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blahrikeau · 10 months

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Chapter One: Age of Queens

Age of Queens: Chapter 1

4906 words

Science Fiction/Romance

Subgenres: Fantasy/Adventure/Political Drama

Original Characters

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The pirates congregate on Hergarde.

That’s where she waits for her captain. Eyeing the wharf, she’s an eagle angling at a fish. Folk are dissuaded from settling on fully aquatic or oceanic planets. Seasickness fades, they say, within a week, but seafever—an agitated state of ecstasy from impermanence, and the body’s loss of memory of solid ground, and skin in dirt—never goes away.

The pier city ritches on steel columns ripe with algae and flaking rust. The nearest land is more than 600 graves below sea level so she bobs in her meager boat over the lipping waves, a wooden spoon in a boiling pot. Her dark cowl flips in the wind. She taps her sweat-beaded lip through the weave.

Later, she intersects the captain and a young crewhand at the armpit of the pier absorbed in conversation. Dusk purples the horizon behind them. The young hand glances at her and his lips flap shut.

“I don’t run a passenger ferry,” says the captain, at her approach. His tweedy beard is rumpled with snot and crumbs. He whistles to a group of his non-busied crew hands, jerks them over with his chin.

She fishes in a snug pocket near her elbow for a little round cylinder. Its smooth neck is warm in her fist, and she sets on a crate between them.

The young hand’s eyes lurch out of their sockets. “Captain,” he blurts.

The captain notices the vial. He waves his men away, including the young hand, who furrows his brows at her before slouching off.

The captain eyes her, then suspends his hand over the vial, clear-through, as though expecting a mirage. She doesn’t stop him, so he uncorks the vial and touches the pad of his finger to the glass lip. Now he’s tasting his finger on his tongue.

“Now git on,” he breathes.

His eyes narrow at her. “This is what I think it is.” He corks the bottle.

She nods. “Water.”

He lifts his shrewd jeweler’s eyes. “What kind?”

“From a spring atop the Mountain Gelion.”

He’s waffling now. The muscles in his leathered jaw ripple, like a vulture’s twitching eye as it circles over its fragrant spoils. He reverently rubs the vial, estimating its total worth, what kings he could sell it to. Perhaps he’s imagining the sweet, clean chalice that will bear it once it has been sold, will be the last to pool such clean water. Just a sip, guaranteeing substantial health and, of course, nutrition. What fine life-bearing minerals are just past his fingertips, he thinks he knows.

“It ain’t a pedestrian trip,” he says, perhaps mostly to himself.

She sets a second vial between them.

The lights go out in his eyes. He stuffs both bottles inside his coat next to his breast and flicks a hand to the end of the pier, lined with vessels like goats bobbing and tugging at a fenceline.

“The big one,” he says.

So big it has to be moored magnetically off the pier. The young hand shuttles her over to the blotch of patchwork metals—an ugly beast, but for the hum of fresh, young engines—where she climbs the ladder lowered to the dinghy. Cargo is being jigsawed into the hold, the gaps pressed to creases, hurriedly but with strategy, like athletes would do before a tournament.

She secludes herself to a shadow behind the cockpit, but not before peeking inside. It’s an antique operating system—Vyztix 720, dated by five decades—but it’s retrofitted with new instruments, whose screens blaze in alarming columns of white against the blue night falling outside.

The young hand is waiting in her shadow when she returns. She’d like to call him sad-eyes, for his dark lashes and brown cow-sweet eyes. He lacks, however, the terra firma and stripped candor of cattle.

“The captain would like you to know that we don’t take directions from passengers,” he says. “You’ll go where we’re heading and make your own way if it doesn’t suit you.”

She knows where she is going but not how to get there. Any heading will do. She nods humbly at him.

He stares, blank with uncertainty.

“You overpaid,” he says suddenly.

“I know.”

Sad-eyes regards her, and leaves. The hull echoes with the dull thuds of his footsteps.

After the ship is secured, and the crew stowed away, the ship blazes with life as the engines kick like a wild boar released. Its age becomes apparent, as the walls vibrate noisily against her back and loose bolts rattle. She rubs her fingertips warm. They’re grainy with red dust that came like powder off of the bench on which she sits. A nice ship would be kind and gentle, quiet and humming like a warm womb rather than a trash compactor.

