Excerpt
Siphany and the Whale
Susan Jane Bigelow © 2024
All Rights Reserved
Chapter One
Lurbira could hear the past calling her.
She extended her sensor range, then quickly drew it back in again. She could barely tell the direction.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she seethed, and she punched the hull of the Junk so hard that it actually made a dent. Fine! Open the damn tin can to space; let it be nothing but vacuum inside. It wouldn’t bother Lurbira; the replica lungs she had didn’t work anyway.
She rapidly flicked her gunports open and closed, over and over.
“Lurbira?”
She spun around and put on her most innocent face. “Yes, Mother Junk?”
Mother Junk was tall and wiry, her white hair pulled back in a bun and her mouth set in a permanent frown. “Don’t you have work to do?”
“I’m sure I do,” said Lurbira brightly.
Mother Junk let her gaze drift down to the dent in the hull the size and shape of Lurbira’s child-sized fist. “Be careful I don’t send you off with the Loyans, Artificial,” she said icily and brushed past.
Lurbira watched her leave, fuming.
“She would,” said a faintly static-laced voice from nearby. Lurbira turned to focus on Isan, who stood awkwardly in the corridor, watching Mother Junk go. The girl still looked remarkably like who she’d been, just with more ashen skin, less hair on her scalp, deep bruises, and silvery implants on her face and arms.
“What do you want, corpse?” Lurbira snapped.
“Mother Junk never lies. She won’t hesitate if she thinks you’ve become a burden.”
“Great.” Lurbira turned her back. “I’ll keep that shit in mind.”
“Be careful, Artificial.” Isan’s voice hardened. “And be careful of me too.”
“Pff,” said Lurbira as haughtily as she could manage. “Don’t make me laugh.”
She stood there, back turned, until Isan finally gave up and left.
This had become completely intolerable. It was time to get off this miserable station in the middle of nowhere. And Lurbira knew just how to do it.
*
Leshandre Siphany woke to the howling of proximity alarms and screamed in panic.
She fought for control of herself. Siphany had dreamed she was back in the institution on Sovena, confined in that awful too-large, too-bright room. Control, the nurses and wardens had shouted at her. Control!
You must learn to show us your outward, smiling self.
You must control yourself, Siphany.
These outbursts and tantrums are un-Sovene!
And then she had seen the unmistakable shimmer of bluenet surround her. She screamed as it molded and shaped her body back into what it had been before she’d set foot on Derstan Station a decade ago.
The present pierced the nightmare fog, and she steadied herself.
She was on her ship, she was alone with her cat in the middle of deep interstellar space far from Sovena, and the nurses and the institution were a hundred light years away and thirteen years in the past. I’m okay. I’m safe. Safe.
But the proximity alarms were still blaring. Siphany tumbled out of bed, cursing, sending poor Kit flying off the sheets in a furry panic.
She sprinted into the cockpit, dove into her chair, and ordered the computer to feed her as much information as possible. A ship was near. Where was it? What was it? How close? Heat signature? Movement? Threat potential?
Information came at her in a steady stream; Siphany let it wash over her as she awakened to the universe around her.
The proximity alert had automatically switched on her bright and shiny high-end defense systems. Her scans swept the sector and quickly fixed the offending object in her target sights.
The sensors weren’t giving her anything conclusive, and the old familiar panic rose. What was it? Pirates? Not out of the realm of possibility, but pirates were rare. Piracy wasn’t profitable enough for many people to risk it. Loyans, maybe? She was close to the border with Haeld space. The Loyan military had their fingers all over Haeld’s long-running civil war, so it was possible. Might be Sovene, too—the Sovenes were in just as deep.
“No,” she muttered to herself as the scans resolved. “Not a ship. Way too small.”
Debris? A random unmapped rock? She trained active scanners on it, trying to gather more data. Frustratingly, she wasn’t getting a lot of readings from it at all, almost as if it were only half there.
Then, as she settled on the idea of an inert piece of debris or rock, it changed course.
“Ah!” Siphany said, surprised. A drone, then. That’s what it had to be, though she’d never seen one quite like this before.
Drones could be bad for business. Mappers like Siphany made money because it was cheaper to pay people who already owned their own ships to head out into space and run the sensor turret rather than send unreliable, expensive drones.
But if someone had figured out how to make a better, cheaper drone…
She ought to just vaporize the damn thing.
Kit jumped onto the console top next to her and peered intently out at the void. His whiskers curved forward, and his eyes darted around. Kit thought space was fascinating.
He’d love this, then.
“Watch this,” she told her cat and stabbed the fire button. A white-hot beam lanced out from her starboard cannon, puncturing the hull of the drone where Siphany suspected its drive section must be.
