The Void Princess 6: Past and Present

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I lay back on my bed, held firmly to the mattress by Laika’s acceleration, and run numbers.

Laika’s small and has a fairly large fuel reserve and oversized solar wings. He has a great capacity for acceleration, and it using it all now, limited by concern for my physical health, not his own capacity. This is the same limit a rescue dragon would hit, so a rescue dragon can probably match Laika’s acceleration and not risk much more than that. Some error in the necessary deceleration and paths (the rescue would have to come to a stop at Carabine whereas we’re entering a major shipping lane and can hold speed), so technically a rescue dragon would make the journey a little bit slower, but might save time by already being in the lane… let’s simplify and assume equal time.

Two days to the shipping lane. Two days until we have a realistic chance of running into hailing distance of other dragons. Speed of transmission, speed of light, to get the message passed to emergency services… negligible, that’s a matter of minutes. Two days for us to get the message there if we run into somebody immediately; three days to get into range of Pegasus’ soul if we don’t. Laika doesn’t have long-range transmission capabilities.

Then, emergency services – assuming they can get together and head out within a negligible amount of time, their response depends on where they are. If we run into someone capable of rescue in the lane itself, straight away? Two days back out. If they have to send from Pegasus? Five.

Between four and eight days to rescue Carabine and his crew. And they have three days of food.

Doable. If they’re rationing. If nobody is particularly weak or sick. Being in no gravity for extended periods of time is as bad as being in 1g, and in no gravity, on restricted food and water, in crowded conditions, all those harmless little pathogens that people carry everywhere do have a chance of becoming not so harmless. Four days is probably fine, although that also depends on how long they’ve been there already. Eight, with so little food? Not ideal.

I once heard that halfkind biology is highly adaptable to singular, stable gravities and their organs don’t require the same kind of variations as ours. That in adapting humanity to be able to tolerate such variation in atmospheric pressures and acceleration, we lost some tolerances that they have, which is why they can live on-planet their whole lives with no apparent discomfort. Carabine’s crew might be the only people in colonised space who have cause to actually envy the halfkind.

I hope the journey is four days. I hope I didn’t just abandon those people to die in space.

As soon as we hit the shipping lane, I start spending all my time in the chair, eyes glued to the screens, scanning for other dragons in range.

Staring at the screens will not make others appear, Laika chides me.

Like you’re not paying more attention to your scans than navigation? I retort.

I navigate well, Laika insists, just as a mistimed thrust jerks me sideways in my seat. That does not count.

The long, lonely journey has given us time to start developing a pidgin. I’m not used to so much time spent on the company of just one other mind – almost no one is. Who takes inter-city journeys without other crew or passengers? Single-occupancy dragons are for short distance trips, patrols or labour withing small communities, not jaunting off through the void like this. Laika shouldn’t be out here like this.

It’s not the horrifying isolation of an EMP shutdown – Laika’s mind is there and solid and real, the whole way – but it’s certainly a lot more quiet than I’m used to. A lot more space to think. More freedom for thoughts and feelings, with only one other mind to worry about. Freedom to think about ten people dying in space.

Or other things. Laika.

?

This secret that you’re going to show me. What can I expect there?

Minerals.

Minerals. Okay. Not, when I think about it, an entirely unexpected answer. Laika’s scientific equipment, small size and stated interest in asteroids suggests that he might be some sort of geologist. Probably analysing something illegal, given the anti-custody measures. I’ve had a chance to look over his blueprints more and, while I still don’t understand most of them, I’m dead certain that there’s empty space in several of his tail segments not accounted for – secret storage, possibly. Smuggling? Illegal mining operations?

Whatever it is, I hope I can transition him into some other field of work. I don’t want to be a miner. I don’t think it’s a good career move to become a smuggler.

We’re a half a day into the shipping lane before we’re able to pass on Carabine’s distress signal to someone within range of someone else who has long-range transmission. They hustle a response that’s another half-day down the lane. Five and a half day’s response for Carabine on 3 days’ food. Not great. But doable.

Pegasus is a sight to behold. It looks exactly like the pictures. Being on the fuzzy conceptual border where the ‘inner’ cities start to become ‘outer’ cities, Pegasus’ main economy is outfitting travellers for the far longer, far less certain journeys between the far less well equipped and less regulated cities further out from the planet. The further we head toward the frontier, the longer the distances and less certain the destinations will become, and it’s Pegasus where we’ll need to equip ourselves for that journey.

