ON THIS PAGE YOU WILL FIND THE BEST IN FACTS SHOUTED AT YOUR FACE THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF TEXT. MY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS TOLD ME I HAD A KNACK FOR USELESS BITS OF TRIVIA SO HERE I AM PUTTING IT TO GOOD USE.
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Vigil’s bar was packed to the brim with people feeling their rowdiest. It wasn’t quite a party, just a get-together Sweettalk had thrown together to celebrate, in her words, “this crew finally recruiting someone who won’t get taller than me.”
Ariadne and Spacebreather were curled up in the corner of a large booth, with Sweettalk and Sasha to their right, and Taryn and Tosin on their left. Ghostrunner was at the bar counter flirting shamelessly with Vigil, while Alicia and Blue sat at the next table with their guest, Crown Vic, having a raucous conversation that the rest of the room only ever seemed to pay attention to when they caught a glimpse of some outrageous thing Vic had said, like “so what, I gotta pretend I regret that night because he can’t handle that another guy knows what his balls taste like?”
The elder Ariadne and Spacebreather had retired to bed some time earlier. Cabrera was dancing provocatively with Cherry in an open space by the speakers.
“Social butterfly, that one,” Ariadne said. “I’m surprised, from somebody so private.”
“I didn’t get the sense she loved being so private,” Pilar said. “She’s not a big believer in being by herself. I think she’s gonna enjoy being here.”
“She’s been texting with Pilar and Tosin,” Taryn said, proudly. “Really bringing my man out of his shell.”
“That’s getting annoying,” Sweettalk replied, squeezing a lemon into her cola. “We know he’s your man. We were all there for it. Some of us put a lot of effort into it.”
“Hush up,” Sasha said, “after all you pushed for this you’re not allowed to complain about it.”
“Wonder where she learned to dance like that,” Taryn said. “Tos, got any idea?”
“Yes,” Tosin replied.
The table remained silent for several seconds, before Sweettalk simply defaulted to the other person on their text chain. “Pilar, you wanna…”
“If you want to know her backstory, you gotta ask her,” Pilar insisted. “That said, I know she’s really proud of her moves. She probably won’t tell you where she learned them, but she might just show you some.”
Ellesmere, now dressed in a simple black T-shirt and jeans, looked like a stranger as she entered the bar and sat alone in a corner. She waited for Vigil to break away from Ghostrunner’s quiet romantic monologue and come take her order.
“Oh for the love of…” Sweettalk muttered. “Hey, dumbass! Get over here and join the party!”
Ellesmere looked up and pointed at herself quizzically.
“Yeah, you’re dumbass,” Sweettalk insisted. “Ven aqui, on the double!”
Sasha muttered to her, “Zee, what the hell are you doing?”
“Be nice,” Sweettalk said, “maybe something good will happen.”
Ellesmere came over to find out what Sweettalk wanted, and Sweettalk beckoned her to sit down. She took a seat next to Sasha, who glanced sharply and pointedly at Sweettalk.
Sweettalk held firm. “Nobody comes to a bar where they know a party is happening and sits by themselves off in a corner without wishing they were part of the group.”
“I don’t mean to intrude,” she said, “it’s just, you’re the only people on this station whose names I know, and you’re all here tonight. What the devil am I supposed to do, play another video game? Watch a rerun of that blasted detective show you’re all obsessed with?”
Sasha wrinkled her nose, but Sweettalk was more easy-going than her wife. “Close enough.”
“Sweettalk, that was it. You all have birth names and street names and nicknames, I’m having a devil of a time keeping it all straight.” Ellesmere said, pointing at everybody around the table. “And you’re… Ariadne, and Spacebreather, and Uprising, and… Dr. Deathsbane, and, uh…”
Her eyes fell on Tosin.
“Right, so, lab assistant…” Ellesmere struggled to remember his actual name, and then corrected herself. “Tosin… How come everybody here has a pirate name except for you?”
“I have a pirate name,” Tosin replied flatly, and then didn’t elaborate.
“This lot all calls you Tosin,” Ellesmere replied. “Why don’t they ever call you by your pirate name?”
Tosin looked confused. “They… call me by both names, all the time.”
Taryn burst out laughing.
“She’s not getting it, Rockstar,” Sweettalk chuckled.
“There, see?” Tosin asked. “All the time.”
Ellesmere almost looked annoyed. “Really? That’s your name? I thought everyone just liked to stroke your ego.”
“Kinda what the pirate names are for, babes,” Ariadne laughed. “Tosin is a rock star, so I named him Rockstar.”
“Also,” Tosin helpfully added, “the rocks.”
“While I’m learning everybody’s names,” Ellesmere asked, “can someone please tell me who the hell Great White and Mako are? You lot keep mentioning them like they’re people I’m supposed to already know. I’ve got no context clues to go on and I don’t even have Shubin to look it up for me anymore.”
“Vigilantes operating in the outer moons,” Tosin explained. “Shark motif. Great White lost her arms in a shark attack, and Mako built her this gorgeous, gleaming-white, practically indestructible mech that blasts music so the bad guys are too distracted trying to bring her down to notice Mako slipping out of the shadows and knocking them out one-by-one.”
“My man has a thing for Mako,” Taryn teased.
“Stop,” Sweettalk interjected, but was ignored.
“I have a professional respect for her,” he admitted. “I studied her mech designs to help our Captain fabricate Mrs. Spacebreather’s power armor.”
“I told Ari if I ever lose a limb I want her to build me something that cool to replace it,” Pilar tossed out. “I mean, she’s one hell of a prosthetist, building bionic arms into a whole battle-mech for her patient.”
Tosin laughed. “I imagine it’s probably why Miz—” Tosin caught himself before he revealed something he shouldn’t, and pivoted artfully, “Miz Great White married her!”
Pilar smiled at him, and thought how nice it was to actually hear him talk for once. She turned her attention back to Ellesmere. “You. What’s your poison?”
Ellesmere considered this. She had, it turned out, never actually had a drink before. Intoxicants weren’t common on her planet, and she’d never spent enough time as a member of a species that enjoyed them to be invited to try any.
“What’s good?” She asked.
Taryn swirled her cognac and cola. “Probably something sweet, right?” She asked. “First time trying alcohol, she’s probably not gonna like the taste right away.”
“Cookie makes a mean boozy milkshake,” Ariadne suggested, watching Cabrera and Cherry finish their dance, “but that might be a bit advanced for a first-time drinker. It’s not about liking the taste, at least not the first time. I want something that’ll make her flinch, then we can refine what her tastes are.”
“Cookie’s got an early night, anyway,” Pilar said. “Getting everybody to try my mama’s pan con chicharrón tomorrow at brunch is the priority here, so don’t any of you dare get in the way of her beauty sleep.”
Sasha pointedly did not make the comment she wanted to, about what choice suggestions she had for what Ellesmere could drink. Cherry kissed Cabrera far too affectionately and they parted several seconds later as Cherry made her way back to Blue and Alicia’s table, greeting each of them with a kiss just as enthusiastic.
“Mezcal,” Cabrera said, slumping down into the seat next to Tosin.
“You can’t possibly have heard that whole conversation from over there,” Taryn pointed out.
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Cabrera replied, “just a general suggestion.”
“Thought you’d want to spend your time with Ms. Cordial,” Tosin replied.
Cabrera smiled. “Oh, I’ve got all night for that, handsome,” she said. “I’ve only got until bedtime to hang out with you guys.”
Tosin’s face remained unchanged. Sweettalk took a sip of her cola. Taryn said nothing.
After a very long silence, Sweettalk finally failed to suppress the impulse to tease her. “I’m sorry, did she just call your man ‘handsome’ and you didn’t turn green with envy?”
Taryn rolled her eyes. “Ha, ha,” she said sarcastically. “What do I care? He is handsome, and I trust him. Besides, Cabrera’s on a date of her own. She’s not gonna try to steal mine.”
“Those days are long past me,” Cabrera laughed. “Word to the wise, kids, don’t hook up with your boyfriend’s best friend, or your best friend’s boyfriend.”
“What about your girlfriend’s girlfriend’s girlfriend?” Ariadne pointed out, gesturing at the ever-more-complicated polyamorous relationship, bordering on a community, that Cabrera had just loosely entangled herself in.
“Well, no advice is universal. It’s different when all those people are in the room when it goes down,” she said, then laughed at a memory she wasn’t likely to share. “Believe me. But no worries, mae, tall dark and gorgeous here is in no danger from me.”
“He is rather fetching, isn’t he?” Ellesmere asked. “In better circumstances I’d like to--”
“I didn’t say my tolerance was unlimited,” Taryn interrupted her before she had a chance to reveal what she’d like to do. “Cabrera, we were just wondering where you learned to dance so…”
“Slutty?” Cabrera offered.
“No,” Tosin replied.
“I was going to say, alluringly,” Taryn offered.
“Trust me,” Pilar said, “we grew up with Blue. You can drop all the cryptic hints you want about your past and you’re not gonna hear any judgments on promiscuity around here.”
“Oh!” Ariadne said, “that reminds me! Taryn, all this talk about your dad had me thinking about that concert and I dug something out for you.”
“What?” Taryn asked.
“We actually took some holovids of his performance,” Ariadne said. “Had to dig back in the records to find them, but we got a few whole songs.”
“Oh my god!” Taryn beamed. “Let’s see them!”
“Querida, are you sure this is a good idea?” Pilar asked quietly. “I mean, think about what that concert represents.”
“No, Pilar, trust me,” Taryn said, “I want to see this.”
“Taryn,” Pilar said, “this was the concert that ended your parents’ marriage.”
“And a few short weeks ago, I’d be disgusted by the very idea of watching it,” Taryn said. “Now that I know my dad wasn’t cheating on my mom, though? Might be nice to see him perform again.”
“Up to you,” Pilar said warily.
“Wait!” Taryn said, and for a moment Pilar thought she was reconsidering, but she just stood up and beckoned Blue and Alicia over. Cherry remained at the table with Vic and caught him up on the finer points of her planned night with Cabrera.
“What’s up, squirt?” Blue asked. “Better be something good, we were discussing our plans for the evening, and that Cherry has a way with words… hey, Cabrera.”
Taryn brightly said, “they’ve got a video of my dad’s last concert!”
“No shit, huh?” Blue asked. “It’s been a minute since I heard Benny’s voice. We gonna play this thing or what?”
“So everyone’s just… okay with this?” Pilar asked. “Nobody’s night is gonna be ruined by watching this?”
“Only if you keep looking for problems,” Sweettalk said. “Come on, not all of us were at this thing.”
“Okay, here goes,” Ariadne said, putting her hologram projection crystal on the table, and pressing play.
A projection of the stage, and the front few rows of the audience, filled the surface of the table. Ben Adair, exactly as they remembered him, spat lyrical fire so fast their ears could hardly keep up, and next to him, dressed so scantily that describing her as “dressed” was a stretch, was Blue.
As his verse came to an end, Blue’s began, and she pulled Ben’s arms around her and danced as suggestively as she could muster, while making direct and unmistakably pointed eye contact with a woman in the front row. She pulled his hands up and down across her torso, all while singing phrases of love and lust that would make even the most seasoned pervert blush.
Taryn burst out laughing. “Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god, look at mom’s face.”
“Yeah, that’s how I felt too, at the time,” Blue said. “Until, you know…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Taryn continued laughing, “she really shouldn’t have shot my dad. She should’ve shot you!”
“I’M SAYING!” Blue threw her arms up in relief. “Kid, I’m tellin’ ya, fuckin’ apple fell straight the hell down. You’re your father’s daughter, through and through.”
The two women started to laugh together, which, of course, gave the rest of the table permission to abandon the awkwardness of the topic and join in.
“That dancing was sure formative for us, Blue,” Ariadne said. “We went home and had quite the night. No wonder I kept this video.”
“Don’t be weird,” Blue said.
Pilar took this opportunity to bait Cabrera again. “You think that’s something,” she said. “You should see how Cabrera dances.”
Ariadne picked up on the move. “Pilar did speak highly of your dance moves when you two were singing La Bamba.”
“Nobody wants to see that,” Cabrera waved off the suggestion. “You’ve all seen way too much of my dancing tonight anyhow.”
“No, trust me, we want to see it,” Sweettalk insisted. “We really, really want to see it.”
Sasha elbowed her. “Down, girl,” she said playfully.
“Well, if your horndog wife insists,” Cabrera said. “You’re all just lucky I’ve missed being... looked at. Get your drinks off the table if you don’t want them kicked over.”
Everybody complied, then Cabrera removed her shoes, stood on a chair, and hopped up on the table. Her body moved perfectly with the music in the bar, and, as if by force of habit, reached for the hem of her shirt to pull it away. She hesitated, briefly, but looked around the room and found no objections. Ghostrunner and Vigil were discreetly watching from the bar, Vic and Cherry were cheering along. Pilar was grinning wide and Ariadne clearly enjoying the show. Blue and Alicia were hooting and hollering. Sasha was blushing, but not offering any sign of objection, and Sweettalk’s face was pushing her to do it. Ellesmere was biting her lip, not even bothering to disguise how much she was getting into the dance. She turned to Taryn and Tosin, the most likely source of objection, but saw the same blank expression on Tosin’s face as always, and Taryn was holding his hand tight, and smiling up at her.
She shrugged, thought “what the hell?” and went on with her old routine, stripping away her clothes and throwing them to people around the room. She hadn’t used this routine in her work with the clients who had no qualms about degrading her, this was a dance routine she reserved for get-togethers with friends who adored her, which she turned into legendary parties by merit of her attendance. By god, she had missed spending time with people. She missed having them watch her, touch her, and speak to her. She’d never have those friends back, but now she had new friends, who would always remember how beautifully she’d danced for them.
When she was finished, she had to retrieve her clothes from everyone who’d caught an article, swapping a quick peck on the lips for her tube top or her tight black skirt or her brassiere, from Taryn, Sweettalk, and Ariadne, respectively, then locked herself in a deep, long kiss with Cherry in exchange for her flannel, which was large enough on Cabrera to obviate the need for the outfit she came in with, before sitting down.
“And that’s how you dance, back home,” she said.
The entire table burst into a flurry of compliments on her athleticism, her form, her rhythm, and of course, as respectfully as they could muster, her body. The only person who remained stony and silent was Tosin, which Ariadne and Taryn knew him well enough to understand: this meant he’d liked her performance very, very much. Ariadne resolved to playfully tease Tosin about this later. Taryn was simply impressed with herself about how little it bothered her. After all, she figured, it’s not like she hadn’t enjoyed the performance too, and she was the one who’d get to go home with him tonight.
Vigil arrived at the table to congratulate Cabrera and to, finally, take Ellesmere’s drink order.
“After all that talk from you lot, I still don’t know what’s any good,” Ellesmere replied. “My first drink is a momentous occasion, I should think! Ought to be something momentous!”
A thought struck Tosin. “Tequila paf.”
“Oh, I like the way you think,” Ariadne said.
“I still can’t believe you taught him that,” Alicia laughed.
“I taught him, and he taught Taryn, and now we’re teaching Ellesmere,” Ariadne said. “It’s a little ritual, and the more we keep doing it, the more we end up linked to everyone else who learns it.”
“Yeah, I remember my own friend’s spiel about these things,” Alicia laughed. “Yeah, okay. Vigil? Round of tequila pafs, on me.”
Vigil nodded, rushed away, and began to prepare the shots for everyone in the bar.
“You gotta see the pictures from that night,” Alicia said. “It’s the only picture I have of Ariana and Blue where they’re both smiling.”
“Now that I gotta see,” Pilar said, “pull ‘em up!”
Alicia searched for the photo as Vigil returned to the table with the shots, delivered two of them to Vic and Cherry so they could participate as well, and returned to the bar to hand Ghostrunner hers.
“Taryn, do the honors?” Ariadne asked. Taryn nodded. “Cabrera, Ellesmere, you learned this shot from Taryn.”
“You put your palm over the mouth of the glass, like this, and slam it down as hard as you can. Then, while it’s fizzing, you throw it back. I learned this drink, this ritual, from my man,” she said, and Sweettalk rolled her eyes, but smiled anyway.
“I learned this ritual from my mentor, who happens to be one of my closest friends,” Tosin said.
Ariadne continued. “I learned this ritual from my mentor, my confidante, my… hell, the closest thing I’ve ever had to a mother. And I also taught it to Sweettalk, and Sasha, and Ghostrunner, and just about anybody else on my crew who’d listen.”
Alicia’s heart melted, and she lovingly said, “I learned this ritual from my weirdest college buddy.” She tapped on her own communicator until a holograph of herself with Blue, Baltimore, Beam, half a dozen almost supernaturally gorgeous performers, and a bartender filled the space between the group. “And he learned it from a gifted storyteller named Ms. Cecile. And, honestly, who knows where she learned it from?”
Ariadne’s eyes fixated on the bartender in the photo, who she recognized immediately as the stranger she’d encountered in her dreams, at the foundation fundraiser, and on the other side of the threshold.
It was at this point, according to her, that she suddenly remembered some of the things I’d said to her, which hadn’t made sense to her at the time.
“I know everything about you, Ariadne.”
“Rubbed elbows with Alicia, before prison.”
Suddenly, Ariadne knew what she had to do. The danger was passed, but her role in shaping events was still ongoing. She recalled an exchange from beyond the threshold.
“We’re not lashed to whatever future you come from?”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
The entire assembled group slammed their shot glasses on the table and threw them back.
“My god,” Ellesmere said, coughing and sputtering from the kick of the shot, “when you asked what my poison was, I didn’t think you meant it literally.”
“Look at us,” Cabrera said, hardly flinching from the bite of the alcohol “two girls without pasts, and we couldn’t have more different reactions to tequila.”
Ariadne knew now that the help she’d counted on to survive had come from this future, from the one where she did what she was about to do.
“You figure it out, eventually. Over drinks, with friends, I should think.”
The friends chatted for about an hour longer before retiring to bed. Sweettalk noted that the tequila paf made two drinks, and cut herself off there. She and Sasha retired to bed with Ghostrunner in tow, and a promise from Vigil to join them after she’d closed down the bar. Next, Ellesmere stretched and excused herself to bed, but not before making a crude comment about how she’d first need an “extra-long date with the shower head” after “the little one’s big dance.” Blue and Alicia pulled Cabrera and Cherry back to their quarters, and Taryn and Tosin politely thanked Ariadne and Pilar for the lovely evening, then retreated back to Tosin’s lab. Soon, after Vic said goodnight and slipped away to god-knows-where, Ariadne and Pilar were the only two left in the bar.
“Girls without pasts,” Ariadne mused, echoing Cabrera’s words. “Old concerts, cocktails, photographs… the little moments that seem to slip through the cracks in the shadow of the big picture.”
Ariadne pulled Luzuha’s coin out of her pocket and turned it over in her hand.
“What’s eating you, querida?” Pilar asked.
“What’s our Luzuha coin?” She replied. “What are we going to leave behind?”
“I don’t intend to go anywhere,” Pilar said.
“Universe is a big place,” Ariadne said. “Time is gonna be going on for a while. Maybe someday, things will have changed too much. People won’t remember us. Won’t remember everything we’ve seen, and done. Everything that mattered to us. What then? I mean, Luzuha left behind a treasure trove, just so somebody could carry on her legacy.”
“If you want to start burying treasure, we can,” Pilar said, “but I’ve always thought that our legacy would be the better world we built.”
“Nothing’s built to last forever,” Ariadne said. “Someday, there might be another world, another time. Maybe if they remember us, remember what mattered to us, they could build it again. Keep our legacy alive, even after we’re gone.”
Pilar nodded. “You know I’m not gonna start shooting down your crazy plans now,” she said. “What exactly is it you’ve got in mind, to ensure all the little pirates of the far future remember us?”
Ariadne smiled. “I think you’re gonna like it.”
[suggested listening]
The Epilogue Triptych
PHASE ONE: Moments after the Plasma Rain, in Parts Unknown
There’s no real way to describe the sensation of believing yourself to be dead, only to suddenly find yourself alive. The closest possible way to visualize it would be to imagine breaking through the surface of a pool despite, just moments earlier, standing on dry ground, with no knowledge of having entered the water.
Shubin and Daeschler, as near as I can tell, awoke on the surface of a planet that neither they, nor anyone from their home universe, had ever set foot on before. The tangle of soft vines they lay on was so thick they couldn’t feel the ground beneath them. Upon waking, they had to strip off their thick fur coats, because the heat and humidity bordered on oppressive. They noted a lack of parasitic insects, unusual for a rainforest climate, but the noise around them betrayed an overabundance of wildlife.
Shubin was ecstatic that they’d survived. Daeschler was excited as well, although slightly embarrassed. She wouldn’t have asked her coworker to kiss her if she thought she’d survive. It was an excellent dramatic gesture for the end of a story, but then their story didn’t end.
Kalrax was as furious to see they’d survived as he was to find that he had survived. He was lucky he could survive outside of a liquid environment in his natural form, and even luckier that he found the heat and humidity rather comfortable. After being one of the most powerful entities in the universe, he was practically apoplectic to find himself lost and alone in some unknown universe with the very two bumbling traitors who’d brought him down.
They wouldn’t be alone together for long, though. Moments later, the people of this world would detect the interdimensional incursion, and dispatch a sleek golden spacecraft to intercept whoever had caused it.
Kalrax was terrified-- these people were advanced, and he was powerless, physically and politically, against them.
Daeschler was overjoyed-- she had never seen a spacecraft quite like this before, nor had she seen a city as technologically advanced as the one they were brought to. She could pick absolutely any object off the ground and spend years studying how it worked.
Shubin was the most excited of all-- a whole new universe of exciting new stories that he knew nothing about going in.
Unfortunately, I can only guess as to what happened to them from here. Perhaps their hosts took them into their society and taught them their ways. Maybe they were taken and executed. Maybe they staged a daring escape and lived their lives on the run in this strange new world they found themselves stranded on.
All I can say for certain is that, to the best of my knowledge at the time of recording this account, that they did not return to our universe, and if they did, they did their best to make sure no record survived of their return.
If I may editorialize slightly, I personally hope they had a long, fulfilling retirement in their new home. I hope Kalrax learned to be okay with somebody else being more powerful than him, and that the intervention of his organization was never necessary to the well-being of the universe. I’m hopeful that my wishes for Shubin and Daeschler may come true. I have less hope that my wishes for Kalrax will be fulfilled. I fear he may have a short, paranoid, unhappy life.
But, like you, I’ll likely never know. If I ever get answers to these questions, I’ll be sure to record them.
PHASE TWO: A biographer’s note, from a time and place far removed from Ariadne’s, but, on inspection, not one so different
It’s my duty, as a historian and a biographer, to tell the story in objective, unbiased terms, and attempt to get as close to the truth of what really happened as I possibly can. Like anyone, I have my biases, and my blind spots, and of course, I have an agenda of my own in recording these events at all.
I will admit to my own biases in my work-- the subject of Ariadne and her crew is one I’m incredibly passionate about, and I have been for a long time. My critics have used the word “fanboy” to describe me, and on that count, I’ll gladly plead guilty! I have tried my best not to allow my own personal feelings towards my subjects to prevent me writing an objective, factual account of events. Dramatized though it might be, this account is, to the best of my ability, what really happened. At least, the parts of it I got right.
Of course, any biographer is going to make mistakes here and there! Is “Racquel” spelled with a C? Are the Baltimore sisters two years apart or four years apart? I now know “yes” and “two,” are the correct answers, but in the past, I’ve felt absolutely sure that “no” and “four” were the answers, and, well, research makes fools of us all. Who knows which answers I’ll know next time?
And, of course, any biographer worth their salt will have to take some liberties with the material they’re covering as well. For instance, in this document, the bulk of the words spoken by the figures in question are translated from their original language. Most of the dialogue in this volume is centuries removed from the time of writing, and its modern equivalent is not a language I speak fluently. For the same reason that, when discussing an 11th century weather event, I would not use the Old English word scúr, even though the primary sources would use that word to describe it. I would call it a “storm,” a word that conveys the correct meaning to a modern reader. If I presented the dialogue without translation, it would not be intelligible to me, or the bulk of my readers, unless those readers happen to be incredibly accomplished linguists.
As such, you may notice several instances where a character uses a distinctive idiom, or a strange turn of phrase, for instance when Pilar refers to Ariadne as a “library rat” or “book-eater.” She was speaking Spanish, the way it was spoken in the 27th century, and as you’ve probably noticed at this point, this volume is presented in English, the way it’s spoken now, in our time.
In that instance, I made the choice to translate her words literally, rather than localize them. The meaning of her words is not lost in the literal translation, and especially since the differing tics of the Martian and Rheian dialects of Spanish became directly relevant in Pilar’s interactions with Cabrera, it seemed like attempting to localize “library rat” and “book-eater” to comparable terms like “egghead” and “bookworm” might have sounded more organic, but would have brought the narrative I presented further from the truth of what actually happened, not closer.
It’s also important to note, of course, that like any biographer, I made choices to omit information that I may have access to. For instance, I became quite taken with Cabrera’s story while researching this volume, and I did, in fact, uncover several journals, documenting quite a bit of information on her former life, and her pursuers. However, all the documentation I have indicates that such information is deeply personal, and not particularly pertinent to the historical narrative. Its inclusion would serve very little purpose except to disrespect the privacy of my subject.
I was lucky enough to have such solid primary sources to work from-- Ariadne’s own cybernetic logs provided me the ability to see much of what she experienced for myself, as well as the written testimonies of dozens of her crew. I was able to independently verify the accounts in her testimonies using news reports, the journals of Earth’s Sovereign Peace Upendo and Mars’ Chief Magistrate Rogelio Santiago, the contract ledger of Catamount Solutions’ Founder and CEO, Kitty Carter, and countless other sources that you can find cited in the relevant section of this document. Many of these events are well-documented already, the fall of Susan Weaver has had countless books written about it, and there was extensive news coverage of the Dr. Simon affair, and the war with the Nameless.
For those events, I was able to verify what happened with relative certainty without making the choice to visit the sites of events, or to interview my subject directly in order to gain a clearer understanding of what I’m writing about. I’m incredibly fortunate that our current technology allows us to do this, and I was careful as possible to prevent my presence from affecting events too much.
However, the events of this chapter in Ariadne’s life were confined to places that most people simply wouldn’t know about. Without the primary sources written by the crew, it’s very likely this story would’ve ended up as nothing but an inexplicable footnote in Peace Upendo’s journals. I was little more than an observer for most of the story, and was careful to involve myself only in ways that I felt would result in the creation of some record of what actually happened.
I compared my notes on Ariadne’s history from before and after I involved myself in events, and found no measurable changes outside of the intended effect of my intervention: before I intervened, there was no record of the story. After I involved myself, there was.
Had I failed, I like to think I would accept my critics’ condemnation with humility. However, I did not, and now I’m able to provide a more thorough understanding of this adventure. Since I succeeded, I don’t have to be humble! I get to take credit for the tequila shot that wrote a history book.
That said, I would nonetheless point out that every historian, and every biographer, involves themselves in the story of their subject to some degree or another. How they choose to tell the story, what information they include, what they omit, and how they present the narrative are an intrinsic part of their accounts. If only one primary source exists describing a person’s life, and it’s written by someone who hates that person, it’s going to be an unflattering and possibly inaccurate portrayal that all future accounts of their life will refer to. Just ask Edgar Allan Poe.
I did my best to provide an objective and factual account of events. I’m sure that the glowing terms in which I describe Ariadne’s Angels will prompt accusations of a narrative bias in their favor, but I maintain my position that having seen the narrative firsthand, my feelings towards my subjects are the result of the historical events, not the other way around.
All of which is to say, most of my sources are available to the public, thanks to the Racquel Ramos foundation’s efforts. There is nothing stopping anyone from going down to their local library, repeating my research and writing a less biased, more objective, less dramatized account of events as they actually happened.
If you do, I’m sure I’ll be first in line to buy that book. Call me biased if you like, but I love reading about these guys.
PHASE THREE – A note from the Pirate Ariadne, in her own words, taken from the Racquel Ramos foundation’s time capsule
To the mysterious stranger from my fundraiser:
To the man who gave me the chance to say goodbye to my Abuela:
To Alicia’s strange friend who left a trail of bread crumbs through time for me to follow:
To my friend, whoever the hell you turn out to be:
If you’re the first person reading this, know you’re the one it’s meant for. You’re the only one who even could decrypt this message. You’re the only one who’d know that I use the lyrics to my favorite songs as passcodes with hundreds of characters. Nobody would ever be able to guess me and Pilar’s song, because we’re the only people in the universe who know it.
How did you learn that song?
I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s not like you can answer me anyway.
It’s been a few months since we met. Right now, I’m sitting in my parents’ old study, the same study I stole my father’s briefcase from, the day I ran away. I’m writing this letter as I prepare to announce the Racquel Ramos Foundation’s newest endeavor. Peace will be thrilled, I actually pitched a legal use of the foundation’s money.
You’ll be pleased to know, you were right. I figured you out, over drinks, surrounded by friends. As soon as I saw that photo of you with Alicia, as soon as I understood your role in the tequila paf story, I understood what you wanted from me. What you were trying to show me.
Those little moments, man. That’s what it’s always been about, isn’t it? The swordfights and space battles are flashy and impressive, but those little things, that’s where love lives, and that’s all that matters.
The things that shaped us into who we are. The things that we thought were gone, that live on simply because we remember them. I understand now what you meant about Luzuha. She died hundreds of years ago, but Cherry still sings folk songs about her. Vic still does a drag show wearing her clothes. She lives on, because of what she means to the people who are still here.
That’s why you taught Alicia about the Tequila Paf. You learned it from people in your life, you taught Alicia, she taught me, and I taught my whole crew. The people you’ve learned them from are now a part of our world, even though we’ve never met them, will never meet them.
It made me realize that I have the power to keep the people we’ve lost alive, the same way. That’s where I got the idea for the Foundation’s latest endeavor. My treasure. The thing that someday, the next generation of pirates and adventurers will hunt down to prove themselves, and share with the world. The Racquel Ramos Foundation Archive for Lost Media.
Ben Adair’s demo. All the Hanguk-Eire recipes Cookie taught us. The elder Racquel’s paintings, at least, the ones my father had in his house. All those movies and music and video games that can only be played on my space station, on machines I rebuilt. That rare footage we uncovered of Sam Cooke performing “Wonderful World.”
Thanks to you, I’m making them available to the public, and finally realizing Yma’s dream: now, with her pan con chicharrón recipe, everyone on Mars will be able to cook her favorite breakfast just like they did in la patria. Even called in a favor with a celebrity contact: Shimizu Mizuki is even gonna feature the recipe on her show!
I spent a lot of time wondering why you care so much about me and my family. I’m not sure if I cracked that, but it sure gave me the opportunity to think about what I love about my family. There’s really nobody like us, is there? I’ve practically been married since I was a kid. I’ve got a daughter who’s only five years younger than me. I’m an only-child with sisters who share no blood with me. I have a mother who I didn’t meet until I was almost grown, and I’m so glad Alicia and I can finally admit what we mean to one another. Hell, Blue is all at once a mentor, a mother, a rival, a sibling, and a celebrity crush. We’re weird, and complicated, and at times we’re difficult to understand, but we’re decidedly us. Thank you, for giving me the chance to think on that.
So, to thank you, I figured I’d offer you some updates on those little moments that I figure only the people who really care about us, as people, and not just our legend, will be interested in hearing. They might not make headlines in the history books, but they mattered to me, and I think they’ll matter to you too.
The older Pilar and the older Me have mostly been keeping to themselves on the station as they get their ship outfitted for their interstellar adventure. Sometimes Alicia stops by to assist in the build, and Taryn is going over every inch of that thing with a fine-toothed comb to make sure they crossed every T and dotted every I, but for the most part, they prefer to leave the crew to us. The older Pilar says shes had enough of goodbyes, and the older me says she learned her lesson about trying to micromanage her past self.
I actually think they’re just making up for lost time. They’ve seen everyone else on the ship more recently than they’ve had a chance at any alone time together. Gives Ellesmere a chance to lurk around the mess hall gossiping and learning how to be a human being. I made her have lunch with Baltimore a few weeks ago, which was hilarious. Beam got the whole thing on video. Don’t worry, it’s in the time capsule.
Sasha tried very hard to apologize to Pilar for sending her away. Pilar was having none of it. She just kept saying they were square, and that “all’s well that ends well.” They really are cut from the exact same cloth, those two. Eventually, Pilar’s stubbornness won out, and Sasha was forced to concede her apology. It’s for the best. I was furious with her when she did it, but Future Pilar put it best when she pointed out what the rest of us didn’t want to say: if she hadn’t done it, my wife would’ve taken the bullet for me. Sasha saved her life by sending her to Cabrera’s.
Speaking of Cabrera, she’s thriving in Xiagu. I never would’ve expected what a social butterfly she’d turn out to be. She’s putting her dance skills to good use in Magenta’s live shows, and of course, on this crew, people quickly took a shine to her boisterous personality. A few months ago, she was so isolated, so starved for human contact, that she’d break down weeping if you hugged her. Now, she proudly boasts that she holds the crew record for most crewmates kissed. She still gives me a pointer, here and there, on how to shore up our security, but she spends most of her time dancing, or taking in a movie, or playing a game, or paying social calls to friends’ quarters. She and Pilar have dinner once a week. Can you believe it? She might be the happiest girl I know.
Things are going amazingly with Taryn and Tosin. They are sickeningly sweet together, and Taryn still hasn’t grown out of the “my man” phase. I’m not sure she ever will, bless her. Tosin asked me if he could ever come to me for advice so he “doesn’t make a mess out of this.” I told him, of course he could, but he hasn’t needed to yet. Besides, Sweettalk remains deeply involved in the whole situation via text, so he’s usually able to convey his feelings to Taryn in a way she’ll understand. The real test will be in a few months, when we’ll have to accompany Tosin home for his brother Ade’s wedding. Do you know how intimidating his mom is? Of course you do, you’re a historian.
Regarding Taryn, Blue has made an effort to be a presence in her life, and Taryn shocked us all by embracing that. Blue feels like she’s righting a wrong. Right before she brought Taryn to us, I think she thought she and Ben were going to raise Taryn together, and after he died, it hurt too much to do it without him. I’ve known her long enough to know she regrets that. Now, she’s giving Taryn the cool stepmom she always deserved, and they both get to spend time with somebody who connects them to the person they loved and lost.
Ghostrunner’s been gearing up for Nahomie and her friends Tali and Sarah to visit the station. Do you know what it means to me, to see them reconnect like this? I thought I’d messed things up between them forever, but something about meeting your future self makes you really appreciate the time you have with the people you love. For security reasons, it’ll be a fairly short visit, but after a brief tour of her old haunts, they’re going to have a few drinks at Vigil’s and catch up. Everybody has a good time at Vigil’s!
On the subject of drinking-- Sweettalk kept to her promise. No more than two drinks on any occasion, and she’s never allowed to drink out of stress or sadness. She’s been working on dealing with her emotions sober, and Sasha’s been making an effort not to bottle things up until they reach a breaking point.
It’s been doing wonders for them. They both miss future Sweettalk, but they keeping saying, now they get to take care of her in advance. Sasha asked Sweettalk to get the tattoos her future self had. Sweettalk was over the moon. They look fantastic on her, but I’m biased, they match my wife’s ink, and, of course, I did both tattoos myself and I’ve never been known for my humility.
I had another dream about you, the other night. We were in a forest, at night. I could hear that haunting sound, choppers mixed with crickets, and I knew it was near where I grew up. You and I sat on a log, and you told me you’d come to say goodbye to someone. We walked for a bit, and talked about your childhood, and mine. Then, we were in a strange city, somewhere else in the world, walking down the street. You were crying. You didn’t know I was there, until you turned around and saw me. You smiled, and then we were in a crowded concert hall. You had tears in your eyes. You told me you were holding onto what little joy you could find. You must have lost someone truly special, the way you looked. We danced together to the next song, and then I woke up.
Was that real? Was it just a dream? I hope it was real. I choose to believe it was. Maybe I’ll never know for sure. I passed your message down to the menagerie. I guess I’ll have to imagine why that was so important to you.
I hope you’ll share these little details, these little moments from my family’s life. I hope we find the people you tell in moments of sadness and bring them a little bit of joy, just like when you found me on that strange city street. If you do share them, just please, please thank them for caring what happens to us. For loving us.
Man, wouldn’t it suck if you didn’t guess the passcode? You’d never see this letter! Guess I’ll just have to trust you to remember our song.
Love,
The suit from the fundraiser,
The girl from the other side of the threshold,
Your college buddy’s close friend and protege,
Your friend,
Ariadne
15 years later
On a world 60,000 light-years from ours
Ariadne woke up on the white sand, wrapped up tightly in Pilar’s arms. This is how she’d woken up every day for the past 15 years. She and Pilar hadn’t aged a day since they punched a hole in time and space to find each other, and they didn’t want so much as a micron of space to separate them. After the decades they spent as widows, even having their bodies between them felt like too much separation.
“Wakey wakey,” Ellesmere said, brandishing a tablet with a detailed itinerary glowing on its surface. “There are eight more populated planets in this system, and if you want to visit them all this week before we move on to the next one, we’ve got to move fast and we can’t get waylaid by fomenting any more uprisings. I won’t have a repeat of what happened on Altair IV. Now, the old me destroyed three of them, but now that the old me is dead--”
“Sit down, Taalika,” Pilar said.
Ellesmere shifted uncomfortably. “I told you that in confidence and I’ve asked you, during work hours you shouldn’t address me by my—”
“—Ellesmere,” Pilar insisted. “Sit with us, on the beach, and enjoy the damned sunrise.”
Ellesmere sighed, and sat next to Ari and Pilar. They had done this song and dance hundreds of times. In truth, she’d learned to build it into their itinerary.
“She’s not a morning person, you know,” Ariadne said. “Never has been.”
“The beauty of space travel,” Pilar said. “Fly around a planet fast enough, ‘morning’ is whenever you want.”
“I’ve seen a sunrise before,” Ellesmere insisted.
“Have you seen this sun rise before?” Ariadne asked.
“I suppose I haven’t,” Ellesmere replied.
“We’re excited for the interplanetary tour, we promise,” Pilar said playfully. “Just take five minutes and appreciate something you’ve never seen before.”
“I suppose it is rather beautiful,” Ellesmere said.
“Understatement,” Ariadne said plainly. “This is a binary star system! Two suns rising over crystal mountains! Look at that prismatic refraction!”
“I already agreed to watch the sunset with you, you don’t need to keep pitching me,” Ellesmere said.
“You’re required to appreciate it,” Pilar said. “That’s an order.”
“That’s the cause now,” Ariadne said. “Me and my wife having the best interstellar honeymoon we can, appreciating the beauty of the universe. How are we going to do that if you’re just doing schedules and itineraries the whole time?”
Pilar smiled. “Just because you’re the waiter doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be allowed to sample the hors d'oeuvres.”
Ellesmere slumped back, and admired the dark seas of this world, almost longing for the days when she was equipped to live underwater.
