Five Unicorn Flush Read online

“No, not really.”

  Jenny pulled her wheelchair closer to the captain’s chair and hoisted herself into it. She set her feet carefully on the footrests, ignoring the pins and needles. Fuck part-unicorns and their halfassed healing. She’d been better off before. At least then her legs had been numb and she could get through her day without feeling like she was constantly on the verge of screaming.

  Besides the possible horn, this mystery ship probably had a pharmacological lab with raw materials enough to medicate hundreds, maybe thousands of people.

  “They might have medical supplies to spare,” she said out loud.

  “Your desire for medication is coming perilously close to addiction,” said Mary. “After this encounter, we should talk about other pain management techniques.”

  Jenny gave Mary the middle finger. As if wanting to blot out the constant, driving pain was some kind of moral failure. She wasn’t looking to get high, just to not feel like garbage for a few sweet hours. It’s not as if she endangered anyone in her pain-free state. The ship flew herself and there were no other living souls on board. Whoever programmed Mary didn’t understand chronic, debilitating pain. Typical Reason wankers.

  “Looking forward to it,” replied Jenny, knowing that Mary would be able to hear the lie in her tone.

  “Friendly ship, this the FTL Stagecoach Mary, hailing hello.” It was nowhere near standard protocol, but Jenny could not care less.

  She settled back in her chair for the long wait. Crews generally debated a response for quite a while before–

  “FTL Stagecoach Mary, are we ever glad to hear from you,” said an exuberant fella on the other ship. “This is the USS Well Actually heading out to Jai-Sal-Meer. There are plenty of pirates out here in this part of space, but not a lot of friendly faces. You looking to slow down and have a cup of tea with us or just wave hello as we pass on by?”

  “That’s odd,” said Mary, muting the comm.

  “No kidding,” said Jenny.

  Every part of her logical brain told her to decline the invitation and keep moving, but her senses were screaming at her that something Bala was aboard that ship. If it was horn, even the tiniest sliver, it would get her that much closer to Kaila. Her finger hovered over the comm, knowing what she had to do. It was a big risk for what might turn out to be a magic ring from a cereal box lodged in someone’s intestine since they swallowed it as a kid. And even if they had horn, they weren’t going to give it up willingly. But she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t try. She tapped the screen.

  “Kia ora, Well Actually. I’d love to come by for a visit. It’s a long cold road out here and I don’t get much company.”

  “Oh Jenny,” said Mary with a sigh.

  “Great! We’ll send a rendezvous location and meet up in about an hour. Well Actually out!”

  “This is going to be interesting,” said Jenny.

  Jenny freshened “And you love interesting,” said Mary, slowing thrusters as the Well Actually’s coordinates came through in a non-encoded message. Everyone within ten thousand kilometers would know about the rendezvous. This crew was either incredibly naïve or setting her up for an ambush.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dude, the Stars are Yours

  Jenny freshened up in her quarters before the two ships met. It wouldn’t do to arrive smelling of stale sweat and dehydrated cheese. She sponged off with a disposable moist wipe that was intended to be tossed out of the ship along with all of the other trash that humans dumped into space. She zipped up her jumpsuit and went over to her closet for one more thing. She unclipped her gran’s patu from the shelf and ran her fingers over the designs carved into the club. It had broken in two during her last big adventure, but the dwarves on the FTL Jaggery had mended it so that the seam was barely visible. Other weapons were more intimidating but only this one carried the weight of the women before her.

  Jenny tucked the patu in her widest pocket and rolled up to the airlock. The Well Actually had already positioned itself above them. Mary made the necessary thruster and microgravity adjustments to line up the two airlocks. Jenny’s gut tightened. Their hatch was an antiquated style that wasn’t the standard size. They wouldn’t be able to dock directly, hatch to hatch, and create an airtight seal. Instead, a flexible tube of thick plastic extended from the Well Actually’s airlock. They expected her to float across. Not that she hadn’t spacewalked before, but it wasn’t generally a task you asked someone to do on a first date.