Her stomach flutters as the great undersea magnets are switched off and they rise into the air. Not long later she feels the ship break through the atmosphere like a dull needle through canvas.

She’d prefer windows, but it’s a windowless ship, of course. Almost a full day of traveling, she suspects there is, between them and the border.

Avoiding the crew’s quarters, she stashes herself between the tallest tower of contraband and the ceiling (rightly so, she thinks to herself with some amusement) and allows the dark of her closed eyelids to pull a curtain over the dark of the cargo hold.

Trying to get her bearings, she tries to suss out their path, as her hips tilt this way or that with each shallow turn. She’d been told once that when people close their eyes and attempt to walk in a straight line, most instead go in circles. She tested out of that, years ago. She tries not to think of circles as the darkness becomes too deep, and it swallows her.

______________

Her eyes snap open just before the ship jostles and a blast sounds somewhere close to her head. Gray gas spurts over her and an alarm shrieks: mother screaming to get out of bed.

“Man your stations!” says a voice over the PA. “Get those cannons hot! They’re on us!”

She’s already crouched behind the cockpit. Another low boom see-saws the ship. She presses a steady red button on the threshold and the door between her and the pilots slides open. The stars tilt as the pilot behind the yoke grunts and teases into a bank.

The whole ship gives a cold shudder and coughs like it has swallowed a throatful of water.

“Damn it. They have an electric muter,” says the co-pilot. He turns around and sees her braced there. “Aya! Get out of here!”

The operating system is frozen—the navigational screens and radar are unblinking and unmoving.

The pilot flaps a lever, up and down, up and down, upanddown upanddown. “Now git on!” he cries.

She steps inside the cockpit and grips the doorway just as another blast hits the side of the ship. Another alarm squeaks, faster this time.

“The fuel tank,” she announces coolly.

The pilot, beet-faced and burning as though he’s ready to blow himself, manages another unsuccessful evasion and hollers,

“Where are my canons!”

Cued by his desperation, a cronk clatters deeply through the fuselage and there’s a flash in the corner of the windshield, the source of it just out of sight.

A beat of silence hangs over them. Then the radar starts spinning, and this time the screen is clear but for their single pimple in the middle. The first alarm stops abruptly, and only the cockpit rings with the second alarm, indicating the swiftly emptying fuel tank.

“Starboard, starboard!” says the co-pilot.

They maneuver around, yawing, until bright speckles of debris drift past their window, benign, like forgotten thoughts. They admire the view.

“One-hit wonder,” says the co-pilot, giving a gross chuckle, a laugh at a funeral.

She turns around and the captain is stamping like a bouncing boulder towards the cockpit. Sad-eyes follows closely. He regards her again, curiously, as the captain arches to see out the windshield, looking for more evidence of destruction.

“We’re clear, are we?”

“Ah, yes, captain,” says the pilot, a little diminished.

She looks at sad-eyes and knows he took the shot that torched the attackers. She studies him while the captain barks,

“Well don’t let them get so damn close next time!” He swats the pilot upside the head, then turns around and finally takes notice of her. Beating him to his voice, she says,

“Do pirates attack other pirates often?”

His beard quivers.

“Cargo ain’t allowed in the cockpit,” he says. Maybe her soft derision came off too strongly.

“Would they have known we were carrying—” sad-eyes nods at the captain.

The captain touches his breast pocket. “Fresh water? Hard to say.”

She nods at the fuel gauge. “You’ll need to stop.”

The captain breathes wheezily, displeased.

“Are we…” she asks, though she thinks she already knows the answer, “in Saddu?” She can feel it: space she has not yet known.

“Not yet,” says the captain gruffly.

She takes one long look at the splay of stars ahead of them, then retreats.

Not long after, the crew prepares for descent. She pulls her gloves on, rubs their leather cuffs shiny, takes them off. Puts them back on. A sickness grows in her stomach, like hunger, as organic gravity starts weighing on her again.

She scavenges a dense wedge of pressed fruits, grains, and seeds from a pouch on her belt, all meticulously picked from a variety of planets back home, and half-inhales it as the ship makes land. But all it does is make her feel heavy and jittery with sudden energy that she cannot swallow. A stack of dry kindling unable to take a spark.