“Right,” she said. “I’m going to prepare us some breakfast. If you two aren’t on your feet and ready to go by the time it’s done, I may actually strike you.”
Ellesmere stood up and walked back towards the ship.
“Thank you, Taalika!” Ariadne called.
“I told you—” Ellesmere started, then realized they were just winding her up. “Oh, bugger off.”
When she was out of earshot, Ariadne and Pilar laughed. “It’s just so easy,” Pilar said.
“When do you think she’s going to figure it out?” Ariadne asked. Of course, Pilar already knew what “it” was: they were trying to show her the beauty of a world outside of service to a cause. The only directives they were willing to give Ellesmere involved stopping to smell any given planet’s equivalent to “the roses.” Ellesmere was, after fifteen years, still so concerned with getting good marks on her assignment that she became immensely uncomfortable at the familiarity and extreme lack of orders she was receiving that she would start inventing tasks to fulfill so she wouldn’t feel like she was slacking off.
Pilar chuckled. “I think it’ll happen just shy of the end of her oath. Four, maybe five minutes before it expires.”
“How much longer is that?” Ariadne asked.
“Twenty-five years,” Spacebreather replied. “Give or take.”
Ariadne squeezed Pilar tight, and gave her a small, soft kiss on the lips. “My storm and rage,” she said, “te amo.”
Pilar kissed her back, and decided that a few more minutes in her wife’s arms were worth the risk of Ellesmere hitting her with that tablet. “Siempre te amaré, querida.”
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion!
The elder Ariadne awoke with a gasp of fear in her bed, in her house in Xiagu. She had only been in the past for one day, and her plan had gone so far off-script that, at first, she assumed she’d simply dreamed the whole thing.
The tattooed arms around her confirmed that, no, it had all been real. Her plan had failed, but she’d somehow managed to reach all her goals anyway.
She thought she’d have to sacrifice herself to save Pilar. She thought, at best, she’d merge into her younger self’s consciousness, sacrificing herself to help another Ariadne avoid the pain she’d endured.
The idea that sheherselfwould end up here, alive, in the arms of her living, breathing wife, had never occurred to her. It was beyond her wildest dreams.
“Querida,” the elder Pilar mumbled out. “You had a bad dream?”
She squeezed Pilar’s hand. “No, no,” she said, “I was just scared that I’d had a really good one.”
“Hey,” Pilar said, “if anyone in the universe gets it…”
“Your hair is gray,” Ariadne replied.
“Yours is gone,” Pilar laughed. “It’s a good look for you, I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“No, I mean,” Ariadne stammered. “I know Sasha was never gonna let us get old, but… I mean, after you-- after, every day I looked in the mirror and I was a little bit older, another line here, another gray hair there, and it broke my heart, every time, that I kept getting older and you just… stayed 28 years old, forever. The idea of you, with grays, was something I thought I’d never get to see.”
“Me neither,” Pilar said, “like you said, I didn’t think Sasha was gonna let me go gray.”
A horrible thought struck Ariadne. If Pilar had aged, what did that imply? “Sasha didn’t…”
Pilar opened her eyes and sleepily matched her gaze.
“She was alive, when I last saw her,” Pilar said. “She was very excited to help me save you.”
“Then why do you look older?”
“Sasha’s medicine could keep me young forever,” Pilar shrugged. “I didn’t see much point in that, without you. So, I asked her to pause the treatment, unless and until I successfully saved you, so we could take it together.”
“You gave up your youth and plunged into the unknown for me,” Ariadne said. “I hope I’m worth it.”
“You’re everything I imagined,” she said. “Everything I hoped.”
Ariadne laughed. “You kidding? I look like my mom,” she said. “God, I’ve been thinking like my mom lately, too.”
Pilar sat up. “My treasure, I’m going to be brutally honest and I need you to take this in the spirit it was intended,” she said, “you’ve always looked like your mom.”
“Is it too late to get Ellesmere to shoot you again?”
Pilar burst out laughing at this. By god, she’d missed this woman.
“I’m serious,” Pilar explained. “Look, you inherited the two best parts of her, her face and a brain that lends itself to constructing bionic exoskeletons. Rosario’s problem was never that she was ugly or stupid. She was pretty, and she was smart. But her heart, shriveled and dead, that’s where you’ve always been different from her. You got your heart from your abuelita.”
Ariadne sighed. “How I wish you could’ve met her.”
Pilar smiled. “Querida, I did,” she said. “When I saved the younger you… I don’t understand it, but she was there. It was like one of those weird dreams, except… I could tell, somehow, it was real.”
Ariadne replied with the only question she could come up with. “What’d she say?”
“She asked me to take care of you,” Pilar said. “Shouldn’t be a problem. I made that promise a long time ago. That’s why I couldn’t just… let it go. When I came back from Cabrera’s, and you were already gone. You’d sacrificed yourself to save me, and that just wasn’t acceptable.”
Ariadne suddenly felt a bit defensive. “Only because you sacrificed yourself to save me!”
Pilar shrugged. “Then I guess we’re even,” she said.
“Do you ever wonder if that’s…” Ariadne hesitated. “I mean, what if it isn’t a good thing, that we’re always willing to go to these lengths to save each other? Mi amor, I loved you so much I was willing to break the universe to save you, and you did the same for me.”
“Is the universe broken?” Pilar asked. “Are those cracks still in the sky?”
“No,” Ariadne admitted, “but--”
“Were they there, in your future?” Pilar asked.
“Yes,” Ariadne said, “the universe was coming undone, that’s my whole--”
“Sounds to me like us being apart is what broke the universe,” she said. “Our love, the lengths we’re willing to go for one another, is what saved it.”
Ariadne pondered this. “So…” She didn’t know how to delicately phrase the question that had been lurking at the back of her mind since the previous night. “Are you… my Spacebreather? Am I your Ariadne? Or are we both just… widows, who’ve replaced our dead wives with parallel copies? Did we… destroy our own home timelines and create new ones?”
Spacebreather laughed. “I have really missed that nerd shit,” she said. “Why are you making it complicated? I’m your Pilar, you’re my Ariadne. Ellesmere changed the timeline, then you did, then I did, and now here we both are.”
“I buried you,” she said, “on Mars. We had a funeral, and I buried you, next to the marker we set for your parents.”
“Yeah, and then, on your next go round, you didn’t,” Pilar said. “On your next go round, I had your funeral.”
“And on our next go round?” Ariadne asked.
“That’s really up to those two beautiful girls downstairs,” Pilar said, “isn’t it?”
Ariadne smiled, and kissed Pilar softly. She had craved Pilar’s touch for so long that every second of it filled her with boundless, leaping surges of joy.
“Hey,” Pilar said. “Would you believe I brought you some gifts?”
“No,” Ariadne laughed, “because that’d be an insane thing to do.”
“I had a lot of time to go crazy,” Pilar said, “and even more time to pack junk onto the Apanqura. See, where I’m from, the crew… well, they missed you, a lot, and they wanted me to bring a few tokens of their affection back with them.”
Pilar got out of bed and Ariadne felt her muscles ache at this separation, even for a moment, as Pilar grabbed a duffel bag from the corner of the room and returned to bed. Ariadne gripped her tight as though every second they were apart, Pilar might turn to vapor before her eyes.
“I already told you about Sasha’s gift,” Pilar said, pulling out a small hard plastic case, “an updated version of her anti-aging serum. No more 25-year regimen, one shot’ll do us each, for good. She gave us about half a dozen.”
“There’s just the two of us,” she said.
“Yeah, well,” Pilar said, “maybe Sasha didn’t want to risk me breaking a syringe and sticking one of us with the ravages of time. Maybe she knows I’ll give the rest to her younger self for research. I’m sure I’m not smart enough to know what goes on in her brain, but I trust her.”
“That’s my girl,” Ariadne smiled. “What’s this one?”
She pulled out a gold medallion with the crew’s insignia engraved on it.
“From Sweettalk,” Pilar explained. “Turn it over.”
Ariadne did, and gasped when she saw the message.
“Not quite a sobriety chip,” Pilar explained, “but I think we can agree it’s a good thing.”
Ariadne ran her fingers along the words as though to confirm it really said what she thought it said:
20 years of stopping after two drinks.
“Do you know what this would’ve meant?” Ariadne asked. “To my Sweettalk?”
“I do,” Pilar said. “My Sweettalk had that coin made the day I told her about my plan to save you, and swore on your grave that she’d live up to it. When she got your Sweettalk’s memories back, we didn’t hear the end of it.”
Ariadne didn’t need to ask to know that Sweettalk had kept her promise.
There were little trinkets in the bag from just about everyone on the crew-- A lock of Cookie’s brilliant red hair, a framed photo from Taryn and Tosin’s wedding-- but she had one priority above all, and she feared it more than any gift.
“What did our daughter send?”
Pilar smiled. “I have no idea,” she said. “She recorded it behind closed doors, and made me promise not to watch it until we were together.”
“She led the charge to stop me,” Ariadne said. “She came back here to save you, so I wouldn’t destroy myself trying.”
“I know,” Pilar said. “Let’s find out what she has to say.”
Pilar clicked play on the portable hologram device, and Ghostrunner, looking not a day older than she did here, and now, in the past, but with long box braids like she’d had in Ariadne’s time, flickered into view.
“An Earth girl and a space girl,” the recording of Ghostrunner said, “isn’t that how it always goes?”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Pilar muttered.
“Me and Sweettalk, this time,” the recorded Ghostrunner explained. “I remember all of it now. The first three futures. I couldn’t even perceive the shape of my plan until I could remember all four dimensions of it.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Ariadne asked.
“In Ariadne’s future,” the recorded Ghostrunner continued, “that’s the version of me that figured it out first. See, both of you have this problem where you keep trying to sacrifice yourself to save the other.”
Pilar scoffed sarcastically, knowing this was true.
The recording continued: “When I first went back in time, I suspected I’d only be buying time until you made it through, Ariadne. I also suspected the Ariadne in the past would try and sacrifice herself to save Pilar, and I think we all know how difficult it is to stop Captain Ariadne from doing something she’s set her mind to. And I knew Spacebreather couldn’t build a time machine on her own-- no offense, Pilar.”
“None taken,” Pilar said, as though the recording could hear her.
“Remember all those times we argued, about your plan? The smarts, not the guilt?” The recording asked. Ariadne did. Ghostrunner had made a point, in those arguments, to point out that she was emotionally compromised, and that the only way this plan would work is if somebody could do it with her smarts, but without her guilt.
“Oh my god,” Ariadne had started to piece it together.
“That’s where I planted the idea in your head,” the recorded Ghostrunner explained, “to send back the chip in your head, programmed with the knowledge of how to build the machine. Sweets intentionally forced you into a physical confrontation, knowing you’d use the opportunity to shoot her and plant the device on her armor. Then, we tipped off Alicia on where to find it, knowing she’d give it to Pilar and Blue, and they’d figure out what was on it.”
“Oh my god,” it clicked with Spacebreather as well.
“See, we knew,” the recorded Ghostrunner said, “that there was always a risk that Ariadne would sacrifice herself to save you. We wanted to guarantee, for Plan B, that if Ariadne succeeded in that plan, Spacebreather and Alicia would know they had the option of using time travel to fix it. The last iteration of me, see, she was just thinking about the past versions of you, all of my contingency plans when I was her were all about stopping the murder in the first place. But you two… See, when Ariadne was the one who died, I realized there was a way I could save all of you. Both Ariadnes, both Spacebreathers. Spacebreather, do you remember your original plan? I’m gonna pause here, I assume you’re gonna respond out loud, even though this is a recorded message.”
“I was going to go back further,” she said, “to when Ellesmere arrived, and assassinate her before you even arrived on the ship.”
“Who talked you out of it?” The recorded Ghostrunner explained. “Who convinced you that it was simply too dangerous, too complicated, too many variables. No, you had to be at exactly the moment of the murder and stop it, right then and there?”
“I barely made it in time,” Pilar pointed out. The hologram paused, as though considering whatever Pilar had said.
“Of course, there was no guarantee you’d make it in time,” she said, “unless, of course, some genius calculated that your attempt to arrive within the defenses would cause a massive shockwave, buying Ariadne several seconds to get away. Credit where it’s due, that genius’ name? Alicia Baltimore!”
“But what about--”
“Of course, we had no idea what Ariadne would do with that second,” the recorded Ghostrunner explained, then burst out laughing. “Ladies, we had twenty years to analyze the footage of that room, and when my memories came back, we had a synthetic simulacrum of her personality that could accurately simulate her actions with a 99.998% degree of confidence. Ariadne was already teetering on the brink without Spacebreather there with her. Then, Ellesmere said that one last thing, before she killed you.”
The recorded Ghostrunner put on her best impression of Ellesmere’s voice, which, to her ears, took on an aristocratic French accent. “‘Unless you can think of a way to stop her having come through in the first place, I have my orders.’ We knew how Ariadne was likely would react to that, in the state she was in, given half a chance. If she grabbed the gun and took out her attackers, we wouldn’t need the precautions, but if she made the jump for the threshold…? So, we gave Spacebreather the heads up, and got Taryn to work designing her everjade-plated armor so she could dive in and save her. We knew it’d burn her bridge back to the future, but if she went into that threshold, we’d rather have the two of you alive, in the past, than dead, in the future.”
“She put us together,” Spacebreather muttered.
“My greatest victory,” Ghostrunner said, “to the ultimate gentleman’s bet. I used the preventative planning skills I learned from Ariadne,the improvisational genius I picked up from training under Pilar, a little bit of Sweettalk’s confidence trickery, a whole lot of my subterfuge, and the help of both of you, and your mentors. Three generations of pirates using all of their skills to bring forth the one, the only, outcome worth pursuing: a future where neither of you is sacrificed to save the other. And now, if you’re watching this, you’re together again. Or, alternately, Pilar, you broke a promise and I’m very disappointed in you.”
Pilar burst out laughing.
“Kidding, of course,” the recorded Ghostrunner said. “I know my mothers. Neither of you would’ve made it this far in the video if the plan hadn’t worked. I love you both. Never forget that. And Ariadne…”
The video waited, as if waiting for her to respond. Ariadne couldn’t speak. The video continued anyway.
“Still not afraid of you,” she said. “Have a good life together, in the past. Can’t wait to meet the new you, in the new future.”
Ariadne wiped a tear from her eyes and settled into Pilar’s arms with a sigh of relief, finally secure in the knowledge that she’d had a positive effect on her loved ones, and had not, as she’d often feared, ruined their lives and kept them in a state of constant peril. Pilar squeezed her tight.
Ellesmere shifted uncomfortably on the examination table in Sasha’s office, feeling absolutely exposed in the thin cotton gown Sasha had provided her. Even though she was technically covered up, she hadn’t felt this vulnerable when she’d stripped naked in front of Pilar, or Director Kalrax, but Sasha’s piercing gaze and silent, stony demeanor felt like it cut her to the bone.
Sasha had just finished administering a series of shots and hypo-sprays and more than a few balms which would prepare Ellesmere for the deep-space voyage she was sworn to embark on. The elder Ariadne and Pilar had discussed it with their younger counterparts, and come to the conclusion that the two of them needed a trip, to make up for lost time and reconnect after 20 years of agonizing over saving the others.
The two Ariadnes were now hard at work equipping the elder Ariadne’s flagship for rapid interstellar travel. The enthusiasm for interstellar exploration among the general public had majorly cooled after the Divoratori war, but the idea had always fascinated Ariadne and Pilar. Ariadne could never leave the system she loved unprotected, though. How could she? She usually tried to keep humble, but sometimes, she was unsure the planets would keep spinning without her.
But now, Ariadne had the uncanny ability to be in two places at once. One could fly off into the uncharted and explore the universe, safe in the knowledge that her home and family would be well taken care of. The elder Pilar had already said her goodbyes to the whole crew in her future, and they all had their own Pilar right there with them, so she felt no qualms about leaving either.
Besides, they reasoned, it’s not like they were leaving right away. Upgrading a ship to cross the space between stars wasn’t something that even Ariadne could achieve overnight. It’d take her at least a year to do it, maybe even two.
Ellesmere, having sworn 40 years of her life to their cause, would be joining them, and it was up to Sasha to get her equipped to take care of a human body in the long-term before they left.
“Right,” she said, “so, in terms of lifespan, what do humans tend to get? I was only supposed to be in this body for about two months, and now I guess I’ve got a lifetime to plan for.”
Ellesmere trailed off and Sasha pointedly waited to respond, just long enough for Ellesmere to get even more uncomfortable.
“Standard human,” Sasha replied. “Most people, Oort excluded, with the standard battery of vaccines live to be between 100 and 120, provided they die of natural causes. In extraordinary cases, people have been known to live to 130 or 140. By my estimate your human body would be about 30, so if you’re lucky, you’ve got a good seventy, eighty years left.”
Ellesmere laughed, and said, “well, if I’d known that was all I’d get, I might not have signed away forty of them to your sisters.”
Sasha didn’t laugh. “You asked what lifespan humans tend to get,” she explained in a flat, mirthless tone of voice. “There’s your answer.”
“And what if I get sick, out there in the black?” Ellesmere added playfully, “I wouldn’t want to die with a few decades left on my sentence.”
Sasha responded very seriously: “you won’t, after this last shot. Took a page out of Ariadne’s book. Nanotechnology, programmed for almost any illness we know of, and ready to adapt to billions that we don’t. I can’t protect you from attack or accident, but I can pretty much see to it you don’t keel over from a heart attack, and I’ll work with future Ari to program your ship to synthesize my serum. Between that and the basic first aid I taught Pilar, you should be able to patch up any incidental injuries you might encounter out there. Course, God only knows what sort of danger you’ll face in the big wide universe, so don’t take it as an excuse to get stupid.”
“All this effort to keep me alive,” Ellesmere said, “a girl could get used to this!”
“Well, Pilar and Ari are going to stay comfortably middle-aged for the foreseeable. That body of yours will be pushing 70 by the time your oath expires, I need you fit enough to perform your duties for at least that long.”
“And here I thought you didn’t like me,” Ellesmere replied flippantly.
“I’m sorry…?” Ellesmere sought clarification, which Sasha genuinely thought it was insulting that she needed.
“I’m a Doctor and you’re my patient,” Sasha explained. “My top priority as a professional is keeping you alive. On a personal level, I’m not convinced Pilar was right to save your life.”
Ellesmere couldn’t help but feel a little hurt by this. “Your captain seems rather taken with me. That seems to matter to your sister. I suspect that’s why I’m alive today.”
“Well,” Sasha said, “I’m not my captain, and I’m not my sister. Before we found out what you did, I just didn’t like you. The posh way you talk, the way you refuse to learn anybody’s names, that stupid blue fur coat… but now? Ari and Pilar are my heroes, and you shot and killed both of them.”
“But they’re not dead,” Ellesmere pointed out.
“No. They saved each other,” Sasha explained. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you pointed a gun at each of their heads, and pulled the trigger, and for that, I’ll hate you for the rest of my life, and I will outlive you.”
“Well, you won’t have to deal with me for much longer,” Ellesmere said curtly, dropping her gaze to the floor.
“But it’s not just that I don’t like you,” Sasha said. “I don’t trust you. You might’ve bonded with Ariadne and Ghostrunner, even gotten Mingxia to tell you a few old stories, but I’m not such an easy sell. And now, I’m in a bit of a bind, because I can’t trust you, but I’m supposed to hand the person I’ve devoted my life to protecting over into your care.”
Ellesmere raised her eyes to look at Sasha, without lifting her head. “What can I do?”
Sasha stared at her pointedly. “Go on,” she said. “What can you do what?”
“What can I do, to earn your trust?” Ellesmere said uncomfortably. “You don’t have to like me. But you’re right, I did kill two members of your family. I owe you as much as I owe them.”
“Swear it,” Sasha said.
“I swear on my life,” Ellesmere said, “no harm will come to your sister as long as it’s in my power to prevent it.”
“Will you die?” Sasha asked. “To save her, will you sacrifice your own?”
“Yes,” Ellesmere said.
“Of course,” Sasha laughed grimly. “You already tried that. Let’s put it another way. Would you be willing to put your life up as collateral? To swear that if they don’t outlive your oath, neither will you?”
Ellesmere considered this for a moment. “If either of them dies before my term is up,” she said, “I will do everything in my power to return here, so you can put me down yourself.”
“No,” Sasha said, “I’ve killed once in my life, and that’s about all I’ve got in me.”
She produced two syringes, and gestured with the one in her right hand. “In this vial is the last of your nanotech shots. One shot of this, and the aging process will arrest itself in your body indefinitely unless and until you return here for the antidote. You take this, and barring accidents, starvation, and acts of God, you may well live forever. Most of the crew choose to undergo this treatment upon reaching full physical maturity, although this is a bit of a supercharged version, a new formula courtesy of my future self, since I haven’t got 25 years to administer the full regimen.”
“And the other?” Ellesmere asked.
“It’s the exact same shot,” Sasha said, wiggling the syringe in her left hand, “and it will do the exact same things, except this one also includes the same nanobots I used to keep Pilar from escaping Cabrera’s apartment. They’re keyed to the nanotech already present in Pilar and Ariadne’s bodies. If either of their life-signs goes dark for more than 24 hours, my nanobots will fry your entire central nervous system. You’ll die, and it will hurt. A lot. They will persist in your system for the length of your oath, and when it expires, they will shut off and be harmlessly filtered out of your bloodstream by your kidneys. If you keep my family alive for 40 years, you get to live forever. If they die, or you abandon them, you die painfully.”
“So, what’s the catch if I pick the one without a killswitch?” Ellesmere asked.
“None at all,” Sasha said. “You can take this one, fly off into the galaxy, and I’ll never know if you ran off at the first interstellar truck stop and hitchhiked away, never to be seen again. And I’ll never, ever be able to trust that you won’t do exactly that, the second I’m not watching you.”
Ellesmere looked hopefully at that vial.
“Or,” Sasha said, “you could take this one. Same benefits, same rewards, as long as you do your job, but I get to rest easy, knowing my sisters are out there with someone who’s put more than her word on the line that she’ll keep them safe. I might not like you, but I’d know I could trust you.”
Ellesmere honestly considered taking the vial in her right hand. She wasn’t going to abandon her post, and she couldn’t imagine that if something managed to kill the two people she planned to travel with, it would fail to kill her anyway. What did she care if Sasha trusted her?
She cared, it turned out, quite a bit. She swore an oath, and she took that seriously. How could she look herself in the mirror if she wasn’t able to swear on her life?“Fine, right then, give me that one,” Ellesmere said. “Left hand.”
“You’re sure?” Sasha asked. “Once this needle breaks the skin, there’s no backing out.”
“Then you’d better get on with it, quick as you like.”
Sasha shrugged, found a vein, jabbed the needle into it, and pressed the plunger.
“Glad to know I can trust you,” she said. “Now, that’s all I’ve got for you today. For the rest of your stay, if you have any medical questions about your new body, feel free to ask me or my colleague Cyan. If you have any personal matters? I suggest you take it up with one of the people who can stand to look at you.”
Ellesmere scoffed, hoping her choice to put her own life up as collateral to prove her loyalty would’ve earned her an ounce of warmth, shuffled out the door. “Well, pardon me, Dr. Bedside Manner.”
The door slid shut. Sasha finished documenting the treatments she’d administered on Ellesmere’s chart, and filed it away. She then left her office, and made her way down to her quarters, where Sweettalk had just returned from feeding their bird in the menagerie.
“Does it work?” Sweettalk asked.
“Of course,” Sasha said. “She took the ‘kill’ shot without objection. I think she means what she says.”
“I meant the kill shot,” Sweettalk asked. “Can the nanobots even do that? I thought they were all programmed with your medical protocols, all that ‘first do no harm’ stuff.”
Sasha laughed warmly. “I never was much good at lying to you,” she said. Of course there had been no difference whatsoever between the two shots. The important thing was, Ellesmere had honestly believed one shot carried genuine risk, and chose to accept that risk to demonstrate her trustworthiness.
“You know, you don’t have to freeze her out completely,” Sweettalk pointed out. “I mean, she’s actually trying now. You know she called me by my name today? She’s not so bad, once you get to know her. Or, I guess, once she bothers to get to know you.”
“Glad you get along with her,” Sasha said. “Glad she’s got people on this ship who’ll show her some kindness. I won’t be one of them. I hope she has a very good life, far away from me.”
Tosin walked with Ariadne through the corridors from Tosin’s lab to Sentry Ops, while he chattered about resetting everything the way it was. She loved this quality about him, she became distressed when her working environment wasn’t just so, and Tosin always made sure to reset things exactly to how they were supposed to be.
“Of course, some of the security upgrades should probably remain, but they’re unobtrusive and shouldn’t interfere with our work. We’ve also got enough everjade to program it into the fabricators, but I doubt we’ll need to synthesize it anytime soon, we’re working with quite the surplus. I’ve turned it over to Speculative Operations to see if there’s anything we can do with it.”
“That’s great, Tosin,” Ariadne assured him, “speaking of the gals down in Spec Ops, I believe you made me a promise. How’d that go?”
“Mrs. Ariadne?” He asked, unsure what she was talking about.
“At ease, Tosin,” she insisted. “Your romantic night in, with Taryn. How’d it go?”
“Oh!” Tosin replied. “It was lovely.”
They walked in silence for several steps.
“Tosin?” Ariadne asked.
“Yes?”
“I’m waiting for you to say more than you’ve said,” she told him. “I want the details.”
“Oh!” He replied. “Well, it’s like I told you before, we had dinner, I taught her how to do a tequila paf, told her the story you told me, and we watched her favorite anime.”
“Feels nice, doesn’t it?” Ariadne asked. “To not have to find little excuses to hang out with each other on the job. To just admit that you’re spending time together on purpose.”
“It does,” he said.
“Just between us gals,” Ariadne said. “Things get physical between you two?”
Tosin’s face didn’t change, but Ariadne knew him well enough to know she’d embarrassed him with the question.
“Just teasing, Tosin,” she said playfully. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“Not… that night. We’re taking it slow,” he said. “But… we’re not… stalled on the issue.”
Ariadne laughed. “Tosin, you dog!”
“The night after we stopped Ellesmere and your future self, adrenaline was running high, it was a celebration, and, well… She’s been getting along quite a bit better with Mrs. Baltimore, but she’s still quite competitive. I think she wanted the two of us to go further than I did with her.”
Ariadne pondered this for a moment, confused, and then, after a moment of dawning horror, burst out laughing as she realized who he meant.
“Tosin, listen to me,” she said, “I respect that you Cytherians like to keep it formal, but you cannot call her that. I think the real Baltimore would actually kill you if she heard you say that.”
Tosin smiled, took out his phone, and punched something into it. “I can’t believe that worked,” he said.
Ariadne couldn’t figure this out.
“Who are you texting?” She asked.
“Mrs. Spacebreather and Ms. Cabrera,” he said. “She started a text chain with us, and advised me on how to ‘get’ you with a prank.”
Ariadne laughed again. “No shit, you two are actually talking, as friends?”
“It’s less nerve-wracking when it’s through text,” he said.
“Yeah, she’s been going through a real text-chain kick lately,” she replied. “Started one with me and Blue, and another with me and some of the Whiptails. Taryn’s in that one. Wonder what that’s about.”
Tosin shrugged, which felt incongruous with the fact that he did know, and immediately revealed, the answer. “She says she always wanted that sort of relationship with her mentor. So, now she’s texting with Mrs. Blue, she’s texting with the girls she’s mentored in case they feel the same about her…”
“And her texting with you and Cabrera?”
“Her answer to the ‘hottie chat’ chain Mrs. Blue is on with Mrs. Sweettalk and Mrs. Beam, I suspect,” he said. “Her, her wife’s close friend, and someone she formed an unexpected connection with.”
“Well, anything that gets the two of you talking,” she laughed. “Taryn’s okay with you texting somebody you’re so attracted to that it literally frightened you into silence?”
“Taryn is thrilled with it, especially because she’s been texting with her too,” he said. “It helps that we’re… in agreement on the subject of your wife’s charms.”
“Bisexuality, truly, the secret to a happy relationship between a man and a woman,” Ariadne grinned. “Good to have like-minded people around, isn’t it? Don’t worry, I’ll keep this little common ground between the three of us our secret.”
“Just ‘between us gals,’ as it were,” Tosin offered, and they laughed together as they pulled up to the door to the observatory and stopped.
“Listen, Tos, I gotta take this meeting,” she said, “but look. You have my number and you know where I live… if you ever want to bend my ear, all that stuff Sweettalk wrangles out of you whenever she interrogates you via text, that’s stuff I want to hear about. Especially if things go further with Taryn, that’s something I’d love to hear, and I promise, you’ll get Ariadne the friend, not Ariadne the lady who’s taken care of Taryn since she was seven.”
Tosin nodded, and excused her to take her meeting in the observatory.
Ariadne inhaled, took a breath, and entered. The station was currently parked in orbit above Enceladus for easy access to and from Xiagu, so the room was lit up in yellow and orange from the view of Saturn. Silhouetted against it was a very small woman who looked quite different from the one other time Ariadne had ever seen her.
“You’ve paid a visit to Alicia, then?” Ariadne asked. “A professional call, not a social one.”
Cabrera ran her hands through her now-pixie short, dark brown hair. “I haven’t been my natural color since I was in high school, I don’t think my own family would recognize me now.” Cabrera said, and gestured noncommittally. “Alicia just cut off the bits I fried with bleach, styled it a bit. It’ll grow out nicely, I’m sure. I’ll look like my little sister, but… there’s worse people to look like.”
“Looks nice,” Ariadne said. “Suits you.”
“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you properly,” Cabrera replied. “I’ve seen you through that ring Alicia gave me, and of course Pilar speaks the world of you, but--”
“I get it,” Ariadne said. “Face to face, that’s its own animal. I’ve heard a lot about you, too.”
“I sure hope not,” Cabrera laughed. “The only real things Pilar knows about me are my home moon and that I used to be a streetwalker.”
“And your pizza order,” Ariadne said. “But she actually told me how you took care of her, and how you two really connected and got close. What you wanted, and what you were looking for. I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten what I owe you, for taking care of her.”
“Listen,” Cabrera said, “I told Pilar, I don’t need the money her sister promised me. I gave that up when I violated the terms of our agreement. Besides, she put a few dozen holes in the guy I was in debt to.”
“You’re still gonna need somewhere to live, though,” Ariadne said. “Gonna need food every day, people to talk to.”
“Pilar said I could live down there,” Cabrera gestured at the surface of Enceladus below.
“Ah, yes, her little promise,” she said affectionately. “It’s been a great few months for people acting without consulting me.”
“You’re… reconsidering?” Cabrera’s expression darkened. “You’re not seriously gonna throw me out, right?”
“No! No, of course not, sugar, what you must think of me!” Ariadne explained. “It’s a good thing. See, I’ve spent the last couple months plagued by this… question. ‘Do I make the people I love suffer with the choices I’ve made for them?’ And, at every turn, the people I love have been answering that question. Alicia gives you the Locker ring. Taryn organizes her little mutineer cell. Sasha kidnaps Pilar and sends her to you. I’m not in charge of the choices they make.”
“So you’re happy that your crew defies you at every turn?”
“I’m happy that they defy me at some turns,” she explained. “But, Alicia also went along with the Locker testing to begin with. Taryn also heard my plan to shove her and Tosin in a hotel room together and agreed it was what would be best for them. Sasha also gave Ellesmere the same treatment we give our crewmates, and Pilar promised you a home. When they think I’m right, they do what I want, and when I’m wrong, they do what they want.”
“Sounds like they trust you as much as you trust them,” Cabrera said.
“And isn’t trust just the name of the game?” Ariadne asked. “So, on that subject… about these people you’ve been pursued by… Pilar said you called them ‘shadow government sons of bitches?’”
“Colorful turn of phrase in the heat of the moment,” Cabrera said. “They’re not with any government I’m aware of.”
“I have to admit, Pilar’s description of them piqued my curiosity,” Ariadne replied. “Do you think they pose a danger to the crew here?”
“I think they pose a danger to anybody who they think knows about them,” Cabrera said. “They have no way of knowing I’m here, so they shouldn’t come to bother you.”
“How can you know?”
“They think I died two years ago,” she said. “I’m only in danger if I show my face in public. If I’d had two more minutes on Titan to put on my helmet, I wouldn’t have had to shoot that guy and we could’ve had a leisurely drive to the library, they only chased us to find out who’d shot one of them. And Pilar, they never saw her face. They’ll have no idea who was driving that motorcycle. And people like you… look, with the crap you guys get up to, if they had any interest in bothering you, you wouldn’t have lasted this long without meeting them.”
“I heard you gave her your jacket to cover her tattoos,” Ariadne said. “Worried they’d use them to identify her. I appreciate you looking out for her. God knows she’s too busy looking out for me to ever look out for herself, so I’m glad someone else out there has her back.”
Cabrera smiled. Ariadne was everything Pilar said she was.
“Pilar’s a foot taller than you, and about two of you in muscle alone. Coat’s too big to be yours,” Ariadne said. “Your brother’s?”
“My brother wished he was that cool,” Cabrera laughed. “Belonged to... a friend. The person who helped me convince them I was dead. He’s the only reason I’m here today. Gone now, though.”
“Ah,” Ariadne said. “They got him?”
“No, actually, he got me to safety, and I never saw him again,” Cabrera said. “Doubt I ever will. I never even learned his real name.”
“I’ve never found knowing someone’s name to be all that important in a friendship,” Ariadne said genuinely.
Cabrera chuckled. “Guess I’m relieved to hear you say that,” she said, “since I’m not telling anybody mine.”
Ariadne gently put her hand on Cabrera’s shoulder. “Listen,” she said, “I know you’re saying we’re safe, from whoever they are. But… I think some good can come from your experience with them. I think we can both benefit from your being here.”
“I’ve run with a crew before,” Cabrera said. “It got just about everyone but me killed. Not really interested in going back to that life. Besides, it’s not like I can leave your little town without putting everybody at risk.”
“Not asking you to,” she said. “Just thinking that maybe you want to find some good in what you’ve been through. Put it to good use.”
“I told you, I can’t tell you anything about them.”
“But you can take a look at our security systems, see where we could be stepping it up,” Ariadne said. “Pilar told me about how you had that apartment set up. Says you’re some sort of infosec wizard. It’s no wonder Pilar connected with you, she’s got a thing for paranoid geniuses.”
Cabrera laughed. “Well, when you put it like that,” she said.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Ariadne said. “But I’m asking you to trust me to keep you safe. So, I figure, I should extend you the same courtesy.”
Cabrera’s heart warmed. “Yeah, mae, I’ll take a crack at it,” she said, and then something occurred to her. “Say, what’s the policy on visitors around here? I got a friend in Pincerna I might want to have over, time to time.”
“A friend, or a friend?” Ariadne asked playfully. “Just between us gals.”
“So what if it’s both?” Cabrera asked, her face growing hot. “It’s just, I’ve been a bit sweet on this girl I met online, and a friend of hers told me she had the hots for me too. I promised she could come visit me, but that was back when I was in the apartment. In a way, she’s the reason I’m here. She introduced me to Blue and Alicia, they introduced me to Pilar, and you were there for the rest of it.”
Ariadne clicked her teeth. “No-go for now,” Ariadne said. “Gonna need a few months of residency under your belt, plus your galley rotation with Cookie, before you can request clearance for somebody we don’t know, and then there’s a lengthy review process… ordinarily I’d suggest you visit her, but in your situation…”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Cabrera said. “We’ve been friends a while, I’m sure she’ll understand if she has to wait a bit.”
“Meantime, you’ll just have to make do with us, for companionship,” Ariadne said. “Plus, I know you’re already… friendly with Blue and Alicia. Maybe you could spend some time with them.”
“Not a bad consolation prize,” Cabrera grinned, and went to brush hair out of her face only to realize none was there.
“Ah, shoot,” Ariadne said facetiously, “I actually think Alicia requested clearance for friends this weekend. Blue’s roommates, Vic and Cherry.”
Cabrera perked up. Was Ariadne pulling her leg? Cherry Cordial was exactly who she was hoping to clear. From the smirk on Ariadne’s face, she could tell she was being had.
Ariadne laughed. “Alicia knew where this was headed from the beginning. She saw your scars and immediately knew you’d be coming aboard, one way or another. Heard how Cherry talked about you on the Luzuha affair, got Cherry cleared as soon as it was obvious you’d be moving here.”
“Cherry’s good people,” Ariadne said. “Her, Blue, Alicia, Pilar… you come with a lot of ringing endorsements where I’m concerned, Cabrera. Or, I mean… hey, I meant to ask... Do you even want to be called that? I mean, you don’t have to tell me your name, but we have to call you something. Might as well be something you like.”
“Cabrera is fine,” she said. “I know I told Pilar it wasn’t my real name but truth is… it’s not the name I was born with, but it’s the name I’ve got, you know? I’m never gonna be that girl again, but I’m this girl now. If I’m gonna be Cabrera, I might as well just be Cabrera.”
“Trust me, I know what you mean,” Ariadne said. “It’s not like my parents named me Ariadne. I’m only Racquel Ramos when I’m in trouble.”
“What, like the foundation?” Cabrera asked.
“You… know my foundation?” Ariadne asked.
Cabrera laughed. “Your foundation? I think you bought me three square meals for a couple months, a few years back,” she said. “You guys funded the women’s shelter I lived in after… well, you don’t get me that easy.”
“Can’t take all the credit,” Ariadne said. “Peace Upendo’s been handling most of the day-to-day these days.”
“Your money, though?” Cabrera asked. “Your idea?”
“Yeah,” Ariadne replied.
“Then I think you might’ve saved my life once, mae,” Cabrera said with a shrug. “From where I’m sitting, Racquel Ramos isn’t such a bad person to be.”
Ariadne smiled and let out a long, heavy sigh. “Cabrera,” she said. “It’s a good name. Strong name. Suits you, like the haircut. Well, Cabrera, I’m lucky to know who you are now, so I’m glad I was able to give a helping hand to the person you were then. Welcome aboard!”
Cabrera offered her hand for a shake, but Ariadne pulled her into a hug.
“And, thank you, again,” she said, “for bringing her back to me.”
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion!
“We’ve put in some pretty extensive modifications to block time travelers from getting in here,” the younger Spacebreather explained.
“Made it difficult for me to get here,” the elder Spacebreather pointed out, “The Apanqura had to breach this time zone well outside the defenses. I barely made it here in time.”
“Although it didn’t stop Ellesmere’s crew from coming and going as they pleased,” Ariadne pointed out, “and they’re the ones we’re trying to defend against. Besides, what are we supposed to do, apply them to the whole solar system in the next 20 minutes?”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Ellesmere said. “We’re cooked. It’s over.”
“Like I said: I’m still breathing,” Ariadne said, “which means it’s not over.”
“In one hour, this solar system will be gone,” Ellesmere insisted. “You really want to spend your last minutes thrashing against the inevitable?”
