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Warp Riders – Chapter 15

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The Captain was nearly at the top of the ridge. Climbing was much harder than she remembered; it was not helped by the skin of sandy soil, sliding around on top of the stonework walls and plazas that seemed to make up the skeleton of this structure.

She’d taken a few more samples, and as she pulled herself up onto the narrow cusp of the ridge at the top, she pulled out the scanning equipment and took a moment to calibrate it before really taking in the vista herself.

It was one hell of a vista.

Looking back towards camp, she could see the shine of the lake in the golden glow of the planet; she could see a distant shore of cinnamon-dusted cliffs with bluegreen trees; she could see, right at the edge of her vision, a large bank of clouds, the first she’d seen at all.

Looking away from camp, the view stretched and stretched and barely changed; just rolling undulations of tree-covered hills, not even another ridge in sight. In the distance she thought she caught another hint of clouds, but she couldn’t be sure. The scanner would pick it up.

While it clicked and beeped and did its thing, she adjusted her perch, and looked down the far side of the ridge. Going down there would put her too far from camp to get back for dinner, and it wasn’t that she was curious, of course, this was all a foolish quest, but there was what looked to be an opening in the side of the ridge.

The Engineer had asked her to get underground if possible. And if the Captain could do that as part of this excursion, then everyone could stay focused at camp until the ship was void-worthy again.

It was clearly the practical choice.

So she slid down the far side of the ridge, carefully, slowing herself on outcroppings of the stonework ruins, until she was beside the hole she’d seen.

It was bigger than she’d been able to tell from above; easy enough to slide through.

Her headlamp showed her similar terrain inside as out; slopes of sand laid over stone blocks. Easy enough.

The first stage, while the light of the sky still crept in and illuminated the cavern, was straightforward. The rocks were a little more slippery, but it wasn’t a problem.

As the Captain made her way deeper into what was turning out to be a deep crevice within the ridge, and the skyglow faded away behind her, things started to feel damp. The stonework was covered by a thinner and thinner layer of sandy soil, and a chill set in.

Carefully, she reached the end of the tunnel and felt a cool breeze on her face; she’d reached a huge cave. Below, the slope she’d been making her way down sharpened quickly into a drop, and the dust and grit she disturbed rattled down until finally it splashed into hidden water.

The Captain got out the scanner again, planning to do one or two more scans down here and then head back up; the rest of this cave was well beyond solo climbing, she was certain.

She perched the device on one knee and initiated it. As before, it whirred as it extended antennae.

But she had misjudged how long those spinning antennae were, and it smacked her on the nose as it revved up, which made her jump, which made it wobble on her knee, which made her try and lift her leg to steady it, which unbalanced her, which caused her to throw her hands behind which was stonework too slick to be grabbed properly. Which was why she fell.

It was a rough fall, sliding down first on her ass and then, unfortunately, rolling sideways down the sharper slope. Stonework pummeled her as she braced her arms around her face and pulled her legs up into a ball – and then suddenly she was free falling through the clammy air.

She couldn’t help herself – the darkness brought out the wrong instincts, and she extended arms and legs in desperate need to stop her fall. Which meant that she was all the wrong shape when she hit the water, and the shock of it pushed the air from her lungs.

When she found the surface, it was with hacking gasps and loud splashes. She could feel her whole body stinging from the impact, and her headlamp was on crooked, though mercifully still working. There was no shore to be found; the cave walls were vertical or worse at water level.

If she’d had her spacesuit, this would be no problem, but no, she’d gotten comfortable in mere fabric clothes, and she felt panic rising as she spun herself in circles, trying to find anywhere to climb out of the cold water, even just halfway.

And there! finally! a rocky island.

Swimming felt strangely awkward, but she made it to the isolated outcrop of stone blocks, and clumsily dragged herself up onto the small, uneven surface.

As the Captain lay on her back, breathing out the panic, she gently scanned herself for injury, flexing her fingers and toes and as she shifted her left leg, there it was, the lightning bolt of pain. She’d done something to her knee; something that made her yell aloud as she tried to put any weight on it. Even just sitting up and stretching the leg out was desperately painful, but she needed to see.

But for all it cost her to sit up, straighten her headlamp, and take a good look around, her reward was a bitter one. She was stranded, on one of a very few small stone islands, in a briny subterranean lake bordered by cliffs of stonework and sand.

Well, shit.