Outside, as the crew assesses the damage, she descends the gangplank. She breathes deeply but her lungs resist—the air content here is, what? 60% ladogen, 20% atomium, and a spice blend of other gasses. It feels like hot pepper in the back of her throat. It’s the ommon, just a taste of it, that burns.

This place is arid, conditional of a temperate desert, bald but for a few spurts of shrubs and short trees.

The captain orders sad-eyes to seek a local fuel dispensary, and the lad departs for a nearby cropping of buildings. She follows him and soon falls in step beside him.

He stops. His long dark hair shines with grease and twists in the breeze, even tied back as it is.

“Lasha,” he says. My Lady. “Maybe you want to stay with the ship.”

“I do not.”

It will be days more on that flying toolbox, without light or wind, before she knows for certain where she is going. Maybe longer. And while her sick feeling grows, she thinks she does not want to go back there.

And, she thinks, local knowledge will inform her heading.

They traipse into town, which fades in swarms of up-kicked dirt. Dust yellows the ledge of every window and roofline. Sad-eyes appears to know where he’s going, peeling like a droplet of water in a rivulet through the commercial district of town.

He piddles through some foreign words with the haunched, wrinkle-rolled man at the fuel dispensary. Bartering happens, that much she can tell. The dialect is not one she knows—she cannot even identify the language family or base language. Uncertainty flows over her again, and she turns, scanning the street.

Finally, the fuel vendor agrees to drive a skiff and loaded tank over to their landing site to refuel there.

She breathes slowly through her scarves as they ripple across her face. The ommum prickles her eyes, and she feels the burn in her waterline. As they begin their return walk, sad-eyes murmurs,

“Your first time in the Match Zone?”

The Match Zone: a slice of critical real estate bisecting their part of the galaxy. On one side, her home. On the other, Saddu. In between is an impenetrable band of piracy and lawlessness, unbreakable even by her government. The only ships able to get in the Match Zone, and pass through either side, are pirates and smugglers, especially those having good rapport with Saddu.

She considers her several-month refuge on Hergarde, and having to learn which local fish species are toxic and which tender by how much she threw up afterwards (later, she’d obtained the proper substances to chemically test them for toxins), the endless bailing of her boat, the magnificent sightings of ridge-backed whale fish, and the days she sat, knees to chest, between gulls and bull-headed osprey to chart the arrivals, crews, and cargo of pirates and smugglers at all odd hours. Months on Hergarde, however, are short. Shorter than what she’s used to.

“No,” she says simply.

“No,” he says, “You didn’t seem upset by the attack. Your first time in Saddu?” he asks, even lower.

“You can’t tell for yourself?”

He looks down at his dirt-kicking feet, then squints up at the sun. “I don’t make it my business to ask why someone with fresh water wants to get into Saddu for the first time. But do you know where you’re going?”

“I hired a captain that could help me find where I needed to go.”

He gives her a creased look. “The captain isn’t the navigator. I’d call him a businessman.”

“But he has significant and frequent customers in Saddu, yes?”

He side-eyes her, again with that inscrutable concern. “How would you know that?”

The dust grows thick before them: a brawl has busted open on the street since they last passed. They detour to the next road.

“The kind and quantity of his contraband,” she says. “He has a big ship. It has a big cargo hold. Lots of customers, big sales…”

The growing monster of nausea digs its bulbous claws up her abdomen. She catches her breath.

“But…” He glances again, “you wouldn’t have chosen him based only on his cargo.”

“No.”

“Well? Why then?”

The shadows across sad-eyes’ face double the impression of his anxiety (or his consideration, she’s not sure which it is).

“You pit-stop on Hergarde more than any other active smugglers, which leads me to believe he has a heavy treasure box buried somewhere deep, under the ocean. So he can’t possibly get stopped by Sadduian border patrol often, or he’d have lighter loads and longer turnover times.”

He’s quiet next to her, now, brows knitted in thought. Slowly, as though he’s unfolding delicate paper crinkles, he says,

“We say that haste and free-flowing wealth are signs of bitsha, which is… It means, em, public enemies.”

“Risky business,” she adds. She’d heard the word. He speaks what they call the Third Common Tongue.