“That’s how I’ve always pictured it,” Ariadne said. “Ghostrunner, Sasha, spread the word among the crew. I’m listening on all channels, any ideas to save the system, just shout them out, I’ll hear ‘em. Like Baltimore always says, no bad ideas in brainstorming.”
“Aye,” Sasha and Ghostrunner said, and rushed off to spread the word.
“It’s done.” Ellesmere insisted, “There is nothing that can stop the Syndicate from carrying out its mission.”
“I did,” the elder Spacebreather said. “Did you forget already?”
Ellesmere bristled at this. “It took you twenty years of planning, and even then you barely did it.”
“Listen,” Ariadne cut in. “All us crabs are in the same pot now, and the heat is on. Ellesmere, you’re with us now, like it or not. Whether we like it or not. So you might as well tell us, if there was a way to beat them, what would it look like?”
“There isn’t.”
“If there was.”
Ellesmere relented. “Fine. Fine.” She said, “ordinarily, we’d take out a rogue civilization using a time-storm. That’s what they’ll be working on right now. We couldn’t do it before because of those cracks in time and space. This system was the epicenter of a temporal crisis, and an intervention on the scale of a time-storm would risk taking out the whole galaxy. Like dropping an atom bomb on a fault line and setting off every volcano on the planet.”
“So we have to, what, build a time machine?” The younger Spacebreather asked, “break the universe again?”
Ellesmere shook her head. “At this point, they’d accept the risk of destroying this galaxy in the present-day, just to eliminate a threat to the Syndicate’s supremacy. The Syndicate is the only force in the universe with the power to wipe us out, and the only way to stop them is ensuring they’d be destroyed too. Mutually assured destruction.”
“My future-self should be able to help us recreate her time machine,” Ariadne mused. “Maybe we could go back in time, find some critical event, and strike there. Suddenly our system is the epicenter again, and they can’t touch us. Atom bomb on a fault line.”
“Falling acorn on a crack in the sidewalk,” Ellesmere replied sharply. “That’s one event in one solar system. I alone have performed thousands of interventions. If we still had the threshold, you could throw me in there and we’d be set. Course, if we had the threshold, we wouldn’t be in this mess, since they wouldn’t be able to wipe us with a time-storm.”
“Take it from someone who just got yanked out of that kind of thinking,” Ariadne said, “I’m not sure how much good that would do.”
“It’s all hypothetical, anyway,” Ellesmere replied. “I’m excommunicated. Locked out of all our subsystems. I can’t even press the pause button without Kalrax’s authorization. All my top-shelf time travel gear is useless now.”
“But if we could figure it out,” Ariadne pressed. “If my future self could build you a functional time machine. Could you intervene on your own past? Stop yourself shooting Spacebreather, undo a few old jobs, I mean… would that work?”
“I’d have to undo them all, and… it’d give you leverage. Make it impossible to destroy your system without the Syndicate going down. Kalrax will never allow that, he’d kill himself first.Probably do the universe a lot of good, bring back a lot of people,” Ellesmere said, something horrible dawned on her. “Oh god… all those people… all those planets. I killed them all, and it didn’t even mean anything. I thought I was helping people.”
“How many assassinations were you sent on, and you still thought you were helping people,” the elder Spacebreather sneered.
“You’re not the first member of this crew to be brainwashed into doing something evil,” the younger Spacebreather corrected herself. “A woman we call sister once wore a Homeworld Empire Marine Corps uniform.”
“She killed our wife,” the elder Spacebreather said.
“We don’t have the luxury of ‘time to squabble’ right now,” the younger Spacebreather replied. “When we’re not facing down imminent annihilation, we can settle whatever personal scores are left over!”
“Everyone,” the younger Ariadne said. “Future-Spacebreather, you and I have already had our moment. Might not have another chance to have one with my counterpart in the docking bay.”
The elder Spacebreather conceded this point and made, quickly, for the hangar. She had come all this way to save Ariadne, after all, and perhaps the elder Ariadne would be more amenable to helping if she could actually see Spacebreather was alive.
“Smart move,” the younger Spacebreather said. “Getting me to run to you is the easiest sell in the universe.”
It was, at this point, that the elder Ariadne arrived in the lab, clearly having missed the elder Spacebreather completely, and hissed: “You.”
For a moment, the younger Ariadne feared that her future self had only come along as a ruse to get within striking distance of her, and then she realized, the elder Ariadne wasn’t looking at her. The comms were still broadcasting system-wide. Anyone onboard would’ve heard their whole conversation.
If looks could kill, Ellesmere would’ve been fried to a crisp on the spot.
“And you, overly flippant, constantly aggrieved, and married to being just indispensable enough to get away with absolute uselessness.”
“We’re really doing this?” Shubin asked.
“Ellesmere is the most dedicated company man the Syndicate could’ve hoped for,” Daeschler replied, “and he lied to her to get her to take on an impossible task, then cast her aside. If that can happen to her, what the hell hope is there for the rest of us?”
“Not to mention,” Shubin said, “forgive me, love, I’m simply a pussycat when it comes to matters of the heart. How many cultures has he given me the chance to learn everything about, only to snuff them out like a damned candle? I’m supposed to just watch Taryn fall for Tosin, and then sign her death warrant?”
“I’d make fun of you,” Daeschler said, “but I understand where you’re coming from. I’m a bloody scientist, and I’m supposed to wipe all that innovation off the map, for the sake of some government maintaining a power I don’t even get a slice of?”
“Then we’re really doing this,” Shubin said. “Do you think Ellesmere will figure out what to do?”
“She will,” Daeschler said, “or she’ll die. Either way, we’ll go to our fate knowing we did what we could.”
They took a deep breath, and entered Director Kalrax’s chamber.
“Agents,” he said, “I’m sorry for the loss of your commanding officer. The Syndicate appreciates your service, and doesn’t hold the actions of one radical against you.”
Shubin smiled his fakest smile. “Goes to show even the best of us can fall, if we’re not careful.”
Daschler fingered the trigger of the genetic spoof, in her pocket.
“Report on the situation in the Sol System.”
“Mostly contained,” Daeschler said. “The fabric is stable in the present, so a category eight time-storm stretching back twenty minutes should take out the whole system with minimal impact.”
Kalrax turned to Shubin. “Cultural ramifications of wiping out the system?”
“Well, if you’ll turn your attention to this chart,” he said, pulling a blaster he’d swiped from Ariadne’s armory out of his pocket, and firing on Kalrax’s tank, shattering it and causing him to spill onto the ground. Every klaxon in the headquarters blared out
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, AGENT?!”
Daeschler took out the genetic spoof, sampled Kalrax’s DNA, and quickly fired it at Shubin and herself.
Shubin rushed to Kalrax’s terminal, while Daeschler took his blaster and held it to Kalrax’s head.
“We’ve got full access,” Shubin gushed. “Director-level security clearance. My god, Daeschler, those girls actually did it.”
“Technology like this could be very dangerous in the wrong hands,” Daeschler mused.
Shubin managed to shut off the Klaxons and lock the doors so that nobody but the Director could open them.
“That won’t last forever,” Shubin said, “eventually they’ll figure out something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.”
“Denmark?” Daeschler asked.
“Oh, I really wish we had time for me to explain the bard to you,” Shubin said. “Eventually, they’ll all get in here and reverse everything we did. We need to bring this whole place down before that happens, or else it’ll all be for nothing.”
“Well then, get to it,” Daeschler said. “Dispense with the theatrics, love, we worked out what we were going to do ages ago.”
“TRAITORS,” Kalrax roared.
“Yeah, that doesn’t sting very much when we did it on purpose,” Daeschler shrugged, furiously typing commands into Kalrax’s terminal. “If we felt bad about betraying you, we wouldn’t have done it.”
“And… it’s done,” Shubin said. “Agent Ellesmere now has Director-level clearance as well.”
“Here’s hoping she knows us well enough,” Daeschler prodded Kalrax with the barrel of the blaster, “to figure out what to do with it before it’s too late.”
“I’m sorry,” Ellesmere said, and knelt down on the floor. “My god, I’m so sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” The elder Ariadne hissed. “She was my universe, and you took her away from me. I’m not here to hear sorry.”
Ellesmere was shaking. “I understand if you want to kill me.”
“Kill you?” The elder Ariadne replied. “Girlie, you don’t get off that easy.”
“Ariadne,” the younger Ariadne said, “stand down.”
“I’m no threat to her,” the elder Ariadne growled, and turned back to Ellesmere. “You took my wife away from me for twenty years, and now, your boss is up there threatening to kill her all over again. If I’m not allowed to give up, what the hell makes you think you get that luxury? You owe me. Get the fuck up and find a solution.”
The younger Ariadne knelt down to meet Ellesmere’s eyeline. “That’s what we do. That’s all we do. We confront impossible problems, and we come up with a way to fix them. You lived on my station. You broke bread with us. Swapped stories. You have no home to go back to. Like it or not, you’re one of us.”
“That flagship of mine is made of programmable matter,” the elder Ariadne said. “It can build you whatever you need, on Spacebreather’s command. If I can create a portal device, can you disrupt your own timeline?”
Ellesmere sighed. “It’s not like I carry around a list of coordinates for every intervention I’ve taken part in. Without access to Syndicate records, I’d just be working from mem--”
At that exact moment, Ellesmere’s visor pinged back to life, and every light on her wrist device lit up simultaneously.
“What the devil-- I’ve got Director-level clearance,” she said, and looked up at the elder Ariadne. “I can open up a portal myself, now.”
The elder Ariadne snarled at her. The younger Ariadne didn’t feel much more confidence that Ellesmere wouldn’t simply flee to save her own skin, and leave them to die.
Ellesmere smirked. “So, quick as you like, fetch me one of those fancy pulse rifles you’re all so fond of waving about. I had a pistol, but I think that massive jackboot flattened it.”
“What are you talking about?” Spacebreather asked.
“Weren’t you listening?” Ellesmere said. “I didn’t have a list of my interventions, and with Director-level clearance, now I do. Sharing the data with you now, if you’ll be so kind.”
Ariadne spotted the notification of a data transfer on her HUD and downloaded it as quickly as possible.
“That’s strange,” Ariadne said. “At the bottom of this list, there’s a bunch of photographs.”
Ellesmere smiled. “The cute anime fan kissing your autistic lab assistant… her laughing over brunch with your hedonistic blue-haired step-mentor… those odd gals in your speculative operations division working with a hologram of you to get your defenses ready.”
“The hell do they have to do with your interventions?” Spacebreather asked.
“They’re what Shubin and Daeschler really care about,” Ellesmere said, “silly love stories, human drama, weird technology… Looks like they aren’t a pair of Judases after all.”
Spacebreather burst into laughter. “Ari, they took the bait!”
“Oh my god,” Ariadne said, “with everything that’s happening, I completely forgot we did that!”
“The bait?!” Ellesmere asked.
Ariadne found a break in her laughter to explain: “Ellesmere, I’m sorry-- actually, I’m not sorry, you lied to my crew for two months and you’ve murdered everybody in this room-- but remember how I told you we bugged your comms? Well, we found out your lieutenants were still onboard--”
Spacebreather cut in, still unable to stop laughing: “W—we guessed our personal drama and cool gadgets would be what did them in, and we left bait for them, to sew discord with your boss!”
“That’s why we talked so much about sending Taryn and Tosin on a mission together!” Ariadne laughed. “They would’ve gotten together anywhere, but we needed to be sure your boy would follow them!”
Spacebreather was doubled over. “I thought for sure the other one was gonna clock the genetic spoof as a trap!”
Ariadne composed herself and looked up to see her older self, smiling, with tears in her eyes.
“Ordinarily I’d be furious,” Ellesmere said, “but in this case, it works to our advantage. We’d better get to work, they’ll have bought us time, but only so much.”
Ariadne ran the numbers through the chip in her skull to be sure every last detail of the math was right.
“Our fastest pulse rifles can fire at a speed of 2,000 rounds per minute,” she said. “If we can rig up the portal to all of Ellesmere’s interventions, in a row, and set it to change destinations every 0.03 seconds, then we can cover all of them in approximately... seven minutes and fourteen seconds.”
“Reverse-chronological order,” Ellesmere said. “No sense in starting at the beginning, we won’t be able to find any of the later ones. Plus, doing it backwards means we’ll be repeatedly making our own interventions and then immediately erasing them as well. The more tangled we make this, the harder it’ll hit Headquarters”
Spacebreather wasn’t convinced. “Won’t this kill you?”
Ellesmere gestured at the three everjade crystals floating behind her. “These’ll keep me safe, at least until they blow from the influx of chronological energy.”
“And after then?” Spacebreather asked.
“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve wiped out my past,” Ellesmere said. “Nobody’s ever done it this many times in a row, though. I genuinely haven’t the foggiest what’ll happen to me. All that matters now is that we make that bastard of a mollusk pay.”
On Ariadne’s orders, Alicia dropped through ever-so-briefly to drop off a turret heatsink that could fire continuously for the length of time they needed, and hooked it up to their fastest, most powerful tripod-mounted HMG pulse rifle. Before leaving, she set up a bulletproof blast shield ten feet away from the gun, just to avoid any collateral. All told, the process took about five minutes.
Ellesmere tapped a series of commands into her wrist-cuffs. “This will open a portal at the site of every incursion I’ve ever caused, approximately twelve seconds after I’ve arrived. I’ve locked onto my own neural signature, so as long as the portal aligns with the tip of the gun, every shot will be a headshot.”
“You seem awfully clinical for someone who’s about to shoot herself in the head 14,467 times,” Ariadne said, “you’re sure you’re ready for this?”
“If we’re lucky, this might even cause a core overload at HQ,” Ellesmere said, allowing herself one last lie. She knew full well, an incursion on this scale would wipe their headquarters from the sky. “Shubin and Daeschler will be facing exile, torture, and reprogramming for this. Why shouldn’t I show the same bravery, to make those rotting bastards at HQbleed?”
“On your mark, then,” Spacebreather said.
Ellesmere tossed her cuff to Ariadne. “Point it at the blast shield and hit the bright blue button. That’ll start the process.”
Ariadne complied, and she and Spacebreather watched as Ellesmere, on their orders, gunned herself down. The rifle’s pulses keeping rhythm with the flickering of the portal, while thousands of iterations of Ellesmere in every conceivable species-- radically different and not even always recognizably organic, but always recognizable as her--flashed past too fast to distinguish from one another.
Ellesmere screamed as she let loose with the machine gun fire, taking her own past self out over and over again. Was she screaming out of rage? Excitement? Sorrow? Pain? There was a degree of truth to all of these, but she didn’t let up on the trigger. She mowed herself down and screamed herself hoarse as the machine-gun fire shook her so violently that the carefully-tied buns in her hair came undone and fell into her face.
Eventually, bright white cracks began to form through the everjade crystals hovering behind Ellesmere, and they splintered into hundreds of shards, which fell to the ground and crumbled into dust. Eventually, the portals stopped coming, as Ellesmere’s resume ran out. She fell to her knees, exhausted and in immense pain, and began to flicker as if she were glitching in and out of existence.
Shubin and Daeschler began to laugh in celebration as the klaxons blared again, beyond even the Director’s clearance to silence.
His communicator was ringing off the hook. Every last agent in the field and in their Headquarters was reporting in, all with some disaster from another corner of the universe.
“Sir, what the hell is happening?” Agent Curie’s voice came through first. “Something weird’s going down in the Sol system, somebody took an agent down two minutes before she was supposed to assassinate that Pirate captain and--”
“Director, we’ve got a real situation here,” Agent Sagan’s voice came through next, “Ellesmere’s been shot on Pentifax III, and her lieutenants are--”
“—we’re looking at a full-scale Carilocyriac rebellion over here,” Agent Crick said, “some lunatic shot Ellesmere before she could wipe out the city. The whole Carilocyriac civilization’s got time travel now, and Shubin and Daeschler are in the wind--”
“—Sir, did you authorize a portal on Tarantioch V?” Agent Franklin came through next. “Are you insane?! Ellesmere blew that whole planet to hell two years ago, and suddenly it’s back in the sky! Shubin and Daeschler are leading some sort of insurrection against the Syndicate on the surface! Do you know how many fires we’re gonna have to put out because of this?!”
“—Director Kalrax, what the holy hell is going on up there?!” Agent Lamarr screamed through the loudspeaker, “one of our agents has been assassinated hundreds of times, and each assassination overwrites the last one! Our core isn’t gonna be able to stabilize from this one!”
“What possessed you to authorize this?!” Agent Goodall admonished, “you’ve murdered the syndicate, Kalrax!”
The chorus of confusion and anger became indistinguishable. Shubin and Daeschler smiled broadly, and turned to him and, gleefully, one after the other, repeated Goodall’s words.
“You’ve murdered the syndicate, Kalrax.”
“You’ve murdered the syndicate, Kalrax!”
“Our fellow agents will all spend the remainder of the lifespan of whatever species they’re stuck as cursing your name for stranding them in the field,” Daeschler mused. “The greatest failure in syndicate history!”
“Oh, what a delight,” Shubin said, “we did the crime, and he’s the one who’ll go down in history as a disgrace!”
“If he goes down in history at all,” Daeschler cackled. “You’re the historian, do you think any records of him will survive what’s about to happen?”
“I should hope not!” Shubin howled, “he’d have been better off deep-fried and served with a side of lemon and marinara!”
Kalrax’s voice croaked out: “You perfidious idiots have destroyed the universe.”
“Oh, come off it,” Daeschler said, opening up her own readouts. “This station has enough everjade at its core to neutralize this attack. We planned it that way specifically. We’ve no quarrel with the universe, just with you.”
“The universe cannot survive without the stability we provide,” Kalrax rasped. “Without the Syndicate’s grip as a deterrent, new powers will be able to rise up throughout spacetime, unchecked.”
“Oh, my giddy aunt,” Shubin said wickedly, “what trouble that would be.”
“Imagine what forbidden technologies people will create,” Daeschler laughed.
“What compelling stories they’ll have,” Shubin added. “As for us… we just pitched our own headquarters into the void, and I bet it’s going to crash-land. Say, what do you think our odds of survival are, Daeschler?”
“About even, Shubin,” Daeschler said, “but if we survive, there’s no telling where or when we’ll end up.”
“Certainly not here,” Shubin said.
“Definitely not now,” Daeschler agreed.
“A whole new world,” Shubin mused.
“Kiss me,” Daeschler said. “Oh, go on, do it. You’re Mr. I-love-the-drama, and this is our big dramatic moment.”
“Well, okay,” Shubin smiled, “but let it be known it’s all for the drama.”
He obliged her request, and Headquarters collapsed in on itself and out of the known spacetime continuum.
Ellesmere remained kneeling on the ground, her edges glitching and crackling. She began to chuckle darkly.
“It’s over…” she muttered. “The syndicate is over. You’re safe.”
“Ellesmere, are you…” the younger Ariadne asked. “Are you okay?”
“Universe is catching up with itself, loves,” she said. “Trying to… rewire itself… mold itself into its new shape… and I’m not… meant to be in it.”
“You’re not going to die,” the elder Ariadne pointed out. “I undid my own past, and I’m still here.”
“Yeah, and don’t forget, you undid your own birth,” the younger Ariadne said, “and nothing happened to you.”
“Portal mechanics are different,” Ellesmere slurred. “Future changes immediately when they close… My everjade crystals… supposed to absorb the change for me… couldn’t take the sustained onslaught… the bombardment… now the universe is fixing itself up, and… I’ve got nothing to protect me… Pretty soon I’ll… Well, if I’m lucky… I might leave a corpse...”
Spacebreather moved towards her, and leaned down to pick her up. Ellesmere was in far too much pain to bother resisting her.
“Like the smartest girl in the universe said,” Spacebreather insisted, “You lived in our home. Broke bread with us, swapped stories. You’re one of us, now. And we don’t give up, when we’re facing down a problem. We get up, and we do something about it.”
“Nothing you can... do for me now, pet,” Ellesmere said. “I knew what I was doing… when I did it… I pretended it was safer than it was… knew you wouldn’t... let me do it otherwise…”
“Just shut up and let me save you,” Spacebreather said. “For once in your life, just... shut the fuck up.” She brought her over to the remains of the crystal formation and lay her down on the ground. She carefully arranged the shards all around Ellesmere’s body so that as many of them were touching her as possible.
Her form glitched again, and the crystals closest to her body began to glow a soft white, then dissipated the energy into the air around her. She breathed a sigh of relief, and all the crystals began to glow, brighter and brighter, until the glitching stopped altogether.
Ellesmere sat up. “How?” She asked, in genuine shock. “How did you know to do that?”
“Girl, you said the everjade crystals were what protected you, and we have a ton of them,” Spacebreather said. “I put two and two together.”
“But why did you save me?” Ellesmere asked. “You’ve got every reason to hate me.”
“And yet,” Spacebreather said, “I don’t. I kill to protect people, and to solve problems. Who are you still a danger to? What problem would it solve, if you died?”
Ellesmere looked over at the elder Ariadne. “I killed your wife,” she said, and turned her head to the younger Ariadne. “I killed you.”
“You also tried to sacrifice yourself to save us,” the younger Ariadne said.
“I’ve got no love for you,” the elder Ariadne said, but then gestured at Spacebreather, “but I love this woman. If she says you should be allowed to live, I’m not going to fight her on--”
She didn’t finish her sentence, because the elder Spacebreather returned to the lab, removing all the wind from her sails and leaving her with an expression like she’d been struck by a space freighter.
“Querida…” the elder Ariadne muttered.
“20 years,” the elder Spacebreather said, angrily, directly at Ellesmere. “You robbed me of my wife for 20 years.”
“I see not every version of you is so forgiving,” Ellesmere said. “I understand, though. Kill me, if you must.”
“Would you stop it already?” The younger Spacebreather asked.
“I don’t want to kill you,” the elder Spacebreather growled. “I want those 20 years back.”
Ellesmere looked at her communicator cuff. “Headquarters is gone,” she said. “My days messing with time are over whether I like it or not, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, I can’t give you those years back. You’re stuck here, in the past, forever.”
“Oh, yes you can,” the elder Spacebreather insisted. “20 years, you took from me, and 20 more from her. Way I see it, you owe us 40 years of each other’s company. After that, you can go wherever you want, but until then, you’re with us.”
“With us?” the elder Ariadne asked, quietly and solemnly.
The elder Spacebreather spun to face her for the first time, her eyes shining. “Of course, querida,” she said. “You didn’t think I could just… move on with my life, after you died, did you?”
“She knew you were here,” the younger Ariadne pointed out. “You were already here when I died, in the last future. She would’ve known you made it back. And Ellesmere, well, she would’ve killed you just as much as me.”
“She came back to save you too,” the younger Spacebreather explained. “If she’d gone back to the new future, then you would’ve been stranded in the past, alone. That’s not something I’d be able to abide, if it were me.”
“And it is,” the elder Spacebreather finished. “I’m here for you, my love. My most precious treasure. After all these years of grief and loneliness, don’t we deserve to be together again?”
The elder Ariadne attempted to speak, but choked on the attempt.
“It’s okay,” the elder Spacebreather said. “I know, it’s a lot to process. But I’m here. I love you, and that’s forever.”
The elder Ariadne raised her trembling hands to Spacebreather’s face, and caressed it as though she thought her wife would dissipate into vapor if she touched her. “Is it… can it really be you?”
“It’s really me,” the elder Spacebreather said. “You saved me, I saved you, now we’re even, we’re both alive, and we’ve got nowhere to be and a long time to get there. Wanna get some dinner, to celebrate?”
The elder Ariadne could now barely stand, and the elder Spacebreather pulled her tightly into an embrace. The elder Ariadne could no longer hold back tears, and began to openly sob into the shoulder of her wife’s everjade armor.
“It’s okay,” the elder Spacebreather said. “I’m here, I got you.”
“I mi… I missed you so much…” the elder Ariadne wept. “Oh god… what did I become without you.”
“You weren’t without me,” the elder Spacebreather reassured her. “Not for a second. I was always coming back for you, all you did was make sure I was able to. I will always, always be right there with you, you hear?”
It was at this point that Ellesmere realized that this crew was really, truly, not going to kill her for what she’d done. How could that be, she wondered, and suddenly the reality hit her. She would not be returning to her life of jetsetting across the universe and back, and would be living out her life in this backwater time period, in this obscure region of space. She’d spent her entire adult life as a dedicated company man, and she didn’t quite know how to motivate herself without a cause to marry herself to.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “40 years, my best effort at making the two of you happy together.”
What the hell, she thought, that was a much better cause than the one that had just hung her out to dry.
The younger Spacebreather put her arm around the younger Ariadne and squeezed her tight. It was nice, she thought, to see such firm proof that Cookie was telling the truth: a universe where they didn’t belong to one another was scarcely worth thinking about. The idea of them being apart was an error so fundamentally wrong that the universe was in danger of collapsing rather than let it be true, and these two had clawed their way through time and space, back from the grave, to set it right.
The elder Ariadne looked the elder Spacebreather in the eyes, and knew this was real. Every day for the past 20 years, she wished she could wake up from her ongoing nightmare in Spacebreather’s arms, and finally, for the first time in decades, she wasn’t disappointed. The nightmare was over.
Ariadne kissed Spacebreather, and for a moment, all was right in the universe.
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“My family will be safe?” Ariadne asked. “If I let you do this, you’ll leave them be?”
“Don’t you dare!” Ghostrunner shrieked, banging on the crystalline shields that isolated Ariadne, Ellesmere, and her lieutenants in Tosin’s lab.
“Your family is only in danger because of you,” Daeschler said. She and Shubin exchanged a look. As they had agreed, they would go along with whatever Ellesmere said. Whatever got them back to HQ and the director, safe and sound.
Shubin concurred. “Come off it, you never put that together? All of this happened because of you.”
“Besides, you don’t have any other choice,” Daeschler said. “Nobody’s coming to save you.”
“Unless you can think of a way to stop her having come through in the first place,” Ellesmere said, “I have my orders.”
Ariadne tried to reason with her one last time. “Please, let m--”
At that moment, the entire station was rattled by a massive impact, knocking everyone in the room off their feet. Ariadne could see on the sensors that they’d been hit by something massive, but the enemy hadn’t fired. Who the hell was attacking them?
She had bigger problems right now, though. She had to think fast to figure out what to do before they all got back to their feet. She was locked in a room with a group of armed wetwork agents sent to kill her, and unfortunately for her, they were making a pretty compelling case that she was the root of all the problems they were facing. If she was gone, would any of this be happening?
If she was gone, no, but if she was dead, that certainly wouldn’t help anything. Ellesmere had a point-- the only way killing her would help is if it somehow stopped her future self from coming through in the first place. Why was she just taking Ellesmere’s word that they could clean up this mess as long as they killed her?
The only way out of this, the only way that left the solar system standing, is if she found a way to stop all of it from happening in the first place.
Her future self was right, all along. She constantly asked other people to sacrifice for her, for her cause, but when it came down to it, what was she willing to sacrifice for them?
Her eyes trained on the threshold, and she recalled Ellesmere’s words.
“You jump through it, you end up in the void outside time and space. Whenever the universe experiences a significant shift, that void is flushed out, and anything in it at the time is erased from history.”
“But that’s a big if. Your future self did a lot of damage coming through. The future is completely unbound now. Timeline flailing in the wind.”
“Unless you can think of a way to stop her having come through in the first place, I have my orders.”
She knew what she had to do. All the children she’d helped, all of her friends and family, she hoped they would still find their happiness with her erased. They might have a lot of adversity to overcome, but at least they’d be alive. And they would never know that she had saved their lives.
Without missing a beat, she got to her feet and sprinted for the threshold.
Sasha and Pilar, eager to share the news with her that Pilar had made her way back to the station and was none-too-pleased about being sent away, rushed through the door just in time to see Ariadne disappear through the threshold.
“NO!” Ellesmere shrieked.
“Well, I have to imagine this development is going to cause some problems,” Shubin said, “for you.”
“You failed in your task,” Daeschler said. “Kalrax isn’t going to be happy.”
Pilar and Ghostrunner pounded on the crystal barrier. Ellesmere walked up to the glass and clicked a device to allow them to hear her through it.
“How the hell are you still here?” Ellesmere asked.
“Get her back, NOW.” Pilar roared.
“I can’t,” Ellesmere said. “She’s gone, forever. Erased from history. Irretrievable.”
“Unacceptable,” Pilar insisted. “Get her back right this second.”
“Why are you still here?” Ellesmere asked. “How are any of us still here? She erased herself from history, her older self unbound us from her future, so the change should’ve been instantaneous.”
At that moment, a figure wearing sleek, futuristic armor made of everjade plating, burst through the door.
“Stand back,” their distorted voice said, and launched a sticky bomb onto the barrier. Sasha, Pilar, and Ghostrunner dove out of its blast radius just in time for it to blow a hole clean in the barrier and once again knock Ellesmere and her lieutenants off their feet. The crystal shrapnel glowed gold as it sublimated back into energy as it was disconnected from its center mass.
The armored figure found a sturdy fixture, secured a long cable to it using a reinforced carabiner, and secured the other end of it to a loop at the back of their armor.
“When I tug three times, pull me out,” they said to Pilar.
“Who are you?” Pilar asked.
“I’m here to save her,” the figure replied, and that was answer enough for Pilar.
“You can’t save her,” Ellesmere said, “she’s gone. Nobody comes back from one of these things unless we’re lashed to a future, and we’re--”
The figure silenced Ellesmere with a sharp point of her finger in her direction, stepped over to her pistol, still on the floor, and crushed it under her boot.
“Fine,” Ellesmere said, “erase yourself trying to save her, too.”
The figure dove into the threshold after Ariadne, and disappeared in its many facets.
Ariadne floated where there was nothing and no time. She thought about all the people she’d never see again, her friends, her family. She thought about how the universe would fare, had she never been in it. She had to believe that Alicia could’ve stopped the Divoratori on her own. That Baltimore and Beam would’ve found a way to survive. Ghostrunner and Sweettalk would’ve had each other, and Sasha had Pilar and Cookie. Blue would’ve found someone to take care of Taryn. Somebody must have done something about Susan Weaver and Dr. Simon.
She didn’t have much hope on this last point. Lucky for her, she thought, she’d never have to find out. She didn’t exist.
So, she wondered, if she didn’t exist, why was she doing so much existing right now? She was thinking, which indicated she was being. Had Ellesmere lied to her about how these things worked? Had she done something wrong?
She’d lost her faith in god when she ran away from home, so much that she never even talked about her old beliefs until the Dr. Simon affair dug up all that old baggage. She had to consider, though, the possibility that she was dead, and this boundless void was the afterlife.
“No,” I said, “don’t be ridiculous. You’re not dead.”
Ariadne whipped her head around to see the source of the voice, and found she was no longer in the boundless void. She was on a rooftop, at sunset, in a garden. The skies were golden, the clouds cast in a vibrant pink. She was on Earth.
She recognized the man sitting on the roof with her. The stranger, from the fundraiser. From all those strange dreams she’d been having.
I knew how important this moment would be, so I made sure to clean myself up for it. I had my finest makeup on, my beard was freshly trimmed, my tattered jacket replaced with a fresh shirt, the exact Memphis pattern that Tosin favored, with my long hair tied back in a matching headband, with a pin in it, bearing the insignia of her crew, a jolly roger with wrenches in place of crossbones.
I stood on the rooftop, idly singing the song Pilar sang to her in their quietest, most private moments. I needed, more than anything, for her to know that I was a friend.
She asked, “How do you know that song?”
I replied, “I know everything about you, Ariadne.”
“How?” Ariadne asked. “We’re not talking about my exploits as a matter of public record. That’s a song only me and my wife should know. The only way you could know what it means to me is if you’d heard it from us, and I sure as hell didn’t tell you.”
I told her, “you figure it out, eventually. Over drinks, with friends, I should think.”
“Where the hell am I?” She asked.
“Are you asking literally, or figuratively?” I asked, but didn’t hesitate to answer both versions of the question. “Figuratively, you’re outside of time and space, in the domain of dreams and fantasies and other things that never were. Literally, I’d say you’re in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Can’t say for sure. Never been.”
“This is my grandmother’s old garden,” Ariadne said. “She used to come up here every day at sunset and paint.”
“I remember,” I said. “You adored your grandmother every bit as much as you hated your parents.”
“How do you know so much about me?” She asked. “Who are you?”
“I guess you could call me a fan,” I said, “or perhaps an academic. You mean a lot to me, where I come from. When I come from. Your story is truly inspirational. Not a lot of people remember it in my time, but I’m looking to change that.”
“Great,” she said, “just what we need, more time travelers.”
“I’m here to learn more about what happened,” I said. “In your time, in your place, you have the legendary pirate Luzuha. In mine, I have Ariadne, and Pilar Spacebreather, and their little family, nestled in the space between Mars and Jupiter. I have my records, but there’s certain things you can only get by going there, experiencing it yourself, in real life.”
“You can’t really try something in a dream,” she quoted.
“That’s the ticket,” I replied. “So you have been listening. I’ve been up and down your timeline, fitting into whatever niches I could, getting as much information as I can find. I was actually a customer at Yma and Gael’s grocery, that part was true. Rubbed elbows with Alicia, before prison. Tried dinner at Ms. Fan’s Hotpot Spot. Beam even picked me up and threw me once, back when she was a cheerleader. I’m particularly fond of the woman who runs your menagerie, it’s good to know she’ll always be doing what she loves. When you’re telling a story, you want to make the things in it, the people in it, feel real, and the best way to do that is to have them be real. When people read about all this, they’re gonna feel like they know you, because I know you.”
“So, you’re why I haven’t been erased from history?” She asked. “I swear, if the universe is destroyed because some fanboy historian--”
I laughed. “No, god, what you must take me for, to think I even could reverse the effects of a threshold. I can’t affect things that much. The story’s mine to tell, but it happened the way it happened, and I have to tell it that way. I’m not supposed to interfere, but sometimes I just... can’t help myself.”
“So you’re why we’ve been having all these weird dreams,” she said.
“No,” I explained, “proximity to the anomaly did that to you. Gives you glimpses of what’s on the other side… echos of my little sojourns into your family’s history... but you can only pick them up when you’re open to the irrational. In moments of uncertainty or, yes, in dreams. I believe your friend Blue would call it the spirit world, but I prefer to think of it as the stuff inside the walls of the universe. The pipes and the wires and the insulation. Your dreams are just… hearing snippets of the neighbor’s conversations.”
“So you’re, what, along for the ride?” She asked.
“Like I said, sometimes I can’t help myself,” I told her. “I’ll admit, I gave Pilar a bit of a hint on what was going to happen, so she could save you. Not that I could’ve stopped her if I tried.”
Ariadne laughed. “Too bad I’m better at self-destruction than she is at saving me,” she said.
“Don’t be so sure,” I replied. “You’re still here, aren’t you?”
“Again, you’re sure that’s not you?” Ariadne asked. “We’re not lashed to whatever future you come from?”
I laughed again, more heartily this time. “It’s a lot more complicated than that. But no, all of this is how it really happened. At least, the parts I got right. But there’s one thing I’ve learned from all the time I’ve spent poring over your adventures. It’s that you’ll tear the universe apart to save her, and she’ll always do whatever it takes to save you.”
“So why are we in my grandmother’s garden?” Ariadne asked. “You writing her history now, too?”
“No, this is actually my gift to you. Moments you never had, with someone who’s gone.” I paused a moment. “Do please pass my love along to Carrie Beastmaster, would you?”
What I was saying dawned on Ariadne. It was sunset now, and her grandmother always came up to paint at sunset.
“Is this real?” She asked. “Is this a dream, or did this really happen?”
“Great questions,” I explained. “In order, yes this is real, yes this is a dream, but it’s not yours or mine, and no, this didn’t happen, but it is happening now. Does that clear things up at all?”
Ariadne hated that it did.
She heard the doorknob to the stairway down to her grandmother’s apartment turn, and when she turned back to check with me, again, that this was really real, I was gone.
But Raquel Ramos the first was there, she was real, and she was delighted to see her granddaughter. This was her dream, and she didn’t question the logic of her eleven-year-old granddaughter being a grown woman. In a dream, things don’t have to make sense like that. She knew, though, on some level, that this was really her granddaughter, speaking to her from across impossible distances.
All she could muster was one word: “Abuela.”
Her grandmother smiled. “What a beautiful woman you’ve grown up to be.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I left you behind, and I never got to say goodbye.”
“What are you talking about?” She asked. “You’re here now. Sit, let’s have a chat.”
They sat on the ledge for what felt like hours, but the sun never quite finished setting. Ariadne told her all about her life, why she’d run away, and what she’d accomplished. She never regretted running away, she assured her grandmother, but she always wished she could’ve had more time with her.
“Did your father ever come to his senses?” Racquel asked Ariadne.
“No,” Ariadne said. “He’s gone, for me. Buried at Arlington.”
“I see,” she replied. “He was still my son, and I loved him, but… I understand that some things are unavoidable. And your mother?”
“Gone, too,” Ariadne said.
“Good,” her grandmother said coldly.
“...Yeah,” Ariadne choked out, her voice as small as when she ran away in the first place. They sat with this for several seconds before Racquel the Elder broke the silence.
“I always wished you could spend more time here, hijita. Your father and that girl couldn’t run away from their heritage fast enough. They thought I was the backwards one, for thinking it meant something to be a Boricua. Everything was about Earth to them.”
“I’d be a Boricua wherever I went,” Ariadne said. “Hell, I’ve been to the moon. Mars. I’ve been to just about every rock on this solar system, and I carry this place with me everywhere I go.”
Her grandmother smiled. “So you remember,” she said, “the song I used to sing you, when you were a little girl.”
“It’s an old standard among the kids I take care of. I’m pretty sure they’re sick of hearing me sing it,” Ariadne replied. “Even have a daughter of my own now, although she’s not so little anymore. She wants to know more about you, though, about our family. I’m glad to be able to share these things with her.”
“I’m glad you have a family,” her grandmother told her. “That’s all I ever wanted for you. Your mother and father… that was no family, no home. If I could’ve taken you away and given you a proper family myself, I would’ve, in a heartbeat.”
“That’s all I do, now,” Ariadne said. “I find people who don’t have homes or families, and I fix it for them.”
“So you turned out alright,” her grandmother said. “When you’re back in your life, you go out there and know that you’re making me proud each and every day, alright, hijita?”
Ariadne didn’t have the heart to tell her that she couldn’t ever go back to her old life, that all of those days she’d just described were gone forever. Even the time she’d already had with her grandmother would be gone soon enough.
And then the green-armored figure appeared on the rooftop.
“Mrs. Ramos,” they said, “it’s a pleasure to finally meet you. I’m here to save your granddaughter.”
“Take care of her, she’s my most precious treasure.”
They nodded. “Mine too.”
The figure grabbed Ariadne, threw her over their shoulder, and tugged on a cable affixed to her armor three times. In moments, they were yanked along a four-dimensional axis, and found themselves back in Tosin’s lab with Ariadne in tow.