  “I don’t like this,” said Mary, echoing Jenny’s thoughts.

  “It’ll be fine. You worry too much. If they wanted to board us by force they would be better equipped for quick entry. This weird and tedious bridge is a good sign. They’re just a bunch of backward old spacers,” said Jenny.

  “Still–” began Mary.

  “Remind me to raise your risk tolerance when I get back,” said Jenny, in a roundabout sort of threat.

  “It’s already at maximum,” said Mary.

  “Nothing’s ever at maximum if you try hard enough,” said Jenny.

  Their retractable tunnel met her airlock. Mary’s articulated grappling arms grabbed onto the flange and sealed it to her hull. Jenny was amazed that it sealed at all. The equipment was old but Mary would have warned her if it wasn’t holding a vacuum. She tightened the safety harness on her wheelchair and hit the pad to turn off the Stagecoach Mary’s gravity and unlock her own door.

  “Here we go,” she said as the airlock hissed open. Her chair lifted off from the floor, which was always a stomach-churning sensation. It was heavy, carved out of wood by grateful dwarves after she’d brought Gary Cobalt back from the dead. The chair was beautiful but when it got going it was a job to slow down. She’d crashed into many a ceiling before learning how to spot the signs of a runaway chair before it was too late. Fortunately for Mary’s bulkheads she’d become proficient in maneuvering the hefty chair over the last few weeks.

  The air that rushed past her from the bridge tunnel was icy cold. This was a tunnel meant for travelers in an extravehicular activity suit.

  “Hey, is this really airtight?” she asked Mary.

  “Yes, but no environmental controls. It’s going to get pretty chilly in there quickly. Hope you have a jacket,” said Mary.

  “You sound like my gran,” said Jenny, pushing off against the door frame with her arms. Her chair whacked against the insides of the tunnel. She cringed as the plastic rippled like a flag in the wind. Jenny wondered if it was as brittle and old as it looked. One small tear would suffocate her in seconds. These old ships were known for their mechanical defects – even when they were fresh off the assembly line. The doors jammed, the food dispensers electrocuted people, and the water supply always leaked. These things were death traps on the best of days.

  Jenny grabbed a spiral strut and pushed herself along more carefully. At the other end of the tunnel, a pink face bobbed.

  “Hey there! Govvie says to… oh. We didn’t know you were a cripple.”

  Now this was not the first time that Jenny had been called that word. The Reason wasn’t too big on sensitivity training, so for most of her life she’d been on the receiving end of various ableist slurs, but this time it really chafed at her. Either she took the time and energy to educate this random pre-teen spacer, or he was going to grow up thinking that word was just fine.

  “I’m disabled,” she said pointedly. “Is that going to be a problem? Because I’ll just turn around right here if it is.”

  The kid glanced behind him for a moment, looking for someone who wasn’t there.

  “Well, no. I guess not,” he said.

  “Good.” She hoped that would be the end of it.

  He floated back to let Jenny through their airlock. She shoved herself forward, annoyed. Her chair banged hard enough on the airlock frame that the vibration shot through her teeth. She slowed down and tried again. The chair thwacked, albeit more gently, on the doorway.

  “Your wheelchair’s not gonna fit,”
said the boy.

  “Fuck me,” said Jenny, unstrapping herself and floating away from her chair. She folded it up along the hinged joints and dragged it through the airlock behind her. When she looked up, the boy had turned bright, splotchy red from his neck to his ears.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Your language, ma’am,” choked the boy. “We don’t hear much swears like that on the Well Actually.”

  She laughed and he flushed a deep shade of red.

  “There’s more where that came from,” she warned him.

  “Not if Govvie can help it,” mumbled the boy, turning away and floating down the hall.

  Jenny followed him, pulling her folded chair behind her. “You won’t need that during your visit. You can leave it here by the airlock and collect it up on your way out,” he said.

  Jenny hesitated. If they turned on the gravity she was stranded. She didn’t like the thought of being marooned on an unfamiliar ship. Then again, even folded, this wooden chair was bulky and hard to maneuver. In the end, her cautiousness won out.