I’m a frontier girl, but not this frontier. My usual territory is away from the sun, not toward it. Pegasus is new territory for me, and its sharp contrast to the average city is obvious even at a distance. Most cities are human-focused, but Pegasus is clearly for dragons.

The actual city is hard to see, a tiny ball of hazy atmospheric shielding in the centre of massive scaffolds that are five or six times higher than the entirety of Minotaur. The strictures are mostly outside of the shielding, in vacuum, a mass of metal spikes and thorns in the void. And everywhere, circling around it, perching on it, climbing or clinging to or launching from the scaffolds – dragons.

I’ve never seen so many dragons in one place. All kinds of dragons. Mostly large transport dragons, of course, and a handful of patrol and guard dragons. A few specialised mechanics and even a couple of private short-range dragons barely bigger than Laika. I strap in for acceleration changes while Laika queries Pegasus and receives a docking route. With a couple of short thrusts of the mostly depleted fuel (this venture is going to drain my bank account dry on fuel alone), he heads for a bare outcropping of iron.

Better landing, he says, sending me a general feeling of approval at the arrangements. No air.

You can fly in air, I point out, flashing him his own glider wing schematics.

With a flash of dismissiveness, he sends me a short video recording (I keep forgetting he can do that) of himself coming down on a building in Minotaur, in front of me, the building shaking and cracking under his heavy landing. Bad.

You were a bit clumsy, I concede. A lot was going on.

Air is clumsy, he insists. Wrong temperature, wrong density, wrong movement. Hard to see.

I almost dismiss that as a young brat making excuses, but no. There’s something else here. Your glider equipment is engineered for different air?

Different air, yes; better air.

What do you mean ‘hard to see’? Your camera feeds show up fine.

Another flash of dismissal. For human eyes. Blocks better eyes.

Air does interfere with some equipment better attuned to vacuum, but in a discussion of atmospheres themselves, I get the sense that Laika isn’t talking about vacuum. What sort of atmosphere were you built for, if not a city atmosphere?

Better atmosphere. He sends me the mental equivalent of a sort of dismissive head toss, and the camera feeds all jerk as he does, indeed, dismissively toss his head.

You know, for someone who’s dragging me all through colonised space to give me information, you’re really, really bad at giving information.

Show you, he promises. The tone has the distinct sense of ‘show you later’. It has the sense of the way Laika talks about his ‘secret’. We understand each other pretty well now; it’s not a miscommunication issue. There are some things he just doesn’t talk about. One more in the ‘illegal activity’ evidence column – might be some protocols in there outright forbidding him from sharing information, and his workaround is to drag me in to see it myself. That’s some real ‘child playing I’m-not-touching-you’ logic.

Well. If it works, it works.

Laika grabs at the scaffolding and pulls his way along towards a central tower connecting it to the city below, a relatively easy manoeuvre in zero G. There’s a large chamber, wider than most small dragons, against the tower; the door to the chamber opens to admit us and I realise, as the external air pressure rises, that it’s an airlock. A mechanism by which I can enter the city without putting on a space suit and Laika doesn’t have to enter a gravity well.

Within the tower I am treated to a reasonably long wait and then the longest and most disorienting elevator ride of my life. Part of the disorientation is the influx of new minds, dragon and human and of course Pegasus himself, after so long with Laika and occasional flashes of others on Laika’s transmission equipment in the shipping lane. But most of it is that I’ve never taken an elevator into a gravity well from Zero G before.

The trip down takes hours, and the elevator is equipped accordingly, more like a mobile lounge than anything. Not a large one – weight is money, when you’re moving it up and down all day – but there’s a place for the fifteen or so elevator patrons to sit, and a large television showing some random drama that Ilya would probably love, and a vending machine for drinks served in little self-contained pouches with spill-free straws that won’t make a mess in all this stopping and starting in slowly increasing gravity. I spend the ride hooked into the Truesoul via Pegasus, responding to messages from family and a couple of frontier friends from whom I’m now physically further than I’ve ever been, checking out what’s latest on Pegasus (not much, or at least not much interesting to anyone who isn’t an engineer), and skimming for the best prices on the equipment I need.

Because I absolutely am going to buy myself decent safety equipment here. Not bowing to Cyclops’ inflated prices was a gamble, but I am not going out onto the frontier without a properly fitted space suit and good EMP shielding. Fortunately, there are plenty of good engineers and sellers here – that’s what this city does.