Warp Riders – Chapter 14

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Back at camp, the Stowaway lay in the planetglow, visibly relaxing, until the Navigatrix was out of earshot. She was getting suspicious, and they thought they might know why, but there was nothing to be done about it. Things were in motion and that was that.

The Engineer had put together an audio translation device that took over the entirety of the ship’s computer. She wanted them to try it sooner than later, because once they were back in there full time, the computer would be otherwise occupied. They hated to disappoint her.

They stood up and caught her eye; “We can try your machine now if you want.”

The Engineer’s face took on the troubled look of anyone hearing the Stowaway’s transformed voice, but she said “Would you like to try the device now? No one will bother us.”

While she tuned radio signals and plugged in wires, she babbled on about the system she’d set up, all the scientific principles she was working with, the codebreaking approaches the computer would run through… and she smiled at them, and said “I’m excited to learn your name!”

The Stowaway had never met another group that used names less, but they smiled at her as best they could. They had the sense that their facial expressions weren’t coming through clearly either, but it was worth a try.

Before this had all started, they’d been part of a small community in the permanently lit zone of a tidally locked planet. They had not, they could admit, been a particularly good kid, and it wasn’t really surprising that they had been kicked out so young. Family had to earn it.

And maybe it was silly to go through the twilight into the night communities without a convoy, but it wasn’t like they could have afforded to join one. The Stowaway didn’t pride themselves on much, but they were a consistently good shot. Good enough to get into trouble, at least.

And so maybe it had been inevitable that they would end up in the wrong part of some nightside town, in some rundown, abandoned neighbourhood, paranoid and twitchy, and shoot the wrong window out, and get the attention of the witches. They replayed it in their mind over and over.

Maybe this was indeed fated; but they’d made the trade, taken the job, tried to find a way to survive it. This was on them. They’d intentionally become the Stowaway and they were going to have to see this all through.

So when the Engineer held up a microphone that she had plugged into a huge array of switchboards and radio transmitters, they held it and calmly recited each step of their journey onto the ship, every trick they had used, each secret they had been given. And the lights blinked…

…and the ship’s engines revved up to support the computer, and they all turned and looked at it, half-immersed in high tide and rumbling and boiling the water around it, and the little lights kept blinking…

…and then finally it all wound down, the air went quiet, and the lights all turned off except for one red one.

The Engineer huffed and frowned and almost looked hurt by the result.

“This should have worked. This is the best audio cipher I’ve ever made – that I’ve ever seen.”

The Stowaway almost felt bad. They reached out and patted the Engineer’s hand.

“It’s not your fault. It’s just the Curse.”

The Engineer’s frown deepened at the untranslatable words that reached her ears, and she turned away, already pulling out wires and unscrewing covers.

Warp Riders – Chapter 13

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The Captain thought of herself as the most physically capable of the crew. She was undeniable The Muscle on gigs – hauling storage crates, busting open doors, throwing the odd punch when things came down to it. Hiking uneven terrain was almost a welcome challenge, honestly.

She certainly didn’t get out as much as she used to, back before the Orb. Nowhere to go, really, outside of time, except what place you brought with you. Maybe it was silly of her to have stuck so close to the campsite so far; moving her limbs was definitely doing her good.

The ruins were less visible away from the lake edge; the landscape had a soft undulation to it, each hill covered in swaying treelike plants. The ground underfoot was a crumbling cinnamon soil, soft and porous and held together by tiny vines that formed a mesh at the surface.

The plants’ leaves were stiff blunt spines, the blue of oxidized steel, and they rustled and rattled in the morning wind. Now and then, a stone ridge would appear, thrust up through the netted vines, too regular to be natural; but overall, it was a fairly pastoral planet.

The high ground she had in mind was a sharp ridge they had picked out from camp. It had looked somewhat artificial in shape in the Navigatrix’s scope, which intrigued the Engineer to no end. The hike there took over two hours, up and down, and it was extremely good for her.

What an infuriatingly simple truth: she needed to be doing things. Everything was simpler when there was something to do! She hadn’t thought about Lucy the whole time she’d been moving – what a joy, what a pleasure, what a relief.

Of course, then Lucy was at the center of her thoughts again. Lucy would have loved this, maybe. She had loved the scenic tourist resorts they used to relax at between gigs, when it was just the two of them and the Navigatrix. At least, she loved the beaches.

It was strange how sandy the soil stayed, even as she started to climb the ridge. Could sand make a ridge? Questions like that probably meant it was time to take a sample; and the Captain paused between a few larger … trees, was a good enough word for them, and knelt down.