“The hell just happened?!” Ariadne asked, watching the threshold disappear behind her, and the everjade crystal formation crack and collapse in place.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ellesmere said, "this shouldn’t be possible. We aren’t lashed to the future Ariadne’s future anymore.”
The armored figure released a clasp on her helmet and pulled it off. The woman underneath it was nearing 50, with short cast-iron gray hair and just a hint of crow’s feet by her eyes, but the aquiline nose, the cheekbones that could’ve been carved from granite, they were unmistakable. This was Pilar Spacebreather.
“No, you’re lashed to my future,” the elder Pilar said. “Or at least, you were. We’re lucky you told Taryn that you were thinking about doing something dumb, like jumping through a threshold to erase yourself from history. Alicia warned me that if I had to follow her in, I’d snap the tether to my time and there’d be no way back to the future for me.”
Sasha rushed over to the elder Pilar and cradled her face. “My god,” she said, “they did it. They actually did it.”
Before any of them had a chance to react, Sweettalk’s voice buzzed on the loudspeaker: “Captain, we need to scrub this assault,” she said, “we’re running out of swarm ships, we’re gonna be overpowered any minute. The Apanqura isn’t going to make it through!”
Ariadne looked through the visual sensors as well and saw that her future self had unleashed thousands of those infernal machines, and the ships they’d purchased from the Ng Gang had dwindled down to the dozens.
The enemy was now within range of the sensors she was integrated with, and she felt a glimmer of hope as she felt a weak point in their defenses:
They registered her, Racquel Ramos, Captain Ariadne, as their commander. She wasn’t able to detect this when they were on the outskirts of the station’s sphere of influence, but here and now, she knew it to be true as well as she knew herself to have hands. She could command them, and that’s exactly what she did.
En masse, her swarm of drones turned on her flagship and began firing on its shields. She felt a surge of exhilaration, but it was short-lived, as the drones quickly gave up their assault and resumed pursuit of the Apanqura.
She issued the command to turn on the flagship again, and it worked again, for a few seconds, and then they resumed their pursuit of the Apanqura.
“Give us some information, dumbass!” Blue’s voice buzzed through, “Alicia’s a good pilot but she can’t work on a battlefield that don’t make fuckin’ sense!”
“She didn’t think to differentiate me from her,” Ariadne said, “the drones respond to my command!”
Alicia chimed in over the loudspeaker: “Yeah, babes, they respond to hers too!”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed!” Ariadne replied, “I’m trying my best to keep them off you!”
“She’s just gonna reverse any command you give!” Blue said. “Your stubborn ass is caught in a stalemate against itself!”
It stung, but Blue was right. Any command she could give, her enemy had equal power to countermand. She had to come up with some sort of move that would benefit her side, that the enemy couldn’t immediately neutralize.
It was, at that point, that she finally really heard what her enemy had said. The elder Ariadne thought the fact that she relied on others was a weakness she could eliminate by doing everything by herself, and that would prove to be her undoing.
Ariadne stood up and sharply announced, station-wide and broadcasting to the enemy flagship on an open channel: “I AM CAPTAIN ARIADNE, OF ARIADNE’S ANGELS, AND I HEREBY ABDICATE MY POST AND RELINQUISH SOLE COMMAND TO PILAR SPACEBREATHER, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.”
She mentally broadcast her personal electronic signature, certifying her resignation, and the flagship stopped its approach. The drones fell still in the skies.
“What the hell did you just do?” Pilar asked.
“Hopefully just a temporary measure,” Ariadne said. “I did the one thing she couldn’t countermand, the one thing that’d be useless if she did it to us, but devastating if we did it to her. All the tech I’ve ever built is designed to respect the chain of command for this crew, but she’s a crew of one, and she intended to merge with me. She didn’t think to shield it against my control because she didn’t think I’d ever step down from power.”
“So you put me in charge of everything, officially,” Pilar said, “and now I control her ship, and all those drones.”
“I’m so glad you’re back, querida,” Ariadne said, and embraced her wife. “Let’s do this, like we promised. Together.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Wait,” Ariadne said, “how did you get back?”
Pilar laughed. “You’re gonna be mad,” she said. “But you’re talking to the most recent Catamount-General.”
“You called Kitty for a ride?!” Ariadne blanched. “Not even Mizumi and Linh. Fucking Kitty?!”
“Can they hear me?” Pilar breezed past her wife’s admonition, “the drones, I mean.”
“You’re broadcasting station-wide,” Ariadne said.
“DISABLE THAT SHIP,” Pilar commanded, “SEE TO IT THE APANQURA MAKES IT THROUGH. FLAGSHIP, DROP YOUR SHIELDS AND OPEN THE DOCKING BAY.”
The ship and the drones complied, and within minutes, the Apanqura was onboard.
The elder Ariadne detached her cybernetics from her armor, they hung useless, wired into a ship that would no longer respond to any of her commands. Her younger self was proving to be the toughest enemy she’d ever faced. Tougher than Susan Weaver, smarter than Dr. Simon, crazier than Nicks Rizzo, and more powerful than the Nameless. She swore under her breath. No wonder she’d beaten them, if this is what they’d been up against.
The sensation of being ripped out of control of the ship, and all the drones, felt roughly like the sensation of being poked very hard in the eye, as felt by someone who has tens of thousands of eyes, all of which were poked simultaneously. Only the cybernetics directly integrated into her body were responding to her now. She stripped away the useless goggles and activated the holographic implants she still had access to.
“Kid, I think you know we’re here,” she heard Blue’s voice booming through every speaker on the ship.
Of course she’d done this. Nobody in her family was listening to her anymore, why should her younger self be any different? But she could still go down fighting. It would be an honor, she thought, to be killed by Blue. In a way, Blue had created her, so who better to destroy her?
“Kid, it’s over,” Blue’s voice rang over the loudspeaker. “I see all these robots you built to fight us if we got onboard, and fuck me if I ain’t impressed, but they’re useless now.”
“You can’t beat Blue in a fight,” Alicia’s voice rang out. “Please, we’re not trying to hurt you.”
“You’d better,” she called back. “After all this, you’d fucking better kill me.”
“We were never here to kill you, shitbrains,” Blue said.
“I fired on the Apanqura,” the elder Ariadne replied. “I thought you were Pilar and I attacked you anyway. Tell me that my younger self didn’t order you to kill me.”
Blue laughed. “Whenhave you ever known me to take orders?”
“This isn’t you, Ari,” Alicia said. “Whatever you’re trying to do, it has to stop.”
“It all would’ve worked so well if you’d all just listened to me!” The elder Ariadne wailed. “Turn around, go back to your little station. I may have fucked up, letting my younger self lock me out of command, but I’m not an idiot. I built a manual self-destruct into this boat, and nobody but the captain needs to go down with it.”
“We’re not letting you do that,” Alicia said. “There’s no point to it.”
“I failed, and I can’t even get back to the future,” the elder Ariadne said, “what’s left for me now?”
“How about a universe where your wife is still alive, moron?” Blue asked. “How about a whole crew that could use your years of expertise?”
The elder Ariadne laughed. “You’re just gonna have to fucking kill me,” she said. “If I can’t even do this by myself, what the hell good am I?”
She stumbled down the corridor and pulled one of the disabled robots’ pulse rifles into her own hands. Manual operation. She’d be able to do something with this.
“Don’t think I’ll hesitate, kid,” Blue said, “but I still believe you wouldn’t disappoint me like that.”
“You and Alicia abandoned me in my time,” she said.
“We’re here for you in this time,” Alicia said.
“Christ’s sake, kid, look at yourself. Look at this goddamn ship. A one woman war machine, designed to make needing other people obsolete. You know who you’re acting like?”
“Don’t you dare.”
Blue dared. “How is this different from that suit of armor Rosario made?”
“I did this to save my family!”
“She built that to rescue her daughter!” Blue shouted back.
“And then she tried to kill me with it!”
“Kid, be serious,” Blue spat back, “you’ve been laying siege to your whole crew for a week. You’re just like her.”
“I’m nothing like my mother!”
“No, you’re not,” Alicia said. “Right now, you’re acting like Rosario. Me and Blue are more mother to you than she ever was.”
Blue sounded angrier than the elder Ariadne had ever heard her. “She was mother to you for, what, eleven years? And she did a shit job, at that! I’ve taken care of you for fifteen goddamn years! Thirty-five, where you’re from! I’ve been a better mother to you than she was, and I sure as shit did it for longer than she did!”
“When you needed us, we were there for you,” Alicia said. “Kept you safe! Sacrificed for you! Took you to concerts and styled your goddamn hair! And when you order us to let you die?”
“WE FUCKING SAY NO,” Blue bellowed. “So why don’t you stop fucking acting like her kid and start acting like ours! Be who you fucking are, already!”
The elder Ariadne felt the tears welling up in her eyes. She had truly gone beyond the pale now. She would have to make them end her. She primed her weapon, and turned the corner, hoping to rush them and leave them no option but to put her down. She took a breath, raised the rifle, and swung into the hallway.
Taryn Uprising was there to greet her, unarmed.
“Shoot me,” Taryn said flatly.
“Get out of my way, Uprising.”
“In your dreams,” Taryn said. “You’re not the only one who can force somebody’s hand.”
“I’m not going to shoot you,” the elder Ariadne said.
“Then drop the gun,” Taryn said. “It’s that, or shoot me.”
“It’s over for me,” the elder Ariadne said. “Look at everything I’ve done. Look what I’ve become. There’s only one way out of this for me, at the end of Blue’s machete.”
“Not an option,” Taryn said. “She’s lost too many people as it is.”
“What do you care? Where I come from, you can’t stand her.”
“I care about her,” Taryn said. “I care about anyone who sees a little girl in danger and saves her.”
“Get out of my way.”
“Not gonna happen,” Taryn replied. “The only way you get to fight Blue is if I’m dead. So shoot me.”
The elder Ariadne stared her down.
“You took me in, an unconscious, drugged seven-year-old girl whose mother just killed her father, and then kidnapped and tried to murder her. You gave me a warm bed, a family, and a sense of purpose. You gave me Tosin. Now, go ahead, you look that little girl in the eyes and put a bullet in her.”
The elder Ariadne tried to maintain her resolve.
“You fancy yourself a killer, right?” Taryn asked. “Go ahead. I’m right back where you found me, on a spaceship hurtling towards the edge, with a woman I trust to protect me at the wheel, helpless to fight back. So, are you gonna be like my mother, kill yourself and me? Or are you gonna be like her, stop this insanity, and save us both?”
This broke the elder Ariadne. She dropped the gun and fell to her knees.
“I can’t do this, Taryn,” she choked out, “I can’t keep living like this.”
“I’m sorry,” Taryn said, “but you’re not allowed to die, either.”
The younger Ariadne was thrilled to hear Alicia’s voice on comms. “We have her onboard the Apanqura,” she said. “She’s coming home, alive, and I think you two have a lot to talk about.”
“It’s over,” the younger Ariadne said joyfully. “It’s really over.”
“Not quite,” Ellesmere said.
“Did you forget about us?” Daeschler asked.
“We’re still required to take her in,” Shubin said.
“No chance,” Ariadne said. “The anomaly is fixed. Our region of spacetime is stable, and I’m never going to build a time machine.”
“She still has the capability,” Shubin pointed out.
“If she’s coming back with Alicia and Blue, she’s seen reason,” Ariadne insisted. “It’s over.”
Ghostrunner piped up: “The anomaly just… went away. Whatever she did in the threshold, she fixed it. You all succeeded in your mission.”
Daeschler checked her readouts. “It’s true,” she said, “zero traces of the temporal anomaly remain. This is unheard of, it’s just gone. Whatever the future is now, she’s not going to build a time machine in it.”
“That’s right,” the elder Spacebreather said. “Why don’t you give that director of yours a call, and let him know you fixed everything? That you found a way to fix things beyond his orders?”
“Because she’s failed,” Shubin said casually. “Her orders were to kill Ariadne, and she didn’t.”
“Doesn’t much matter that the problem was solved anyway. Director Kalrax doesn’t much care for mavericks who do things their own way,” Daeschler said. “She’s stalling.”
“She failed twice,” the elder Spacebreather said. “I remember everything, Ellesmere. This is now the fourth iteration of the timeline. In the third, you succeeded and killed Ariadne. In the second, I jumped in front of a shot intended for her, fired from the first. She survived, I died. I saw you, Ellesmere. Before I died, I saw you.”
Ellesmere shifted defensively.
Sasha was the first to put it together. “You,” she growled, her festering hatred of Ellesmere suddenly feeling justified for the first time. “You little bitch, you killed my sister!”
“She’s fine now!” Ellesmere pointed out desperately. “More than fine! Look, there’s two of her!”
“All of this,” Ariadne growled, “this was you cleaning up a mess you made.”
“No,” Ellesmere insisted, “no, this wasn’t my fault. You destabilized the timeline with your time machine.”
“She only built it because you killed me,” the younger Spacebreather said, her voice boiling over with rage. “So what happened in the first future, huh? Was there ever even a time machine?”
“I wasn’t there for the first future!” Ellesmere said. “I got the order to take out a time machine inventor for the stability of the region. I didn’t question that order.”
“No, you just missed and destabilized the whole region,” Ariadne said.
“You built the blasted machine that broke the universe!” Ellesmere spat back.
“So? What did happen in that first future?” Ghostrunner asked. “Why did you get that alarm?”
“Call your Director, Ellesmere,” the elder Spacebreather insisted. “I’ve been waiting for answers on this for 20 years.”
“She’s right,” Shubin said. “We have to report in to Director Kalrax.”
Ellesmere stood firm. She wasn’t making that call.
“If you won’t,” Daeschler said, “I will.”
Daeschler dialed him up and a hologram of his cephalopodian visage filled the room.
“Agent Ellesmere,” he said. “I can’t help but notice you’re not alone.”
His voice was pointed: Ariadne was still alive, and that was a problem.
Ellesmere saluted the Director. “Things went a bit off the rails since last call, Director, but the objective is complete.”
Kalrax’s eyes trained on Ariadne. “Is it, now?”
“This region of spacetime is secure and stable,” she explained. “We’ll have no further problems here, ever.”
“I thought you understood, Agent Ellesmere,” he said, “that your objective was to eliminate this threat to stability.”
“She’s not a threat to stability,” she insisted. “We solved the problem without needing to kill her.”
“She is the problem,” Kalrax insisted. “Someone like that could bring down our whole organization, left unchecked. She ended the Divoratori cycle. You have the hubris to believe she doesn’t pose a threat to us?”
“She’s never going to build a time machine now,” Ellesmere insisted. “It’s safe, it’s done, it’s over!”
Kalrax was quickly losing his temper. “You colossal fool! If all I wanted was that she didn’t build a time machine, I wouldn’t have dispatched you in the first place.”
He had just said something he shouldn’t have, and Ellesmere caught it. “She was never going to build one, was she?” She asked. “In the first future. You knew. She was never going to build a time machine. The only reason she ever built one is because--”
“—Because you failed,” Kalrax insisted. “If you had killed her the first time, her crew would’ve been permanently neutralized as a threat. You failed, and now we’ve had three temporal incursions.”
“The cracks in the sky, the anomaly, the instability,” Ellesmere said. “We’re the time travelers who triggered them. If you’d never sent me to kill her, none of it would’ve happened.”
“And she would be free to continue to expand her influence,” Kalrax said. “She might have one day grown powerful enough to challenge our control.”
“That’s what this is about? Control?!” Ellesmere asked incredulously. “You sent me to kill a woman because you can’t let anyone be as powerful as you?! And I followed your orders like a lamb to the bloody slaughter!”
“Stability,” Kalrax replied, “is paramount to our Syndicate’s control over the universe.”
“But we destabilized the region!” Ellesmere said, enraged. “We’re the ones causing the bloody timeline to fall apart!”
“Political stability,” Kalrax said, “is every bit as vital as temporal stability. We cannot hope to protect the fabric of the universe if our power over it is not unflinching.”
“Is our power so fragile that it can’t even withstand a hypothetical challenge?” Ellesmere asked.
Kalrax narrowed his eyes. “First day working in government, is it?” He asked. “Thanks to your failure, the whole solar system will have to be scrubbed. Shubin, Daeschler, two authorized for extraction. Former Agent Ellesmere, since you have such sympathy for these creatures, you’re welcome to stay and die with them.”
The hologram cut out.
“Well, you hate to see it,” Shubin said. “It’s been a pleasure, boss. We’ll miss you!”
“You know, for however long is appropriate,” Daeschler said.
“You traitors,” she said. “You questioned him every bit as much as me. You failed every bit as much as me! How dare you walk away from me?!”
“Fairly easily,” Daeschler replied, “we’re authorized for extraction.”
“Ta!” Shubin said, and they disappeared through a fold in space.
Everyone in the lab was stunned silent.
“What now?” Ghostrunner asked.
“What do you mean?” Ellesmere said. “It’s over. The solar system has been scrubbed. Shubin and Daeschler return to HQ to debrief the Director on my failure. Kalrax’s forces will be arriving within the hour to plant charges at the edge of your system that will consume it in a time-storm, which will rip us to shreds, moment-by-moment, forever.”
“Unless?” Ariadne asked.
“What do you mean, unless?” Ellesmere asked. “We’re done.”
“Strange, because I’m still drawing breath,” Ariadne said. “Spacebreather, Cougar Spacebreather? Any ideas?”
Shubin and Daeschler arrived back at headquarters moments later.
“It worked,” Shubin said. “The Director doesn’t suspect a thing.”
Daeschler pulled the device she’d swiped from the gals in Spec Ops from her pocket. The genetic spoof. “I hope that boss of ours is as clever as she always pretended to be,” she said. “If she doesn’t figure out what we’re up to, we’re all doomed.”
“Come on, love,” Shubin grinned. “We’ve got a solar system to save.”
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion! And don't forget to listen to the companion Podcast Adaptation of the "Cabrera's Apartment" segment!
CABRERA'S APARTMENT BUILDING
Pilar awoke to a modded-out shotgun being dropped on her stomach.
“Load it,” Cabrera said. She was dressed not in her usual sports bra and shorts, but in a t-shirt, jeans, and an old pair of basketball sneakers, all topped with the tattered leather jacket she slept in.
“Oh good,” Pilar replied, wiping the sleep out of her eyes, “you’ve lost your mind.”
“Before I change my mind,” Cabrera replied.
“Change your mind about…?”
“Don’t be a dick, mae, you said it yourself,” Cabrera said. “’I’m going to let you go, I just haven’t figured it out yet,’ remember?”
Cabrera was hard at work stuffing what few possessions she had in an old kit bag.
“You’re not serious,” Pilar said.
“Don’t make me regret this,” Cabrera told her, gesturing with the pistol in her left hand as her right unplugged her computer from the desk and stuffed it in the bag.
“Hey, you don’t have to tell me twice,” Pilar said, grabbing a handful of shells from the box at the end of the bed and beginning to load the shotgun. “What changed your mind?”
“You said your world had to end for my exile,” Cabrera said. “I can’t stomach the idea of adding you to the list of people who’ve lost everything so that I can go on. Some of the people in my old life thought saving me would be worth their sacrifice, least I can do is act like it for once.”
“Cabrera, thank you,” Pilar was genuinely touched. “I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe. How do we do this?”
“Keep that gun handy,” Cabrera said, tucking her bushy hair up into a knitted cap, and putting on a pair of dark sunglasses. She took off her oversized leather jacket and tossed it to Pilar. “Put this on, cover up those tattoos. Keep your eyes peeled for clean-cut guys in suits. We need to get downstairs, steal the landlord’s ride, and get to the library. There’s a public teleport there that doesn’t keep records, the people after me won’t be able to follow us even if they do spot me on the way there.”
“The teleporters on the station will be offline by now,” Pilar said, “so the enemy can’t break in that way.”
“Do you have someone you can call, this side of the asteroid belt, who could give us a ride back to the station?”
“I do, but Ari’s gonna be pissed,” she said. “And it’s gonna cost us. You still got access to that per diem account?”
Cabrera nodded. She picked up a device and punched in a code, and Pilar swore she could actually feel the nanobots in her system deactivate.
Pilar got dressed, laced up her boots, and Cabrera beckoned her to follow out the front door. “We’ll be sitting ducks in the elevator, I don’t take ‘em anyway on account of they all got cameras, but we should be fine taking the stairs in the fire tower, just as long as we don’t run into--”
“Cabrera!” Her landlord was waiting less than ten feet away, in the hallway. He was a rather grotesquely unwashed man wearing rather grotesquely unwashed clothes. He was too skinny and his skin was pale to the point of being sickly, and it was safe to assume his tank top had at one time been white. Despite his unfriendly demeanor, his face seemed stuck in a crooked, sleepy smile. “The hell do you think you’re going? You have a shift in ten minutes.”
“I’m giving notice,” Cabrera said. “Come on, mae.”
“You can’t quit,” he said, “you still have six figures left on your debt. You got people after you, chica, walk out of here without paying, one way or another, and I’m not responsible for what happens to you.”
Pilar bristled at this. “Cabrera, we’re never coming back here, right?”
“Right.”
“Good,” Pilar said, and turned on the landlord. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure. You’re the landlord, right? Hoffman? Cabrera’s told me so much about you. You own all these soundproofed apartments, yeah?”
“Soundproofed? The fuck you talking about?” He replied. “Cabrera here’s the only nutbag wasting money soundproofing a high-rise.”
“None of your other tenants are worried about being heard?” Pilar asked, smiling now that she knew that everybody in the rest of the apartments would hear her. “I’m surprised a man in your… line of work wouldn’t provide a bit more in the way of privacy.”
“Listen, lady, I run a clean business here. I provide housing for low-income working stiffs, even create jobs for em,” he said. “Not everybody who lives here is a lowlife whore like her with a target on their backs.”
Something flashed red behind Pilar’s eyes, and she slung the shotgun over her shoulder-- something the landlord clearly hadn’t seen before, based on the look of surprise on his face that would remain frozen on his corpse forever-- and blew a hole in his chest with it.
“THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS,” Pilar yelled loud enough that everyone would hear it, “WHEN YOU TRY TO CHEAT THE SMUGGLERS’ GUILD.”
She and Cabrera rushed down the hall to the stairs, Pilar reloading the shotgun as she went. “The hell are you doing, mae?!”
“He called you a whore while I was holding a gun,” Pilar said as they took the stairs three at a time, “What did he think was going to happen?!”
“I don’t give a shit about killing Hoffman,” Cabrera said, “I mean, screaming your head off for the whole damn apartment complex to hear?!”
“All that hair cooking your brains?” Pilar asked. “The apartment you’re leaving behind is soundproofed and rigged up with cameras and sensors and all sorts of weird privacy shit. When the cops come to investigate, they’re gonna find that, and they’re gonna wonder who was staying there.”
“So you implicate your own crew?!”
“I’m not Smuggler’s Guild,” Pilar said, “not by a long shot. Smuggler’s Guild is defunct, and the former members are all dead. But all those witnesses just heard them claim credit for the murder, so when the cops comb your place for prints and DNA and find yours--”
“—they’ll think the Smugglers’ Guild was harboring me,” she said, “and so will the people who were after me.”
“Exactly,” Pilar said.
“Only problem,” Cabrera said, huffing from the effort of running down several dozen flights of stairs, “I don’t have fingerprints no more.”
“You know, this would be a lot easier if your legs were longer.”
“I’m keeping up with you,” Cabrera said. “It’s not easy, but I’m doing it.”
“No, I mean, I have no idea where we’re going. Doesn’t do us any good if I’m in front.”
“Three more flights,” Cabrera said, clearly losing her breath from all this. “Parking complex on the ground floor, the landlord’s ride will be there.”
“What’s he drive?”
“Old hovercycle,” Cabrera said, “vintage. Think you can drive it?”
“I can drive anything,” Pilar said.
Cabrera was panting. After months, if not years, of being bound to her apartment, eating little but replicated and less-than-nourishing junk food, it was clear she’d need to take a breather, which would take time they didn’t have.
“On my back,” Pilar offered, “now.”
Cabrera sighed, and then jumped onto Pilar’s back. Pilar bounded down the rest of the stairs and, at Cabrera’s instructions, found the landlord’s hovercycle parked in his private space. She set Cabrera down and set to work hot-wiring the cycle.
“Okay,” Cabrera said, admiring Pilar’s work, “now you really remind me of my big brother.”
Pilar got the cycle started. She strapped on the helmet hanging from the handlebar, and tossed the shotgun to Cabrera. “Hold on tight and watch my six.”
Cabrera’s eyes flared, and she let out a blast from the shotgun. Pilar whipped around to see a man in a suit and a black helmet crumple, dead, to the ground.
“What the hell?!”
“I told you, their eyes are everywhere!” Cabrera said. “We gotta get the fuck out of here!”
THE STREETS OF TITAN
Pilar got on the back of the cycle and Cabrera pulled on her own helmet and wrapped her arms around her waist. As they drove away, Pilar took one last glance at the man in the suit, and saw his body disintegrate into dust, which fluttered away in the wind.
“What the hell?!” Pilar asked.
“I don’t think he saw me,” Cabrera said, “but they’ll know he’s dead. We gotta get to the library fast. It’s three blocks left, turn right, two more blocks, get on the expressway, ride for five klicks, get off at exit 626, and then it’s a straight shot.”
Sure enough, just around the right turn Cabrera mentioned, half a dozen black vans came in hot pursuit of them. “Seven-o-clock!” Pilar screamed, and Cabrera took a shot, blowing one of their hoverjets off and sending the van into a spin into a nearby building, where it crashed in a massive fireball. Pilar saw, in the rear view mirror, that it disappeared in the exact same fashion as the man Cabrera shot.
Pilar pulled onto the expressway, and Cabrera took two more shots and took down two more vans in the same fashion.
Pilar took note of the colorful neon lights winding through the seams in every building. They must be somewhere in the colonial moons, they only started using these sunlamps past Mars, and they couldn’t be as far out as Neptune, where they stopped bothering with keeping people from going crazy from too little sunlight. Still, being somewhere between Jupiter and Neptune hardly narrowed it down.“Where the fuck are we?”
“About three klicks from our off-ramp,” Cabrera said.
“No, dumbass, where in the system are we?!”
“Wh-- Titan!”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but are there no cops on Titan?!” Pilar asked. “We just blew up three cars, we’re firing off shotgun blasts on busy city streets, and we’re easily going 300 klicks per hour. How have we not seen every cop on this rock?”
“When they’re involved, cops never hear about it,” Cabrera said, “they can’t have law enforcement knowing about them, so they intercept all the emergency calls, mess with all the security cameras, everything. No trace left for the cops to find.”
Cabrera took another shot and took out a fourth van. To her horror, eight more appeared to take their place.
“God damn it,” Cabrera said.
Pilar didn’t love the solution she’d come up with, but it was the only solution she had. She pulled off at their exit ramp, and asked Cabrera “which way to the cop shop?!”
“The what?!”
“The police station, which way?!”
“One Police Plaza,” Cabrera said, “500 meters that way!”
Pilar stepped on the accelerator. Cabrera took out two more vans, the remains of which evaporated just like their comrades. Cabrera and Pilar were glad their faces were concealed, or else whoever these people were would know exactly who they were dealing with.
The promised five blocks came to an end and there was no police station.
“What the hell, Cabrera?!” Pilar asked.
“What was I supposed to say?!”
“Goddammit, did you make up directions just because it’d be rude to admit you didn’t know where it was?!”
“I know it’s somewhere in this direction!” Cabrera announced, “just keep driving!”
Pilar swore under her breath at this feature of Martian culture that Beam assured her had been imported from Latin America on Earth, and apparently, infuriatingly, had not been lost in translation in the colonization of Rhea.
Cabrera took out three more vans and cackled wildly. “God DAMN, I missed this fuckin’ RUSH! Take that, you shadow government sons of bitches!”
“Whoa, where’s this language coming from?” Pilar laughed. “Were you a sailor in your old life?”
“Nah, not a sailor,” Cabrera cackled. “I’m a captain!”
Luckily for them, Cabrera’s directions weren’t too far off. Ten blocks later, they came upon One Police Plaza, and as soon as the police cars were in sight, Pilar glanced in the mirrors and saw all of their pursuers self-destruct into clouds of dust rather than risk being uncovered.
Pilar idled the motorcycle in front of the front steps, and took a deep breath. “How far from here to the library?” She asked, “and please, only respond if you actually know the answer.”
“We’re not far,” she said. “Why’d they ditch us?!”
“You said the cops never show up when they’re involved, no matter how much ruckus we cause,” she said, “and they don’t want the cops knowing about them. So, I figure, we go where cops are, suddenly the ruckus is gonna get gone.”
They rode the rest of the way to the library without incident. They removed their helmets just outside the library, far from the prying eyes of any security cameras that would alert Cabrera’s pursuers to her location before they were long gone, put on an air of nonchalance, and strolled in the front door. Pilar asked the worker at the front desk, a bearded 30-something man with long, gray-streaked hair and a colorful silk shirt that would’ve made Tosin green with envy, “you have public teleporters, right?”
“We do,” he said, “but right now it’s only safe to travel within the Colonial Moons, and even then, I’ll need your library card.”
Pilar briefly panicked. “I thought they didn’t keep teleport records here.”
The man gave a friendly customer-service laugh. “Oh, we don’t, honey,” he said. “Least, not for members of the Free Library Network.”
“Oh!” Pilar said. “I’m a member of the Free Library of Mars! I don’t have my card on me, though.”
“I can look you up from your name and date of birth,” he said helpfully.
“María de la Soledad Beam,” Pilar said assertively, “April 1, 2593.”
“Here you are,” the clerk said. “Huh, that’s strange. Says here you’re only five feet tall. You’re sure I’ve got the right María?”
Pilar panicked again, but was quick on her feet: “That’s my wife, Ariana Baltimore,” she said. “November 2, same year. Tiny little thing, but she should be on file with my height. We’ve been trying to get that changed for ages.”
“Ah, yes, here she is!” The clerk said. “6 feet even, according to our records, but according to a police report from a speeding ticket a few years back, black female, brown hair, brown eyes, just over five feet. Somebody must’ve swapped your heights on a form someplace. Ah, yeah, you guys are from Earth, that explains it. Look, they even spelled her name wrong, Ariadne Baltimore. Great social services down there but terrible records.”
“Really?” Pilar asked, “Because it sure seems like you know a lot more than the library should have access to.”
“Age of information,” he said brightly.
“Yeah,” Cabrera said pointedly, “some real scary people could track you down from all that, if they wanted to. Makes you never want to leave your house.”
The clerk smiled cheerfully. “What a smart little girl! Is this little Pilar or Alia?”
Pilar stifled a laugh.
Cabrera choked back her indignation at being mistaken for a little girl. “I’m Pilar,” she lied.
“And you’re sure this is all private?” Pilar asked, putting on her best concerned-mom voice. “My young daughter is real nervous about this kind of stuff. Don’t want any boogeymen coming after us because of our names in some teleport logbook.”
“Oh, don’t worry, sweetheart, I’m not even writing it down,” he said. “This place is a public transit hub, hundreds of people teleport in and out of here every hour, and we don’t keep records on who or where. Nobody’s gonna be able to follow you home, alright sweetie?”
Pilar kept a straight face. Cabrera simply replied, “thanks, mister.”
The clerk showed them to the public teleporter, they punched in their destination on Calisto, and in a white flash, they were gone.
ARIADNE’S LAB
The Apanqura was in flight to the enemy’s flagship, with Taryn, Blue, and Alicia in tow. Myriad Swarm was providing them with as much cover as they could, but Ariadne didn’t expect them to need it. Her future self was under the impression Pilar was still onboard, and that was her ship. She was sure their enemy would never fire on it and roll the dice on hurting or killing Pilar.
“This doesn’t make any sense!” She shrieked to Ellesmere, watching as Alicia narrowly avoided a shot from one of the flagship’s turrets.
Ellesmere’s lieutenants rushed into the room.
“Boss, the anomaly is going wild,” Daeschler said, “it could happen any minute now.”
“I hope that super-shield of yours is back online,” Shubin said to Ariadne, “otherwise the universe is hanging by a thread.”
“Fastwing, Blue, do you copy?!” Ariadne shouted into comms.
“We’re a little fuckin’ preoccupied right now, short stack!” Blue’s voice crackled through the comms.
“We are no longer dealing with a version of me worth saving, is that clear?” Ariadne shouter. “She just fired on Pilar. If you have a clear shot, you shoot to kill.”
“I suppose we could take custody of a corpse,” Ellesmere mused, “nonetheless, still probably for the best to take her alive.”
“It’s not me anymore,” Ariadne said, visibly beginning to panic. “I would never do that! She’s got to be put down!”
“Captain Ariadne, the shield?” Shubin asked.
“It’s back online,” Ariadne said. “We have bigger problems right now.”
“Good,” Daeschler said, “then we have a defined impact radius.”
“The hell is that supposed to--”
At that moment, the shield generators set around the room activated, encasing the three of them in a ring of durable blue crystal. It would take a few minutes of sustained gunfire to break through it.
Ariadne’s eyes flared. This was only supposed to happen when the assassin’s portal was about to open. She felt some relief, deep down, that Spacebreather wasn’t really here.
Ellesmere clicked a button on a device on her wrist. The threshold in the everjade ring flickered, and no portal opened.
“And there’s that portal neutralized,” Ellesmere said. “The assassin will think their shot got off, but they might as well have shot a brick wall. You’re welcome.”
“What… the hell?” Ariadne asked.
“I told you, I’m here to cut off this turbulence at its source,” Ellesmere said.
“Thank you,” Ariadne said, realizing the enormity of what had just happened. The assassination had been stopped, and the assassin thought they were successful. They wouldn’t be coming back.
“Well,” Ellesmere said, “don’t thank me just yet.”
Ellesmere pulled her pistol out of her coat and trained it on her head.
Ariadne whipped to look at Shubin and Daeschler. “Will one of you please start making some goddamn sense?”
Ghostrunner chose this moment to enter the lab, and, seeing Ellesmere holding a gun to Ariadne’s head, began to pound on the glass.
“That portal wasn’t the source of the anomaly,” Ellesmere said. “You are. I told you, just a few days ago. I’ve been sent here to kill you.”
“I thought you were just being a jackass,” Ariadne said. “What the hell good will it do you to kill me now? She’s already here.”
“And when I’m done here, Director Kalrax will send a fleet of ships to blow her out of the sky and send her back to the future where she belongs, where she’ll become what you become. A corpse, with a hole in its head.”
“It’ll resolve all of this,” Daeschler pointed out. “The cracks in the sky, the threshold, all the danger will just… go away, once you and her are gone.”
“Trust me,” Shubin said, “it’s not pretty, but it’s the only way your family survives all of this.”
“Why now?” Ariadne asked. “You’ve been here two months. We trusted you. You could’ve killed me at any time.”
“No,” Ellesmere said, “only after we neutralized the portal incursion. Do you know how complicated interfering with a portal makes things? The whole agency is derailed for weeks, even months setting it right. We had to make sure that portal still went off, got caught in our trap, and then kill you.”
“There’s got to be another way,” Ariadne said. “Please, you know me. You know what I’m capable of. We can fix this together.”
Ellesmere primed her weapon to fire.
“I’m sorry,” Ellesmere said. “Believe me, it’s not like I’m happy about this.”
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion! And don't forget to listen to the companion Podcast Adaptation of the "Cabrera's Apartment" segment!
SPACEBREATHER’S SUBCONSCIOUS
Pilar and Racquel were dressed up for a nice Hanguk-Eire dinner in their favorite restaurant. They were seated in a private booth, the one where they’d had their very first date, a year previously. They had clicked immediately when they met-- Pilar working the deli counter at her parents’ restaurant, Racquel stopping in for a quick bite on her way to work at the Embassy-- and quickly became inseparable.
The restaurant’s chef, who happened to be the owners’ daughter, was quite taken with their love story, so even though Pilar had been saving up for this dinner for some time, there was no chance they would be billed full price for this meal. This was lucky, of course, Sasha’s med school debts weren’t going to pay themselves off, so the savings wouldn’t go to waste.
Pilar knew Racquel was too smart not to know about the ring in the breast pocket of her suit jacket, but she would still pretend to be surprised when Pilar popped the question. The chef delivered their meal herself, and Pilar caught sight of a wink from her as she hustled off. Great, she thought, it’s obvious to everyone.
As the chef hustled off, she was stopped by the man in the next booth. He was rather scruffy-looking, with long brown hair streaked with white and a dark beard, wearing a tattered denim jacket covered in badges and appliques. He handed her $40, and said: “Poor Man’s Cake, Aunt Eleanor’s recipe, on me, for the happy couple. Keep the change.”
“Aye,” the chef said, and ran back to the kitchen.
“Good to see you’re feeling better, love,” he said to her, stood up, and left before Pilar and Racquel could thank him for the dessert.
Pilar reached into her pocket to retrieve the ring, but there was nothing there. She looked up at Racquel, but she was nowhere to be found. The restaurant was gone, and she was enveloped in a boundless void.
She withdrew her hand from the jacket pocket and was shocked, horrified, to see that it was skeletal, caked with ash, and about half the size it was supposed to be. She tried to scream, but remembered that her vocal cords had rotted away fifteen years ago.
She was suddenly beset with terrible knowledge of reality: she was dead, and had been for a long time. Nobody was there to keep Sasha fed, so she’d starved. Sweettalk and Ghostrunner languished away in the orphanage for the remainder of their adolescence, and when they finally aged out of the system, found themselves running smalltime cons on the streets of Xijing just to afford a mouthful of food. Three marines, found dead just outside of Highwater Outpost, suffocated after the destruction of their terraforming station, with no way off the surface. The news media reported that they were killed by some new alien threat. One of the marines had a sister who was captured and publicly executed after a failed assassination attempt against Susan Weaver, whose forces were currently burning across the skies, grinding the universe to dust under the heel of her jackboots.
“STOP IT!” Pilar screamed. “IT’S NOT RIGHT! THIS ISN’T WHAT HAPPENED!”
CABRERA'S APARTMENT
She thrashed herself awake, drenched in sheets of icy sweat, and struggled to place her location before remembering that she was still trapped in Cabrera’s tiny apartment. Daylight peered from around the edges of her blackout curtains. It was morning.
Cabrera was standing over her bed, clearly roused by the noise. “What’s good, mae? You alright?”
Pilar made no effort to conceal the tears streaming down her face. “You have to send me back, Cabrera! You can’t keep me here!”
“I have to,” Cabrera said, “you know that.”
“She’s out there!” Pilar pleaded. “You told me yourself, she talked with the enemy. She might be the smartest woman in the universe but so is the person she’s up against.”
“She can handle it, remember?” Cabrera said. “You said so yourself, first day you were here.”
“I can’t handle it!” Pilar cried. “I can’t do this without her.”
“You won’t have to,” Cabrera said. “Remember what she said on my last call, they developed some new sort of shield, and they have a whole plan worked out wh--”
“There’s no plan, don’t you see?” Pilar cried. “She doesn’t know what she’s going to do. She’s afraid, and she’s overdoing, and she doesn’t have me there to put her head back on straight.”