He nods. “Be careful that your close observations don’t have the same effect, Lasha.”

They’ve passed out of the hive of buildings and onto the flat strait before the ship. Most of the crew sways in a circle around their taken-apart fortress, hands braced menacingly on their variety weapons.

Suddenly she feels heavy. Her sickness overwhelms her, becomes so great that she freezes in her step. The sense of hunger vanishes, replaced by cold realization.

Sad-eyes notices her planted several paces back, so he turns and looks.

“The fuel vendor is coming,” he says, pointing. A large cylindrical tank is gliding over the field atop a hovering skiff, driven by the wrinkly vendor.

Her blood beats in her ears. Her eyes sweep the field, the nearby buildings, the distant treeline. She feels the presence before she sees it.

The tank explodes—bakoom—in a mushroom of fire and the young man leaps.

“Ho!” he cries. The faraway crew freezes, shifts, scrambles uncertainly. The captain is hollering unintelligibly.

When she does see the presence, it’s like the shadow of a falcon descending from nowhere. A black-clad woman vaults towards the ship, a long metal staff in her hand.

“Come with me.”

Sad-eyes backs towards her, eyes on the strange, dark figure, her muscular form pumping in the blue shadow under the ship.

“They’re all former mercenaries,” he says, gesturing at the crew, “she can’t—”

She can. The dark-clad figure’s staff flashes with every whip, snapping up sunlight as it cracks dully over heads and backs. The falcon-shadow takes the crew, two at a time.

Her sickness has hardened into urgency. Her hand twitches at her belt. Her feet prickle, ready to fly.

“Come with me,” she says.

Sad-eyes looks at her, pale with disbelief. Behind him, the dark-clad figure is interrogating the captain now. He points directly at them.

She’s running before she decided to run. Back into the tangle of buildings, pale walls flash by as she goes like lightning under checkered shadows of rooflines. The young man is skittering behind her. Dust flies up and sticks in her cowl, and she fears that they’re giving as good as a smoke signal for the falcon-shadow to follow, but estimates that flat ground is faster than going up and down the rooftops.

She’s about to turn left but reconsiders it: dips right. Hard footsteps—not her own—seem beat on her like a second heart, and she picks up speed, pushes faster.

Between them, she always had the longer endurance running, and she trusts in that now.

To her surprise, the young man is not far behind the flapping fringe of her headscarf. He’s running like he means it, which is good for him.

Behind them, but not far, screams rise.

Between the wedges of the rooflines she’s been spying black flies of rising and descending ships to the northeast, close to where they went to pick up fuel.

She feels the heat of pursuit. Suddenly she stamps the ground and leaps madly for a nearby roof ledge, which she grabs and pulls down to her hips to send herself over the roof ridge.

The crawling sprawl of a proper airfield is in sight now, and she doesn’t dare look behind. From beam to beam she zips evenly. She feels the lightness of her feet, sprung with relief to be back on solid terra.

She tumbles from the last rooftop and darts across the tarmac, aiming for a ship that’s small, black, and angled: a two seater, needing only a single person to fly.

It’s manned by two lethargic guards, restlessly kicking and pacing. They rotate and stiffen at her approach, raising their uniform weapons: blasters. Only Sadduians carry ballistic arms. She registers what they are but is too far away for close combat evasion.

“Halt right there!”

She dips behind the ship’s atmospherial wing as the blasters let loose their twisted, ballistic explosions. She jumps up and scales the molded side of the ship with her tactile gloves, breathing sharply past the burning metal sizzling hot from the choleric sun under her chin.

But the guards are hesitant to fire now that she has climbed into the ship’s sensitive parts. She drops into the cockpit and under the pilot seat as a single blast throws sparks.

“Don’t shoot!” one guard chastises the other.

From under the control panel she finds the ignition and fires up the ship—it starts immediately, purring to just the right touch.

“You’re under arrest!” one of the voices shouts from outside the ship. Another useless warning blast sails over her head and threatens to damage the interior. “In the name of our great General—”

The engines fire blue and hot and the ship hovers for liftoff. The heat is enough to throw the guards, and only hoping that this ship is similar in power and agility to those she has flown before, she guides it forward and hurtling over the tarmac.

