The Void Princess 7: Here and Beyond

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The cities start to change out past Pegasus. Fafnir, Draugr, Brunnmigi. Each smaller than the last, each further away. Two week journeys turn to three weeks, a month. Two. Three months out to Fenrir, a tiny little ball of metal way out on the edge of colonised space. (This is another reason I don’t go home for holidays very often – getting anywhere from the frontier takes forever.) There’s nothing but darkness beyond Fenrir, no matter how much I fiddle with Laika’s telescopics, our next port too small, too far, to be visible.

Well, that’s not exactly fair; Laika hasn’t given me a precise location for our final destination, so it’s possible that I’m simply aiming incorrectly, something that’s very easy to do for a little city so far away. Also, we’re looking into the fucking sun. Not directly, but we are heading vaguely sunward. It’s always there.

We come into range of Fenrir’s soul, which is a little disconcerting. He doesn’t have direct access to the Truesoul right now (like Minotaur, some cities just don’t have a great connection to the rest), and his own soul is tiny. These frontier cities always feel so small until you get to know the people inside them.

If you mostly hang out in the larger cities in the middle of colonised space, you might not have noticed how cities are different to dragons. Dragons have their own minds independent of others; Laika would still be Laika if he were alone, although without human minds to calibrate his own against he would slowly lose coherence and go feral again. A dragon’s soul isn’t entirely stable, but it is complete, a thing in itself. Cities aren’t like that – a city can’t go feral because a city is a handful of written protocols and a hub for the souls interacting with it. A city is built from its population, human and dragon, and if everyone leaves, there’s nothing to go feral – just a shell, waiting.

Which means that a barely populated city feels, well, tiny, to someone who grew up in Minotaur. Even someone who’s been working in little places for over a decade. It’s a surprise again every time. But at least it’s not overwhelming, after so much time with just Laika.

There are no other dragons aloft as Laika exchanges docking instructions with Fenrir and engages his thrusters to nudge us toward the atmospheric shielding. There’s less than two thousand people in there. I could get to know every citizen personally if I wanted to, given time. It sounds more inviting than the alternative.

It’s a long trip through the black, this last one, isn’t it? I ask Laika.

Yes. There’s apprehension in his soul. Ten months.

Ten months?!

Ten months and nine days. Approximately.

I guess I should be relieved that he can give me precise travel information, now that there will be no more uncertainty of other traffic and city stops. But ten months. For fuck’s sake.

Stars, we’re both going to go feral out there.

You are human.

Humans go mad in isolation, too, you know.

You won’t be isolated, he points out, in a reasonable tone. You will have me.

I’ll have him. I always do. Laika drops under the shielding and unfolds his in-atmosphere wings, adjusting his legs to use thrusters again, but it’s not necessary. This little city has 0.2G, and we weigh basically nothing. A lot of the frontier cities are low-grav because they tend to have so much coming and going, what with mining operations, and little need to keep tourists happy with the accustomed high gravity of the inner cities. Laika drifts us down with the resistance of his wings alone, and stumbles a little on the landing. Clumsy in a city atmosphere. The wrong atmosphere, as he’s told me.

Laika, I say, ten months is a really, really long time to travel without other humans.

Secret, he says, in a ‘we have to’ sort of tone. He sounds worried. Upset. It’s no difficult to see why. He’s always been cagey about travel times, even when the times are relatively certain, and I don’t think it’s just whatever block prevents him from telling me about our destination. He didn’t want me to know about this long distance dash until I absolutely had to know. He knows what he’s asking me to do.

He knows that any sane Princess would say no.

There’s no practical reason for me to keep going on this journey. Ten months there, ten back, add time for doing whatever needs doing for this ‘secret’… it could easily be two years before I speak to anybody at all except Laika. For what? Vague curiosity? Laika’s not in danger over the abduction thing any more; law enforcement bought our story and approved our partnership ages back. Princesses and dragons change partnerships sometimes, if there’s a personality disconnect or if one wants a life that the other can’t follow them on. I can break off our partnership and pass Laika off to someone else out here. I can book a passage back towards the centre and put all of this behind me. And there’s absolutely nothing that Laika can do to stop me.

I climb out of the cabin and drop – well, drift – to the ground. I pat Laika’s nose, and consider, really consider, saying ‘no’ to him.

But when I touch his soul again, what I say is, we’re getting you to a mechanic before we go. We’re getting a proper long-range radio system installed. I don’t care how stupid the dish looks. I’m not going no-contact for two years, I’d go mad.

Secret, he protests.

I shake my head. I don’t care. What are you worried about, the message service triangulating our position? It’s this or nothing, Laika. We’re not getting trapped out there with no ability to talk to anyone at all. I’m not risking a Carabine situation, not several months’ travel off any shipping lane.

He flashes a grumbling, reluctant assent. There’s relief under there, too. Relief that I’m coming, I suppose.