The Engineer didn’t want immediate surface soil – she said they’d probably already contaminated it, simply being out in the breeze, so the Captain used the provided tools to dig down half the length of her arm. As she scooped the sand into the vial, she brushed against something – something hard, but smoother than the stone ruins. She did something very unscientific and scrambled around in the soil with her hands until she unearthed it; smooth, tinted a little darker than white, dry as a – well, it was a bone. A human bone.

Probably even less scientific was the noise she made when she realized she was holding a jawbone, and flung it away from herself.

“Augh, augh, no, no, augh -”

It rattled against the tree needles as it rolled down the slope of the ridge.

Well, there was no retrieving it now, what a tragedy.

After a thorough session of sanitizing her hands, the sampling equipment, and her face for good measure, she pulled the pack onto her shoulder and turned back towards the peak of the ridge. Nowhere to go but up, old girl.

Warp Riders – Chapter 12

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No one did anything so rude as to, say, sigh with relief as the Captain disappeared in the distance, but the Navigatrix caught the Engineer and the Bosun exchanging a meaningful look, and the Stowaway sat down and stretched back in a cat-like yawn that almost looked forced.

She had to ask. “She hasn’t been that bad, has she?”

The Engineer snorted as the Bosun raised an eyebrow.

“I’m happy to make her coffee and send her on her way, but yesterday she kept interrupting me, trying to tell me how to wash out the percolator. My percolator.”

The Stowaway was trying to suppress their smile.

“And!” said the Engineer, “AND she started taking my short range radios apart without me while I was eating lunch. She made me explain to her everything I was doing for the whole afternoon.” She huffed. “Set me back by days.”

“She not bothering you?” asked the Bosun, as the Stowaway gave up and started giggling at the Engineer’s expression.

The Navigatrix tilted her head. “Well, she’s certainly around more. I don’t mind her taking an interest in my work.”

“Looked more like nagging to me.”

“Doesn’t get under my skin, I guess. Maybe you could find more joy in sharing?”

The Engineer glowered at her. “I’m happy to share, but she’s been miserable since we got here and you know it.”

“No good at relaxing, I’d say.” The Bosun gestured. “This kid, now, they get it.”

The Stowaway had stretched out, hands under their head, eyes closed, clearly enjoying the breeze.

The Navigatrix honestly thought the pose looked forced, but far be it from her to nag anyone. There were much better ways to spend the day.

Warp Riders – Chapter 11

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The next planetrise, she dragged herself out of her tent and drank half the Bosun’s first pot of coffee; the Engineer talked at her for what felt like an hour about scanners and photogrammetry and sampling methods; the Navigatrix handed her a compass-like device she’d built; the Stowaway packed her both a dehydrated lunch and dinner, and strapped a few bottles of water together for easier carrying.

The Captain had a growing suspicion that they’d all worked out this plan before the Engineer had even brought the data collection idea up with her.

It wasn’t a good feeling. That said, she figured it could join the fatigue headache, the stomach ache from the coffee, the lingering bad mood from a sleepless night being angry, and the constant piece of gravel in her boot in the competition for “why is the Captain Angry Today.”

And off she stomped, heading for high ground to do a long distance scan first, and then with explicit instructions to get underground if possible and see how far down into the soil the artificial structures went.

Warp Riders – Chapter 10

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She tossed and turned in her tent later, trying to get some sleep, unnerved by the casual tone everyone had about being stranded here. Didn’t they want to get back through the warp? Escape time again? They’d had plans, schemes, jobs to do; important jobs, she thought.

When they had been flying outside time, everyone had been so… professional. The Engineer kept the ship’s systems running; the Bosun kept things comfortable; the Navigatrix kept track of where and when they were; and the Captain stood at the helm interface, making decisions.

And Lucy had – Lucy’s job had been – the Captain’s mind stuttered for a moment, like missing a step on a stair.

…Lucy had done a little of everything, she remembered. Lucy filled in all the gaps, covered breaks, watched the prox sensors, kept point from the ship on jobs…

The Captain huffed in her camp roll, trying to block out the tide of emotions that hit her as she remembered them running back to the ship, proud of their haul, ready to take off, only to discover Lucy gone. A quick “goodbye, good luck” left flashing on the helm screen.

It was so angering, such a betrayal, so pointless – they lived outside of time! They were immortal! They could pull off heists and runs and jobs no one else had ever dreamed of! The Captain could not understand why someone would walk away from that life.