She lazily targeted a forward section as the drone tumbled out of control, when, to her shock, the speakers crackled to life.
“Unknown ship!” a frantic female voice said. “Stop firing! I surrender! I mean no harm! I’ll give you whatever you want! Please don’t kill me!”
“Oh, no,” Siphany cried, leaping to her feet. What did I just do?
*
Siphany fought panic as she pulled the tiny ship into the cavernous cargo bay with her grappling hook, and then she scrambled ran to meet it, clutching as many medical supplies as she could. Her heart raced as her bare feet pounded the carpet. Please don’t let whoever’s in there be dead. Please don’t let her be dead!
Her weapons had blasted a single neat hole in the aft drive section. The drive hadn’t exploded, thanks be to whatever scraps of luck Siphany possessed.
She reached the hatch and yanked it open.
“Hello! I’m here! I have bandages and—and…Hello?”
Her voice reverberated inside an empty hull. She gingerly eased her way into the ship, keeping a hand on the outside of the hatch.
“Hello? Is…anyone in here? I talked to someone…? Are you hurt?”
Nothing.
Siphany took a deep breath and let go of the hatch. She had to stoop to walk in the tiny ship, and it was only a few steps from the hatch to the single-seat cockpit. There was no one in the chair.
A light blinked on, and Siphany stifled a scream.
“Hello! I am an experimental prototype ship. I have become lost on my way to insert the-name-of-the-place-here. Thank you for not blowing me up.”
“You’re…welcome?” Siphany said. “Is there anyone on board? Hello?”
It was empty. She’d been had.
“Please return me to my station. We are a small Junk and need all the supplies we can get.”
“A Junk?” Junks were illegal space stations crewed by weird hermits. Siphany had thought they were all gone.
“Please do not alert the authorities. You will be rewarded.”
“Right. You’ve got to be kidding. How gullible do you think I am?” she asked it, feeling both humiliated and angry. “Why did you do this? What are you doing out here?”
“Hello! I am an experimental prototype ship. I have become lost on my way to—”
“Fine, right, got it. Voice off.” That seemed to be its entire message. So it wasn’t sei, meaning it wasn’t sentient in either a digital or organic kind of way. No self-awareness, just a program running on a loop.
What was she supposed to do now?
Part of Siphany wanted to shove the thing back out the cargo bay door and finish it off. No one would miss it.
Besides, the whole thing smelled fishy. What would a Junker ship be doing out here? Why would people living on a Junk have a ship with stealth technology?
And yet, it had asked her to return it. Nicely.
The overwhelming sense that she was being conned warred with Siphany’s need to return what wasn’t hers. What right did she have to keep it? She should take it back. It was the correct thing to do, and the Form would insist on it. Plus, she’d shot the damn thing.
It was her responsibility now. Siphany heaved a massive sigh. “This is a bad idea, and I don’t like you,” she informed the ship. “Show me the coordinates.”
The ship beeped, and a map appeared over its single computer console. A red light blinked. Siphany studied it for a moment, nodded, and transferred the point to her navigational computers. Only eleven light years. She could make it in four jumps.
Then she’d be back at work before anyone noticed she was gone. It was settled—Siphany would return the ship to its owner.
And then she’d try to forget any of this had ever happened.
*
Sleep eluded Siphany, even though it was quite conclusively time for it. Kit was a little ball of cement at the end of her narrow bed; she wiggled her toes, and the cat grumpily shifted so she could get out.
Siphany had nothing to do. That was usually fine; she liked nothing. It suited her, and she could fill up the nothing with the quietness of her routine, her cat, and herself. But this kind of nothing to do was different. She was on edge; she couldn’t turn her brain off. Everything was too loud, just like it had been back when…
Her gaze drifted to the wall between her cabin and the next one over. No. She didn’t want to think about them, or she’d just go round and round until she forgot to eat.
To distract herself, she got up and logged into the massive virtual city of Hydras. The city was partly immersive, partly interface; she could go there without completely abandoning her sense of the ship around her. In Hydras, Siphany could interact in real time with people from all over the Mid-Perseus Arm of the galaxy.
Hydras’s virtual cityscape was an essential component of her sanity—social contact without the messiness of people in her space. Accessing the subspace net that allowed instantaneous contact across hundreds of light-years wasn’t cheap, but it was worth it. Siphany wandered the streets near her home base in the Yonaka neighborhood, then checked into the pilots’ lounge she liked.
Pati, one of the lounge’s regulars and a fellow citizen of Derstan Station, walked over. She was a freighter pilot with a wicked sense of humor and a sympathetic ear. “How’s things, Sif?”