  “I’ll keep it with me. Never know when I might need a place to sit,” she said.

  “Uh huh,” said Junior. “Whatever you want.”

  “What’s your name, kid?” she asked.

  He looked up at her, confused, as if he’d never been asked this before.

  “Your name?” she reiterated. “What people call you?”

  “Oh. Junior,” he said. Jenny was not getting a great feeling about this place.

  “I’m Jenny,” she said.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Miss Jenny”.

  “Just Jenny,” she said, cringing inwardly at what felt like a teacher’s title. She didn’t particularly have anything against kids, but they always seemed to be on the verge of accidentally killing themselves. Jenny had a hard enough time keeping herself alive. She wasn’t about to take responsibility for a tiny creature that liked to swallow everything that wasn’t bolted down.

  “We mostly go zero G to save fuel. Sometimes we turn on the gravity for visitors, but I think this time Govvie will keep it off,” said Junior.

  Jenny was glad to hear that. As much as she appreciated the mobility that her chair offered, she was always more maneuverable in zero G. The boy stopped short and Jenny nearly plowed into him. She pulled herself to a stop using a doorknob on one of the quarters they passed. It rattled in her hand, but did not open. A muffled voice from inside called out to her. The boy cleared his throat and motioned for her to leave her chair.

  Junior continued down the hallway toward the middle of the gravity cylinder. They came out into the large atrium that was always at the center of these things. They all had wheel-and-spoke designs, not unlike the official Reason flag – three crimson spheres filled with a five-pointed star, a seven-pointed star, and a twentyfour-spoke wheel representing the United States, Australia, and India. Everyone called it the ‘spheres and tears’. Humans had a bit of a reputation in the universe.

  Jenny passed the huge planter that was meant to be the centerpiece of the place – it usually had an immense and ridiculously symbolic tree growing in it. Life, cooperation, symbiotic relationships, blah, blah, blah. This one was empty.

  The common area for a generation ship with a city-sized population was a ghost town. She’d seen plenty of people at the windows a few minutes ago. They just weren’t here.

  “Is it second shift?” she asked. Even though there was technically no ‘days’ on a ship, these old societies liked to mimic the light/dark cycles of a planet. There was usually a first shift when most people were awake and a second shift when the common areas were slightly quieter.

  “Uh… sure,” he said, not stopping. “Around here, people kind of keep to themselves.”

  The hair on Jenny’s neck bristled. Generation ships had been designed for lots of common interactions. It was what held the community together. Experience (and a handful of massacres) had revealed that people behaved more civilly toward each other when they were interdependent in lots of little ways. So the ships were designed to function with the maximum amount of human interaction. You couldn’t just sit in your cabin with a replicator and pornography. You had to go out and make food, negotiate with people, and work in cooperation. Even when everything was essentially free and it was all a sham. It helped keep people sane and happy.

  The atrium rose through the heart of the ship. The walls were flanked by a spiral ramp up to several floors of shops and working areas. All of them were closed and dark. A few were boarded over as if they’d been condemned. Something wasn’t right on this ship.

  Her pocket buzzed twice and she jumped, sending her off course into a support beam. It was just her tablet with a message from Mary. Junior hadn’t even noticed. He was getting farther away from her by the second. She tapped the comm bud in her ear and mumbled, “Go.”

  “Jenny, the docking tunnel is retracting. I’m still outside, but you can’t get back. Tell me everything’s all right on that ship,” said Mary.

  “Nope,” Jenny replied in a low voice. The boy turned and she pretended to be admiring the parquet floors.

  “Is this real wood?” she asked.

  “Uh, I think so. We should keep moving,” he said.

  “Sure,” she replied brightly. He seemed satisfied.

  “This ship looks deserted,” she whispered into her comm. “It’s not right.”

  “Well you can head back for the airlock, but there’s no way across unless you want to float across about ten meters of openspace without an EVA suit,” said Mary. Jenny detected the slightest hint of “I told you so.” Bravo to those AI programmers.