Stars, I make some stupid fucking decisions with my life.

I’m not in a hurry to leave the last bastion of civilisation I expect to see for a couple of years, and neither, I think, is Laika, despite his usual antsiness to get this little quest over with. I quickly reacquaint myself with the best methods of drinking booze in low gravity without making a mess, learn who the best prostitutes within my meagre budget are (always a thriving industry in these sorts of places), and pick up some general labouring work to pay for said booze and prostitutes. And supplies. So, so many supplies. We can recycle water, but we have to carry about 2 years’ worth of food, fuel and generals out there, and Laika is tiny. Meaning we need cargo trailers; big containers chained together that Laika can push or pull along with us, which is more weight, which means more fuel. Which means another cargo trailer just for fuel. Proper long-haul dragons have internal storage for this kind of thing. Laika does not.

I get a decent spate of work AI soothing, acting as counsellor and troubleshooter to various persnickety AIs, which is basically dragon taming except your patient isn’t incoherent and raging and made of many, many kilograms of metal intent on flinging you off into space or killing you. I even pull in a couple of dragons who get lost and start to lose themselves at one point, which I’m not supposed to do now that I’m a Princess, but there’s no one else on hand to do it and only active dragon tamers care about those sorts of rules (which I’m not now, because Princess). I beat the Queen Magistrate in a combined drinking competition/dice game one night and win free berth for both Laika and myself until we leave, as well as two big metal boxes that a local welder can turn into viable cargo trailers for me, adding to my caravan, and her daughter is so impressed with my game that she gives me a discount next time I buy her services in bed.

It’s a pretty good city, all round.

Eventually, though, we do have to leave. I scrounge up twelve radiation-proofed cargo trailers and fill them with high calorie rations, fuel, materials and emergency replacement parts, including two backup water purification systems because dehydration is the most embarrassing way to die in space. I also include seven hundred little chocolates of various flavours, and seven hundred variously flavoured coffees. ‘Oh, Shana, such a waste of space and weight’ – no. This is an extremely long distance journey for just me and one dragon. If I don’t have a coffee and a little treat to look forward to every morning, I WILL go mad.

The placement of Laika’s long-distance transmission system is an issue of some consideration. The dish needs to be pointed pretty precisely for it to work. No problem, right? Just figure out which part of Laika will be facing the right direction on our straight-line journey and put the dish there.

Some problem. The problem is gravity.

Like most of our trips, Laika will be accelerating for half the journey, decelerating for the other half (Well, the acceleration will probably take longer because we’re primarily using solar sails and heading toward the sun, so maximum acceleration is slower, but the principle is the same.) The problem here is that I’m inside Laika the whole time and would really like the floor to remain the floor. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen dragons fly outside a gravity well, but that’s why they fly at that goofy-looking orientation, back-first when accelerating and feet-first when deceleration. If Laika flew the same as he walked or glided, head and shoulders forward and tail and hindquarters behind, I’d spent the next ten months walking on the back wall of my little shower cubicle with my bed halfway up a very, very tall wall. Which is not an ideal situation.

All this is to say that the part of Laika facing civilisation will change throughout the journey. Dragons with long-range transmission capabilities are usually built to accommodate this in some way, by using multiple dishes, or a dish with a lot of articulation, or most commonly, simply mounting the dish on the dragon’s head or tail. But Laika’s a tiny little guy. He can’t carry that kind of equipment on his head or tail without unbalancing other systems.

In the end, I make a call. I figure that constant communication will probably be more psychologically important at the end of the journey than the start, and I can use it as something to look forward to. As for the first half of the journey, well – so many uninterrupted months under high acceleration is really bad for me without some intermediate time in lower gravity for my organs to cycle fluids or do whatever little things they need to do outside of high gravity. So Laika’s flight plan includes one “zero G” day per fortnight, where we cease acceleration. At those times, I can get out and restock from the cargo trailer, and Laika can turn around and aim his transmission dish, giving me a chance to upload and download messages and data (very, very slowly).

One day per fortnight, in contact with civilisation. It’ll have to do. Velocity from acceleration is cumulative; small changes early on can have massive effects on travel time. Adding more zero G time means longer travel time, means more supplies, means more crates in the cargo trailer, means more weight, means lower acceleration and more fuel and even more travel time which means…

Small differences accumulate, is the point. Our current estimates are already shaky because they depend on estimated of how long it’ll take to shed weight from the cargo caravan. Laika’s not a cargo hauler; he’s tiny and speedy and the caravan weighs more than he does, so small wrong estimates can throw our results off severely. We can’t add more zero G days to the situation.

Once a fortnight. That’s what we can spare.

We can still hire a long hauler as a companion on this journey, I point out as we get our caravan up into space and linked up.

Secret, Laika reminds me.

