wanderlust--v2.out there

I quit with the editing. This thing doesn't actually suck . . . it would take a whole re-write and overhaul to drag it up to the level of suck. I believe the best description of this dissaster is "bleaghhh agh agh".

Not entirely, but the crawl that they had been reduced to was not so much better than not moving at all, given the vast distances of nothing that separated stations and planets and anything remotely resembling habitation. They coasted, drifting with no propulsion, and with lights set low both to conserve what energy they could, and to avoid attracting unwanted attention while the Ratatosk was a sitting duck.

It wasn’t a new thing that the swarm was after them. The Ratatosk was hardly an unknown entity, and Sellis was--in a way--sort of proud of her infamy. He refrained from saying so, the third time Lilaey came up from the gut of the ship with a mouthful of opinion on how things should have been done and reports of how she felt about having to take things apart then put them back together, in time they simply didn’t have.

“It takes what it takes,” Sellis said, because there was really no choice other than to do as fast and as solid a patch job as possible with the materials and time that they had. That or sit and wait.

Lilaey went to the pilot’s station to punch computer keys, then stood and frowned at the screen for long moments. “I hate to tell you this, but there’s no repair I can do that’s going to make this tub move much faster than it is now.”

“Don’t talk that way about my baby,” Sellis said, and patted the smooth paneling beside him for emphasis, “We close to anything?”

“Nothing. Nothing friendly, anyway,” she said, and Sellis had already known that. Very little of the Reaches was particularly friendly, even to ships and crews with honest reputations. Out in the middle of nowhere, with supplies, replacements, and contact with civilization coming only occasionally and often irregularly, people were cautious. Cut what risk factors they could do away with, and minimized what they couldn’t. A ship known to be rogue was hardly going to be welcomed. A crew known to be rogue and wanted was almost certainly going to meet a grisly end before being put on ice to await whoever could verify identities and pay bounties.

It would probably take them weeks to get even so far as a refueling station, hostile or not. If they could get that far. If there was any bubble of humanity within the range of their crippled engines.

“I’m not ready to send an SOS.” Sellis said, and Lilaey blinked and made a face like she was surprised he’d been considering it, or surprised he would make a joke of it, knowing that whoever showed up to an SOS would likely be unpleasant. Her brow furrowed in irritation.

“I’m not done with the engines yet,” she said, as if affronted. “I’ll get us somewhere.”

It was the ‘somewhere’ that was a problem, Sellis thought, the absolute lack of available somewheres. He said, “Then what are you still doing up here?”

She tapped the computer keys, “Checking sensors. At least now we’ll be able to tell if someone’s coming. Guess you could just look out the windows, but--“

Lilaey grinned, but didn’t look away from the screen, busy tapping keys and considering readouts.

Sellis gave her a minute, before walking over to watch numbers and tables fly up the screen, “Up and running?”

“Looks to be. The only thing that is.” She tapped more buttons and the screen went dark then lit up with new columns of number and letters that started to scroll by too fast for Sellis to make sense of.

“Shaky. If it were anything but jump, I’d say let’s give it a shot, but if it gives out between--well, God only knows.”

Sellis thought about the wrenching wrongness of being in jump, of the distorted time and the disconcerting, sickening feeling of being stretched and squashed all at the same time, of being everywhere and nowhere and of the utter nothing of it. That utter nothing that wasn’t even darkness. He scrubbed a hand through his hair and said, “Shit.”

“Beats the alternatives. Marsh might be able to jump us a little way.” She said it evenly, conversationally. As if that ‘might’ weren’t a horrible, lurking thing.

Lilaey hit another button, and screens that had been dark came to life, clouded with static, then cleared again, displaying the exterior of the ship, distant stars and lots and lots of nothing. Sellis wasn’t sure if that was a relief or not.

“Preferable to the damn swarm, I guess,” he said finally, nodding at the main display.

“Don’t jinx us now,” Lilaey said, bringing up more displays, showing empty, dark space all around, “those bastards know we’re hit. They’re not going to clear off that easy.”

“You call that easy?” Sellis jerked a thumb at a screen displaying the damage report, “I call that skin of our teeth.”

All that nothing all around, and they weren’t likely in the clear. The swarm--what passed for the law out here on the edges of everything--were small; fast, maneuverable, and with impressive firepower for their size, but they had a limited range, and no jump capacity to speak of. They would have to regroup at a carrier, but even that delay wouldn’t slow them much now they had the Ratatosk’s scent.

“How much speed did you say can you get us?” he asked, watching the screens.

“You’re lucky we’re moving,” Lilaey said, “And I can’t get much more than we have. Too much damage, and no parts to replace what's scraped.”

“Drag Marsh up from the engines, would you? I don’t see why I have my mechanic up here, and my pilot down in machines.” He checked the coordinates on the pilot’s screen and brought up a map, “If we’re going to be dragging ourselves across the universe we may as well drag with a destination in mind.”

Lilaey sighed, said, “We’re too far from any--“ then stopped, made an annoyed sound, and said, “Fine. I’ll get him. But don’t think we’re going anywhere.”

“Right. I know,” Sellis said, and when she’d gone checked the readouts himself to see if they could go anywhere.

Marsh came and leaned up against the bulkhead while he was scrolling across the map for the third time, and waited with what would have been patience in anyone else. In Marsh it was an edgy kind of stillness. Nothing of patience in it at all. “Yes?” he said, when Sellis looked up from the computers, in a tone that implied he’d been interrupted in the middle of important business.