  Jenny had spacewalked unsuited a long time ago and it had nearly killed her. She wasn’t keen on repeating the experience any time soon.

  “Options?” she asked.

  “They probably have escape pods on the residential decks. Or EVA suits near the airlocks. I can pick you up with my cargo grappler if you can get outside safely. We can try to shoot our way out, probably unsuccessfully, if that’s the route you’d like to go,” said Mary.

  “Hm,” said Jenny thinking through the logistics. “Can you upload into their systems?” she asked, hanging back as far as she could.

  These old ships often operated on unsecure wireless networks.She’d disabled an antique trawler or three by loading Mary into their systems and bringing the ships under her control. Mary was quiet for a moment as she checked for open network nodes.

  “I can get into the food service system, but it’s walled off from the rest of the system structure. And it looks like it hasn’t been used in decades.”

  “Then how are they eating?” asked Jenny.

  “I have no idea, but no one’s getting food out of the inventory. I mean, maybe they’re working from paper or a firewalled system that I can’t see, but, from this vantage point, it looks like the crew of thousands haven’t eaten in years.”

  Jenny’s skin prickled again.

  “You made a bad choice,” said Mary.

  “Yes, I made a bad choice,” echoed Jenny. She left the comm open so that Mary could hear what she heard in case she needed to get out of there fast.

  The boy floated into a doorway near the top of the atrium. Jenny pulled herself up the ramp railings, wheelchair still floating behind her, hoping they weren’t going to turn on the gravity while she was sixteen stories above the parquet floor. She shivered at the thought. Or perhaps it was that the ship was barely above freezing.

  She looked down at the atrium. A face peeked up at her from a storefront window and disappeared as soon she turned. The boy slipped into an open administrative office on the top level of the atrium. As usual, riffraff at the bottom, government and admin at the top, looking down on everyone else. This wouldn’t be the pilot’s bridge, which was away from the common areas. It was meeting rooms and offices for councils or governors or whatever ruling class they had on here. There was always a governance system separate from the people who actually run the ship
. That way the population couldn’t vote to change course or chase comets at whim.

  They floated through an empty maze of plastic desks separated by half-walls covered in fabric. The ship was old, probably launched right after the first of Earth’s multi-year superstorms. She scanned the desks for a logo.

  There it was – painted on the plexiglass doors of the manager’s offices. CoSpace. Jenny’s fears eased a bit. CoSpace was known for their relaxed, laissez-faire approach to space travel. Their tagline had been, “Dude, the stars are yours.” Run like a startup, their philosophy had been to skip hiring mathematicians, psychologists, and economists and instead hold an expensive lottery to choose residents. Problem was, the computer-based lottery was easily hacked. A secondary market of CoSpace-hacking companies had emerged, nearly all of them in Russia. For a hefty sum, you could guarantee the CoSpace lottery would pull your name. Not surprisingly, filling ships with hackers, grifters, and oligarchs didn’t make for sustainable space travel. Most of the CoSpace ships had failed to reach a habitable planet before their society broke down and everyone died. Go out far enough in any direction and you would find CoSpace ships drifting in the far reaches of known space, a handful of survivors munching crickets around a solar warmer. There was nothing of worth on board, so even pirates left them alone.

  The boy knocked on the door to the largest office and a chipper voice from inside told them to come in. They floated into a brightly-lit office, tidy and sparse, but covered in a thick layer of dust. A man with graying hair and a bright white smile floated over to her, extending his hand. He was wearing a buttondown dress shirt and tie, with only boxer shorts underneath. Jenny got a weird vibe off him. Like he’d been floating around in his underwear and had only managed to half-dress before she’d arrived. It added to the strangeness of the empty ship. It didn’t seem like this guy was in charge of anything up here.

  “Governor Dan,” he said, pumping her arm. He glanced at her wheelchair.

  “Did you need the gravity on or…”

  “Captain Jenny. Floating works better for me.”