It still stung, she had to admit. It still made her angry. She was lying in a tent on a moon with her ship half drowned and her crew going around telling her what to do, but she all she could really care about was how mad she was at Lucy.

What was wrong with her?

Warp Riders – Chapter 9

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They’d crashed on a very accommodating moon, it turned out. The weather was clear, the temperature mild, the air breathable, the flora and fauna both edible and minimally aggressive.

The only discomforting element was the ruins.

They were so well incorporated into the landscape in some places, it was almost hard to notice them. All that was left was stone and metal, but enough of it was there to intrigue the Engineer.

“Just one day trip!”

She and the Captain were arguing while fishing in the briny lake. There was a stone plaza – or maybe a stone roof – that protruded out into the deeper part of high tide and made for good hunting; the construction of it was tantalizingly mysterious.

“We need you focused on getting us out of here, not settling in.” The Captain sighed and started pulling her line back in. “I need you to make the ship livable enough we can get inside and repair it.”

“I just need to collect some data; I can examine it after we leave.”
“No!”

Around the camp stove at dinner, the Captain found few allies.

“They’re creepy,” said the Bosun. “Ruins don’t work like this, so evenly spread out. I say send her out for a day.”

“Don’t you want to get out of here? We need the ship working!”

The Navigatrix raised a hand –

“I agree, we can’t ignore how strange this place is. But if you can’t spare the Engineer, Captain, you could send someone working on less urgent things?”

“Everything is urgent right now! Are you angling for a day off too?”

The Navigatrix gave the Captain a withering look.

“Supervising is not an urgent role, Captain. Why not go take a walk tomorrow.”

The worst part was, everyone else agreed.

Warp Riders – Chapter 8

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The Navigatrix found camp life surprisingly nice. She’d spent most of her life in flight; two or three more days and this would be the longest she’d been terrestrial since a brief stint in her teens.

She loved watching the sunset as they woke up, seeing the green rays turn blue and slide below the horizon; feeling the warmth of the planet glow on her back as the lake rushed in to high tide. There was faunal noise here, random and textural and sometimes quite annoying.

The wind was incredible, pushed around predictably by the solar cycle, but always a little surprising as it pulled at her hair and tunic like a living thing. So different from the forced air of any ship she’d been on. Sometimes if she turned her head just right, it hummed to her.

But none of it drowned out the silence she felt outside the Orb.

The crash had happened when she was out, arguing with the Captain about the computer; no one had been on the bridge at all, and they ended up doing the landing from the emergency controls in the back of the ship instead of trying to rush through all the tunnels and ladders.

And it was good they did, because the bridge took a serious hit upon impact, crumpling from the side in such a way that the sealed doors folded into locked origami steel structures. The Captain’s attempts to get into it while things were still hot had nearly taken her arm off.

So the Orb was, for the moment, locked up, away from the Navigatrix, and she felt like she’d lost a limb – or maybe more accurately, a sense.

Now time was all around her and she couldn’t feel it, couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear it at all, and oh, how she missed it.

Warp Riders – Chapter 7

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The Orb had come to them about a year after they’d officially started running gigs together – the Captain, the Navigatrix, the Engineer, the Bosun, and Lucy. At that stage, they’d pulled off a few good tricks for some high rollers, and they’d gotten cocky.

Mostly clients communicated via parcel coordinates – they’d send galactic positioning system coordinates, and the Nav’d find them on the map, and Lucy’d pilot the flight, and they’d all have a good nap until the ship dinged and they’d haul in a tiny little box with instructions.

They’d drop off scores and pick up payments the same way; they only went planet-side for the runs themselves, and the occasional shopping trip.

So it wasn’t unusual to pick up a faint signal full of numbers and letters; and it wasn’t particularly hard for the Engineer to decode.

It was, notably, a pretty remote corner to go fishing for a tiny box in, but the Captain’d told them that was how the best clients worked; they were too rich and powerful to know the difference between reasonable requests and inconvenient ones. So off they went.

But it wasn’t a box at the coordinates; it was a small, very small, very dark, very hard to find chunk of an asteroid. Lucy saw it first, noticed its dust trail on the scanner. They’d pulled it in, and the first person to pick it up had been the Navigatrix – and that was when things got weird.

First, she froze. For a full minute, no one could get her attention or pull the rock from her hands.