Money can help people keep any secret. It would solve a lot of problems.

No. No one else. Just me and my Princess. Secret.

Yeah, yeah; I know. My stupid inconvenient dragon and his stupid inconvenient secrets.

I stay in contact with the Truesoul as long as I can as we head out. Once we’re out of range, it’s goodbye to real communication, soul-to-soul communication, with anyone except Laika until we get back. I expect it to hurt, when we finally move out of range. It does. Through a great effort of will, I resist the urge to turn us back.

I feel lonely and at the end of my rope after a mere week, which is ridiculous, because I’ve done journeys like this far longer than a week before. The difference there, though, is that I’ve always had a nearby port to look forward to. ‘Only one more month of this and I’ll be in Orion,’ I’d be able to tell myself. Not now. Now there’s only the black ahead.

Sometimes I fantasise about grabbing Laika’s manual controls and turning us back. I don’t, of course. I couldn’t do that to Laika, and the further we get from colonised space, the less practical it becomes. Those controls are for stopping a feral or disoriented dragon from slamming into things, not for piloting one solo for weeks on end. What would I even do with him when I need to sleep? Leave him locked down and unable to move in an emergency?

We’re two weeks into our journey before I notice something seriously wrong with our route. It takes that long because the problem is that there’s nothing wrong with our route. By which I mean, we’re heading in generally the same direction we’ve been heading for months; the sun is in the same general area on Laika’s cameras, ahead of us and to the right. I would have expected it to be to the side, at approximate right angles to our path of motion, if we were heading to some distant, unregistered city further back in the orbit. But we’re not following the orbital path of Fenrir or anything like it. We’re still heading inward.

A secret city further inward than is officially considered the edge of colonised space? Not impossible. Likely, in fact. If some group wanted to establish themselves without the risk of orbiting into any traffic lanes, that’s an obvious place to do it – that’s how colonised space generally expands.

But a secret city ten months inward of colonised space? No, that just doesn’t make sense. The math doesn’t work out. Of course, orbits aren’t straight lines. It’s possible that we’re cutting the corner, so to speak, heading to a point that’s a quarter or so of an orbit behind Fenrir. But that seems too far, for the time. I ask for our precise angle from Laika, pull up our acceleration timetable, and run some quick math. No; we can’t interact with the orbit of colonised space in that time, not even close. Nowhere near close. And it doesn’t make sense to build that far inward, completely cut off from any practical trade whatsoever; there’s nothing that far out of colonised space that could possibly be worth –

Wait. There is something.

Oh no.

I remember Laika complaining that the atmosphere of cities is ‘wrong’. His gliding wings were built for a radically different environment. Fair; cities do vary in temperature and air pressure. But he also said he couldn’t see properly in city atmospheres, that his visual equipment was designed for a different environment too, and that shouldn’t change very much at all between cities; it’s all the same mix, an atmosphere that humans can breathe. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, a handful of other trace gases; all essentially transparent to our sunlight, not counting the disconcerting tendency to scatter light and soften shadows. There’s no reason to make an atmosphere of anything else, so why design a dragon to see in something else?

Unless you’re building him to work in an atmosphere that you don’t get to design.

I pull up some general data about the solar system, run the numbers again, and get an answer that I really, really do not like.

Laika, I ask, trying not to panic. Are we going to Venus?

He doesn’t confirm my suspicion – well, more than a suspicion, the math doesn’t lie. I don’t expect him to, given how little he can tell me. Far more telling is that he doesn’t deny it. Yes, we’re going to Venus.

To Venus.

To a planet.

Why would there be people or dragons on a planet? Apart from the halfkind on Earth, obviously; that doesn’t count. Humanity evolved on Earth so, absurd as it seems, that’s probably the best place for humans who haven’t been adapted for space living. But that’s an annoying shackle of our past, outside of our control. What possible purpose could anybody have for settling on another planet? It’s not a mining operation. I don’t care what valuable minerals are on Venus, there’s nothing that could be there that’s worth the fuel of constantly dragging it up out of such a massive gravity well. Whatever can be found there, it’s far more practical to learn to synthesise it in space and take materials from asteroids, which doesn’t require remaining close to Venus.

Science. It’s some kind of science installation. That explains Laika’s wide array of sensory equipment and his articulated tail grapple, for sample gathering or whatever. It doesn’t explain why it would be secret, though. Unless it’s an industry secret kind of thing? Laika’s creators want to find something and capitalise on it before anyone else can? Maybe. But that still doesn’t sound practical. With that kind of distance, massively dangerous and with material resupply next to impossible… with this level of secrecy… with Laika, built to resist questions and with systems to escape custody… whatever they were working on must be life-changing. Society-changing. I can’t think of anything that could possibly be on Venus that would be worth all this.

What could Laika be bringing me to an entirely new planet to see? And why did Lyllania kill herself over it?

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