She is empty of remorse for her theft—it’s the Match Zone, anyway.

“Hey!” A voice lifts below her. She shouldn’t be able to hear it, not over the roaring engines, but it carries to her ears alone. “That’s my fucking ship!”

She recognizes the voice, and so doesn’t stop. But her heart jolts when she sees the falcon-shadow figure as it descends on sad-eyes. She needs a pirate.

She tips the lean black ship towards the ground, where sad-eyes is desperately attempting to evade the falcon-shadow, and is succeeding by the skin of his teeth. But the falcon-shadow is stronger. The falcon-shadow raises her staff and it catches the sun.

She reaches her gloved hands outside of the cockpit, lifts herself onto the nose, sweeps her foot out as the ship dips. Her toes connect with the tip of the staff. The end of it goes flying.

Dust flies in a tornado around her and she jumps out. Sad-eyes’ is burying his face in the crook of his elbow to protect from the flying gravel and dirt. Through the cloud stirred up by the engines, she sees the falcon-shadow.

“Into the ship!” she screams at sad-eyes. He fumbles up and into the open cockpit. The ship lifts away from its dangerously-close scrape to the ground and levels out.

The dark-clad falcon-shadow appears through the dust, staff in hand.

She jumps, crashes less nimbly onto the wing, and drops into the cockpit.

“Out!” she shouts, jerking sad-eyes out of the pilot seat. “In the back!”

He does so, and she sheathes herself behind the yoke, smashes a button that looks like it probably closes the cockpit, and pulls back. The cabin pressurizes. They shoot up. She lifts a clear cap on the dashboard and pushes the lever underneath. The atmosphere-breaking boosters howl and propel them into thin air.

She can hear sad-eyes buckling himself into the harness behind her. Alarms blink—slipping stabilization, increasing G’s, steep angle—but do not sound. This ship was built for combat.

She rips off her scarves and replaces them with a headset hanging nearby. It hacks and hisses at her until she tunes it into the second one in the cockpit. Sad-eyes is already wearing it.

“Who was that?” he shouts. “Who was that!”

She can hear him breathing, pffting hard through his nose.

“I don’t want to be on a ship with you. I don’t want to be involved in this. Put me down on the next inhabitable planet.”

“No,” she says, though her heart is beating in the back of her own throat, and she’s glad he can’t see her face from where he’s sitting.

“What do you mean no?” he cries.

“I need you to get me through Saddu,” she says coolly.

He’s gasping now, wetly with anger, as though his brush with the dark-clad woman is becoming clearer to him.

“Whatever reason you have to be in Saddu, I do not want to have any part in it,” he says.

“You already have a part in it,” she says. “Or why did she go after you back there instead of me?”

That sobers him. He quiets, settles. She can still hear him breathing, and smell the dank sweat and dirt emanating from him.

“Now where should I cross the border?” she says.

“The border,” he echoes.

She finally harnesses herself in, pulling the straps tight over her shoulders, chest, and hips. “Are you the true navigator, or not?” She shifts in her seat and tries to glance over her shoulder at him. “Do you know Saddu, or not?”

She was nine when she was taught that maps of Saddu do not exist: a fact she and her people are now all balefully aware of. It’s a feat of unbelievable proportions and loyalty. She’s known that Saddu outlawed the making or keeping of Sadduian maps, which is why only a select number of pirates and smugglers who have been in, around, and out of Saddu can get outsiders to where they want to go, at such a high price. It’s a dangerous thing to go flying through unnavigable territory, dotted randomly with black holes, planets, gravitational fields, and other waiting deadfalls.

Saddu can only be found in mind and memory.

“Yes,” sad-eyes finally says, like an empty gust of air, standing down. She can see the clear white of his eyes in her periphery, filling in around his earnest brown irises and flitting lashes. “I know Saddu.”

“I am too conspicuous to be let across the border, yes?” she says. She glances in a mirror she spotted in the corner of the cockpit, angled at the backseat. “Yes?”

“Yes,” he sighs. “You don’t look Sadduian or pirate.”

She handles the controls—alive and breathing, pushing back against her, trying to stray, like a wild animal—and pushes them further into the steep, unending darkness, pock-marked with white exit wounds and needle-holes. “Where can I find a weak spot in the border patrol? New hires, a spread in the grid where the checkpoints are few and far between, something.”