Then, the rock exploded, sending dust across the common room, larger fragments rattling against the ceiling, the floor, the lockers… when they blinked the dust away enough to see, the Navigatrix had pulled whatever was still in her hands right up to her face, and she humming the way she did when charting a drop, but faster, higher, frantically.

When she finally lowered them, she revealed the Orb.

They’d passed it around; the strange sphere of gas that simply… held itself together. It had almost no weight, but it also had no momentum – they could gently push it from hand to hand and it would simply stop midair if they disengaged.

The Captain had taken it first, eyes wide with fear even after the Navigatrix had woken up and laughed with delight. The Captain stared at it for a minute or two, then scoffed at it with some relief.

Next it went to the Engineer, who mostly talked about its mass and energy and glow.

She hadn’t bothered staring into it particularly; she just pushed it around until she got bored, and then gently shoved it over to the Bosun.

The Bosun cast a skeptical eye across it, shook her head, and handed the Orb, though they didn’t know it was the Orb then, to Lucy.

Lucy smiled, like it was all a fun game, as she caught the Orb and pulled it towards her face; but she grew deadly serious as she squinted into it. There was a hint of awe on her face when she locked eyes with the Navigatrix.

“Is this thing – is this a chart?”

The Navigatrix grinned like a mischievous child.

“If I’m right, Lucy, this thing is a chart of time.”

It took a few creative modifications to the ship, but within a month they were ready for their first trip outside of time. The Captain had brainstormed a list of new possible gigs to try if this thing really worked, and she kept them all on task.

First, they went into warp – as usual – but then came the new part: they went all the way through, out the other side of light speed. Suddenly, they weren’t going impossible fast – they were simply floating motionless in a churning, smearing maelstrom of stars.

Then the Navigatrix sat down at the helm and raised the Orb to her eye level. She shoved all ten fingers into its gaseous form and began to stretch it, pulling it wider, taller, deeper, until it became a huge bubble that she was completely hidden within.

Her voice was muffled as she hummed her busy-thinking hum, and the Orb started to churn in sync with the lights outside the ship — and then the ship began to move, driven by the Navigatrix from deep within the Orb.

And once she proved they could move in and out of time at will, the Captain sent word out that they had new, longer term capabilities, and the real fun began.

The Navigatrix started spending more and more time inside the Orb, coming out to locate more mundane locations on the usual computer, or to eat, or to sleep, but very rarely. She was the first one of them to realize that eating and sleeping had become … optional, essentially.

In fact, a lot of things felt optional after a while. The accounts they’d set up once while a century or two in the past were taking care of most of their material needs, and being outside of time really reduced those to almost nothing.

They still did client work, but more for the fun of it; maybe that was why the jobs they took got so much more dangerous.

Warp Riders – Chapter 6

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The Bosun watched her superior officers bicker while she brewed another pot of coffee over the open flame. She and the Engineer had made good time earlier, wading waist deep through the receding lakewater to maximize time on the ship, and she’d been able to secure a few treats.

Were they treats if they were usually just parts of everyday meals? Well, they’d had a week of breakfasts on shore by now with only rehydrated emergency rations, and real toast felt very special after that. Flame-toasted toast, even. Fancy.

The Bosun thought of herself as the ship’s mom, which was the only time she ever had any interest in parenting, thankyouverymuch. She liked doing the daily cleaning, keeping meals on schedule, nagging everyone into doing their laundry properly. It was the best job she’d ever had.

Ship life had been pretty new to her, but old dogs learned new tricks all the time, and if it was going to be camp life for a bit now, well, she wasn’t particularly worried. They’d get some basic food testing equipment off the ship soon and then this moon would be her oyster.

She handed the frozen loaf to the Stowaway, who deftly sawed it into thick slices with a mean looking knife that the Captain really wasn’t sure they should have access to. “That kid’s too good with it for my comfort,” she’d said. The Bosun found a lot of comfort in knife skills.

As soon as the bread started toasting properly on the stove, the smell gathered everyone together. The Engineer even emerged, clearly not having slept since the ship run, raw wires tucked into her braid. The Stowaway flipped a slice, revealing a golden crisp, and they all sighed.

Tomorrow night she thought she’d try and crack open the deep freeze. The whole storeroom was going to feel like a treasure trove, honestly, if the Engineer could find her blow torch and finally tear open the crumpled door.

She couldn’t stop thinking about all the leftover curry she’d packed in there; she wasn’t sure how old it was, but maybe being outside time meant that didn’t matter. The Bosun had found that thinking too much about the Orb and time and such was useless; she’d just check by smell.