“If she’s as smart as you say she is--”
“We know what she becomes without me,” Pilar shouted. “That’s why we’re in this mess to begin with. Please, you have to let me go back, I can’t bear to think of her in that kind of pain!”
“I’m sorry, mae, really,” Cabrera said. “No.”
“So my world has to end, so you can have your little exile?” Pilar snapped. “What difference will it make whether you’re living in isolation here or in some log cabin somewhere?”
“Watch it,” Cabrera said.
“Or what?!” Pilar pressed. “I thought we were actually starting to become friends, but you don’t give a shit about me. All you care about is getting paid.”
“Pilar, please,” Cabrera said. “We are friends. I… You can’t really think this is just about the money for me.”
“Don’t let’s pretend,” Pilar said. “You told me what you were doing straight-up on the first day. I’m stuck here, and you don’t think it should have to be unpleasant.”
“Mae, it was a tense situation, I was just trying to--”
“I’m leaving,” Pilar said, “and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
“The nano--”
“I can’t believe I bought that line of bullshit for so long,” Pilar laughed. “There’s nothing in my system that’ll knock me out. Sasha’s smarter than me, she knows I know that. She could just make that up and I’d believe her. Why waste time developing a knockout system when it works just as well on fiat?”
“Pilar, I--”
“Goodbye, Cabrera,” Pilar said, making for the door, “let’s never do this again.”
Pilar turned the doorknob, and was unconscious before she was able to see an inch of the hallway.
When she came to, Cabrera was sitting at the foot of her bed. The faint light from behind the blackout curtains was gone. It was nighttime again. The restraints were back on, since she wasn’t sure Pilar wouldn’t wake up swinging.
“I gave my word,” Cabrera said softly. “I gave my word to your sister that I would protect you, even if it killed me.”
This took Pilar aback. She saw that Cabrera was crying too.
“Blue said… that keeping you safe was the most important work I’d ever do,” Cabrera said. “Can’t you see that you’re their world?”
“I really don’t know what came over me,” Pilar said. “I’m sorry for what I said, Cabrera.”
“You’ve been out for a few hours,” Cabrera said. “I spoke with Alicia.”
“And?”
“I told her she didn’t have to pay me,” Cabrera said, “for doing this. Still believe I’m just in it for the money?”
“I can’t let you do that, Cabrera,” she said. “I was being an idiot. I’ll see to it you get your money.”
“Yeah, that’s what Alicia said,” Cabrera said, “including the idiot thing.”
“I deserve that,” Pilar said. “Sometimes it gets really tiring to be surrounded by goddamn geniuses. Always a step ahead of me.”
“She told me to tell you, Indigo Niner Fife, and then to do this with my fingers,” Cabrera said, tapping her fingers slowly and carefully onto the mattress in front of her. “Made me practice it until I got it perfect. She wouldn’t tell me what that meant, but she really stressed that I relay it.”
Pilar’s muscles relaxed. “You actually made that call, didn’t you? You’re actually not just saying it.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s an authentication password,” Pilar said. “Indigo Niner Five tells me that Alicia’s message is actually coming from her. It’s burned, now that she’s used it, we won’t be able to use that one again.”
“And the finger taps?”
“MacGowan code,” she said, “a set of hand signals she developed in prison. She taught it to all of us.”
“What’d she say?”
“That you were telling the truth,” Pilar said. “You really did offer to give up payment, just to convince me this wasn’t about money. And… yeah, she called me an idiot. Guess I’ve gotten that call from both Baltimore sisters now.”
“I don’t want anyone else to lose everything, the way I did,” Cabrera said. “You stay here, you might lose them all. You go back, they might all lose you. Why am I always stuck in these impossible situations?”
She came over and gently removed Pilar’s restraints.
“I’m so tired of losing people,” Cabrera said. “I can’t… I don’t have that many people in my life, mae. I know it’s weird, and silly, but I’ve really come to care about you. I don’t know what it would do to me if I finally made a friend again, face to face, and then lost her too.”
Suddenly, Pilar had her own stroke of genius. “You don’t need that cabin, you know.”
“How do you mean?”
“What if there was a safe place with no security cameras, and lots of people? Lots of friends?” Pilar asked. “Somewhere ‘they’ could search for a thousand years and never find?”
“Your crew?” Cabrera asked. “Not interested in resuming a life of crime, mae.”
“What about just a life?” Pilar asked. “We’re not just a criminal operation. We’re a town. A community. There’s hundreds of us, living in a hidden city nobody could possibly find.”
“Yeah, right.” Cabrera flipped her long, bleach-fried hair to the other side. Alicia had made this suggestion before, and she brushed it off now the same way she’d brushed it off then: “And there’s a lake of stew, and of whiskey too! You can paddle all around ‘em in a big canoe!”
“I’m serious,” Pilar insisted. “Anyone who wishes you ill, they can search the entire surface of the damned moon and they’ll just find craters and crevices. Even if someone told them exactly where you were, they wouldn’t be able to find it.Blue and Ariadne set up the security themselves. You could go into exile there, still have your little self-sufficient house, but you could also sit in a park, join a book club. Cabrera, you could have dinner at a restaurant. Imagine, me and you throwing back cocktails in an actual bar.”
“Is this real?” Cabrera asked. “This isn’t some kind of ruse, to get me to let you go?”
“You were brave enough to give up your reward for me,” Pilar said. “What if I told you that this offer stands, even after this is all over? Even if I’m stuck here until my family comes to pick me up, the door is open. You can come back with me.”
“You’re a good friend,” Cabrera said.
“Yeah, you too,” Pilar said. “You know, on the curve of people who’ve kidnapped members of my crew.”
“Can’t be too broad a category,” Cabrera said.
“Girl, you’d think,” Pilar replied.
ARIADNE’S LAB
Ariadne stood back from her triumph and wiped the sweat from her brow. She wanted desperately to still be mad at Sasha for sending Pilar away, but she never quite seemed able to stay mad at Sasha, especially when she had such an infuriating habit of being right: the sedatives worked wonders the previous night, and it had made the difference in her ability to finish up the shields.
She gave the signal to the gals in Spec Ops to bring the new system online, and watched through the visual sensors as the cracks faded away from the sky.
Perfect, she thought. She had worked with Ellesmere on understanding the principle. The cracks were like water damage on the surface of the universe, and the temporal anomaly was like the burst pipe leaking water. The universe was able to heal, but not as long as it had chronological energy pressing down on every weak point.
Their enemy had been siphoning this excess chronological energy off and using it in her replicators to generate the drones she’d used in her assault. They had emulated this measure to direct that energy into the ship’s shields, giving them basically limitless defensive power.
Since the epicenter of the anomaly was within their station, they had cut off their enemy’s source of power. She no longer had an unlimited supply of drones, she would have to damage their shields sufficiently to reopen the cracks.
“Whatever energy she’s got left is going to have to last her until she brings the shields down,” Ariadne said proudly.
“How long do you think that’ll be?” Ghostrunner asked her.
“I hope it lasts us until tomorrow,” Ariadne said. “Blue and Alicia fly for her flagship in the morning.”
“The day Spacebreather was killed, in the other timeline.”
“If everyone’s calculations are correct, yes,” Ariadne said. “If we can keep her out past that point, and Spacebreather is still alive… maybe she’ll accept that she doesn’t need to do all this to protect her.”
Ghostrunner put her hand on Ariadne’s shoulder. “I’ve been thinking a lot,” she said, “about the day we rescued the triplets. She was badly injured, and you and Sasha rushed her back to the station. Spacebreather and Sweettalk stayed behind to buy you time to get her away, and they were taken prisoner. Simon’s forces didn’t know I was onboard, even you guys didn’t notice I’d slipped away, and--”
“I remember,” Ariadne said. How could she forget? Ghostrunner killed 437 people that day, to protect her crew.
“So, I wanted to volunteer for the mission tomorrow,” Ghostrunner said. “We follow Great White and Mako’s playbook, a loud frontal assault to draw attention away from the covert operative getting the job done in the shadows. Blue confronts your future-self head on, while I infiltrate the ship’s inner workings and sabotage her. If anybody’s going to go undetected--”
“Out of the question,” Ariadne said incredulously, “are you kidding me?”
“She won’t hurt me,” Ghostrunner said, “I can do it.”
“You’re right,” Ariadne said, “she would never hurt you. But it’s a bad plan.”
“Are you saying that because you actually think it’s true,” Ghostrunner asked, “or do you just really want it to be?”
“I actually wish it wasn’t true,” Ariadne said. “If we were up against anybody else, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. But she is the one person who won’t ever forget you’re a player on the board. She loves you, she knows exactly what you’re capable of, and most of all, you’re the person who sabotaged her last effort. I guarantee you that ship is Ghostrunner-proofed. Every alarm bell on that boat will ring off its hook if you set foot onboard. You’re the first person I’d send to do this job, so she’ll be expecting you, the absolute last person I should send.”
Ghostrunner paused, as though realizing something.
“What is it?”
“You have to send Taryn.”
“Have you been getting enough sleep?” Ariadne asked incredulously. “Taryn is a strategist, not a stealth operator. She’s vital here, and in far too much danger there. I hate to hand it to her, but our enemy might have a point. I’ve known Taryn since she was 7 and I’ve been sending her into the line of fire since she was 12. She’s absolutely the last--”
Ariadne caught herself mid-sentence.
“The last person I’d ever send...”
“Which makes her the person the enemy would never expect,” Ghostrunner said. “Taryn Uprising, the person whose job it is to fight you? The person who built an arsenal of gear specific to you?”
“The future-me will have made a Ghostrunner-proof ship, but there’s no way I could Taryn-proof something,” Ariadne said, “that’s her whole job, I need her because I can’t anticipate her. As long as I’ve got her, I’ve got my bases covered.”
“And in the future, she took our family and hightailed it to safety,” Ghostrunner said. “That’s a vulnerability future-you has, that you don’t.”
“I could never ask that of Taryn, though,” Ariadne said.
“You don’t have to,” Ghostrunner said, tapping on her watch.
“I’m in,” Taryn’s voice buzzed from it. “Sent Ghostrunner in to get you to figure it out.”
“And you snuck under my radar,” Ariadne said, “to prove you can fly under hers.”
Alicia’s voice buzzed through Ariadne’s own comms. “Cap, you’re gonna want to see this,” she said. “Her flagship just recalled all its drones. Myriad swarm is firing on her now, but… honestly, you’d better just look for yourself.”
Ariadne closed her eyes and directed her focus again through the visual sensors. Her future self’s flagship had, in fact, recalled all its drones, and its main cannon was charging up.
“Fastwing… What the hell is she doing?” Ariadne asked.
“I kinda hoped you’d know, boss,” Alicia said.
“The level of cannon-blast it’d take to bust these shields would drain her offensive reserves, she’d be down to navigational power for hours.” Ariadne said, and then it dawned on her. “But it would open up the flow of energy, allowing her to resume her drone assault.”
“I bet she’s counting on that coming online before our shields do,” Alicia said, “or at least trying to keep us in the fight, so we can’t rest.”
As if on cue, the cannon went off and a volley of blasts struck the shield, shattering it, and the cracks reappeared in the sky. Ariadne directed all extra power to recharge the shields as quickly as possible, but she could see the drain on the power they were getting from the anomaly. The enemy would be able to recharge the enemy’s reserves rapidly until the station’s reinforced shield was back online.
“In the morning,” Ariadne reassured Alicia, Taryn, and Ghostrunner. “We just need to make it until the morning, then this will all be over.”
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion!And don't forget to listen to the companion Podcast Adaptation of the "Cabrera's Apartment" segment!
Cabrera and Pilar’s thumbs raced rapidly to keep up with one another on the fighter game they were currently playing on her desktop hologram console. Neither of them was paying particular attention to the game, though, as they’d been lost in conversation for some time.
“And we didn’t usually bring her around our proteges, because, I mean, you’ve met her, why would we?” Pilar asked. “She’s my mentor, and it’s already weird enough that she’s hooked up with our friend and Quartermaster. I’ve asked Cookie never, ever to tell me whatever weird history they have together. But, we’ve just formalized the adoption, and Ghostrunner is at the center of this whole thing. We couldn’t just leave her behind on a mission to get information on her sister, you know?”
“So you introduced your daughter to Blue?” Cabrera asked. “Like, on purpose?”
“I know it sounds crazy,” Pilar said, “but I was excited for them to meet. Blue’s been like… well, not quite a mother, but, she’s my hero. And with Ari’s history, I never really thought having a kid was in the cards for us, you know? The girl froze up at the mention of moms. Not like I had a problem with that, mind you, I was very happy with the life we had, mentoring all those kids. I just never really expected it, you know?”
“You don’t hear about so many unplanned adoptions,” Cabrera said.
“So, there I am in the diner, buzzing with so much excitement that I’ve got a daughter, that I’ve actually almost forgotten what a toll the past year had taken on me,” Spacebreather said, “and Ghostrunner, with that wit of hers, drops some wisecrack on her about a tuna melt, and I swear to god, I thought Blue was going to cut her down right there in the booth.”
Cabrera laughed. “Do they get along now?”
“Oh, yeah,” Pilar said, “or at least, they love pushing each other’s buttons. Your little buddy Cherry told you how she won the bet, right?”
“Boy, did she,” Cabrera beamed at the mention of Cherry. “She sounds lovely, your Ghostrunner.”
“She is,” Pilar said. “Light of my life. Something truly special in that girl.”
“Something special in all of you,” Cabrera said. “All your stories about your family, your crew. You just… come alive, when you talk about them.”
“It’s why it’s so hard for me to be apart from them,” Pilar explained. “What am I, if I can’t protect Sasha? Ghostrunner? Ariadne?”
“You’re a pretty good friend,” Cabrera said.
“I like to think so, but what good am I to them here?”
“I meant to me,” Cabrera pointed out. “Look, I’ve known you what, three days? Four? You have every reason to hate me, but you’ve been nothing but supportive, even when I… haven’t made it easy.”
“Well, you’re not such bad company, when you’ve got your head on right,” Pilar said.
“Time was, people would pay a lot of money for my company. I like you better than I liked any of them.” Cabrera laughed. “Sorry, dark joke.”
Pilar laughed. “You just told me something painful about your past, with a smile on your face. You want to apologize for having scars where you’ve been cut, next? It’s a sign of healing.”
“Why are you being so nice to me?” Cabrera asked.
Pilar smiled and cast her thoughts back fifteen years. “Would you believe it’s because of Blue?”
“What, you’re nice to everyone she scores with?” Cabrera asked.
“No, gross,” Pilar said flatly and quickly. “I learned it from her. Me and Ari, see, our worlds had ended when we found each other. We were living on the streets, starving, begging and stealing just to survive. Then, we met her, and she… was kind to us. She wasn’t nice to us, mind you. In fact, on more than one occasion she actually threw knives at me.”
“Knives?!”
“Sparring exercise,” Pilar said, “and trust me, it makes a lot more sense if you knew me as a kid. Would’ve traumatized anyone else my age, but me? It made me feel alive.”
“Have you ever seen a therapist?” Cabrera asked. “I know that’s rich, coming from me, but--”
Pilar brushed this off. “She was always kind, though. Showed me that there was someone who would accept, even love a fucked-up, sadistic adrenaline junkie of a kid like me. I didn’t have parents anymore, but I had somehow tricked the smartest girl in the universe into falling for me, I had a sexy Baba Yaga teaching me how to fight, and now… I have the perfect life. I have a family again. I sang at Blue’s wedding.All that, from the ashes of the world I lost.”
“Sorry, Blue’s married?” Cabrera asked.
“Relax, to Alicia,” Pilar said. “You know, the lady who told her to have fun and sent her into your little tryst?”
“I guess I didn’t realize they were married,” Cabrera said, “that’s not very married behavior in my-- okay, well, I guess in my experience it’s very married behavior.”
“If it helps, neither of them will give us a straight answer on whether they’re proper married,” Pilar said. “But I sang La Bamba and they did a dance where they tied a ribbon, if that’s not a wedding I don’t know what it is.”
Cabrera laughed, and belted out the first line: “¡Para bailar la bamba!”
Pilar joined in on both the laughter and the song, the two pulling Cabrera to a standing position so they could dance to it:
“¡Para bailar la Bamba!
¡Para bailar la Bamba se necesita una poca de gracia!
Una poca de gracia para mí para ti,
Y arriba y arriba,
Y arriba y arriba, por ti seré
Por ti seré, por ti seré
¡Yo no soy marinero!
¡Yo no soy marinero, soy capitán!
¡Soy capitán, soy capitán!
¡Yo no soy marinero!
¡Yo no soy marinero, por ti seré
Por ti seré, por ti seré!”
The two laughed heartily until they ran out of air to breathe, and settled into a sigh.
“You know,” Pilar said, “that song is from the seventeenth century, and we’re here in the twenty-seventh. Almost a thousand years old, and Jarochos are still dancing to it at their weddings.”
“It’s a beautiful song, those things tend to stand the test of time,” Cabrera said. “What did you and Ariadne dance to, at your wedding?”
“When we were alone, away from our family and friends, I sang her our song” Pilar said. “Not quite as old as La Bamba, mind. Blue has a collection of 21st century music, on this archaic format, and we heard this song when Ari was fixing up something called a ‘Discman’ because she’s a crazy person who can’t let a machine stay broken, and we just… fell in love with it. It summed up our feelings for each other the way no other words possibly could. The most beautiful song I’ve ever heard.”
“Can I hear it?” Cabrera asked.
“Sorry, amiga,” Pilar replied. “That song’s our little secret, hers and mine and no one else’s. I think we might be the only two people alive who’ve ever heard it.”
“So I guess I was wrong,” Cabrera said, “the most beautiful songs don’t always stand the test of time.”
“Oh, but it did,” Pilar said. “It was there all those centuries, hiding, waiting, just for us. For me, and for the other half of my soul.”
Cabrera sighed wistfully. “I wish I had someone who loved me, the way you love her.”
“You will, someday,” Pilar said. “I know you think you’re going to be in isolation for the rest of your life but… hey, things happen. Everybody’s got their own normal. Maybe Cherry and Vic want to come live with you on that remote farmhouse you’re gonna buy with the money from this job.”
Cabrera blushed. “Oh, I’d be honored, and it’s not like she hasn’t expressed an interest, but… Cherry can do much better than me.”
“Enough of that,” Pilar said. “Ariadne can do better than me, too, but I’m the one she wants. Learn to take yes for an answer, amiga.”
Cabrera smiled softly. “When I talk to Alicia tonight, I’m gonna tell her how sweet you’re being,” she laughed. “She’s gonna think you’re trying to bamboozle me into letting you go.”
Pilar laughed. “That’s because you’re going to let me go,” she said. “You just haven’t figured it out yet.”
“Good one, mae,” Cabrera chuckled. “But that cabin is calling my name. Keeping you here is my ticket out of this hellhole, and I’ve got to get free of this goddamn apartment.”
“Yet another thing we’ve got in common,” Pilar said. “Do you think we could’ve been friends, in your old life?”
“From what you’ve told me?” Cabrera said. “I think you might’ve tried to kill me back then. And frankly, I wouldn’t have blamed you.”
“Would you have tried to hurt someone I care about?” Pilar asked.
“I’d like to think I wouldn’t.”
“Those tattoos, the ones that used to be where those scars are now,” Pilar said. “They weren’t hate symbols, were they?”
“What do you take me for?”
“Then you’d probably be safe, don’t worry,” Pilar said. “Nonetheless, I’m glad we get to meet now.”
“Even though I’m technically keeping you prisoner?”
“No, I mean, as opposed to back then,” Pilar said. “You said everyone you knew died, I’m glad to have shown up after that happened.”
The room was icy silent for a full second.
“Sorry, dark joke,” Pilar said.
Cabrera burst out laughing, and threw a cushion at Pilar’s face.
DAY FOUR – ARIADNE’S LAB
“You sure you’re ready for this?” Ghostrunner asked.
“Not at all,” Ariadne said, “but maybe I’ll be able to get a clearer picture of what to do if I have more information.”
She had set up an old-fashioned comms device, with a simple transmitter and receiver, and no capability to take over anything else on the ship. For the past five minutes, they’d been broadcasting a simple message, locally, on an open frequency: “If you want to talk to me, hail me here.”
She had hardwired the mic to her own voice-print, removed all video recording devices from the room, even going as far as to switch off her own sensory implants and shielding the lab from life-sign scans, so that her counterpart couldn’t detect her crew in the room with her: Ghostrunner, holding her right hand for moral support, and Sweettalk seated to her left for direct rhetorical support.
It didn’t take long for the enemy to respond to the hail. The younger Ariadne took a deep breath, and answered the call.
“An old radio transmitter? Really,” the elder Ariadne’s voice buzzed through the speaker, “if we can’t trust each other, who can we trust?”
“You’ve spent the past four days besieging your own home,” the younger Ariadne replied. “What about this situation screams ‘trust’ to you?”
“Two months,” the elder Ariadne mused. “That’s really all it takes to get me to turn on myself?”
“You lost yourself,” the younger Ariadne said, “I sided with our family.”
“Your family told me to give up,” the elder Ariadne said spitefully. “That our wife was dead and we had to accept that. But I knew the truth. I knew we could fix it, you and I.”
The younger Ariadne intended to set her straight, that they had actually come back to save her, that they feared the elder Ariadne would screw that up, and that Pilar was safely beyond your grasp, but Sweettalk cut her off.
“No,” Sweettalk said, “if you tell her Pilar is out there somewhere, she’ll leave here and start combing the solar system for her. Tell her she failed. Pilar is already dead.”
Sweettalk spoke as quickly as possible. “I know what I’m doing. Her response to an obvious lie will tell us what she thinks is happening. Remember, she hasn’t been here these past few months”
Ariadne nodded. She’d brought Sweettalk on to advise her on strategy, and it would defeat the purpose to fight her on it. Besides, her future self would catch on if she took too long to radio back.
“Your calculations were off,” the younger Ariadne said, “the portal came and went two days ago. Spacebreather’s dead.”
The line was silent for several seconds, and then a chilling laugh came through.
“We always were a terrible liar,” the elder Ariadne said, “but that was actually a pretty good lie. Who do you have there with you, Sweettalk?”
Sweettalk looked urgently at her. “Double down,” she said. “Pilar is dead. And yes, let her know I’m here with you. If she thinks she’s caught you, she’ll let her guard down. Rule number one of a con: the mark should believe they’re tricking you.”
The younger Ariadne obliged: “Sweettalk is here,” she said, “but Pilar is dead. You just missed her funeral.”
The chilling laugh made its return. “I missed her funeral the first time, why would now be any different?” Said the elder. “Be so serious, if Pilar died, you wouldn’t be out of bed, let alone running a siege defense, for the next four months. She’s standing right next to you, isn’t she?”
“We got her,” Sweettalk pumped her fist. “She thinks Pilar is here, so she won’t abandon the siege. Ask her how she thinks this all ends.”
“What are you even trying to do?” Asked the younger. “Take her back with you to the future? You think she’s going to love you after you separated us for 20 years?”
The chilling laugh rang through again. “You really haven’t figured it out yet,” mocked the elder. “That was always our problem, wasn’t it? Selfish, and yet completely unable to focus on ourselves.”
Ghostrunner furrowed her brow in confusion. Selfish was not the word she would use to describe the woman who took her in unconditionally, who put her own plans on hold to find her birth sister and then paid out of pocket for her college education. The elder Ariadne would know that. Without Spacebreather, was she really so far gone to think she’d always been selfish?
Sweettalk looked at Ariadne and shrugged. It seemed she also had no idea what the future Ariadne was getting at. “Ask,” she said, “can’t make sense out of nonsense without asking.”
“Selfish? Focus on ourselves? What the hell are you getting at?” Asked the younger.
“You really think I’m just here for her,” The elder replied. “Sweettalk and Ghostrunner weren’t there when Pilar died, but I was. It was just her and me. I know the truth. The assassin didn’t just shoot her. She leapt in front of the shot.”
The younger Ariadne considered the implications of this. “The shot was meant for me,” she replied. “Spacebreather sacrificed herself to save me.”
“Isn’t that always the way, with us?” The elder asked. “Your whole crew, in constant danger because of you. How far out are you from the Nameless’ reign of terror, now? Two years? Jane’s neck broken. Vigil, shot in the face. Ghostrunner’s body controlled like a puppet by her abuser. Speaking of, few years before that, Ghostrunner, killed a few hundred; Cyan set aflame; your wife caught a bullet in a fortress set to self-destruct. Oh, and all the while, little Taryn Uprising, training as a Whiptail at the ripe old age of thirteen.”
“You think I didn’t feel those losses?” The younger spat back. “But I did something about them. I fixed them up. Kept them safe.”
“If only you could really keep them safe,” the elder replied. “Out of the line of fire. You’ve got Xiagu, after all. Why put them in harm’s way to do our work, when they could stay at home, safe, in our little hidden village?”
“I can’t do it all myself,” the younger said. “You of all people should know that.”
“My point exactly,” the elder replied. “You rely on your crew, your family, for everything. You’re the ideas man, while everyone else does the actual work. You think up a gun, then Tosin makes the materials, Spec Ops builds it, Pilar fires it. Wouldn’t it be something if you could do it all, and they could stay safely out of harm’s way?”
The younger Ariadne put it together, right then and there. This is why she hadn’t been able to follow things, and why the elder Corantine and Mingxia seemed unclear on their enemy’s goals. They’d all been laboring under a false pretense, that the future Ariadne was coming for Spacebreather.
“You’re here for me,” said the younger. “You’ve spent twenty years turning yourself into a one-woman crew, and you came back to fix me.”
“To give you a gift,” the elder replied. “You let me get in close, and I download my memories and consciousness into your body. You’ll be in command of this flagship, and you’ll be able to do everything yourself.”
“And if I fail,” the younger Ariadne said, “I’ll be able to pop back in time, download what I’ve learned into my past self, and take another crack at it.”
“Exactly,” said the elder. “Now you’re getting it. So why are you fighting me?”
Sweettalk pointed something out. “Her future came apart because of her,” she said. “If you’re just going to make the same mistakes as her, how is that keeping her family safe?”
“Where’s your family,” the younger asked, “in the future? They safe?”
“Pilar, Sasha, Vigil,” the elder Ariadne said, “I’ll be able to keep all of them safe if you just let me through. I’m finally good enough to do it myself.”
“No,” the younger Ariadne asked. “Baltimore and Beam, the twins, Taryn and Tosin, Alicia, where are they all? Is Xiagu safe, in all the time-storms?”
There was no chilling laughter this time.
“They wouldn’t listen to reason,” the elder Ariadne replied. “They wouldn’t just let me keep them safe.”
“Let me guess,” the younger Ariadne replied. “After Mingxia and Corantine came back to warn me, they all fled the solar system, and you.”
“They didn’t listen!” The elder said. “If they’d just stayed in Xiagu, I could’ve fixed everything! If they’d just listened to me!”
“She couldn’t stop them from being a crew if she tried,” Ghostrunner pointed out. “You never put us in danger, you only kept us safe as we rushed into it!”
Of course Ghostrunner was right, the younger Ariadne thought. “You managed to do it all yourself and you ended up alone. A captain of nothing. Your crew deserted you, and they were right to do it!”
“They won’t desert us this time,” the elder Ariadne said. “Together, we can make them see reason! Let me through, and we can keep them safe forever.”
The younger Ariadne spoke to what she thought was her enemy’s most cherished priority: “Mingxia and Corantine gave me all the information I needed to prepare. Pilar is alive, and no assassin is coming for her. The future you want is already there.”
“Maybe you did prepare well,” the elder replied. “Maybe you did stop this assassin. But Pilar will always jump into harm’s way to protect you, as long as you let her. Let me through, and you won’t need her to protect you, ever again.”
“You’ve really lost it,” the younger replied, “if you think I’d ever want to stop needing her.”
“Needing her is what destroyed you when you lost her,” the elder replied, “lucky for us, I can stop you doing both.”
“Losing her turned me into you,” the younger spat back, “just like you’re trying to do. Mingxia and Corantine were right. One way or another, it’ll be your fault if I lose her.”
The line fell silent for several seconds before the elder finally spoke. “Put up as much of a fight as you like,” she said. “I’ll be there soon. And when we’re together, it won’t matter much whether you want to become me.”
Ariadne’s sensors showed she wasn’t lying. The turrets were all but gone, and the myriad swarm was in position to take up the next leg of the fight. She feared it wouldn’t be long until the enemy breached their perimeter.
“Oh, and don’t think I’ll think twice about harming your crew,” said the elder, “once you and I are together, I’ll fix them up. I can fix anything.”
The transmission cut out. Sweettalk and Ghostrunner remained silent, waiting for Ariadne to speak before they weighed in.
Ariadne turned to Ghostrunner. “Still think you could never be afraid of me?”
“Never,” Ghostrunner said, “not in a million years.”
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion! And don't forget to listen to the companion Podcast Adaptation of the "Cabrera's Apartment" segment!
CABRERA'S APARTMENT
“I just think less is more,” Pilar explained. “I don’t understand pizza that tries to be something other than pizza.”
“Not a fan of ham and pineapple?” Cabrera asked.
“Look, I’ve eaten it, I’ve even enjoyed it,” Pilar said, “if it’s there, I’ll definitely have a slice, but it’s not really what I’d order, if it’s up to me. If I want pizza, then I want pizza. Sometimes I’ll put a topping on it, but it’s still got to taste like pizza.”
“So, one extra cheese, one bacon which is insane--”
“How is that more insane than pepperoni?” Pilar asked.
“Pepperoni isn’t insane,” Cabrera pointed out.
“Exactly,” Pilar said.
“What about a white pizza?” Cabrera asked. “They make this great one with garlic, onions, spinach, and feta cheese.”
“Oh, this pitch again. I’m not saying that doesn’t sound tasty, but it’s not pizza the way I imagine it.”
“Well, we’re already getting two that are pizza as you imagine it,” Cabrera said exasperatedly, “so why don’t you try something new for once in your life, mae?”
Spacebreather laughed. “Fine, get a… what did you call it, again?”
“Appetizer pizza.”
“Yeah, I’m the insane one,” Pilar said.
“Pure life!” Cabrera said triumphantly, tapping the last of the info into the pizzeria’s website. “We got three pizzas inbound.”
“Where’d you pick up that phrase, appetizer pizza?” Pilar asked. “That’s a deeply specific pie to need a shorthand for.”
“I thought we were past you trying to wrangle details about my past out of me,” Cabrera said. “Can we just order dinner?”
“You’re literally holding me prisoner, and the next update from home won’t be for another nine hours. I have nothing but you to be interested in right now.”
“I don’t have any clients to help right now,” Cabrera said. “Do you game?”
“Listen,” Pilar said seriously. “You can say no, and we’ll drop it, but… I get the sense that your situation doesn’t allow you to entertain guests very often. If there’s anything you need to talk about, with somebody who, well, can’t really do anything with that information, feel free to bend my ear. Might help distract me from my worries.”
Cabrera laughed. “What would I want to talk about?”
Pilar looked deadly serious. “If you want, we can pretend I didn’t hear any crying last night. Just know, I’m around, and you don’t have to keep it all to yourself.”
Cabrera tensed up. “You heard that, huh?”
“Wife’s not the only one who doesn’t sleep well in a bed by herself,” Pilar admitted. “Believe me, I’m okay with knowing nothing, just… the way you talk…”
“How do I talk?”
“Like you’re already dead,” Pilar said. “Makes me sad. You talk about yourself like you aren’t a person.”
“I’m not,” Cabrera said quietly. “I died, two years ago, in every way that matters. Like I said, the people who did it, do it so thoroughly there’s nothing left of you.”
“No, I don’t accept that,” Pilar said. “You’re a person, a living girl, and one I’m actually starting to enjoy being around.”
“Who am I, then?” Cabrera asked sarcastically. “I was her daughter, his girlfriend, her best friend, their sister, her muse, and all of their favorite ‘date.’ I won’t ever be any of those things, to those people, again. They’re all dead, every hand I ever shook, every mouth I ever kissed, they’re gone, and so is every version of me.”
“Except this one,” Pilar said softly. “The one who likes spinach and feta on a white pizza. The one who has favorite video games, and still feels sad about what happened to all those dead people. Just because your home is gone doesn’t mean you die with it, and boy, isn’t the world lucky you didn’t?”
“There’s nothing left of that girl,” Cabrera said. “She’s dead and buried in the same gutter she crawled out of.”
“And yet I’d wager you still speak with her accent,” Pilar said. “You still cry about her family. You still call people mae, like they did back home on, what was it, Rhea?”
Cabrera’s eyes flared. “You son of a bitch, how the fuck do you know that?! You’re with them after all, aren’t you?!”
“I’m not with anybody!” Pilar said.
Cabrera was shaking, and already pulled the pistol from the waistband of her shorts. “I never should have trusted them,” she said, “this is why you wanted to hear more about my past, right? You wanted to be sure I was who your bosses were looking for?”
Pilar put her hands up, to show she was harmless. “Cabrera,” she said as calmly as possible. “You’ve met who I work for. I have no idea who ‘they’ are.”
“‘Couldn’t they just fabricate that stuff,’ you said, I should’ve listened.”
“If you already believed I was safe, why the hell would I poke holes in that?!” Pilar pointed out. “Cabrera, the people after you don’t seem like they particularly care about getting the wrong person. If I wanted you dead, I could’ve killed you a dozen times by now. I promise, I’m not here to get you.”
“Then how the fuck do you know I’m from Rhea?!”
“It was a guess,” Pilar said calmly. “You keep calling me mae, and saying things are ‘pure life.’ Smart money said you’re a tica, and most of them live on Rhea.”
“That’s…” Cabrera hesitated, “that’s true.”
It was, in fact, true. Rhea was one of the first Martian colonies, spearheaded by Costa Ricans who wanted to simultaneously maintain ties with Mars and the autonomy they once enjoyed on Earth. Their population had ballooned to over 90 million, and now the majority of Costa Rican Spanish speakers in the universe could be traced back to Rhea.
Cabrera began to lower her gun.
“I didn’t mean to upset you more,” Pilar said, “I’m sorry.”
Cabrera set her gun on her desk, and slumped into her chair. “I’m so fucking stupid,” she said. “Of course I’m giving away who I was with every word. I speak English online, I’ve never been anywhere where I can speak Spanish except back home. How the hell have I survived this long?”
“Hey, listen to me,” Pilar said, approaching her cautiously. “You let something slip about yourself, and it was okay. It didn’t destroy you. Nobody came to kill you.”
She pulled Cabrera in and gave her a hug. Cabrera began to weep into Pilar’s shoulder and it became clear this was the first physical contact she’d had in person since Blue’s visit.
“I wish they would,” Cabrera confessed. “Why can’t I just die already?”
“Don’t you dare. Sister, daughter, girlfriend, muse,” Pilar said. “The people you were all those things to… who else remembers them?”
“Nobody,” Cabrera said.
“Who else knows how they ordered their pizza? How they smiled, what their voice sounded like?”
“Just me,” she said, “I’m all that’s left.”
“That’s why we keep going,” Pilar said. There was a knock at the door, and Pilar felt Cabrera tense up in terror in her arms, then relax, when she remembered what they’d been doing before she pulled the gun.
“The pizzas,” she sighed in relief.
“Come on, let’s eat,” Pilar said, “and pretend none of that happened, okay?”
Cabrera nodded. Pilar squeezed her, and then let her go so she could retrieve the pizza.
As she returned from the front door, Pilar saw her consider something, decide on it, immediately regret it, and then resolve to do it anyway. “You remind me of my big brother,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” Pilar asked.
“He always knew what to say.”
SICKBAY
Ariadne sat in a cushy leather chair in Sasha’s office.
“I feel a lot better, really,” she explained. “I got a good night’s sleep last night, with Cookie’s help.”
“And with the help of some very, very powerful sedatives,” Sasha pointed out, “which Cookie had to practically force you to take after five hours of trying to get you to sleep. Your insomnia isn’t getting better.”
“If you haven’t noticed, I’m under quite a bit of stress,” Ariadne said. “You sent away my wife, how come you got to keep yours?”
“Sweettalk is my wife, I’m not the boss of her,” Sasha said. “Pilar is my big sister. I will always be the boss of her.”
“I’m your big sister too,” Ariadne pointed out, “is that why you’re suddenly the boss of me?”
“No, that’s because I’m your doctor. Why are you so resistant to letting anybody help you?” Sasha asked. “What good do you think you’re doing us by running yourself ragged?”
“I told you, I can’t sleep without Pilar here,” Ariadne said, “and you sent Pilar away.”
“I did what I had to do, to keep my sister safe,” Sasha said. “She and I are square now.”
“When she was ‘keeping you safe,’ I stood up for you,” Ariadne pointed out. “Got you back in the field, even helped Pilar see reason. When are you and I square?”
“When I kept Pilar safe, you stood up for her,” Sasha replied without hesitation, “and I overrode you, just like Pilar did when you stood up for me. Now, I’m willing to admit this is a problem I caused. Are you ready to let me solve it?”
“Why are we still having an argument I already lost?” Ariadne asked. “I took the damn sedative last night, I’ll take it again tonight.”
“And you’ve been switching off the processor embedded in your brain at night?” Sasha asked. “Haven’t been using it to, say, project your consciousness down to Spec Ops while your body’s asleep, hash out a way to draw power from the rift like the enemy does?”
“Taryn,” Ariadne said, identifying the rat immediately. “I know I gave her this job, but it doesn’t make it sting less when she does it.”
“The gals in spec ops all know to report to me if you’re caught in the lab, digitally or otherwise, while you’re supposed to be sleeping.”
Ariadne swore internally. Sasha knew her too well. “I can’t afford to lose eight hours of prime thinking time, Sash. I need to beat her.”
“You need to beat the version of yourself who drove herself crazy by spiraling into obsession,” Sasha pointed out, “by spiraling into obsession and driving yourself crazy?”
Ariadne felt ashamed. She had to confess to someone, and Spacebreather was beyond her grasp. To her, though, Sasha was the most trustworthy person in the universe. She couldn’t bullshit her the way she could almost everyone else in her life.
“Sasha, can I be perfectly honest with you?”
“You know you can,” Sasha assured her.
Ariadne made what might have been the most shameful confession of her life: “I have no idea what I’m doing, here.”
“Now, what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Sasha asked.
“I can’t make heads or tails of any of this,” Ariadne said. “It feels like we’re caught in the middle of eighty different plans, and all of them are just… spray-and-pray from people who understand things I don’t and won’t give me a single straight answer. Corantine and Mingxia showed up from the future and they were, what, trying to prepare us? Trying to save Spacebreather? Well, great, they did both. What now?Ellesmere is trying to stop me building a time machine? Great, I’m never gonna build one. Universe is still coming apart at the seams. Nothing I come up with seems to be helping, in any way.”