Getting into the city itself, the population hits me like a sharp velocity change. Sometimes, drastic and sudden population changes can be overwhelming to the soul, and I’d been too distracted over the Carabine crew to brace properly for it, so I half-stumble out of the elevator as I reach to close off my soul to general direct contact, connecting only through Pegasus. My isolation with Laika had had me getting lazy, laying myself bare and open with no intrusion, and the population of the elevator hadn’t been enough to bruise me up, but a city was another matter. I close myself up tight for now; I can acclimatise to the city later.

If it’s just going to be me and Laika bouncing from city to city for a year or more, I’m going to be wildly swinging between isolation and crowds the whole way. I hope this doesn’t have any long-term psychological effects.

Through Pegasus, I book myself into a hotel for a couple of days, skim for some casual data manipulation work to lighten the load that this trip will take on my wallet, and don’t find much. No matter; there’s plenty of casual work on the frontier. After a quick night’s sleep in somewhere that isn’t the universe’s most cramped dragon interior, I set out to buy what I need at a shop that I decided on by the highly sophisticated method of ‘looking at what is closest to the hotel’.

It’s a little storefront on a cramped street. The sounds of an engineering workshop waft in from somewhere very close by, which is always a good sign. The storefront itself has a couple of demo models of suits, but most of the displays are digital, saving space.

Behind the counter is a young girl, maybe five years old. Bright red hair cascades down her shoulders; she stares at me with wide green eyes over very plump freckled cheeks. I stare back, my breath catching in my throat. She’s just a child, but she looks so, so much like Tascia. What is it with my past haunting me lately?

“Dad!” the girl yells. “Customer!”

A shouted voice, a familiar voice, comes from some backroom. “Shana, are you alone out front again? I told you to – ” The speaker cuts off as she opens the door into the shop. She stares at me, mouth open. I feel a soul probing mine and I drop my walls a little, enough to touch back. It’s warm, familiar, settling into an old, old groove of memory.

“Hi, Tash,” I say, trying not to sound surprised. I don’t think I succeed.

“Shana, go find your mother.” Tascia steps aside to let the girl scurry past her, then walks into the shop proper. She looks the same, mostly. A fair bit older. Pregnant. Hair tied back in a safety wrap, grease smeared on the side of her face; she’d probably been working.

“So,” I say. “This is awkward.”

Amusement flashes across her soul, breaking for a moment through her own awkwardness. “Don’t usually see you this close to the sun.”

I shrug. “I’m trying something new.” My eyes land on her swollen belly. “As are you, it seems. You’re that girl’s father?”

“Yeah.”

“You named her after me?”

She shrugs. “It’s a good name. You don’t get dibs on it. My wife gets to name this one, though. I think she’s going to go longer and more flowery.”

“How many kids?”

“This is the second.”

“Your first pregnancy?”

“Yeah.” She grimaces. “Don’t believe all the happy flowery bullshit in the ads for maternity products. It’s hell on the body.”

I chuckle. “That’s what my mum always said. Ilya would never have been born if – ”

“If your dad didn’t agree to carry the second one. I know. Your mother’s warning weren’t wrong.”

“And yet you decided to become a mum anyway.”

She shrugs. “You know I was going to eventually. What’re you here for?”

“Safety gear. Everything from the space suit up.”

“You’re throwing out all your old stuff at once?”

“I don’t have most of my old stuff on me. It’s complicated. Don’t ask.”

“It can’t be that complicated. It’s you, so you’re off chasing a rogue dragon that’s likely to get you killed.”

“Something like that.”

Tascia sighs. “I’ll need your current measurements for the suit. I can’t imagine you’re exactly the same size as when we parted.” She looks meaningfully down at her belly. “I’m not.”

I grin and send her my current measurements. She quotes me an absurd price; I talk her down, but not as much as I really should. I transfer the funds; she arranges delivery to Laika. We stand there and look at each other awkwardly for a bit.

“Your dragon’s docking info says you only just docked today and you’re already replacing your equipment,” Tascia says, “so I guess you’re not staying long?”

“No. Sorry.”

“When will you be back?”

“Not for a while.” I do my best to calculate the journey time; an impossible task with the information I have. The engineers think Laika was out for at least a year, and he didn’t need to worry about stopping in cities for food and soforth, so… a year and a half? Another year and a half back? Probably. “A long while. Look, Tash… I’m sorry.”

Her eyebrows shoot up in that inquisitive sort of way she has. “Whatever for?”