“I’m sorry, were you a mechanic now? Is my entire crew down in machines, playing flunky to Lilaey?”

“She needed help,” Marsh said. He was holding a wrench, of all things, and for a second Sellis considered asking him just what the hell it was they were doing to his ship, then decided he didn’t want to know.

“I guess that’s a ‘yes’,” Sellis said, and Marsh shrugged a shoulder. “Right. Not your problem. Got it,” Sellis said, vacating the seat and gesturing for Marsh to sit.

“There was a lot of damage,” Marsh said apologetically, as if he was justifying being down in the ship’s belly repairing engines, or maybe justifying everyone else being down there instead of at their stations.

“Lilaey already gave me the report. Check if we have power for jump. Check if we can jump.”

Sellis thought again of the twisting horridness of jump, shook it off, and said, “So’s sitting here. I didn’t say do it, I said check if we can.”

“You’re the boss.” Marsh sounded doubtful. Like he maybe thought Lilaey was the actual boss, or at least that she should be. Or maybe just that Sellis shouldn’t be.

“Just do it,” Sellis said, and after pausing like he was weighing the merits of the idea for himself, Marsh slid into the pilot’s seat, deposited the wrench next to a display and considered the readouts on the screen. He punched a few buttons and displays Lilaey had left off came to life and the pilot’s station lit up, numbers and indicators brightening into a steady glow.

Marsh grabbed his headset off the top of a computer and pulled it on one-handed, the other flying across keys. “Coordinates?” he asked, not looking up, not even looking at the displays and monitors, but beyond them in that disconcerting distracted manner jump pilots could have.

Marsh twitched, “A guess,” he echoed, and it wasn’t a question. He sounded exasperated.

Desperate situations, Sellis thought, not liking the idea himself. The idea of being stuck between made his hair stand on end, made a dull chill of fear coil in his gut. They could have been stuck between already, if Marsh hadn’t made this jump. If the damage they’d taken had blown the drive before he’d pulled them out of that other side of the world, and back into living, moving reality.

“If we have to risk it, I’d rather not be jumping blind again. Maybe we can end up near something. Something inhabited.”

Marsh tapped keys, either ignoring him or deep into the system. The screen flickered, and a starmap came up on the main display. A second and diagrams overlaid it. “Jump range,” Marsh reported, as labels appeared, naming stations and planets.

“We’re out in the mining section. There's not even a city out here. God’s sake, Marsh, how the hell did you--“

“Jump drive was damaged,” Marsh said, swiveling his chair and pulling the headset off. He scrubbed at his eyes, then looked up to consider the map as if he hadn’t seen it before. As if he hadn’t dragged it up and pieced it together himself. “I was a bit lost,” he admitted, glancing at Sellis, then getting up to pace towards the back of the bridge, where he stopped, paused, and came back.

“Lost? You were lost and you jumped us all this way? Blind?” Sellis asked, trying to focus on that and not the idea of being lost in jump.

“Ratatosk jumped us,” Marsh said, seriously. Sounding like some dramatic, romanticizing kid, but meaning it.

“Maybe the damage caused--.” He didn’t finish the sentence, left it hanging as he stepped towards the main display, considering it with a frown. “I don’t know, Sellis.”

‘I don’t know’ wasn’t something Sellis wanted to hear from the person who was supposed to be guiding them back and forth between that shifting nothingness and what Sellis considered reality. ‘I don’t know’ was a dangerous thing for a man playing with something as uncertain and as incomprehensible as that netherworld between. Sellis said, “Alright, you don’t know,” and was surprised that he sounded as calm as he did, as calm-ing. Marsh gave him an odd look.

“It was alright,” he said, as if seeing straight through Sellis’s composed demeanor, “We were never stranded. Never going to be.”

“Sure. Just lost.” Sellis didn’t bother asking what Marsh thought he could have done if they had been stranded. Had never really bothered asking what jump was like to someone who could keep his head through it, who didn’t lose all awareness in a swirl of nothing so complete that his mind compensated by imagining color and light and patterns and noise where there was absolutely none.

“A bit lost,” Marsh corrected, and grinned, looking fierce with the tag mark dark on his face, the long, thin triangle of it staining his cheek like the track of an inky tear.

Not quite like other tags Sellis had known, and it was odd at times to remember what he was. To compare him to the cheap labor of the Reaches, or the sleek servants that served Old Space nobility, or even the diverse hordes that teemed throughout the stations and satellites of Midstate--psyched to hell and back and many of them probably not even proper tags at all but poor fools who’d run into some horrible bad luck, or fallen on the wrong side of the law.

Sellis weighed that; the prospects of capture and tagging and psychs against the endless shifting nothing they’d risk with jump. Neither possibility was particularly appealing, or even more appealing than the other. On the other hand, he doubted their possible fates was a thing that required much guessing. The crew of a rogue ship was more likely than not to be put to death on the spot, whether or not they were technically outside anyone’s jurisdiction, way out here on the edges of populated space.

“Rock and a hard place,” Marsh observed, considering the starmap, then after some moments, “Maybe they won’t come after us.”

“At least it bought us some time,” he gestured at the map, “What's our range?”

Marsh’s unhappy look shifted into a doubtful one, then into calm consideration, then back into unhappiness, “I’m not sure. Considering the damage, maybe the edge of the Reaches. Just inside the border. But jump was strange. We might get kicked further, maybe much closer.”

Marsh scowled. “Might,” he said, and before Sellis could reply, the intercom beeped.

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January 31st, 2007

[original][-9r] Pieces of Dark [1a/7][PG13]

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