“Ari, earlier today you figured out a way to harness the rift itself to supercharge the station’s force-shields,” Sasha said. “Does that sound like someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing?”
“So what?” Ariadne asked. “The shields just buy me time until I do… what, exactly? Capture her? Kill her? Come up with some miracle cure to these cracks in the sky that I barely understand?”
“I thought you were planning to send Blue in, to reason with her,” Sasha pointed out.
“It might get her to stand down,” Ariadne said, “but who’s to say that’ll work? What if I do beat her and it does nothing? Sasha, I’m so used to understanding everything. I can do all this amazing stuff because I can predict what the outcomes will be, but in this situation, I have no guarantees. I have no information. I’m just… throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.”
Sasha considered this. “Ariadne,” she said softly. “I’ve known you a long, long time. Your ‘throwing spaghetti at the wall’ is a safer bet than anyone else’s best laid plans.”
“That’s just it,” Ariadne said. “That’s what’s keeping me up. Everybody expects me to come up with this genius plan to save everybody, and the stakes are so high, and I’m flying blind and… what if I’m not good enough?”
“I can’t blame you for feeling the pressure,” Sasha said, “but even with these stakes, I feel safest betting on you. Of course you can handle whatever this situation throws at you. You’re the smartest woman in the solar system.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Sasha asked. “I’m just a Doctor. You build worlds.”
“Sasha, you were a doctor at thirteen years old because all it takes for you to memorize a medical textbook is reading it once,” Ariadne said. “You think we didn’t notice that? You think we would’ve let just any kid practice medicine? This world I built? I built it for you! You’re the one who everybody should be putting their faith in, not me.”
Sasha scowled, and stared at her, and said nothing. Suddenly, she was in on the joke that her loved ones always teased her with, asking her to count a large quantity of objects at a glance, or recall a specific word from a specific page from a book she’d read years earlier. Until then, she’d never really put together why they always did this. Living where she did, with the people she lived with, it was easy to forget these things weren’t within most people’s capabilities. Now, it suddenly hit her: her family was in awe of what she was able to do, and they were teasing her for being the only person who didn’t see it as exceptional.
“I’m sorry, Sasha,” Ariadne said, “but I’m not smart the way you’re smart. I have no idea how we get out of this one. As long as I’m at the eye of this storm, it feels like we’re barreling straight over the edge.”
“You’re right, you are an idiot sometimes,” Sasha said coldly. Ariadne sat in her guilt, deeply ashamed of all she’d said, and all she’d felt, over the past few days. “I’m not under any delusions that I’m not smart. That’s how I know you can get us out of it.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Ariadne said, “I just--”
“Look, let’s pretend you’re right. I’m the smartest girl in the universe. Fine. Whatever,” Sasha said. “Maybe listen to me, then. There’s two Ariadnes in this game, and I, the smartest girl you know, am betting on one of them. Her Sasha lost faith in her. Yours still thinks you’re going to win this. So, do you trust me, or don’t you?”
Ariadne sighed. “I love you, Sasha.”
“I love you too, Ariadne,” Sasha said. “And the truth is, you’re right. There’s no guarantee we can fix this. But we still have to try, don’t we?”
“Yeah, we do,” Ariadne said.
“And can you think of anybody else more likely to get it right?” Sasha asked. “Seriously, I’m asking, we could use all the help we can get.”
Ariadne laughed. Sasha was right, of course.
Sasha put another bottle of sedative down on the table. “Tonight, you’re going to take these sedatives,” Sasha insisted, “before you try and fail to fall asleep for five hours. Not after. And you’re going to switch off that chip of yours, too. Doctor’s orders.”
Ariadne looked suspiciously at the bottle.
“You said you don’t know how we’re going to win,” Sasha said. “That’s how we win. You’re not going to be able to beat her by making all the same mistakes she does.”
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion! And don't forget to listen to the companion Podcast Adaptation of the "Cabrera's Apartment" segment!
CABRERA'S APARTMENT
“I appreciate that,” Cabrera said into her headset, her voice transformed by a modulator on the microphone. “if you wouldn’t mind, you’ll have the option on your communicator to take a short survey indicating you’ve received only the most excellent customer service today. My name is Stephanie, and your valued customer feedback helps me improve.”
Pilar repeatedly flopped her head onto the pillow on her cot in boredom, driven to near-insanity by the corporate doubletalk drivel Cabrera’s shitty job forced her to spew.
Cabrera pushed a button, starting the next call. “Hi, Ms. Netzer? This is Chelsea, we’ve been trying to reach you about your spacecraft’s extended warranty--”
“Oh, you’re Chelsea now?” Pilar asked. Cabrera ignored her. The modulator on her mic was hard-coded to her own voice-print, and nothing else could pass through it. Pilar could scream as loud as she wanted and the client would be none the wiser.
Pilar took advantage of this by watching television, while Cabrera helped various idiots with their computer problems and tried to trick poor saps out of their credit card information on behalf of her landlord, Hoffman. He’d set her up with a new life and modified her appearance all for the low, low price of digital peonage.
Companies who needed to outsource their customer service, or their marketing calls, paid his shell corporation the equivalent of an employee’s living wage, and he offloaded the labor onto the many desperate people-- many of whom lived in this very tenement building-- who he had smuggled away from the most terrible of circumstances and graciously ushered into crushing debt to him.
The few people who came to him with enough money to purchase his services outright would be set up on a new planet where nobody could find him. Everybody else ended up on what he called the “payment plan,” which was his euphemism for living under his thumb; still enjoying his protection, but forced to provide cheap labor towards a steadier source of income.
Of course, they were not “paid” in the traditional sense. Their wages-- far less than the living wage he received for each of their services, and even less than the Colonial Moons’ federal minimum-- went towards their expenses, and the remainder was deducted from their total debt to him. Their expenses, their food and utilities and clothing and anything else they might need, were provided by the landlord, and charged to their tab at the company store. Of course, the prices he charged were so high that, without fail, their debt often increased with each day’s labor, so he had very little employee turnover.
Pilar was now almost two days removed from her sister’s betrayal, and she adored her sister too much to hold it against her for long, so she was really enjoying getting to hate Cabrera’s landlord. She was almost mad that she wouldn’t be able to kill him. When she left here, she’d have no idea what world he was even on.
“—and your valued customer feedback helps me improve.” Cabrera finished her call, and removed her headset. Her shift for the day was finally over, and because all she’d eaten for the past two days were leftover takeout paid for with the per diem, her massive debt had actually decreased by a few dollars.
In what little off-time she had, she was allowed visitors, even free run of the city, but until recently she’d never taken advantage of either. She was convinced that even a few blocks outside the house would pose too much of a risk. Pilar wondered about this, and how she fit into it, as a stranger who was allowed into her house.
“So, why’d you let Alicia and Blue in here?” Pilar asked her. “Hell, why am I allowed in here?”
Cabrera laughed. “Alicia Baltimore,” she said. “Born to Ariel and Lucy, August 10, 2591. Temple University, College of Engineering, class of 2613. Reported missing shortly after graduation, declared legally dead, 2620, over the objections of her parents, who claimed to have received a letter from her informing them she was in Europe finding herself. Resurfaced in 2623 and provided details of her political imprisonment shortly after the fall of the Weaver Regime, then entered a life of seclusion with family. All records of her after that are in social media posts with photos of family events by her sister Ariana, who uses the pseudonym Ana Myers for security purposes.”
“I don’t think I knew that much about Alicia’s history.”
Cabrera continued: “Blue was a bit more tricky to vet. Couldn’t quite nail her down, beyond urban legends of avenging angels and malicious spirits that take the form of a beautiful insane woman with wild blue hair.”
“No, that’s pretty much her in a nutshell,” Pilar said.
“But I actually did find records of her,” Cabrera explained. “When I tried to vet Vic and Cherry. Cherry trusted me enough to tell me their old names, and I found out all about them, with a little bit of hacking, got into the WITSEC documents for Victor Ford and Cheryl Haines, verified everything they told me about themselves. They were who they said they were, but any time I tried to find out where they were now, I kept finding her, over and over again. Anyone who goes looking for them, finds her. Turns out they’re hiding from some pretty scary people, too. That’s why me and Cherry get along so well.”
“Pretty impressive research skills,” Pilar said. “Seems wasted on tech support.”
Cabrera smiled proudly. “Pilar Spacebreather, born July 17th, 2605, that’s Volans 7 on the Martian Standard calendar,” she said. “Daughter of Gael Aguilar and Yma Amaru, Martian grocers wrongfully executed, 2615, as terrorists by the Weaver regime in a publicity stunt. I’m sorry, by the way, for when I asked you about knowing what it’s like to lose somebody, I should’ve known better. One sister, Sachasisa, born November 29, 2609, Martian Standard Cetus 6. Whereabouts of both sisters are unknown after their parents’ death, no known surviving relatives on Mars, but facial recognition pings a wanted poster for the pirate Ariadne, who, interestingly, pings a match on the reclusive heiress to the Ramos family. Did I miss anything?”
“I have another sister, but there wouldn’t be a record of that,” Pilar said. “So what, you do extensive background checks on everybody you trust to make sure they’re safe?”
“No,” Cabrera explained, “I do extensive background checks on everyone to make sure there’s a record of them. The people who are after me, you’ll never find a photograph of one of them. No scraps of their existence, and that goes double for the people they’ve killed. You know what comes up when you look for me? For my real name?”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Every photograph of me ever posted online, either deleted, or I’ve been edited out of it. Every reference to me in a school yearbook or motel guestbook, every stupid status update I ever posted, gone. Not. One. Trace. See, they don’t just kill you, they erase all evidence you ever existed. The person I was before is dead, and buried so deep nobody, nobody, could ever dig her up. If any of you were with them, I wouldn’t be able to find anything on you, would I?”
“I mean, if they’re that powerful,” Pilar pointed out, “couldn’t they just fabricate all that stuff?”
“Why would they need to?” Cabrera asked. “If they knew where I was, or even that I was still alive, I’d be dead already.”
They chatted for a while, and then finished off their leftovers and put on the nightly Colonial Moons news report before bed. Things weren’t looking good, in the system. The Calistan election cycle was in disarray after the arrest of Salvatore Balotelli for murder, which made Pilar crack up-- that felt like a lifetime ago now, she’d almost forgotten her role in it-- but the top story was, of course, the strange phenomenon in the skies between Mars and Jupiter.
Strange green energy patterns formed what looked like a massive cracked sphere encasing the inner part of the solar system. After several unmanned probes turned to dust passing through one of them, the governments of all the system’s colonies had instituted a travel embargo which cut off all transit across the Martian-Jovian border, for the safety of their citizens. All teleportation from one side of the cracked sphere to the other seemed to be jammed, as well, and anyone who tried to cross the barrier was bounced back to where they started.
Cabrera made her report to Alicia, and informed Pilar that the cracks in the sky were, in fact, related to the war between the Ariadnes. The crew was, per Alicia, “working on it,” but Ariadne was having a bit of trouble adjusting to the situation without her. The stress was starting to get to her.
“Can you make sure Cookie is staying in her quarters?” Pilar asked. “She can’t sleep by herself, not properly.”
Cabrera relayed Alicia’s response. “She says that’s a good idea, and she’ll send a message down to the kitchens straightaway.” She paused. “Alicia says to say, Ariadne loves you, and misses you. So does she. So does everyone.”
Pilar choked, and nodded. Cabrera stood silent.
“Sasha says, she hopes someday you can forgive her for this,” Cabrera said.
The tears began to stream openly down Pilar’s face.
“Tell her we’re even,” Pilar said, “that I love her, and don’t tell her that I cried.”
Cabrera nodded, listened for a moment, said goodnight to Alicia, and pulled the ring off her finger. “She told her you cried, mae.”
“Yeah, I kinda figured,” Pilar said. “Let’s get some sleep. We got a big day of sitting around the house tomorrow, followed by another exciting shift of listening to you help people calibrate their hologram monitors.”
ARIADNE’S LAB
Ariadne’s eyes were fixed on the circular crystal formation and the swirling, crackling, faintly green-tinged storm raging within it.
“This was gone, before she got here,” Ariadne explained to Ellesmere, pointing at the disturbance at the center of the ring. “You looked at it like it was the strangest thing in the world, and you called your boss, and told me that the anomaly was stronger than ever. But it was gone. And now, she’s here, and I can barely see through this thing, can I?”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Ellesmere said, “things are often more complicated than they look from the outside.”
“The cracks, in the sky,” Ariadne said. “Are they an extension of this?”
“The universe is a pane of glass,” Ellesmere said. “Those are cracks in the pane. This is the bullet hole.”
“And that ship, that just took down my first wave of turrets, that’s the bullet?”
“Seems that way, love,” Ellesmere said.
“So why is the bullet hole here,” Ariadne asked, “when the bullet is out there?”
“She’s not the original bullet, remember?” Ellesmere said. “She’s coming back to stop a time traveling assassin who shot your wife through that hole. Now, she’s changed the past so that unfortunate incident never happened. Your wife is tucked away in some corner of the universe even you can’t reach, and anyone who opened a portal in this room would be encased in crystal.”
“So why is the original bullet hole still here?” Ariadne asked. “If the gun was never fired, why the exit wound?”
“But the gun was fired,” Ellesmere said, “for her, and her alone. Her very presence here is keeping those events alive. Take her off the board, the hole closes, and the cracks fill.”
“Convenient,” Ariadne said. “You really just have an answer to everything, don’t you?”
“I’m very knowledgeable.”
“And yet,” Ariadne continued, “not all of what you said adds up, does it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You think I haven’t noticed that none of what you’ve said or done since you got here has made a lick of sense. You’ve said you’re here to stabilize our region of spacetime, and to stop the construction of a time machine, but you’ve assisted us in the creation of all sorts of time-bending technology to fight off time travelers. You didn’t bat an eye when two time travelers arrived on my station with the express intention of interfering with the natural course of history.”
“Like I said, I don’t care about history--”
“Shut up. Please, for once, just shut the fuck up.” Ariadne put on her best mocking impression of Ellesmere’s accent. “Oh, that ship is the bullet… no wait, it’s not the ORIGINAL bullet. The anomaly is going to destroy the galaxy, no wait, the solar system, no wait, the UNIVERSE.”
“I never--”
“Oh, but I think you have. See, at every opportunity, you’ve delayed and stalled and obfuscated, and kept us busy as bees preparing to defend against the inevitability of this attack. You said you wanted to avoid a time war in this region, but I think you actually wanted this fight to happen, or maybe you’re just trying to waste as much time as possible until… whatever it is you do want to happen. All I can’t figure out, is why.”
Ellesmere panicked. What was she supposed to do, in this situation? Admit that she knew this battle could’ve been avoided, that it all could’ve been resolved peacefully, but she let it happen because her hands were tied up in red tape? Double down on her lie that the anomaly was reaching critical mass, and that she still held out hope the situation would resolve itself before it came up? All she could think to do was offer as little information as possible, and hope Ariadne filled in the blanks.
“I had my mission objectives,” she said. “The intelligence from my superiors states clearly that there’s only one safe way to end all this and keep the fabric of reality intact. I won’t deny I’ve had my doubts, but everything has unfolded exactly as they expected. I have complete faith that we can resolve this, as a team.”
“What a load of political horseshit,” Ariadne laughed cynically. “There weren’t any lies in that little speech, but I also noticed there weren’t any facts. You sound like my mother. So what, pray tell, are these orders you’re just following? What is this big objective? And if you say one more time that it’s to stabilize the anomaly without saying how, I swear I’ll have you thrown out the airlock.”
Ellesmere bristled at being addressed this way, and she took a gamble. “I was sent to kill you,” she said.
“Bullshit,” Ariadne said. “You’ve been here for months, you’ve had every opportunity, and you haven’t taken it.”
“Fine, whatever you say,” Ellesmere snapped, the anger in her voice straining against its infuriating poshness. “But let me tell you something, and know I am being entirely, brutally truthful with you, because with how damned helpful I’ve been over the last few months, you still have the gall to be this disrespectful to me. I’ve fought for you on every single call with Director Kalrax. I am still betting on a happy ending for you. Capture your future self, isolate her in stasis, and turn her over to the Syndicate. I honestly believe that will quash this bloody anomaly, seal the cracks, settle the future into one possibility, and put a hefty serving of egg on Director Kalrax’s face.”
Ariadne laughed. “You know, I like seeing you all worked up like that,” she said. “Makes you seem almost human.”
“Oh, this is funny to you?” Ellesmere asked.
“I guess I should come clean,” Ariadne said. “I’ve known you were fighting for us this whole time. I tapped your calls to your boss. But until you admitted it, I didn’t know which of us you were playing, us or him.”
Ellesmere’s face flushed hot. At least Ariadne thought she was playing the Director, rather than trying desperately to remain within his favor.
“I appreciate all your help,” she said, “and I’m going to defeat the enemy, and figure out how to seal these cracks.”
“And you’ll turn her over to the syndicate, when you’ve got her?” Ellesmere asked.
“No.”
“Then how--”
“Right on time, Uprising.” Ariadne said cheerfully as they filed into the room, Tosin greeting Ariadne and Ellesmere with the customary kiss on the hand. “Hear you two have got good news for me. Why don’t you tell our guest what you’ve discovered?”
“Wh-- okay,” Taryn said, taken a bit off-guard by her employer seemingly already knowing what she was here to report. One never quite got used to how much Ariadne saw and heard around the station “Well, me and the gals in spec ops have been doing our best to reverse-engineer those drones the enemy is using. We’ve noticed a few things. Tosin?”
“The shrapnel from them is recently-minted from a fabricator,” he said, “even with my techniques, that ship can’t possibly have the energy capacity to create this many spacecraft, of this complexity, with materials this durable. And each wave has two or three more drones, which would deplete her energy reserves even faster.”
“Interesting analysis, Rockstar. Where is she getting the energy to do it?” Ariadne asked.
“Well, that’s the other thing we noticed,” Taryn said, “shortly before every deployment, the cracks in the sky flicker away for a fraction of a second. We think she’s found a way to draw chronological energy from the rift and channel it through her replicators, into physical matter.”
“Can we match it?”
“Yes,” Taryn said, “with time.”
This was as close to a ringing endorsement that Taryn could possibly give.
“Ellesmere, you asked how,” Ariadne explained. “I can’t turn her in to the Syndicate, because I have no doubt they’ll kill her rather than risk letting her go free.”
“Probably a safe bet,” Ellesmere admitted.
“So we’re going to put some egg on Director Kalrax’s face,” Ariadne said, trying to sound more confident in their victory than she was. “We’re going to win the naval battle by tapping the rift and robbing her of her one advantage. I know how she thinks. Blue is going to talk her down and make her realize Pilar is waiting for her, safe and sound, in the future. She’ll voluntarily return to the future, and the anomaly will go away just like it was about to before she got here. You get a big promotion and get to finally leave us alone forever.”
Ellesmere decided to let her keep on thinking she was on their side. If only she could use the pistol hidden in her coat now and end this, the whole exhausting affair could be over, but she still had to wait five days. If she pulled the trigger even a second before that, she would shatter the universe.
“I hope you’re right,” she said simply. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to get some shut-eye. You’ve had me monitoring this blasted formation twelve hours a day, and I’m frankly tired of looking at it.”
“More staring at it tomorrow,” Ariadne quipped.
“Can’t wait,” Ellesmere replied. She left the room, and was relieved to still be in the captain’s good graces. She couldn’t very well take her out at the end of the week if she wasn’t in the lab with her.
“Boss, you should get some rest too,” Taryn said.
“Dear, Ms. Alicia told us she understood the advantage rest gave her,” Tosin gently reminded her, “she doesn’t need us to tell her.”
“Thanks sugar, but I do,” Ariadne confessed. “I’ve actually got to admit, I didn’t sleep all that well last night. I went to bed all excited about getting a full night’s sleep, and then I just lay there in bed, feeling alone. Watched the security cameras in the corridors for a while. Tried to read a book, for all the good it did me. Alicia actually ordered Cookie to babysit me tonight to make sure I got some sleep.”
“Do you think that’ll help?” Taryn asked.
“I hope so,” Ariadne said. “Alicia says the order came straight from Pilar. Helps to know she’s still looking out for me, wherever she is.”
Taryn was silent.
Tosin was not.
“I miss her,” Tosin admitted. “I wish she was here.”
Ariadne sighed. “Me too, honey, me too.” Ariadne looked up at her two proteges, and spoke honestly. “Sometimes I think you’d all be better off if I just threw myself through this damned formation. All of this could be over in a second. If I disappear from history, so does she.”
“There’d be no her,” Taryn said, “but there’d also be no crew. You really think I’d be better off back in Pincerna, with my mother’s family?”
“Blue would’ve found somewhere for you,” Ariadne said. “Maybe she would’ve even taken you in herself.”
“Cut that shit out right now,” Taryn said. “I’d be derelict in my duties as your devil’s advocate if I didn’t tell you, this kind of talk isn’t productive or healthy. I never want to hear that bullshit from you again.”
Ariadne laughed. “You still believe in me,” she said. “Glad one of us does.”
The three of them sat in silence for several seconds, before Ariadne broke it.
“I have an unusual request for the two of you.”
“Anything,” Taryn said, and Tosin nodded assent.
“Turn off your communicators, go somewhere private, and spend some time together. No work talk. No battles. I want you two to have a proper, sweet, romantic moment, for me. There’s snacks in the galley, and condoms in sickbay, if you need them.”
“Boss, we’re at war right now,” Taryn said, slightly embarrassed, “I hardly think any of that matters right--”
Ariadne sprung up from her chair. “It’s the only thing that matters, do you hear me?” She was almost shouting. The dark circles under her eyes were pronounced, and Taryn now noticed that her cheeks still had the salt of dried tears on them. “Love is, and always has been, the only thing that matters.”
Taryn objected, “there isn’t time right now for--”
“This might be all the time you’ve got, kids” Ariadne said darkly. “My wife is out there somewhere, alone, and unless things go right, I might never see her again. The time I’ve had with her, might be all the time I get with her. So you two, go downstairs, for me, and take two hours to appreciate the fact that you get to hold each other, and see each other, and touch each other.”
“Boss, I--”
“It’s a direct order, Uprising,” Ariadne said, “and not the sort I’d advise rebelling against.”
“Okay,” Tosin said. “We’ll do it.”
“Tosin, we don’t have to--”
He cut her off. “To be clear, I’m not doing this as your subordinate, and I’m not following an order. I’m doing it as a favor, to one of my closest friends. We’re going to go down to Vigil’s, and I’m going to teach Taryn how to do a Tequila Paf,” he said. “We’ll get snacks, perhaps I’ll let Taryn show me the next arc of our favorite anime, and see where the night takes us. I haven’t worked out all the details, but I’ve thought about it quite a bit.”
Ariadne smiled. “Sounds like a lovely night,” she said. “Hang onto this one, Taryn, he’s a keeper.”
“And when she gets back, and she will be back soon,” Tosin insisted, “I’ll be glad to have something pleasant to discuss with Mrs. Spacebreather.”
Taryn couldn’t help but smile.
“Dismissed, kids,” she said. “Have fun. Be safe. And remember, I’ll know if you slip off and try to get some work done while you’re supposed to be enjoying young love.”
Taryn took Tosin’s hand and they turned to leave, but Taryn hesitated. She knew she’d be failing her duties if she didn’t say this before she was officially relieved of duty.
“I’ll know if you try and sneaky get some work done, too. Get some rest, boss,” Taryn said. “I mean, tell Cookie not to let you out of that room until those bags under your eyes are unpacked. We need you.”
Ariadne didn’t need to be told twice. She was truly glad Cookie would be with her tonight. After all, as Pilar always pointed out, she couldn’t sleep by herself, not properly at least.
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion! And don't forget to listen to the companion Podcast Adaptation of the "Cabrera's Apartment" segment!
CABRERA’S APARTMENT
“Want something to eat?” Cabrera asked.
“No point,” Pilar said, “I’m gonna get out of here before I need food.”
“No, you’re not,” Cabrera said. “You can’t get out of that bed.”
“I haven’t met restraints I couldn’t slip out of,” Pilar growled. “You have to sleep sometime.”
Cabrera dramatically pretended to yawn. “Yeah, I got a full night’s. You’ve been out for a while. That stuff they used to put you under was powerful,” she said. “Besides, you’re not slipping those restraints. I’ve been told to tell you they’re Rubicon tech, designed to keep you cuffed to that bed. Course, I got no idea what Rubicon tech is supposed to be, but they assured me you’d understand it.”
Pilar looked down at her restraints. Taryn’s handiwork.
“Look,” Cabrera said, “if you promise to be cool, I’m willing to take off the restraints.”
“Okay. I promise to be cool.”
“You’re lying, aren’t you?” Cabrera mused. “Are you seriously doing a ruse right now?”
“Try me,” Pilar snapped.
“Well, now I’m not going to,” Cabrera said, “because you have an attitude problem.”
“Forgive me, for not being my usual chipper self when I woke up handcuffed to the wrong side of a stranger’s bed,” Pilar said. “Are you going to loose these restraints or not?”
“Well, eventually, yeah,” Cabrera replied. “You’re gonna need to use the bathroom at some point, and I don’t particularly feel like changing a bed pan. The restraints were just there to keep you from coming up swinging and hurting yourself, or worse, me.”
“God forbid,” Spacebreather said. “God, I wish I could hurt you.”
“So violent!” Cabrera said. “Been a while since I’ve had that kind of talk pointed my way. Can’t say I’ve missed it.”
“Well, get used to it.”
“Look, I’ll take the restraints off, but I feel like I should tell you,” Cabrera explained, “they’re not what’s keeping you here. Those were powerful, persistent nanotech drugs you got hit with. They stay in your system, and they’re tethered to the location of that bed. Anything beyond, say, five meters away from that bed-- however far away that door is--they automatically kick in again and knock you right back out.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Pilar asked.
“Because knowing won’t make a difference,” Cabrera said, “and because I’m not very strong, and you’re fourteen inches taller than me, and with all that muscle it’d be a pain to lift you back to the bed, and I don’t really feel like doing all that, so it’s easier to just tell you how to avoid passing out.”
“They’ve got to wear off eventually,” Pilar said, “and I’ll be ready.”
“They wear off straight away, if you give the all-clear code. But only she and I know that,” Cabrera said.
“Ohhh, I’m gonna kill her, if she lives long enough for me to save her,” Pilar laughed. “She really does think of every little thing, doesn’t she?”
Cabrera ignored this. “So, I’m gonna take the restraints off, and you’re gonna keep in mind that you can’t leave or hurt me, and we’re going to order some food. I got a per diem to keep you fed, and honestly, as much as I’d appreciate being able to pocket it, maintaining this level of privacy ain’t cheap and I don’t make that much money in my dayjob. I don’t get to have takeout that often. What’s your preference?”
Cabrera hit a button on her desk and released the restraints on Pilar’s wrist. Pilar considered making a break for the door, but she knew her family. There was no chance Cabrera was lying, this was exactly the sort of thing they’d make to contain her. She sighed, and resigned herself to the situation.
“Where are we?” Pilar asked.
“We’re in my apartment,” Cabrera said, “duh.”
“No, I mean, where are we in the solar system,” Pilar sighed once more. “I’m not about to order Martian food if we’re on Charon, you know? It won’t be any good.”
“Ah,” Cabrera said. “Colonial moons. That’s all I can give you.”
“What?!” Pilar said. “You can’t even tell me which moon?!”
“I could count the number of people I’ve trusted with the location of this apartment on one hand,” Cabrera said, “and I haven’t got very big hands. Your quartermaster is one of them. I’m in regular contact with her, and I expect her to retrieve you by remote teleport when this is all over. I don’t need you blabbing my location all over the solar system once you leave here.”
“Who am I gonna tell?” Pilar asked. “What am I gonna tell them? That there’s a 135-centimeter goblin woman with bleached hair living in a rathole apartment with blacked out windows, who’s down to hold you prisoner as long as your wife breaks her word and asks you nicely?”
“Okay, a couple of things,” she said, “first of all, I am one hundred forty five centimeters. Second, yeah, that information is more than enough to get me killed. Do you know how many non-achondroplastic dwarves are out here building privacy bunkers and disguising their appearance? The number’s not super high. They’re everywhere, system-wide.If they know what planet to look on, they’ll find me, and this apartment might as well be my grave. Third, bitch, I don’t even know your wife.”
“Right, you’ve never met her, that’s the whole point,” Pilar said, “that way her future-self can’t track me down.”
“No, is your head hollow like a drawer?!” Cabrera said. “Your wife vetoed this plan after she made her little promise to you. Your sister set all this up without her.”
Pilar was stunned. “She didn’t… she didn’t break her promise?”
“Guess not,” Cabrera said. “Look, there’s an Indian place down the block that’s pure life, and they know to leave it on the doorstep. You like Indian?”
“Like it actually matters,” Pilar said, “I’m sitting here while my wife goes to war, and my sister actually pumped me full of drugs to keep me from protecting her. You think I give a shit what I eat?”
Cabrera threw a takeout menu at Pilar’s face.
“Muchacha, ¡por dios! will you shut the fuck up, lady?” Cabrera asked. “Do you know what some people would give to have somebody, anybody, who loves them like that?”
“Loves them, what, enough to drug them? To keep them prisoner?”
“Enough to try and keep them safe, even if it means pissing them off so royally they might never talk to you again?” Cabrera asked angrily.
“She stuck a needle in my neck!” Pilar said. “Knowing that me and Ariadne didn’t want this!”
“Yeah, how unlucky you are to have a sister who wants you alive. Hell, how unlucky you are to have a sister who is alive. Let’s hear it for you, the real victim in all this.”
Pilar was taken aback. “Sorry,” she said halfheartedly, “I didn’t know.”
“You know, I’ve heard all about you from my friends,” Cabrera said. “They all talk about you like you’re the toughest, coolest girl in the universe. Now I actually meet you and all I get is a sad sack throwing a tantrum that she has too many people who care about her.”
“Watch it,” Pilar said.
“Or what?!” Cabrera asked. “You’re gonna hit me? You’re gonna kill me? Blue will never talk to you again. Do you know what it’s like to love someone and know they’re gone from your life forever?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Pilar said coldly, but she realized Cabrera was right. There was nothing she could do about it, anyway.
“Listen, mae, I didn’t mean to go off on you like that,” Cabrera said. “You’re having a bad day, and it makes sense you’re mad.”
“Yeah, I’m mad,” Pilar said, “but I’ve got no right to be. I did the same shit to Sasha, few years back. Took away her freedoms bit by bit to keep her safe until I had her caged, like that damned parrot.”
“Parrot?”
“Down in the menagerie,” Pilar said, as though Cabrera had any way of knowing what this meant, “she’s had it for years. I didn’t know how long they lived when I got it for her. I hate that fucking bird.”
“It’s a bird, mae,” Cabrera said.
“Well, maybe it hates me,” she said.
“You got a good family, is my point,” Cabrera said. “Don’t take it for granted, like I did.”
“What are they giving you?” Pilar asked. “Sasha and Alicia, what did they offer you, to keep me here?”
“Like I said, keeping this place secure ain’t cheap,” she said. “And it wasn’t cheap getting free of my old life, neither. The guy who hooked me up with this apartment, with my new identity, with this new look, is the sort of guy who breaks legs if you miss a payment on your debts, and who starts repossessing cosmetic surgeries if you miss two payments.”
“They offered you enough money to get free of your debts,” Pilar said. “Typical, that’s just what she’d do too.”
“Nah, mae, they offered me enough money to buy my way out of here, too. I do this, I have enough money to buy a self-sufficient house, 500 miles from anybody, where I can be left alone the rest of my life.”
Pilar slumped back on the bed, resigned to being here, and feeling like a jackass for being mad at Sasha for giving her a taste of her own medicine.
“Chicken biryani and saag paneer,” Pilar said. “And if you’re getting a per diem, I’d better see some gulaab jamun.”
“Woman after my own heart,” Cabrera said, punching Pilar’s order into the site on her computer, and submitting it for immediate delivery. “Shame we didn’t meet under better circumstances.”
“So, you’re in contact with Alicia?” Pilar asked. “She’s who you report to, in all this?”
“Oh, she’s been bad,” Cabrera said. “She’s been wearing that fancy ‘locker’ thing on and off for the past couple months. She doesn’t let me see anything sensitive, of course, just… spending time with me. Letting me see some friendly faces, hear some friendly voices, feel some… friendly touch. This is the first time you met me, but it’s far from the first time I’ve met you.”
Pilar grimaced at “friendly touch,” since she remembered now that Blue had bragged about a tryst with Cherry’s friend, during the bet, and even remembered the name “Cabrera” as one of their allies in finding Luzuha’s treasure. Clearly, Alicia and Blue had been allowing Cabrera to remotely ride along in some of their encounters since, and Pilar preferred to keep that side of their life out of her mind.
“You should’ve shown me the coin,” Pilar said. “The one from Luzuha’s chest. I would’ve trusted you without question. We’re both pirate queens.”
Cabrera grinned. “You wouldn’t have put it together, though, would you?”
“Nah,” Pilar laughed. “Probably would’ve thought Ariadne gave you the coin to get me onboard, and would’ve been mad at her for something else she didn’t do.”
“She’s very pretty,” Cabrera said, “and an absolute lunatic. Makes sense why you two are together.”
“Appreciate it,” Pilar sighed. Was she really stuck making smalltalk until this was all over? “What about you, you got somebody in your life? And please, if it’s Alicia and Blue, know I’d rather not know the details.”
Cabrera laughed. “Those two are… a lot of fun, for sure,” Cabrera said, “and it’s awful nice of them to spend time with me. Before them, it was just me and my little vibrating friend for months.”
“Did you hear what I said? About the details?” Pilar asked.
“But no, haven’t had anybody in my life like that in a long, long time,” Cabrera said. “That part of my life’s probably over.”
“Why? You’re not bad-looking yourself, or at least you wouldn’t be if you got a good night’s sleep,” Pilar said, “and I know plenty of girls and more than a couple guys who’d go gaga for somebody your size, so it’s not that.”
Cabrera winced. “Never had any complaints on that front before.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean any offense,” Pilar said. “I’m just… look, I’m not trying to be too nice to you, here, you’re still keeping me prisoner, but, I don’t know, man, if you wanted somebody, you wouldn’t have much trouble finding them.”
“I never did,” Cabrera said, “but it’s over, now. I can’t leave this apartment, ever, and most of the people I talk to online think I’m a middle-aged white guy named Frank. Frank gets his share of takers, Cabrera, not so much.”
“What about Cherry?” Pilar asked. “You trusted her enough to tell her where your apartment was, even to invite strangers there.”
Cabrera laughed. “I should be so lucky.”
Pilar dropped the subject, she wasn’t getting anywhere with it. “Why can’t you ever leave this apartment?”
There was a loud knock at the door, and Cabrera perked up as though under attack, then relaxed when she realized it was just the food delivery.
“I gotta survive,” Cabrera said, peering through the peephole of the door to make sure the delivery guy was gone before she cracked the door to grab the food. “Too many people paid too high a price for me to die now.”
“And you’ll die, if you leave this apartment?” Pilar asked.
“You ever been in a store that didn’t have a security camera?” Cabrera asked. “Their eyes are everywhere, and if even one of them spots me, I’m a dead woman walking.”
“Who’s ‘they?’” Pilar asked.
“Pray you never know,” Cabrera said darkly. “Come on, eat your food. I got you garlic naan.”
“Cabrera, if there’s people after you, that’s sorta my specialty. If you let me go, I can help you.”
“You know,” Cabrera said, “garlic naan isn’t even something they had, in India, at first.”
“Cabrera.”
“Immigrants moved all over the world, back when there was just one world, and garlic bread was already a thing, so they started making garlic naan too, and everybody loved it so much that it just became part of the cuisine.”
“Cabrera, I’m serious.”
“I’m not letting you go, mae,” she said. “You’re offering me more risk, they’re offering me a sure thing. Too good to pass up. Besides, you can’t help me. Not with them. Nobody can fight them.”
“Can I at least talk to her?” Pilar asked. “Can you, I don’t know, get Alicia on the horn, get her in a room with Ariadne, and let me tell her I’m okay?”
“You’re not okay,” Cabrera said, “but I’ll pass whatever messages you’ve got along to Alicia later tonight, and get an update if I can.”
“Thank you,” Pilar said genuinely. “I know she can handle herself, I know she’s in good hands, I just… hate to feel this powerless.”
“We’re stuck together for the foreseeable,” Cabrera said. “Might as well try our best to be friendly, you know? Doesn’t have to be so horrible, spending time together.”
“Don’t push it,” Pilar replied.
ARIADNE’S LAB
“You heard the woman,” Blue said, as Alicia’s hologram flickered away so she could resume her duties as a spacecraft operator, “Pilar’s fine, and she doesn’t think you sent her away.”
“I wish she was here with us,” Ariadne said. “If I had gone through with this plan, this is around where I’d be realizing what a mistake it was.”
“Kid, you and I both know she’s always too eager to sacrifice herself to protect you,” Blue said. “Frankly, it’s about time somebody gave her a taste.”
Ariadne looked at the continuous chirping on the long-range comms. The enemy’s flagship was still being held at bay by the defense turrets, under Alicia’s direction, but Ariadne estimated they’d only hold for another day or so. The chirp was incessant. The enemy was hailing her, and all of her attempts to block the hail had proven futile.
“You really ain’t gonna answer her?” Blue asked. “How long are you gonna ghost yourself?”
“I know how she thinks, Blue,” Ariadne said. “I designed the system. She can send as many requests as she wants, but as long as I don’t open the floodgate, she can’t get in.”
“You think she’s trying to trojan horse you?” Blue asked. “Kid, you really haven’t figured it out yet, have you?”
Ariadne said nothing, knowing it always grated her when Blue was right about something. Unfortunately for her, this didn’t stop Blue from powering through.
“The system recognizes her as you,” Blue said. “That’s why she can countermand your order to block her number. The very fact that she can hail you means if she wanted to take over your system, it’d be taken over by now.”
“Even with that ship of hers, she doesn’t have the processing power to take over the station and fend off the defenses,” Ariadne said. “Alicia could blow her out of the sky in seconds.”
“So why not answer it?” Blue challenged.
“She’s not concerned about her physical body,” Ariadne said. “As long as her mind gets through, she’s got no need for that ship or the body onboard it. Like I said, I know how she thinks. Letting her into the station’s network would be like letting her bypass all the defenses we’ve spent the past two months setting up.”
“What aren’t you understanding about ‘she could just brute-force her way in?’ You’re the same person, how is she smarter than you?”
Ariadne considered the chirp again. “Taryn’s Rubicon code will confound her cyber-assault for the time being,” she said. “If she could hijack our systems, she wouldn’t be waiting for me to accept the call.”
“You know, I know how you think, too,” Blue said. “I know you’re scared to talk to her.”
“Watch yourself, Blue,” she said simply.
“No chance, short stack,” Blue said, “you’re avoiding her because you don’t want to hear what she’s got to say.”
Ariadne snapped at her. “No shit, Blue! Why the hell would I want to meet the version of me who failed to save Pilar?”