“Y’know.” I shrug. “For not being the kind of person you needed. You gave me so many chances to change, and I just…”

“I didn’t change for you, either. I acted like it was your fault, and that wasn’t fair. We were both too stubborn to become the person the other one wanted us to be.”

“I still love you, I think,” I confess.

The eyebrows shoot higher. “Not only me, I hope.”

“No. Not only you.”

“Well, I don’t love only you any more, either.”

“Good. That’s good.” I put a hand on her shoulder. Take it off again. “We should go out for drinks when I’m back in Pegasus. You won’t be pregnant any more then.”

“I look forward to it.”

And then I leave.

I know we don’t mean the same thing, about loving other people. Tascia has a wife, children, probably married into a big loving family. I have… my birth family, a handful of associates on the other end of colonised space, and my abductor who I agreed to stay with to save his live from law enforcement. Hardly the same thing.

But it’s what we both wanted, isn’t it? She wanted stability, a homebody of a partner that I never wanted to be, a settled life. I wanted a small circle, movement, a transitory life where she wasn’t willing to follow. And we both have what we wanted. It doesn’t have to be equal.

So.

I order dinner to my hotel room, and I’m halfway through it when the notice comes through from the deep space rescue vehicle (who has a proper long-distance radio, unlike Laika): Carabine’s crew is en route to Pegasus, eight survivors including the dragon. Two deaths. That’s… not too bad, I think. That’s better than I would’ve gotten messing around trying to repair stuff like Laika wanted, right? I did make the right decision, right?

I guess there’s no way to ever really know.

And the timeline. A long time, I’d told Tascia, without really knowing how long. But now that I think about it, the numbers don’t really add up. A year and a half is a totally blind guess, and yes, it can take that long to get out to the edge of colonised space, having to hop between cities for supplies. It can take longer, if one isn’t careful about one’s rout. A year or longer is also not an unreasonable length of time for a feral dragon to bounce around space. But… to be lost somewhere out on the frontier, and to randomly make his way inward until he ends up at Minotaur, right in the middle of civilisation? Without encountering any other dragons or cities on the way? No. That’s a tiny target in a vast universe. Laika knew where he was going. He came to Minotaur, to Lyllania’s home city, on purpose. Probably avoiding everyone on the way not intentionally, but because he’d taken a direct route, not moved between cities as any dragon with a living princess would have to, and thus simply not been in any of the major shipping lanes.

Meaning he would’ve travelled in single line. Straight or curved, depending on how good his information on Minotaur’s precise location and orbit was, but one line, without needing to regularly decelerate to match city velocities, without needing to be mindful of human force tolerances in acceleration. I crunch some basic numbers based on what I know of Laika’s capabilities and the fuel reserves he reached Minotaur with (not much fuel beyond emergency thrust), and the numbers do not make sense. Laika can get very fast if he wants to. With acceleration early in the journey, deceleration as he got close to minotaur… there’s nowhere in colonised space that it should take him that long to arrive from.

Okay, well, what if he was almost out of fuel when Lyllania died? I recalculate using acceleration from his solar wings only. It’s still too far. Well, what if he’s got some kind of hard lock on acceleration so that he can only go at human-tolerable speeds even with Lyllania dead? That would make sense. Dragons don’t generally fly too far without a princess. I run the numbers again. Nope. He just… should not take that long to get anywhere.

That all depends on the orbits, of course. The spread of colonised space is always dependent on the orbits. Things closer to the sun orbit faster than things further out, so the cities spread out and come together again over time; there are periods of time where two cities might be on opposite sides of the sun. But we’re all close enough to the Earth’s orbit that the spread is pretty slow. It’s been three years since the inner cities would’ve been a year away at a realistic speed for Laika. And if he was out there for three years… no.

No, there’s only one real answer; our destination is much further away than I’d thought. There are plenty of small cities that are off the beaten path, and some of them don’t show up on maps. Laika must have come from a ‘dark’ city trailing far, far back (or forward) of others on its orbital path, or possibly one on an entirely different orbital plane. Meaning very meager trade, very rare resupply. A very dangerous and very lonely place to live. For no reason! There’s no reason to build a city so far away from everything else!

Unless the point is the isolation. Unless it was built specifically to be secret. A secret that my little dragon, with all of his custom systems and hidden compartments and authority-slipping modifications, can’t even tell me about directly when I ask.

Oh, Laika. What are you dragging me into?

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