“You don’t need to.”

She tilts her head to listen more closely, her brows pulled together in confusion.

“Whoever that was…” he starts, his voice tight with contempt. “Whoever’s ship it was that we stole…she had to be something special to fly this.” He runs his hand along the panels by his head. “This is a specialty military ship. Made for cruise and combat. I have no doubt it’s installed with a level-1 clearance beacon.”

Like a priority beacon? She wonders.

“Tell me about level-1,” she says.

“Some Sadduian ships are installed with clearance beacons that emit certain radar signals and information, based on their use and who’s flying them. Mostly military. They have special air and space privileges. Level-1 is allotted to high-ranking officials only. They have clearance at every border and against all security measures. No stops. No questions asked…”

His voice fades reverently.

“How much would a ship with level-1 clearance sell on the market for? In the Match Zone?” she asks.

The corners of his lips threaten to curve upwards. “No one knows. One has never been hijacked before.”

She tightens her hands around the grips. It’d seemed easy, earlier. She considers why her pursuer would have been traveling alone, what she would have been doing in the Match Zone, on that dusty, pointless planet.

“My guess…” he says a few minutes later, “it’d be priceless.”

That stirs and settles silently between them. Her thoughts tunnel so deeply she thinks their echoes must be audible in the cockpit, like more alarms blaring. War, war, war, she thinks. The war feels far away when you’re no longer being fired at. It feels far away in enemy territory. She feels unsettlingly like a timer has just been set.

She unguards a switch enabling a separate panel of what appear to be countermeasures, though the symbols are unlike any written language she’s yet seen, but for a few samples of writing collected from Saddu’s old days.

The ship’s true alienness is in its modernity. She’d been trained in a sampling of many spacecraft, but she’d always been outfitted with the best of what was available out-of-exercise.

This had the novelty of invention, sleek and secretive, as exclusive and precious as virginity.

How unawares they have been, she thinks, uninformed of the advanced technology the enemy has been cuckolding them with. Her stomach churns with bitterness and disquiet.

She breathes sharply and switches on the weapons employment. The lights flare red in warning.

“You can use a targeted weapons system, yes?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says.

“Firing systems are online, so keep your thumbs light until we can confirm pursuit.”

It’s unlikely, though, that any ship on that planet could match this one in speed. The efficiency with which they’d left the atmosphere behind had been impressive, defying any scope of radar at this point. She continues,

“Rounds like these are similar to cannons but are faster and more slippery.” As an afterthought, she adds, looking into the mirror, “Have you ever fired a blaster?”

“No,” he grunts. “I’m not a soldier.” There’s another beat, then he adds, “And I’m not Sadduian.”

The knot in her chest loosens, barely. She takes a slow, deep, painful breath.

Sad-eyes gives her coordinates and they cruise—quickly but not conspicuously—towards Saddu’s empty canvas. The quiet and vast blackness swells like a headache.

Now she can smell the soap and skin of the woman who wore this headset before her, and can feel the oil of sweat on the earpads. A hair, not her own, tickles the back of her neck where it is stuck to the seat back.

Sad-eyes shifts haughtily behind her. “Can you turn on the air coolant?” he says.

She’s been sweating but hasn’t even realized, headachey as she is. She peers under her elbow at grids of mysteriously-labeled buttons and switches, and starts guessing at which one is right, until finally the stuffy heat of the cockpit sighs away before a gust of cool air.

Sad-eyes sniffles, still trying to be mad. But she can feel his contempt ebb away, weakening, as the tide of foreboding rises. They can both feel it climbing up to them now.

“Thank you, Lasha,” he says.

“You’re welcome.”

“Will you tell me who that was?” he asks.

She blinks, hard, and nods. “Yes. Eventually.”

He nods, satisfied.

“Moyika,” he says. His voice gives with a wobble of hesitation. She hears him breathe and swallow through her headset. “That’s my name.”

In the beat of silence that follows his declaration, she recognizes the implication that she must return his gesture of goodwill. She thinks twice, but a fake name doesn’t sit well between two people in a ship this small.

“Lita,” she says, her voice steady, hiding her. “My name is Lita.”

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