Blue recoiled. Ordinarily, she’d be proud of Ariadne for mouthing off to her like this, but under the circumstances, she wasn’t particularly enthused by it.
“Your daughter was brave enough to face that. Lived with that version of herself for two months,” Blue said. “Sweets too. Why shouldn’t you have to take a goddamn phone call?”
Ariadne bristled at this, and pushed her face up close to Blue’s. “I was your protege,” she said, “same way Ghostrunner’s mine. You want to give it a try? We can dial up a version of you who loved someone you couldn’t save, see how you like getting a call from them every five minutes?”
Blue simply put her arms around Ariadne. “Kid,” she said softly, and gave her a gentle squeeze “you forget who you’re talking to? I don’t need a time machine to meet that version of me, I see her in the mirror every morning.”
Tears came to Ariadne’s eyes.
“Maria,” Blue said. “Ilias. Benny. Hell, I’d start listing off my kids, but I don’t want to cry in front of you. You can do this, kid, I know you can.”
“I’m sorry, Blue,” she said.
“It’s okay, kid,” she said, “it’s okay.”
“I’m not strong enough to face her,” she said, “I’m sorry I let you down.”
“You could never let me down,” Blue replied.
Ariadne wiped away a stream of tears. “I’m gonna have to take that call, eventually,” she said. “But what the hell would I even say to her? Tell her Pilar isn’t here, and there’s no way to find her?”
“What if somebody else talked to her?” Blue asked. “Somebody who could actually get through to her?”
“Unfortunately for us, Sasha and Alicia hid her away with some mysterious contact they won’t tell me anything about.”
Blue laughed. “Bitch, I was talking about me, and you know that.”
“Blue, no offense,” Ariadne replied, “but I’m not sure you’re up to that job.”
“You’re right,” Blue said, “I guess someone else just humbled you to tears.”
Ariadne sighed. “What are we gonna do, Blue?”
“The plan hasn’t changed, chica. We hold her off as long as possible, let her get in close, and then I play Pilar’s part in the plan. Fly for her command ship, fight our way through her defenses, and try to talk her down.”
“I can’t let you do that,” she said, “it’s too dangerous.”
“I’m tough stuff,” she said, “and you won’t have as easy a time gettin’ rid of me as you did with your little pocketknife.”
Ariadne looked at the swarms of drones periodically emerging from the enemy’s flagship, dishing out a few blasts here and there on the turrets, before being shot down, then less than a minute later, a second swarm. Surely she didn’t have all of those onboard, her ship didn’t have that kind of mass. Was she somehow manufacturing them? Where was she getting the energy? Mentally, she directed the computer systems to relay a message down to Spec Ops, telling the gals to work out how she was making those ships.
The movements of the small drones were exactly how she’d have programmed them, and left little room for error. Anyone trying to pilot through them would be shot to swiss cheese before they had a chance to return fire.
“She’ll be jamming teleportation within her perimeter, same as we are in ours. You’re a skilled pilot, but you’re no Spacebreather,” Ariadne said. “If you’re gonna do this, how are you gonna avoid being shot down?”
“I’m gonna take the Apanqura,” Blue said. “Teenybopper says Future Ari won’t fire on family. If she thinks Pilar is onboard, she’s not gonna blow me up.”
“I built the Apanqura,” Ariadne said. “If I can get a bead on it, I can disable it safely. That means, so can she.”
“I know somebody who can fly it so well you won’t be able to get a bead on it,” Blue said. “I’m sure the fighter bay can do without Alicia on drone patrol for one night.”
Great, Ariadne thought, now Alicia’s in danger too. “At least you two have your weird augmentations that make you harder to kill.”
“When do you think she’ll be in range?” Blue asked.
“Couple days, if we’re really unlucky,” Ariadne shrugged.
“Then I’ll be ready in a couple days,” Blue said, “just in case.”
“Have you noticed,” Ariadne said, “that she takes a break, every two hours, for thirty minutes exactly?”
Blue laughed. “Oh my god, you’re still doing that? That shit almost put you in the hospital back in the day.”
“The round-the-clock wakefulness experiment,” Ariadne said. “Thought that if I took a half-hour nap every two hours, I could stay awake and alert around the clock.”
“Yeah, dummy,” Blue teased, “you tried that running-on-fumes shit for a week and then you crashed so hard you almost slept through a whole day. If you don’t take the nap, the nap takes you. You don’t fuck around with sleep.”
“Apparently, she does,” Ariadne said, with a smile. A difference in their tactics was something they could exploit. She mentally issued another command through the ship’s computer: summoning Ghostrunner to the bridge to take over command. “I’m going to trust my beloved daughter to handle things in my absence, while I get an edge on our enemy by getting a full night’s sleep.”
“I’m heading down to the bar, get a drink with that lovely robot that’s seeing your kid. I’ll wake you if we win,” Blue said, standing up and heading towards the door, “or if we all die.”
Ariadne laughed. “Thanks,” she said, “nothing in between, though.”
The format for "Ojo de la Tormenta" will be slightly different this week than every other week!
Today's installment, "Chapter 16 - Director On The Set" will run as normal.
Chapter 17 takes place over the course of a week, and will be released in real-time. One update per day, starting tomorrow, and concluding on January 4th with the release of Chapter 18. You can read along live, each day, or you can wait until all six parts of Chapter 17 are released and read them all together! If you've been joining our chapter storytimes on Discord, we will be having a big storytime extravaganza on 1/4 where we read through all the updates and the conclusion. All are welcome!
As a special surprise bonus, there will be a companion "podcast" for each day. These podcast episodes are 5-12 minutes and only cover about half of what happens in each installment, so while I encourage you to listen and enjoy, make sure you're looking at the actual chapter too or you won't understand what's going on later! Links to the podcast episodes will be included in the chapters' posts, and the whole thing will be posted on ao3 as usual!
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion!
PART ONE – HERE, AND NOW.
“If she’s going to get here, she may as well do it already,” Ellesmere quipped as she performed a routine scan on the crystal formation. The distortion within the formation was, at this moment, nowhere to be seen, but her instruments measured a lot more than the naked eye.
It had been a back-breaking process, but after just over seven weeks, Ariadne felt there was nothing left she could do to better prepare her forces for the incursion.
The elder Mingxia and Ghostrunner were In the lab now, waiting for the result of Ellesmere’s scan. They intended to remain for as long as possible, in the hope they might simply lock the future Ariadne out of events entirely. They’d already said all their goodbyes, just in case they were forced back to the future, but they hoped they could buy enough time to be sure Pilar’s murder had been averted.
For the last act of preparation Ariadne had up her sleeve, she was laying out generator strips across the floor of the laboratory, using the same tech that created the crystal barricades that shielded them from the Catamounts on a job that seemed so long ago now.
They were designed to activate if anything resembling a portal through time and space appeared in the room, and encase it in a protective barricade. Ariadne’s decision to keep Spacebreather on the station meant she needed to be much more cautious, and the fact that Spacebreather insisted on remaining by her side in the laboratory magnified that tenfold.
“I’m in no rush for her to get here,” Pilar said. “If we’re lucky, this time next week, our guests will be able to head back home safe and sound, and we’ll never have to meet her.”
“Well, the anomaly is…” Ellesmere found herself in a difficult position here. The truth was, as far as her readings were concerned, there was no anomaly remaining.
In the future that would result from this moment, Ariadne would likely never attempt a time machine. The assassination of Pilar Spacebreather could not have been more handily prevented, and ever since the myriad fleet had arrived, the threshold in the crystal formation had been slowly but surely settled. The wound in time had all but healed, and the only thing that would derail this was if something picked at it.
As of now, the only reason the future Ariadne, the one who threatened the station, even still existed was the fact that the quantum trebuchet was currently occupied.
Her future was locked into existence until the moment the elder Mingxia and Corantine returned home, and the second they did, the future would transform around them into the new, better one, where nobody threatened the fabric of reality.
If Ellesmere told them this, they could return home right this very second, and the whole thing could be resolved with no muss or fuss.
Actually telling them this, however, would be considered insubordination. She had been given strict orders, and was not to deviate from them. If they returned home, the crew would no longer have any reason to tolerate her presence on the ship, and she would miss the moment she’d been sent to strike. She would be a failure, she’d be marooned in this solar system, and a new strike team would be sent along to trigger time-storms to wipe out the whole system with her in it.
She couldn’t risk that, but it still didn’t seem right to her.
“I think I’ll need to consult with my lieutenants,” she said. “If I mark a beacon for their return, are they going to get caught up in your crystal shield trap?”
“As long as they don’t use a portal,” Ariadne shrugged.
Of course, Ellesmere didn’t actually have to set any sort of beacon. Shubin and Daeschler were undoubtedly on the station at this very moment. She fired off a message to them, telling them to reveal themselves in the lab. They’d be here within minutes.
Pilar and Ariadne exchanged a wordless glance. They had been aware for some time that they were being watched by invisible observers, and were glad they hadn’t tipped their hand.
“It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from them,” Pilar said. “How can you be sure they’re even coming back?”
“We don’t leave an agent behind,” Ellesmere said.
“Unless,” Shubin’s voice cut in, as he and his partner suddenly materialized before them, “they fail in their task.”
“Had a devil of a time getting back in,” Daeschler lied, “seems you’ve been a bunch of busy little bees, beefing up your defenses against time travelers.”
“Say, did the girl with the Japanese comic book fixation ever get together with that stick insect in the goggles?” Shubin asked, as if he hadn’t been in the room when it happened.
“The chatter won’t be necessary,” Ellesmere said. “Daeschler, what do you make of these readings?”
Daeschler made a cursory, false effort at pretending to glance at some figures flickering across her holographic visor. “Hmm…” she considered.
Ellesmere was expecting her to tow the company line, and tell the assembled crowd that the threat was still present, that they would need to remain through the week as well. Daeschler, however, surprised her with her actual response.
“I think we need to run these up to Director Kalrax,” she said. “Our mission parameters may have changed. We’d be derelict in our duties if we didn’t give him a full report.”
Ellesmere sharply wondered what the hell Daeschler thought she was doing.
“I concur wholeheartedly,” Shubin said, “the Director needs to hear about this as soon as possible. How long have you been sitting on this?”
Ellesmere suddenly put together what must be happening-- her lieutenants must be setting her up as a failure to save their own skins. Director Kalrax had mentioned they had voiced similar objections to her, and clearly those objections would be damning to whoever was pushing them.
She was trapped. If she ignored this recommendation and the mission was anything short of a glowing success, the review board would point to that as the reason for the failure, and Ellesmere would be marooned as the agent in command. She’d have no choice but to approach the Director for his input, and she knew she’d be penalized for daring to question his orders.
Ellesmere hadn’t expected her lieutenants to go off-road like this, and certainly hadn’t expected them to throw her under the bus, but she supposed she had no choice.
She tapped a few keys on the device around her wrist, and moments later, a distorted, disguised image of director Kalrax appeared in the air between them.
“What is it now, Agent?” He asked, his eyes taking notice on the assembled crowd of humans marveling at the sight, however pixelated it may be.
“Director Kalrax,” Ellesmere said with a salute. “Having just a… bit of trouble seeing you.”
“The anomaly surrounding that station is stronger than ever,” the Director replied, baffling Ellesmere, who could see that the anomaly was all but dead. She certainly couldn’t mention that now, though, that would be direct insubordination. The director was signaling to her that he was cutting off contact, as if she were being marooned, and her only ticket back was to maintain her pretense until her objective was complete.
“That’s why I’m reporting, Director,” she said, lying for the benefit of the crew. “The anomaly is more unstable than ever. If I do nothing, this may be my last report before the mission is resolved, one way or the other.”
“Then I suggest you resolve it, agent,” he said simply. “You have your orders.”
Kalrax swiveled towards Ariadne and Pilar, froze for a moment, and then said.
“You have the thanks and gratitude of the Syndicate for your hospitality over these past two months,” he said. “I understand it cannot have been easy to quarter one of our agents for so long.”
“Agent Ellesmere has been nothing but helpful,” Ariadne said, perhaps too generously, bristling at having to show deference to such an obvious authority figure. Once this call was over, she could say whatever she wanted about him, but she didn’t want to piss him off when he could still send an army to wipe them out of the sky. “Our goals are aligned, the safety of this system is our paramount priority.”
If Director Kalrax had a visible mouth to form it, or if the hologram had enough resolution to display it, he might’ve smiled. “It pleases me to hear that,” he said, and a chill ran down Ariadne’s spine.
“Agents, stay the course,” he said. “You have the cooperation of the local population, use it, and don’t contact me again until the region is stable. If you can’t stabilize the region, don’t bother contacting me at all. Terminating.”
With that, the call cut out.
Ellesmere was exhausted by the whole thing. Amazing, how Director Kalrax could shut down her objections without even allowing her to mention them. She looked pointedly at her lieutenants, and realized she couldn’t currently stomach the sight of them. She decided she’d give them assignments that would both take them out of her field of vision and annoy the absolute hell out of them.
“Agent Daeschler, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Report down to Speculative Operations and familiarize yourself with their defenses,” she said, “and you, Agent Shubin, you stay glued to her side, and help her in any way she sees fit.”
Both of them scowled and looked just a little bit betrayed-- which Ellesmere thought was rich coming from them-- but nodded in assent and left to follow their assignments.
Good, Ellesmere thought, at least I still have some authority around here.
Alicia and Sasha entered the room together, a tablet on Sasha’s arm, and Alicia with her best cool, business-like bearing. “Good, Mingxia, Corantine, you’re already here,” Alicia said. “All systems are go for your Captain’s arrival.”
“I’ve cleared Alicia and the other pilots for battle,” Sasha explained, “and Cyan is handling the gunners as we speak.”
“Plus, with your auth codes, our automated defenses have been disarmed, reprogrammed to lock you out, and re-armed,” Alicia explained. “My handiwork.”
“You sure?” Ariadne asked. “Alicia, you’re one hell of a hacker, but you’re no match for me. I’ll make short work of whatever defenses you put up.”
“Of course you will,” Alicia laughed. “But my efforts are designed to keep you out, and bolstered by Taryn’s Rubicon codes. It’ll take even you several days to break through, maybe longer. Most importantly, now that we’ve got Ellesmere’s lieutenants onboard, we’ve used the everjade to create a temporal jammer around the station. Any time traveler attempting to materialize within our borders will have their navigations scrambled. Unencumbered, it’d take at least three hours to get to the station. With all she’s got to fight, she’ll be lucky if she gets within a week’s flight of here. When she arrives, we’ll have time to get to battle stations.”
“Perfect,” Ariadne said.
“What about me?” Pilar asked Sasha pointedly. “Am I cleared for battle?”
“As of your last exam, yes,” Sasha replied, “but I still strenuously object to how you’ve chosen to involve yourself.”
Pilar looked at Ariadne. She had promised she wouldn’t try and protect Pilar by keeping her away from the action, and she hadn’t been thrilled at Pilar’s suggestion, but her logic was ironclad.
“I’m the only one she’ll listen to,” Pilar said, “and if I’m the one she’s trying to save, she won’t fire on the Apanqura. I fly on her ship, make my way in, and talk her down.”
“And you’re okay with this?” Alicia asked. “You’re really giving her permission to do this?”
Ariadne nodded assent. “I trust her,” she said. “I promise.”
Alicia and Sasha made eye contact. Ariadne noticed. Pilar didn’t.
“She’s right, you know,” the elder Corantine said. “She won’t intentionally hurt her family.”
“At least,” the elder Mingxia said, “she wouldn’t kill them. She did shoot me.”
“You know what that was,” the elder Corantine said, her eyes flashing out of fear that this Ariadne would find out what was on the device currently imprisoned in the epoxy cube in Alicia’s custody. “When we were escaping our own time, she had the opportunity to kill me, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it.”
“It’s been two months,” Sasha insisted, “for her too! For all we know, she’s planning to blow a hole in the hull and recover Pilar’s frozen brain from space. Trust me, Cor, I’ve known her longer than you. There’s nothing she’s not capable of when Pilar’s on the line.”
“Sasha, I love you,” Corantine said, “but the amount of time I’ve known her could fit your entire lifetime inside of it.”
Sasha did the math in her head. Corantine was right. She was from twenty years in the future, and Ghostrunner had been rescued ten years ago. The elder Corantine had known Ariadne longer than she’d been alive.
Corantine’s voice was cold. “Catch up with me in 20 years and tell me whether you think Ariadne could hurt Spacebreather.”
Sasha was struck speechless, but suddenly remembered something. “Then why did you come back at all?”
Ghostrunner looked aside guiltily.
“She wouldn’t hurt her on purpose,” Mingxia explained. “But she can’t control everything, and her mind, brilliant though it might be, is blind where Spacebreather is concerned. We want to see them both get out alive.”
Sasha turned to Ariadne, “and you’re going to achieve that by sending her right into the belly of the beast?”
“Shrimp,” Alicia said. “Don’t.”
Sasha shook to her senses, and backed down without complaint. “Yes, Pilar, you’re clear for battle.”
“Thanks for your trust, Sachita,” Pilar said gruffly.
“Besides,” Mingxia said, “I’m still holding out hope it doesn’t even come up.”
“If we can hold up for another week, we can be sure the f--” Corantine began, and promptly vanished into thin air along with the elder Mingxia.
Ellesmere’s visor sprang to life with just about every alarm, alert, and klaxon it could feed into her senses. The threshold at the center of the crystal formation returned in full force. The anomaly, as still as a frozen lake just moments ago, was now a monsoon. That settled that: the only way forward now would be to complete her mission objective, just as Director Kalrax had ordered.
“She’s here,” Ariadne said, her tone as cold as the grave. She immediately looked on her long-range scanners and saw that a massive flagship had materialized just outside the range of their defenses-- great, Ariadne thought, she was lucky after all, or maybe she was just smart enough to know they’d do this and materialize outside their borders. A dozen smaller vessels ejected from the flagship as she watched, and got to work on the automated defenses.
Pilar’s voice boomed into the public address microphone. “Alright ladies, gentlemen, and anybody else who might be listening, as of right now we are at war. Battle stations, on the double!”
She set down the microphone.
“Don’t make me regret this, querida,” Ariadne said.
“I’m going to be fine, teso--”
Pilar didn’t get to finish her term of endearment because Sasha had snuck up behind her, and jammed a syringe into her neck. Pilar crumbled to the ground, unconscious.
“NO!” Ariadne said, and lunged to stop her. “I told you not to do this!”
“And here I thought those two liked each other,” Ellesmere quipped.
“You don’t talk,” Sasha snapped.
Ariadne ran towards Pilar, but found herself blocked by Alicia’s surprisingly muscular arms, and was pinned in place. She wasn’t prepared for this, and anything she could do with control of the station’s systems to turn the tide of the situation would prove fatal to Alicia, so she decided to appeal directly to them, in the hope she could get them to see reason.
“We scrapped this plan!” Ariadne pleaded. “I promised her!”
“You promised her,” Alicia said. “We didn’t.”
Ariadne struggled against Alicia’s grip, to no avail.
“She can’t stop us from keeping her safe, and neither can you,” Sasha said. “She’ll be furious, when she comes to, but I still owed her one for the years she kept me out of the action.”
“I won’t let you do this!” Ariadne yelled. “I gave my word!”
“Your hands are clean, Ari,” Sasha insisted, as two Whiptails entered wearing helmets that prevented her from seeing their faces. A quick scan of the security cameras on the station showed dozens of Whiptails wearing identical helmets. She didn’t need to review the footage to know that extreme care had been taken to ensure she wouldn’t be able to work out who provided the muscle. They picked up Pilar’s unconscious form and dragged her out of the room.
“It’s done,”Alicia said. “Are you ready?”
Ariadne breathed a sigh of relief. Knowing she’d done her best to call off this plan didn’t make her feel any less like she’d broken her promise to Pilar, but knowing Pilar would be safely removed from danger almost neutralized that sting. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
“Wasn’t talking to you,” Alicia said. “Sending her your way in just a few minutes.”
Ariadne knew better than to ask Alicia who her mysterious contact was. The whole plan, from the moment they’d come up with it together, had hinged on Ariadne not knowing where Pilar was being sent. While Pilar was off with Taryn’s away team, Sasha and Alicia had deployed a plank to an unknown location, along with all the supplies necessary to keep Pilar comfortably contained for the duration of the battle, and a hefty down-payment to the contact for their services, with the remainder to be paid upon retrieval of Pilar, when it was safe. The teleportal would self-destruct after Pilar had been delivered securely, and there would be no trace of her location left onboard for the future Ariadne to follow.
She could feel the defenses fighting off the flagship, scrapping the smaller assault crafts it was churning out. She looked through the eyes of the security cameras peppered across the station’s defense web, and marveled at the massive black ship, so dark light seemed to fall into it, visible only because of the intricate purple lights that spread across its oblong surface, outlining its many points, fins, and even what appeared to be an interior ring.
What impressed her even more than the future Ariadne’s flagship were the bright green coils of energy that had appeared to spread out from the place where the ship had arrived, like three-dimensional fractures in space itself.
“Look at what you’ve done,” Ellesmere said.
“This can’t be real,” Ariadne said. “Can we still fix it?”
“If you can stay alive for another week, maybe,” Ellesmere said, beginning to panic. She might not live long enough to fulfill her objective. “But that’s a big if. Your future self did a lot of damage coming through. The future is completely unbound now. Timeline flailing in the wind.”
“What does that mean?”
“Could be nothing,” Ellesmere admitted, “could mean there’s more future versions of you coming. Could mean the end of the universe.”
“Great,” Ariadne said sarcastically. “Well, one problem at a time. We’ve got an invasion to repel.”
“On your mark,” Ellesmere said, and ran her thumb along the edge of the service pistol in her coat.
PART TWO – HERE, BUT NOT NOW. THE THIRD FUTURE, TWENTY YEARS AFTER DIVERGENCE
“Sweettalk?! Sweettalk?!” The voice called as the universe swirled back into existence around her. “Zee?! Are you with us?!”
Sweettalk gasped and sat bolt upright. For the first time in decades, she remembered everything. The last twenty years, both versions of it, fought to reconcile in her memory, but all of it came into crisp focus as she came back to reality.
It was still twenty years in the future, that hadn’t changed, but her body had. She could feel the renewed vitality, it was like she was twenty years younger than it was just moments ago, when she’d been standing in the lab, arguing with the younger Sasha about--
The thought hit her like a freight train as she realized what it meant, if she hadn’t aged in twenty years.
“Sasha!!” Sweettalk shouted, her eyes flying open to see, delight of delights, her wife, alive and well once again. Or, perhaps, as she always had been. Yes, that was right, she thought. She could still remember every minute of the past, when she’d lost Sasha, but it was like the ghost of a memory. A sketch which had been inked over with cleaner lines. “It happened, I remember it all! You need to get Pilar right now!”
She whipped her head around to see Ghostrunner, the lines gone from her face, beaming that killer smile. “Did we do it?!” She asked. “Did we really save them all?!”
“I’m alive, and so is she,” Sasha said urgently, “but our work isn’t done just yet. Pilar and Alicia are downstairs, ready for you.”
“They’re already prepared for our arrival?!” Sweettalk asked. “Even we didn’t know when we’d be back.”
“We’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” she said darkly.
“What do you mean, our work isn’t done?” Ghostrunner asked, and then they both remembered the new version of events. The event they’d been preparing to fix, in this brave new future, for the past twenty years. Ellesmere, standing over Ariadne’s corpse, with a smoking gun in her hand.
“No,” Sweettalk said. “No, no, we can’t have failed again.”
“She didn’t live long enough to build the machine,” Ghostrunner said, “we can’t go back this time.”
“Snap out of it,” Sasha insisted. “We have work to do, remember?”
The work. The plan! It came flooding back to them. How could they forget? They’d been waiting for it for twenty years!
They hadn’t been the only travelers who would’ve been pulled back from the past when their Ariadne forced her way through. The chip in Ariadne’s brain had been wiped clean when Ellesmere killed her, but it was still functional, and the version of it that had been forced back with them was encased in three layers of the same everjade that allowed them to remember the last iteration of their lives.
If their memories had returned to their bodies in this new future, then the chip would now bear a digital simulacrum of Ariadne’s consciousness, fully equipped with the schematics for the construction of a time machine, and ruthlessly eager to do exactly that.
They rushed down to meet Pilar in the war room, where she sat, grinning ear to ear. She held up the piece of everjade Ariadne had fashioned into a necklace for her all those years ago. She wondered if wearing it, when the timeline shift happened, would even work, and she was overjoyed that it did.
“I remember the old futures, too,” she said, “the parts of them I was alive for, anyway.”
“Really?” Ghostrunner asked. “What’ve you got?”
“The version of me who got shot,” Pilar said, “she saw the assassin, through the portal.”
Sweettalk gasped. “Do you mean--”
“That’s right,” Pilar said, “I know exactly who killed me.”
PART THREE – NOW, BUT NOT HERE
Pilar’s head spun as she came back round to consciousness, slowly at first, but then rapidly, as if breaking through the surface after nearly drowning. She was on a soft bed, but her wrists and ankles were restrained. She screamed just about every obscenity she could think of, but it was no good. She couldn’t break loose of the restraints.
Around her was a rather shabby, small apartment. The windows were blacked out, the lights kept dim, except for somewhere near half a dozen blaring holographic computer monitors which made the silhouette of her tiny warden’s frizzy hair look almost like a lion’s mane.
“Oh, good, you’re up,” she said.
“Who are you?!” Pilar growled. “Why am I here?”
“You’re safe here,” her warden replied. “Right now, this apartment might be the most secure location in the solar system.”
“She promised me she wouldn’t do this,” Pilar growled.
“Well, she did,” her warden replied, evidently not knowing that neither of them was referring to the same “she.”
“I’m going to get out of here,” she said, “and I’m going to get back to her. You’re going to be sorry you agreed to help her with this.”
“Doubt it,” her warden replied. “I’ve been told to tell you those restraints were developed by the gals in spec ops, to comfortably contain you specifically. And I’ve received a promise from one Ms. Blue that you won’t intentionally harm me, or she won’t ever speak to you again.”
Pilar was furious. She couldn’t bear the thought of going the rest of her life without speaking to her mentor, but if Blue had really made that promise, she’d be physically unable to break it without the warden’s permission. Her warden had to remain unharmed.
“How long?” Pilar asked. “How long will I be your prisoner?”
“Prisoner,” her warden said sarcastically. “Houseguest, more like.”
“So, can I leave?” Pilar asked.
“No,” she said, “no more than I can. This apartment is the safest place in the solar system, as long as you stay inside it. We’re stuck here for the duration.”
Pilar screamed as angrily as she could muster, until her lungs ran out of air.
“Scream all you want. Soundproof walls,” she said, “with the sounds of talk radio piped through them at regular intervals, so the neighbors don’t hear an eerily silent apartment next door.”
Pilar looked at her warden with unbridled contempt, and repeated her first question, which remained infuriatingly unanswered. “Who are you?”
“You can call me Cabrera. It’s not my name, but you can call me that anyway.”
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion!
Interlude - The Third Future, Two Months After Divergence
“I’m sorry,” Ellesmere said. “Believe me, it’s not like I’m happy about this.”
“My family will be safe?” Ariadne asked. “If I let you do this, you’ll leave them be?”
“Don’t you dare!” Ghostrunner shrieked, banging on the crystalline shields that isolated Ariadne, Ellesmere, and her lieutenants in Tosin’s lab.
“Your family is only in danger because of you,” Daeschler said. She and Shubin exchanged a look. As they had agreed, they would go along with whatever Ellesmere said. Whatever got them back to HQ and the director, safe and sound.
Shubin concurred. “Come off it, you never put that together? All of this happened because of you.”
“Besides, you don’t have any other choice,” Daeschler said. “Nobody’s coming to save you.”
“Unless you can think of a way to stop her having come through in the first place,” Ellesmere said, “I have my orders.”
Ariadne tried to reason with her one last time. “Please, let m--”
She was cut short by the gunshot, which pierced her brain with a stream of white-blue plasma. Her body crumpled to the floor, and Ghostrunner wailed furiously.
“It’s done,” Ellesmere said.
Director Kalrax’s holographic cephalopodian visage appeared before them. “Good work, Agents. Three to extract, approved.”
Sasha rushed into the room to alert her of the news that Pilar had found her way back to the station, and that she was furious at having been sent away. Pilar and her traveling companion pursued them closely. They all stood in shock as they took in what they were seeing.
“You…” Pilar growled. “You’d better hope I don’t get in there because I’m gonna rip your fucking guts out and strangle you with them!”
Pilar took the knife out of her hip sheath and began to slash at the barrier.
“You won’t get away with this! I’ll cut you up into bits and feed you to the damn cat!” Pilar shrieked, making no progress against the force field.
“She’s already gotten away with it,” Shubin pointed out sadly.
“Don’t worry,” Daeschler said, “the local timeline is so messed up, you’ll never see any of us again.”
“Black mark on the system in our records,” Shubin assured them, appearing strangely sad about how this had turned out. “We’ll board the place up like an old mine shaft. The rest of your lives are yours.”
“I really liked her, you know,” Ellesmere said. “I actually am sorry about this.”
Ellesmere pressed nine buttons on her communicator, and said three words into it: “Ready for extraction.”
The space around her and her lieutenants folded, and with that, they were gone forever.
The next few days were fragmented for Pilar. She barely remembered them, flitting in and out of them like some sort of horrible dream. She was aware that the future Ariadne’s forces were unable to fight two enemies at once, and that Kalrax’s forces had arrived, blown her out of the sky, and vaporized her body a few short hours later. She was aware that, true to their promise, they left the crew alone after they’d gotten what they came for, and simply vanished out of the sky. She wished she was unaware that Ellesmere’s shot had wiped the contents of the chip in Ariadne’s brain, preventing any possible restoration.
The chip, however, was physically intact, and had been removed as Sasha prepared the body for burial. This gave Pilar an idea.
She approached Alicia, with a solid piece of epoxy the size of an ice cube, with a void inside it where the future Ariadne’s bug had once been, in one hand, and the wiped chip from her Ariadne’s brain in the other.
“What if we could fix it?” Pilar asked. “What if we could set it right?”
Alicia looked at her blankly, and said nothing. What could she possibly say to that?
“It’ll take time,” Pilar said, “it’ll take a lot of time. But I have it all worked out. If you can build me what I need, we can do it. We just need time.”
Alicia sighed. “I’ve got all the time in the world,” she said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Pilar opened her mouth to speak, and then noticed the man Alicia was sitting with. A scruffy, bearded white man with long, gray-streaked hair and blue eyes ringed with dark circles.
But she needed to stay focused on making things happen the way they were supposed to, and couldn’t be derailed. I pressed my finger to my lips, and she said nothing.
Chapter 15 – The Ng Gang
Pilar woke up from a gasp from her disturbing dream, the details of which were already quickly flowing out of her short-term memory, rousing an annoyed Blue who was poured into the bed next to her.
“It had better have been a sexy nightmare for you to wake me up like this,” Blue said.
“No, it was… really weird,” Pilar said. “I think somebody shot Ariadne, and I wasn’t there to protect her.”
Blue rolled her eyes. “What do you think that means?”
“I know, I know,” Pilar said. “Ariadne always says dreams are just what’s on your mind, tossed like a salad with all your memories. I’m anxious about being sent away while she’s in danger, so I had a stress dream about it. That’s probably why the, uh, epoxy cube turned up.”
“Can it with that therapy-speak folderol, your wife don’t believe in jack shit, and it makes her dumber than she is,” Blue said. “Yeah, sometimes dreams are just random crap, but sometimes they mean something. Messages from the spirit world. Last night we cast a binding spell on the ripped-apart ghost of your wife’s future failure. You think a dream like that don’t mean nothing?”
“So you thinks she’s really going to get shot?” Pilar asked.
“It’s not always literal,” Blue said. “It’s a message. If you don’t understand it, it probably means you don’t need to yet.”
“And if I never figure it out?” Pilar asked.
“Then you’re one lucky fuckin’ duck,” Blue said. “Who shot her?”
Pilar tried to answer. “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck, the dream got away from me, I can’t remember.”
“Then it must not have been real,” Blue said. “If someone really shot Ariadne, I know you’d remember their mug for the rest of your life.”
Blue sat up, stretched, and fished through her rucksack for something to wear to the rendezvous with their contact later in the day.
“Hey, wanna wake up the loverbirds?” Blue said, pulling on a neon pink and blue top over her bare torso, whose sole strap wrapped over her right shoulder and around her neck, but left her left breast entirely exposed so that passersby could see the glittering golden stud through her nipple. “Feels like my tits have caused enough problems for them as it is.”
“You know, you don’t have to wear a shirt like that on business,” Pilar pointed out.
“I gotta dress like somebody Tess would do business with,” Blue said, “and so do Taryn and Tosin.”
“I’m not making Taryn walk around with her tits out,” Pilar said, “no chance she’s comfortable with that.”
“She don’t have to,” Blue said, “Taryn can wear one of my tops, not all of them show everything. Tosin, I stole some clothes for from the store.”
“We didn’t even hit the menswear section,” Pilar said.
“You didn’t hit the menswear section,” Blue pointed out.
Pilar shrugged, and knocked on the adjoining door between their rooms.
Taryn awoke to find Tosin already out of bed, and she could hear the shower running. She turned over to the bed’s nightstand and saw a pad of hotel stationery propped up against the lamp. While she slept, Tosin had sketched the Pincerna skyline for her.
To call Tess’ workshop a “workshop” almost undersold the enormity of the building itself. It was, in scale, much closer to a large warehouse, or small sports arena. Its architecture was brutalist and utilitarian, and its overwhelmingly intimidating effect was compounded by the fact that every single window was tinted to near-complete opacity.
“This outfit is the worst thing you’ve ever done,” Taryn said, feeling completely exposed and vulnerable in a flimsy powder-pink track suit and sideways baseball cap that offered none of the protections that her usual spacetight body armor would. “You had sex with my dad and put your tongue down my boyfriend, and I hate this outfit so much more.”
“Hush,” Blue said, “and he wasn’t your boyfriend when I-- hey, loverboy, you her boyfriend now?”
“Yes,” Tosin said, even more uncomfortable in his outfit than Taryn was in hers. “Was it necessary to get me a crop-top?”
“I thought you were Mr. Literal,” Blue said, “look, man, Pilar asked you if you wanted anything at the store. Mentioned clothes specifically.”
“Let’s just get this over with,” he said.
“Listen, kids, I didn’t mention this before but, uh,” Blue hesitated. “Tess is… a bit eccentric.”
“Look who’s talking,” Taryn said, and then gestured at Tosin. “Look who she’s saying it to. We’ll be fine.”
“No, I mean, like…” Blue said. “God, how to explain. You know how Alicia dresses like somebody’s fuckin’ history professor, but you scratch the surface and it turns out she’s actually a freak like me? Look, you’re gonna see her, and you’re gonna form certain impressions of her straightaway, and I just need you to know, she’s not what she looks like, at all.”
“Fine, fine, we’ll be ready for anything,” Taryn said. “Let’s go, we’ve got some spaceships to buy.”
They entered the black marble office for their appointment and were ushered past a far-too-fancy security desk and to an elevator that looked like it cost more than the average Titanian house, and moved so smoothly that the riders did not realize it had moved at all. The doors slid open and deposited them directly into Tess’ office, where Taryn and Tosin realized what Blue was referring to, and it’s not what either of them expected.
From her description, Taryn and Tosin had anticipated someone like Alicia, who appeared incredibly subdued and put together, with a thrill-seeking maniac lurking underneath that projected image.
Tess, in actuality, projected a very clear visual image in the way she styled herself: she looked like an unhinged dictator with far too much money.
She wore a bottle-green, crushed velvet tailored suit, with bright silver accents along the piping and seams. Her shirt was bright blue, and she wore a white tie with a clip made from a handgun bullet. Her short, feathered black hair just barely stuck out from under the crooked peaked cap with the Ng Gang’s crest emblazoned in platinum in the center. Her visible left eye was a pure green cybernetic which glowed bright enough to be seen through the lid, and her right eye was covered by a metallic black patch. Her black boots had the steel toes on the outside, and probably added about an inch onto her overall height.
Tess was, when they walked in, dealing with several of her assistants, a blend of professional-looking women in blazers and pencil skirts, and people dressed as eccentrically as her, and her mild tone and laid-back attitude was at complete contrast with the image she presented of herself.
“Look, I don’t mind sharing,” she said calmly, “but we’re just going to have to tell him that if he’s going to take my spam out of the fridge, he has to at least tell me about it so I can get more.”
“He’s stealing from the company,” one of her assistants pointed out, “you’d be within your rights to poison the spam, and if he takes it, he bears legal responsibility for anything that happens to him as the thief.”
Tess brushed this off. “He’s taking spam, not gold bars or graphics cards. I’m not gonna kill him for being hungry,” she said. “Plus, then I can’t use the spam if he doesn’t take it. It’s a lose-lose.”
Tess noticed them walking up, and wordlessly dismissed her entourage.
“Princess!” She exclaimed. “It has been too long! You need to make your way out to Titania more often!”
“Been busy with work,” Blue said. “These are my associates, Taryn and Tosin.”
Taryn and Tosin’s blood ran cold. Blue wasn’t supposed to use their real names. They’d rehearsed their cover story, gone over every element of their fake backstory and identities with a fine-toothed comb.
“They don’t normally dress like this,” Blue admitted. Another thing she wasn’t supposed to admit.
Tess grinned. “Oh, don’t mind that,” she said, gesturing to a small circular device on the ceiling. “Easier to do business if we keep everybody honest.”
The truth hit the three of them like a ton of bricks. They’d heard of these, but none of them had ever actually encountered one outside of a police station: a candor engine.
A candor engine was a deceptively simple device. Inside was a small psychic transmitter that affected the mental process which issued commands from the brain to the vocal chords. If someone attempted to speak falsely, the speech command would be unable to leave their brain, and they would simply say nothing. To the unprepared, it could even cause them to speak honestly, even if they meant to lie.
This was a problem for the away team. Their entire plan hinged on the lie that they were not affiliated with the crew the Ng Gang refused to do business with.
Taryn had to act fast to come up with a way to convince Tess to make her a fleet of ships without telling a single lie. She’d noted that the candor engine forced her to speak the truth, and only the truth, but did not require her to tell the entire truth.
“Taryn Bishop,” she said. “Callsign Uprising. I am the founder and leader of Faction Rubicon. We are planning to mount a naval defense against a powerful enemy, and we’re here to make you a generous offer in exchange for several hundred of your cheapest, most effective remote-controlled spacecraft, with as few smart features as possible.”
“Tess Ng,” Tess replied, “is the name I use professionally. I keep my real name private because you don’t need to know it and because I can. Who’s the palm tree standing next to you?”
Taryn intended to introduce Tosin as the chief fabricator and a valued member of Faction Rubicon, but unfortunately, the candor engine caught her off-guard, and even though this was technically true, she instead said how she actually thought of him: “He’s my boyfriend.”
