waited until he got responses, or…” They paused and then sighed. Riston closed zir eyes. “Or not. Two other ships didn’t respond. I was working with him on the comm array when the alerts came back. He didn’t want me to tell anyone until we got official confirmation.”

“And now you’re telling me. This ship is shit at keeping secrets.” The joke fell flat, but the other person laughed anyway. Or imitated a laugh. Fear coiled in zir gut.

“You’d find out soon enough.” There wasn’t an ounce of pretended humor left in their voice. “One of the ships is Lissa’s. Pax Sanctis has gone silent.”

“Oh.” The word sounded like it had been pushed out by a physical blow. “And the third?”

“Dignis.”

Riston scanned zir memories, trying to pull up the random moments when Cira had mentioned her broad extended family. Didn’t she have a cousin of some sort on Pax Dignis? No, that was the ship Meida’s brother, Tanshu Dalil, was captain of. It sometimes seemed as though she had family everywhere within the PSSC. They’d had plenty of time to spread—their ancestors were among the very first brought in to the newly chartered entity. They were both legion and legend within Pax society, according to what Riston had learned, and that was another layer of horror to these disappearances. It was like someone was taking Cira and Erryla’s family away piece by piece.

Now, if Tanshu was missing, the whole family must be a mess. Worse, this development made Riston more aware of how fast this was progressing. From two ships to five, all of them last docked in different sections of the occupied quadrant, in a matter of weeks? If stowaways, not deeply hidden viruses, were responsible for each breakdown, the implications were terrifying. And the reach of this plan was staggering.

“Why haven’t we heard an official announcement from Paxis?” the second voice demanded. “They can’t possibly think keeping this secret is feasible.”

“Not unless they’re going to cut off our communications themselves.” The first speaker sounded tired now, deeply and absolutely worn out. “Hopefully they’re just looking for confirmation first. Everything will fall apart if we can’t trust Paxis to tell us where the danger is.”

“Everywhere,” the second speaker said. “Everyone else in the quadrant has been fighting and dying while we stayed safe in our white ships and our untouchable station. Maybe we’re finally paying the price for separating ourselves from the rest of humanity.”

“‘Isolation breeds fear, resentment, and the kind of abiding hatred not even centuries can excise,’” the first said, something about the tone of their voice making Riston think they were quoting something.

The second speaker laughed harshly. “You’re shit at comfort.”

“I never claimed otherwise.”

Under the continuing murmur of their conversation, Riston heard the soft thud of footsteps against the grated metal floor as the pair began moving. Thankfully, it seemed like they were moving away from where Riston and Tinker were hiding. The sound of their passage faded completely in seconds, but Riston motioned for Tink to stay where she was and put zir finger over zir lips when she opened her mouth to speak.

The threat hunted the entire Pax fleet, chasing them like a plague of vicious ghosts. It didn’t seem like anything or anyone could stop the onslaught bearing down on them all. Looking at the situation from a distance, Riston almost laughed at zirself. What exactly did ze think ze could do here?

Three more silent ships. Three in one day when the previous ships had been cut off one by one. If it hadn’t felt like there was a countdown running before, it did now. Somewhere, someone sat waiting for updates and watching on a screen—or on many—and sending out commands. They were working a plan and following a timeline, and all of it was aiming for something.

There was one feeling that intrinsically linked the worst moments of zir life: helplessness. As Ladadhi was destroyed by missiles and fire, as the new home ze was supposed to live in vanished in a slew of clerical errors, as ze watched the first people ze’d trusted on Datax board a ship and leave zem behind, there had been a storm of emotion in zir chest that clouded zir head and made it difficult to think. What had fueled all of it, though, like oxygen feeding a fire, was the agony of helplessness weighing zem down. Ze’d had no choices, not even bad ones, so all ze’d been able to do was hold on as zir life accelerated.

Ze felt that now, except it was worse than ever before. Ze’d never been responsible for protecting anyone else in the past. It had just been zem. Not so now. It made the sensation of crawling zir way up a landslide and losing ground every second scarier than ever.

“What do we do now?” Tink’s voice tremored, fear or uncertainty shaking each word.

Riston clenched zir hands and turned away from the passage where the crewmembers had been, their conversation repeating inside zir head. Although there was so much ze wanted to be able to do, there was only one action they could take now. “Work faster.”