Siphany blushed. She liked it when Pati called her Sif. “Hi, Pati. And not great.”
“Aw. Sorry to hear it. You okay?”
“Yeah,” sighed Siphany. “Just a little shaken.”
“Want to talk about it?”
Siphany considered it but backed off. What would she say? How could she explain this sort of weirdness? “No, it’s okay. I don’t know how to even talk about it. Sorry.”
“No problem,” drawled Pati. “If you change your mind, though, that’s what I’m here for. How’s your ship holding up?”
“Running smooth,” said Siphany, brightening. “Those DH-58 stabilizers work better than I thought they would.”
“Told ya. You’ll be able to shoot the ticks off a dog’s ass from a parsec away.”
Siphany giggled and then launched into a description of the latest upgrades she’d made to her sensor net. Pati made all the appreciative noises, even though Siphany was certain she was burying the woman in information. Another reason to like Pati; she always made Siphany feel calmer.
When Pati finally excused herself to get some work done, Siphany decided to explore some of the new countryside they’d installed nearby.
The virtual world was more crowded than usual, to her dismay. Unrest in the real world seemed to draw people in.
When she’d had enough, Siphany logged back out and listened for a long moment. Silence. She exhaled, then noted the time. It was the interval for rounds, so she stood and began pacing deliberately over the ship from end to end, making sure it was all still there.
She padded barefoot through the carpeted corridors, brushing her fingers along the metal and plastic walls. Computer terminals lit her way here and there, as did the dim, recessed lights at floor level. The air was warm but dry, just how she liked it. She kept the hours of her watch, all synced to the rhythms of the Form.
Siphany’s job was making charts and maps, more detailed than anything that currently existed for these largely empty sectors. She mapped out all the hazards, radiation levels, unexpected gravity shifts, and tiny little rocks packed with valuable minerals, which gave the Derstan Station Mining and Mapping Company something to sell.
Other freelance mappers, cargo haulers, and traders had ships full of light and people. Some took crews of twenty aboard their cramped ships and strung up sun lamps everywhere. They fought the darkness and boredom together and then split the proceeds between them.
Not Siphany. She kept her lights low, only high enough to see by. She alone carried no crew besides her cat. And, of all the mappers, only she didn’t have to share her salary with anyone.
Space makes me bats, other mappers often said when they learned that she went out alone and for longer than anyone else. How do you stand it?
Siphany always smiled and murmured something half true, all the while wanting to say: Don’t you understand? Space keeps me sane.
She’d paid plenty to have plush, comfy carpets and chairs put in to replace the hard industrial defaults and to keep the heat nice and high. She also had top-of-the-line weapons, shift engines that could hit a pebble in the middle of a cubic light year of nothing, and advanced computers to help her plot the best course. She had a strong real-time connection to Hydras and other social sites where she could indulge whatever companionship she might need, then log off and be herself in the warm, quiet darkness of her home.
And thus, she kept herself stable and intact.
Siphany glanced at the clocks she’d placed all over the ship. The time for doing the rounds had passed; now it was time for an interval of creative work. Keeping time, planning her day around the hours on the wall, was deeply satisfying. Humming, she picked up her graceful, wooden Sovene flute and headed for the perfect acoustics of the cargo bay.
But she found she couldn’t concentrate—the songs wouldn’t come, not with the intruder ship crouching so ominously there on the soft carpet of the bay. She sighed, deciding to play in her cabin instead.
Just then, a soft signal chimed from the intercom; they were at the shift point. Saved. Siphany put her flute back in its velvet sleeve and headed for the cockpit.
She brought the ship to a standstill and powered up the shift generators.
There, surrounded by stars and perfect silence, Siphany calculated the tricky way through hyperspace from the shift point. Then, with a nod, she fired the shift engines. The world around her seemed to shimmer, her stomach flopped up and down, and then she was out. The ship wrinkled out of space, reappearing a few moments later a third of a light year away.
Right on target. Three more jumps to go. She punched in the coordinates of the next shift point, six hours of mundane travel away, and let the ship take over from there.
“Good, good, that went well,” she murmured. Kit padded in and sat in the copilot’s chair, giving it a disdainful sniff before settling down. “Let’s see how fast we can get there, right?”
In response, he began to purr quietly to himself.
The stars slowly slid by outside.
Everything was so perfectly quiet, so perfectly orderly, from Kit’s purr to the warming heat to the distant thrumming of the engines.
The intruder ship still sat in the cargo bay below, but at least it, too, was quiet.
Siphany felt herself begin to unwind, a little bit at a time. Her world was still intact, for now.
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