“Lucky girl,” Tess said. “So is he here for moral support, or…?”
“He’s our chief fabricator, he’s here to oversee the manufacturing process so we know we’re getting what we asked for.”
“And what is it you’re asking for?” Tess asked. “Powerful, disposable ships, with dumb computers? Most people expect a balance of affordability and durability, and most people want smart systems. Really reduces the likelihood of, you know, spaceship explosion.”
“We’re in the market for quantity over quality,” Taryn said, “and our enemy can take advantage of any smart features the ships may have. We need something that can only be controlled by the operators.”
“Sounds like you’re in for one hell of a dogfight,” Tess said. “You have specs for the request?”
Taryn produced an envelope and handed it to her. Tess took a small letter opener shaped like an old Spanish sword, cut the envelope, and read from it.
“Looks like you’re in the market for the PX-80 Defender. Whoever made these modifications to the specs is one hell of an engineer,” Tess said. “Quick to produce, quicker to destroy. Cheap, because I can usually only sell them to chumps. But there’s no way I’ll be able to churn them out in this quantity, in five weeks. The energy costs alone--”
“I can help you there,” Tosin piped up. “Am I correct in assuming you employ Dr. Abimbola Adamolekun’s fabrication method?”
“Of course,” Tess said casually. “It’s the standard for a reason, she’s a genius, and a total smokeshow to boot. You should know, if that’s a Cytherian accent I hear. You must use it too, everyone does.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I left Venus to study how to improve on Dr. Adamolekun’s methods.”
“Really,” Tess said flatly. “You’re what, 20 years old? You think you’re gonna improve on the methods of a certifiable genius?”
“I do,” Tosin said. “There’s nobody in the system who knows her work better than me, and I know the problems inherent to it, and I know how to solve them. She’s brilliant, of course, but there’s a cultural bias in how she does things. Her manufacturing methods assume an energy surplus like we have on Venus. They work great if you’re producing ships on Venus or Earth, but out here, where we have to budget our energy, it’s just wasteful. My methods seek to optimize energy efficiency. If you let me show you how to do things my way, I can quadruple your output with no increase in energy expenditure.”
“Bold talk,” Tess replied, “and thanks to the candor engine, I know you actually believe it. If it’s true, we’re definitely in business, especially since a method like that will make a huge dent in my expenses. But… what makes you think you’re good enough to reinvent the wheel after Dr. Adamolekun did such a good job inventing it?”
“My research is sanctioned by Dr. Adamolekun,” Tosin admitted. “I was her personal protege from birth until the age of 14. I thought I could improve on her methods by attempting to achieve the same results under strict parameters, finding creative solutions to make up for the lack of unlimited solar energy.”
Taryn and Blue both glanced over at Tosin. They were aware he’d come from a powerful family on Venus, but they had no idea exactly how influential they were. His mother was a legend, but Blue had never known Tosin’s last name, and Taryn had simply never made the connection.
Taryn was, of course, thrilled that he was able to use his expertise and his influence to land them this deal. She knew she didn’t have to worry about the candor engine with him. He didn’t believe in lying, after all, and besides, he didn’t really know how to do it.
Taryn breathed a sigh of relief, satisfied in the success of their mission.
“Which is why she approved of my apprenticeship with Captain Ariadne.”
The room was so quiet you could actually hear the joints in Blue and Taryn’s neck popping as they quickly turned to glare at Tosin.
“Ariadne? That rat?” Tess said harshly. “Deal’s off, I don’t want shit to do with you, your good-for-nothing crew, or your shark-fucking rat of a Captain. Blue, lose my number, then take your teens out of my place of business.”
“Okay, first of all, Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Blue replied.
“Wait,” Taryn said. “You don’t have all the information!”
“Only information I need,” Tess said firmly, “is that if the Ng Gang elders find out I did a favor for Ariadne or any of her associates, they’ll have my head for breakfast.”
“Ariadne is our enemy. She’s who we’re preparing to defend against.” Taryn insisted. She could get away with saying this, because it wasn’t a lie. “Faction Rubicon is a radical group of mutineers dedicated to standing against her authority, subverting her from within her own ranks, and in less than two months, we will be going to war with her.”
Tess looked at Taryn and found herself making the exact calculation she’d installed the candor engine to avoid having to make: was she hiding something between the lines? Was she actually saying what she meant? Of course, everything she was saying was true, it quite literally had to be, but her words were chosen politically. Tess didn’t much care for having to suss out whether people were shooting straight, and it grated on her to be thinking about this at all.
In her cybernetic eye, she could see the readings from the candor engine. Blue had largely been refusing to speak, so she wasn’t getting anything useful from her. It was registering normal levels of activity from the girl, the levels you’d expect from someone who’s accepted their inability to tell lies and is not attempting to do so, but still has to adjust her behavior from how she’d normally speak.
Her boyfriend, though, fascinatingly, wasn’t registering on the candor engine at all. He wasn’t straining against it, he wasn’t adjusting his behavior. He was saying and doing everything he would say and do even if the engine was switched off. Even mentioning Ariadne wasn’t coerced, he must have simply forgotten he was supposed to omit that detail of his life.
“You,” Tess said, pointing directly at him. “Is what she’s saying true?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation.
“Is Ariadne a threat to you?” She asked. “Will these ships really help you defeat her?”
“Yes, and yes” he repeated.
“And is that the whole truth?” Tess asked.
Again, without hesitation, Tosin replied “No.” Blue and Taryn snapped to look at him again. “I could spend all day here explaining the situation and still would not have told you the whole truth. Nothing we ever say is the whole truth. Everything in the universe is much larger than any number of words can possibly convey.”
Taryn wondered briefly if this is why Tosin always attempted to over-explain things. A bid to be understood, in the face of a firm belief that it was impossible to ever tell the whole truth.
Tess could see in the readings that this was exactly the answer he would’ve given with no candor engine. She was satisfied that he could be trusted when he verified their statements.
“Deal’s back on,” she said, “as long as he does the talking from here on out.”
Taryn turned to him for permission. He nodded. “Deal,” she said. “When can we start production?”
Tess smiled. “Let’s take a trip downstairs,” she said. “Let your man show his methods to my boys, and see if we can’t get the first batch underway tonight.”
The next five weeks were an arduous affair for the crew, but especially for the captain. Ariadne was putting in her hours in the holo-simulator until the entire crew was prepared to take her on in an all-out naval dogfight. After this, she would have a debrief with the elder Corantine and Mingxia to learn as much as she could about the future from which they’d come, and the version of her they’d be facing.
The elder Corantine and the younger Ghostrunner spent much of their time together, in silence, but also spent as much of their time socially as they could with Ariadne. Corantine valued having an opportunity to reconnect with her mother, and Ghostrunner’s newfound knowledge of the future made her appreciate the time they had together all the more.
After spending some quality time with both iterations of her daughter, she would visit the lab and consult with Ellesmere on the status of the everjade formation and threshold anomaly within. The readings were steadily growing in intensity, signaling that their time was running out until their enemy arrived, but the truth was they would have no way of knowing how close to the two-month mark it would happen.
She and Ellesmere would then retire to the mess hall and have a meal with the assembled crew. She would guide Ellesmere on how to navigate a conversation without getting hit, and Ellesmere, now willing to share small nuggets of her life and experience as an alien time agent, was actually managing to hit it off with some members of the crew. She had gone, in the space of a month, from “universally hated” to “halfheartedly tolerated,” and then finally to “almost like a friend, but one who annoys you.”
Her next stop would be to Alicia’s armory, where she would consult with Alicia and Sasha on the progress of their ongoing project, and the three of them would have a drink together, or else just unwind from the day. Alicia had set up stations in the fighter bay which would allow one pilot and one gunner to control up to a hundred ships at once. She would train the pilots, and Sweettalk would train the gunners, and when Faction Rubicon arrived with their fleet of 10,000 ships, their small army of 200 operators would be equipped to direct the entire contingent.
She would then step into the locker, to have a long conversation with Pilar, who would update her on the progress of the manufacturing mission, and the joys and hardships of supervising the honeymoon period of Taryn and Tosin’s relationship.
This was the most cherished part of her day, even though she couldn’t be there physically with Pilar, she was glad to have the ability to hold her, and kiss her, and speak to her as if they were in the same room. Sometimes Blue would be there, and pass along her love, and a few raunchy comments, but usually she would be off with that evening’s tryst.
Before they knew it, Faction Rubicon had secured a myriad of small spaceships. They were single-pilot crafts, no larger than a motorcycle, and because they had been modified to be controlled remotely, the entire space intended for a pilot was outfitted with a large power cell that could power their shields and weaponry.
Tess was thrilled at how much Tosin’s fabrication methods had cut their energy expenditure. The corners he allowed her to cut meant they were able to come in significantly under budget, and using the schematics he provided for wind-farms in Ouranos’ atmosphere, she could charge the Ng Gang the same amount for their vehicles and weaponry and turn four times as much profit. At those rates, she might’ve almost forgiven the fact that they were there on Ariadne’s orders. Only almost, though, so the away team was careful to keep that information under their hat for the duration.
The ships’ manufacturing was overseen on the ground, but the actual process of creating them happened on an orbital platform, so that storage wouldn’t be a concern. A fleet of 10,000 PX-80 Defenders departing from Titania was hardly noteworthy, it was the spacecraft manufacturing capital of the seedy underworld, so to any outside observers, the only thing it would signal was that the Ng Gang was beefing up their security. They were fine with this, especially since it kept their competition scared, and they got a cut of Tess’ profits. If it also hurt Ariadne’s Angels, they would consider that a win-win.
Nonetheless, the away team’s return would happen on the Apanqura. Their myriad swarm was set to follow it wherever it went in the system, and it took them only a few days to tow them all the way back home, to their hidden fortress tucked away between Mars and Jupiter.
Pilar was just glad to be back home, able to sleep in her own bed, with her wife, and not in a crappy motel.
“I appreciated the time with Blue, though,” Pilar said, Ariadne massaging the tension of the past month out of her shoulders. “The last time I got to stay with her for so long was-- remember the Ben Adair concert?”
“Everything seems to come back to it, these days,” Ariadne said. “You know, outside this station, I’m not sure how many people even remember him, and we must’ve brought up his music, what, a dozen times in the past month? I was just telling Ghostrunner about when we met him. Great story, sad ending.”
“Happier ending, now,” Pilar said. “I forgot to tell you, this morning before we headed back. Blue took Taryn out for breakfast and then they went out to a movie. She said she’d made a promise to her dad, and you know how she is about promises.”
Ariadne smiled. She was glad Pilar kept this news to herself, to tell her in person. Alicia would certainly be thrilled they were getting along better, as well. “They got through a meal and a movie without biting each other’s heads off?”
“A miracle, I know,” Pilar said. “Even seemed to have a good time!”
“So you spent the whole morning, just you and Tosin?” Ariadne asked. “How was that?”
“I’ve never heard that boy talk so much,” Pilar laughed. “Well, okay, I did most of the work in the conversation.”
Ariadne shrugged her own shoulders. “You do have a way of helping people with… unique brain wiring come out of their shells.”
“He reminds me a lot of you,” she said. “Like, what you’d be, if your parents were better people. Better parents.”
“Do you think I would’ve found you?” Ariadne asked. “If I had supportive, decent parents like Tosin’s, I never would’ve run away from home. Do you think we’d even know each other?”
“Tosin ran away too,” Pilar pointed out. “Besides, if you had better parents, my parents would still be alive. I’d probably be running the shop with my dad, my mom on the grill, Sasha working at some ritzy hospital revolutionizing the field of medicine. Maybe one day, you come to visit Mars, you stop into the shop for a sandwich, our eyes meet over the register… Yeah, that’s what I think would’ve happened. I think we find each other no matter what. Your parents being decent people is about the least likely thing I can imagine, and even in that world, I think we’re together.”
“Reminds me, I had a dream about your parents a while back,” Ariadne told her.
“Oh yeah?” Pilar said. “I love when they show up in dreams. How are they doing?”
“Your mom cooked me a pan con chicharrón, as it happens,” Ariadne said. “I think I saw you peeking around a door, you were just a little girl.”
“Sounds like me,” she laughed. “I was a shy kid, and always had a weakness for pretty girls. I take after my dad.”
“Sent a recipe to Cookie,” Ariadne said, “asked her to make them for your big homecoming. She should be up with them soon.”
“Pan con chicharrón, man,” Pilar said. “I haven’t had one of those in years. Did I ever tell you, my mom used to have these little laminated recipe cards to give out at the shop. She was on a one-woman campaign to--”
“--Make sure every household on Mars knows how to cook like they did back in la patria,” Ariadne finished.
“So I did tell you,” Pilar chuckled.
“No, you didn’t,” Ariadne said. “Your dad told me that, in the dream. Pilar…”
“Yes, querida?”
Ariadne spoke nervously. “Every couple of nights, now, I’ve been having these really vivid dreams. Everyone on the station’s been getting them, ever since the everjade formation showed up. Sasha dreaming about getting hotpot in Xiagu, seeing Sweettalk’s parents and grandparents there, celebrating her mom’s pregnancy. I dreamed about Haiti, holding Ghostrunner as a baby. Sweettalk dreamed about your parents’ shop, too, and Ghostrunner’s had dreams about both of our families… Have you been having strange dreams lately?”
“I’ve had a few, yeah,” Pilar said. “A few of them were pleasant, like… you and me, sitting in the back at Blue’s wedding. Some of them were a bit… stranger.”
“Stranger how?” Ariadne asked anxiously.
Pilar winced. She didn’t want to mention the one where Ariadne was killed, so she figured she’d tell her about one of the other weird ones she’d had. “I was sitting in an old Homeworld Marine Corps recruitment center, and Baltimore and Beam were there. They’d never met before, just signed up and gotten their assignment at Highwater. They’d gotten their hair buzzed for basic training, I guess old Flaxy wasn’t strict about that regulation once they were on the base. Baltimore was nervous, so of course she was loudly complaining. Beam shrugged and made some irreverent remark, and Baltimore laughed. Then, there was this big disturbance, one of the other recruits had failed the psych eval and attacked an officer. They had to escort her out of the place kicking and screaming. I swear to god, she looked just like the Nameless.”
“Sounds like her,” Ariadne said. “Did you tell Beam? She’d probably get a kick.”
“Texted her as soon as I woke up,” Pilar said. “She said that’s pretty much how their first meeting went, but we knew that already. I probably just remembered the story from when they lived here.”
“And the soldier who went section 8?” Ariadne asked.
Pilar laughed. “She says that happened too, although she doesn’t remember the soldier’s name or face. Just that she wasn’t very sociable,” Pilar thought hard about this. “The Nameless has been on my mind a lot, lately. She was probably the greatest danger we’ve ever faced, and everyone keeps telling us how we’re right back in the line of fire. That’s probably why she showed up in my dream.”
“Way I see it, you pulled the short straw,” Ariadne said. “I get to dream about your parents, you had a dream about the worst person we ever met.”
“Blue was telling me, while we were away, that dreams are messages from the spirit world-- don’t you dare make that face,” Pilar said.
Ariadne was seated behind Pilar, who could not see her face, but she knew her well enough to know it would need to be cut short.
“Call it what you want,” Pilar said. “Spirit world, temporal anomaly, or some other… unexplained phenomenon… we’ve all been having these weird dreams. I think they must mean something.”
“What do you think it is?” Ariadne asked, uncharacteristically letting the spirit world element slide.
Pilar thought about the dream she’d had, where Ariadne had been shot dead, and how she didn’t arrive until after it was too late.
“It’s all stuff we missed, that we wish we’d been there for,” Pilar reasoned. “You and my parents, me and Blue’s wedding. Sasha and Sweets meeting all the people their loved ones have lost. We’ve always wished we knew what the Nameless got up to before she conned her way onto our crew.”
“What’s that tell you?”
Pilar pulled away from her massage and made eye contact with her wife. “I need you to promise me,” she said, and then repeated it firmly for emphasis, “promise me, that you will not find some way to send me away. Don’t put yourself in danger to protect me.”
Ariadne looked in her face and lied, and Pilar knew she was lying. “Of course not.”
“I’m serious,” Pilar said. “I can tell when you’re lying to me, and I know you already have a plan to keep me away from the action. I’m telling you, I’ll find my way back, I swear to god, even if it kills me. There’s no one in this universe who can keep me away.”
“You can’t blame me for wanting to keep you,” Ariadne said. “You might die, querida.”
“So could you!” Pilar snapped. “You think you’d be broken by losing me? You think you’re the only one?”
“I can’t just sit by and watch you die!” Ariadne insisted defensively.
“Ellesmere said I wasn’t going to!” Pilar shot back. “She told you I was safe, and you’re still planning to send me away?”
“She told me things wouldn’t unfold the same way,” Ariadne pointed out. “That’s very different from you being safe.”
“What, so you’re just gonna send me away anytime we do anything dangerous?” Pilar asked. “Maybe you should just keep me sequestered for years and years, never let me do anything, like I did to Sasha, huh? Ari, we’re pirates, there’s always going to be danger. When we got married, we agreed we’d face it together.”
“This is different, querida,” Ariadne said. “I’ve spent the last month faced with the reality of what I become without you. The certainty of it. She’s real, she’s out there, she’s coming for us, and I’ve seen what she does to our sister, and our daughter.You think I want to be that? If we just get through this--”
“--No, of course, you don’t want to be that person,” Pilar cut her off. “You just want me to have to find out what kind of person I’ll become without you, is that it?”
Ariadne was speechless, and said all she could think to say. “I’m sorry. I love you.”
“I love you too,” Pilar replied, “even if you’re pissing me off right now. Don’t send me away. Don’t… ‘protect’ me, by taking away my ability to protect you. I’m serious about this.”
“I can’t promise that,” Ariadne said. “If I see an opportunity to get you clear of the danger, I’ll take it.”
Pilar sighed. “Yeah, I know,” she said.
“Would you do any different?” Ariadne said. “If I’m the one in danger, can you honestly tell me you wouldn’t stand between it and me, knowing you might die?”
Pilar thought about the omega contingency. How she’d lied to Ariadne about being willing to kill her, when in reality she would’ve risked her own life to mount a rescue, without hesitation.
“That’s why I forgive you,” Pilar said. “For breaking your promise.”
“I love you,” Ariadne said again. “More than anything.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” Pilar said. “Now… don’t break the promise.”
Ariadne smiled. Pilar knew better than to think her forgiveness would go to waste. She pulled Ariadne in for a kiss, and hoped, for a minute, that she’d have the opportunity to set this right before either of them had to protect the other.
At this point, Cookie wheeled in a cart with three plated dinners, her cane hooked on the push-bar for when she left. Pilar, despite enjoying Blue’s cooking on the mission, had missed Cookie’s food dearly over the past few weeks, and greeted her with a bear hug and a kiss on the forehead.
Something about the arrival of Cookie settled the argument completely. Her devotion had never been in doubt. She wouldn’t, for a moment, hesitate to sacrifice herself for either of them, and neither of them would ever forgive her if she did. Just by merit of being there, Cookie forced them to understand the other’s point of view, on some level.
“Say, Cookie,” Pilar asked. “If Ari had better parents, if she’d never run away from home, what do you think life would’ve been like?”
“My parents would probably still be alive,” Cookie shrugged without missing a beat. “I’d be working in their restaurant, and I assume you two would be our best customers.”
“Really?” Ariadne asked. “You just assume we’d be together, too? In every version of events, no matter what else happened?”
“Thank you kindly, I’m not much interested in considering what shouldn’t-have-been,” Cookie said. “What place would I have in a world where you two aren’t together?”
“Hear hear,” Ariadne said. “What good is a world that doesn’t have a place for Cookie?”
Cookie, blushing furiously, removed the cover from three pan con chicharrón sandwiches, and Pilar’s face lit up at the smell. She and Ariadne bit into the sandwiches. Ariadne looked astonished, and Pilar began to tear up.
“This is… exactly what it tasted like,” Ariadne said. “In the dream.”
“I told you,” Cookie said, “the recipe was real, I’ve got no idea how you dreamed it up.”
“This is my mother’s recipe,” Pilar said. “This is exactly how she used to make them. How did you--”
“—I genuinely have no idea,” Ariadne said. “And doesn’t that just thrill you?”
Pilar took her hand and squeezed it affectionately. “Do your worst, querida,” she said softly. “I don’t know many people who can best me in a fight, and I won’t leave without one.”
Ariadne lost her resolve, and conceded the issue. “I’m not going to send you away again,” she said. “I promise. I can’t have us both go down because we’re racing to jump on a grenade for the other. We need to be in this together.”
Ariadne was telling the truth, and Pilar believed her. Pilar was incredibly relieved-- no matter what came for them, Ariadne gave up on her plans to face it alone, and resolved to stand up to it together.
Catch up on ao3! All chapters posted there, shortly after being posted here! And feel free to join us on Discord for discussion!
Later that night, Ghostrunner found herself unable to sleep. It had been a strange week, to say the least, and there was quite a bit on her mind. She found herself making her way to the war room, hoping someone would be in there for some light gaming.
Unfortunately, the only person in there was Ellesmere, but tonight, she would take what she could get.
“You people have the strangest taste in recreation,” she said. “Supposedly my character’s girlfriend has been kidnapped, but in order to save her, I have to spend hours trawling through caves to find enough precious gemstones to buy the equipment to rescue her?”
“Well, yeah, if we just went right for her, the game would be about five minutes long,” she said, “and it’d end with your guy getting pancaked by the villain because she doesn’t have the right armor.”
“What kind of way do you call that, to tell a story?” Ellesmere asked. “I spend half an hour walking to a room full of bad guys, fight all of them in under a minute, and then go back to the ship to have a conversation with every character, and it takes longer than all the action bits put together.”
“Realistic,” Ghostrunner said. “Real life is mostly waiting rooms, and traffic jams, and talking about stuff after you’ve done it.”
“Not my real life,” Ellesmere told her. “I show up on a planet, do my little job, report back to HQ, go to sleep, next day, next mission. I don’t know how you stand all this downtime.”
“Downtime is a good thing to have,” Ghostrunner told her. “You ever been to a concert?”
“What kind of question is that?” Ellesmere asked. “Have I ever been to a concert?”
“The ‘yes or no’ kind?” Ghostrunner replied.
“Yes, I’ve been to a concert,” she said, “of course, on my world they were underwater and had a gladiatorial component, but I assume the principles are the same on most worlds.”
“Some of them,” Ghostrunner said, not really wanting to engage with the ones that weren’t. “See, I’m a big music lover. I leap at the opportunity to see live music, whenever I have it. And of course, the performances are magical, and the experience is amazing. But when I think back to the actual memories from those nights? What I think of isn’t watching the band onstage. It’s standing in line outside the venue wondering what songs the band is gonna play, talking too loud afterwards because our ears are still ringing. It’s the ride home, listening to the album we bought at the merch table. The actual concert takes, what, an hour? Two? But the event is a whole day of waiting, and traveling, and sitting, and getting there. That’s where everything really happens.”
“Doesn’t make for much of a game, though,” Ellesmere said, barely dodging a monster’s sword.
“Then why are you still playing?”
“Because I can’t sleep, and it’s the first night I don’t have to be in that cell,” she said. “And because I want to see what happens. Why are you here? Don’t you have a corner to lurk in until someone reveals their darkest secrets?”
“I already know everyone else’s darkest secrets,” Ghostrunner laughed. “Besides, most of the ship is asleep by now. Not gonna bother the people on guard shift. Vigil is catching up with my future self in the bar, Sasha and Sweettalk are occupied with the other Sweettalk, and Spacebreather is off on her away mission. You’re who I’ve got to talk to.”
“Glad I rank so high on the list,” Ellesmere said. “I’m starting to see what you mean about how all of life is just downtime. I’d forgotten what it was like to slog through time at regular speed, in the correct order.”
Ariadne slunk into the room and sat down on the couch to Ellesmere’s right.
Ellesmere didn’t break eye contact with her video game. “Thought you were getting a nightcap with your stepmother or whatever, you know, the silver fox who’s almost as good at building spaceships as you.”
“Silver fox pulled a double shift on the simulator after loading up the Apanqura for their mission. She had one drink, we had some laughs, and then I sent her to bed to get some well-earned rest,” Ariadne said, “and I wanted to give Vigil and Corantine some space to catch up.”
Ghostrunner smiled at this. She was glad her elder self was able to get a few more precious moments with Vigil.
“I know what I’m doing up,” Ghostrunner said, “what are you doing awake? Didn’t you also pull a double shift on the simulator today? Do you need somebody to send you to bed too?”
“I don’t sleep so well when Spacebreather’s away,” Ariadne said. “What are we playing?”
“The downtime simulator,” Ellesmere said sarcastically, twiddling her thumbs on the controller. “I really have to do all this just to get to the juicy conversations, and if you complain about it, she tells you about some of the concerts she’s been to.”
“So you want the juicy downtime conversations in the game, but not in real life?” Ghostrunner asked.
“I ever tell you guys about my first concert?” Ariadne asked.
“Oh my god, you really are her mother,” Ellesmere scoffed. “Can I play my game in peace?”
“Really?” Ariadne asked. “For the first time, you don’t want to hear a personal story?”
“I thought you hated this game.” Ghostrunner pointed out.
“I just can’t stop playing it!” Ellesmere said.
Ariadne powered through with her story. “My favorite rapper. Ben Adair.”
“Done a-that?” Ellesmere asked.
“Yes, congratulations, you got the joke,” Ariadne said. “I was fourteen years old. Blue took us. She’s the one who introduced us to his music, of course. Nobody did political rap like him. He’d spit out a few dozen words in ten seconds and every one of them would land like a knife. Got us backstage passes, we got to meet him before the show.”
Ariadne fished out her communicator, flipped through the “favorites” folder on her photos, and pulled up a hologram of herself and Pilar, barely more than kids, flanking a handsome young rapper, while the angriest woman ever photographed stared daggers at Blue in the background.
Ghostrunner squinted at the hologram. “He looks a lot like--”
“It’s a long story,” Ariadne said. “A long, sad story.”
“So, does Bantu Knot Ninja’s theory hold water?” Ellesmere asked. “Do you remember the downtime from that night more than the concert itself?”
“I remember the concert plenty well,” Ariadne said, “I idolized my mentor, and she went onstage half-naked and performed the most salacious dance I’ve ever seen with my favorite rapper while his wife fumed three seats over.”
“I’ve met your mentor,” Ellesmere said, “that must’ve been quite the sight.”
“But the thing I really remember is that apparently Blue had to help Adair with a personal issue that night,” Ariadne said. “Me and Spacebreather had to catch the subway back to her apartment. We stopped at this hole-in-the-wall fast food joint because we were starving and it was the only thing open in Blue’s neighborhood. Ordered some beef patties because we only had fifteen bucks left. They probably weren’t the best quality in the world, but boy, I was so hungry it was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten.”
“Hang on,” Ghostrunner said. “After my first concert, you took me and the girls to Queen Chicken and got us beef patties.”
“Rituals, traditions,” Ariadne said. “Maybe someday you’ll have your own protege, and you’ll take her to her first concert, and get her beef patties on the ride home.”
“This is the same speech you give everyone about the tequila pafs,” Ghostrunner said. “I think I’m starting to understand it.”
“You lot really care about the little moments, don’t you?” Ellesmere asked. “You know, earlier today, I contained a vortex in time and space that could erase a person from history, and you spent almost twelve hours repeatedly murdering your subordinates on the simulator. But I bet the both of you are much more focused on this little moment, of us sitting on the couch and playing video games and clucking like hens.”
“Well, yeah,” Ghostrunner said.
“Of course we are,” Ariadne told her. “The whole time you were containing the threshold, that was just you, in the lab, setting up equipment and grumbling to yourself. Me in the simulator, that was just running drills.”
“This, right here?” Ghostrunner asked. “This is what we’ll tell our friends about, when we’re talking about you.”
“It’s what you’ll tell your lieutenants about, whenever they get back,” Ariadne said. “This is that human drama you’re all so obsessed with. Most of it happens sitting around in a circle, between people who are just having a chat.”
“Damn it!” Ellesmere yelled, as one of the enemies in the game killed her character, forcing her to respawn at the most recent checkpoint. “I really don’t care about collecting these bleeding jewels! I just want to get back to the ship and find out how this romance plot pans out.”
Ariadne laughed softly. “You ever been in love, Ellesmere?”
Ellesmere hesitated. Yes was the truthful answer, but it would come with follow-up questions she wasn’t eager to dig into. No would spare her of that, but she sensed it would trigger a lengthy explanation.“It’s... just a video game,” she replied after a beat.
“I sent my wife away,” Ariadne admitted. “Whatever’s coming really scares me. I don’t want to see a world without her in it, and I’ll do anything to prevent that.”
“As long as you don’t build a time machine,” Ellesmere said, as if by rote at this point.
“I’d build a hundred, if it would keep her safe,” Ariadne said. “She could justify the existence of the whole universe on her own. If it comes down to choosing one or the other, I’ll pick her every time.”
“Maybe that’s why the anomaly won’t calm down,” Ellesmere shrugged.
Ariadne didn’t like this. She knew Ellesmere was lying to her, but Ellesmere couldn’t know she knew.
“My wife is going to die if she’s here,” Ariadne said, hoping to coax the truth out of Ellesmere. “Ghostrunner’s mother, and the love of my life. So, I’ll find any excuse I can to send her away, and keep her far away from where the killer will end up.”
Ellesmere laughed derisively. “Well, the killer has access to spacetime portals, so they can show up wherever you send her,” she said. She saw the hurt look on Ariadne’s face and something tugged at her heartstrings. “Ugh. I hate how emotive your human faces are. Look, I’m not supposed to say anything, but…”
Ariadne felt a surge of excitement. She’d finally cracked her loyalty.
“Your wife isn’t going to die,” Ellesmere admitted. “At least, not for sure. Someday, maybe, but probably not when she did last time around.”
“How can you know that?” Ariadne asked.
“In the previous iteration of the timeline, there was no anomaly,” Ellesmere said. “Imagine the assassin is a pilot; they made a routine landing in ideal conditions. Now, there’s a hurricane. No visibility. Slippery runway. No safe landing options. The only people who even can travel here, outside the Syndicate, are the people whose time machine originated in this iteration of the timeline.”
“But that happened,” Ariadne said. “If the killer can’t open that portal in the past, what does that mean for Mingxia and Corantine? They’re reacting to what happened the first time.”
“That happened in the last present, so it only matters in the last future. This is the new present, so whatever happens here will affect the new future. Their future’s being overwritten, the long way round.”
“And what if the assassin is using our tech? From our future? The ‘new’ future?” Ariadne asked. “How can you be sure I didn’t do it?”
“I’ve seen your time machine in action,” Ellesmere said. “Quantum trebuchet versus portal generator, it’s completely different tech, love. Your future self might accidentally kill your wife trying to save her, but she definitely didn’t do it the first time. Your wife’sin no greater danger than anyone else standing in her way.”
“Why haven’t you told my future self?” Ghostrunner asked. “The two of them came all this way because they think Ariadne might be causing their future by intervening.”
“Because they already know she didn’t,” Ellesmere said. “They used the time machine, and at no point did they open a portal. You think they haven’t figured that out? The two of them are trying to do the same thing the widow Ariadne is: save their family and fix their future. You know what the difference between them is?”
Ariadne piped up. “Ariadne feels she has to correct a failure. Mingxia and Corantine don’t. That’s why they’re trying to prevent it, and she’s trying to undo it.”
“Bingo,” Ellesmere said. “Say, what’s that one mean? Translator’s telling me it’s the name of a farmer’s dog, but I don’t see why that means ‘correct.’”
Ariadne continued, ignoring the question. “And that’s why they’re the ones who actually stand a chance of saving her. I’m compromised, too close to the situation. They’re just trying to change the past, she’s trying to get a do-over. Absolve herself of a failure that on some level, she knows will still have happened even if she manages to reverse it. That’s what I’ve come to understand, that I don’t think she ever will.”
“When she gets here,” Ellesmere asked. “Are you prepared to do what it takes to stop her?”
“I’m trying to be,” Ariadne said.
“Are you prepared to kill her?” Ellesmere asked.
Ariadne remembered seeing her mother, drained of humanity, slump dead in her mechanical exoskeleton out of sheer spite. “Yes,” she said.
Ghostrunner remained silent. She knew her answer would never be yes.
Which made her wonder what, if not death, her future self actually had planned for her mother.
“Okay kid,” Blue said, twisting the dynacopper wire one last time to secure it against the bullet. “Whenever you’re ready, light that candle, and let’s see what we’ve won.”
Pilar braced herself, and flipped the switch on the power cell.
At first, nothing happened. The hologram projector crackled to life, but for a moment, all it gave them was the faint prism of static in which crisp holographic images tended to appear.
“Could it be busted?” Blue asked.
“It’s not,” Pilar said. “She wouldn’t build something that would break so easily. Come on out, querida, I want to talk to you, and I know you want to talk to me.”
After a few seconds, the field of static flickered to life, and a distorted, glitching visage of a middle-aged Ariadne, head shaved and eyes obscured by the massive lenses of her goggles, appeared in the center of the room, her face expressionless.
“Hola, querida,” Pilar said. “It’s good to see you.”
The simulated Ariadne simply asked, in a droning monotone: “Why did you take me off the station?”
“You were caught trying to interfere with the operations of critical equipment,” Pilar said. “You should know, removal and investigation is standard protocol in suspected cases of sabotage.”
The simulated Ariadne offered no expression. “I cannot save you from here,” she said. “Return me to the station at once and do not impede me, and we will be together again upon my return to the future.”
Something about Ariadne’s glitching monotone voice rubbed Pilar the wrong way. “You’re… not talking right,” she said. “This isn’t my wife’s voice.”
“I am an accurate facsimile of both her appearance and voice,” the simulated Ariadne insisted, without changing inflection.
“Then why are you talking like one of Susan Weaver’s PCs?” Pilar asked.
The simulated Ariadne did not respond, nor did she register the question on her face.
“The real Ariadne would’ve taken offense to that,” Pilar said. “She might’ve even thrown her drink on me.”
There was no reaction.
“You came back to save my life,” Pilar said, “but you don’t seem to have the slightest reaction to seeing me. There’s no love in your words. No grief. No pain. You’re not my wife.”
“Correct,” the simulated Ariadne replied. “I am not your wife.”
“Then what are you?” Pilar asked.
“I am a simulacrum of your wife,” the simulated Ariadne said. “She offloaded everything but her intellect, her computational skills, and her drive to accomplish the mission. Her emotional attachment to you may prove a liability in her ability to save your life. I will not be deterred by appeals to emotion. She may love you. She may grieve you. I do not. But I will save you.”
“She tore herself apart to save me?” Pilar said. “I can’t accept that.”
“You will,” the simulated Ariadne replied. “You do not want to fight her, in her current state. In order to ensure my competence to complete this mission, she shouldered my burden in its entirety.”
“Drove herself mad to keep you stone-cold sane,” Pilar replied. “All that rage, all that grief, all that love, she feels it double so that you don’t have to feel it at all.”
“But I can fix it,” the simulated Ariadne explained. “I have all the data I need to build her time machine. Bring me back to the station, I will construct it using Tosin’s equipment, and your Ariadne will have the power to save you, if and when you meet your demise.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Pilar replied. “Building that time machine means the entire station gets blown out of the sky, and half the system dies.”
“Irrelevant concerns,” the simulated Ariadne replied.
“The real Ariadne would find those concerns incredibly relevant,” Pilar said. “She’d care about it.”
“I am not the real Ariadne,” the simulated Ariadne repeated. “I do not care about that.”
“The real Ariadne would destroy herself rather than let anything destroy this system.”
“Not without you in it,” the simulated Ariadne said, sounding almost like the real one.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Pilar said. “See, I know her better than you.”
“I am a part of her,” the simulated Ariadne objected, not changing the inflection of her voice.
“Well, I know her better than her, too,” Pilar insisted. “She has sisters. A daughter. A whole crew to look after. She wouldn’t sacrifice them for me, no matter what she tells herself.”
“No,” the simulated Ariadne conceded. “But you know as well as I do that she does not believe in having to choose between one way and the other. She will try her best to have it both ways. Even when all hope is lost, she will try to save you, even at the cost of her own soul. There is no her without you.”
“I can’t let you come back to the station,” Pilar reiterated. “If you build your machine, Ellesmere’s syndicate will wipe us off the map. That’ll kill me, her, our whole family. I can’t let that happen.”
The simulated Ariadne’s face finally betrayed an emotion: confusion.
“Syndicate? Ellesmere?”
“Oh, right,” Pilar said, “they weren’t a factor in your time.”
“Temporal cleanup crew,” Blue offered. “Somebody made a mess in time and they’re here to clean it up. And if they think that’s us, they mop us up.”
“Hello, Blue,” the simulated Ariadne said, her voice cracking and glitching on Blue’s name. “Where were they, when Pilar was killed?”
“Your time machine created a period of instability that prevented them from intervening directly,” Pilar said. “They had to go back a few months and wait for the incursion the long way.”
“Building the machine may result in your death,” the simulated Ariadne reasoned. “Unacceptable.”
“I agree,” Pilar said. “It’s why I think you know you can’t come back with us.”
“I must follow my directive,” the simulated Ariadne stated. “I must build the machine. But I must ensure your safety. How can these directives be at odds?”
The simulated Ariadne showed signs of distress.
“You don’t have to worry,” Pilar said. “I’m going to take care of you. You won’t have to go against your directives, because… you don’t have any options. I will be safe, and you will not be able to build anything.”
Blue explained, “the bug you’re in draws its power from a wireless current. Basically any building or ship can power it. We’ll put you in a Faraday cage to block the signal, and you’ll just go to sleep. Then we’ll encase the bug in epoxy hull sealant and let Alicia hide it away wherever she buries all the skeletons in her closet.”
“I can build the machine in secret,” the simulated Ariadne stated. “You’re going to see a fabricator for the Ng Gang. Let me loose in their facilities, and I will create the machine without the syndicate’s knowledge.”
“I’m sorry,” Pilar said, “I can’t allow that. It’s too risky. These are forces even she shouldn’t be playing with.”
“Tell me you wouldn’t do the same, for her,” the simulated Ariadne said. “If she were dead, you would not risk everything to bring her back?”
“I could study for a thousand years and never know enough to build a time machine,” Pilar said. “Besides, she’s a better person than I am. I’d do a lot of things she’d never do.”
“Please,” the simulated Ariadne said flatly. “Please, let me pursue my directives. I can find a solution to both problems, I can build the machine and save your life.”
“I’m sorry, querida,” Pilar said, pulling out her pocket knife, and cutting the dynacopper cables connecting the power cell to the holo-emitter, and causing the hologram to go dark. “Trying to have it both ways… guess you were more like her than you gave yourself credit for.”
“Kid, I’m really fuckin’ sorry,” Blue said. “That can’t have been easy for you.”
“It’s fine,” Pilar said. “She was right, you know.”
Blue looked at her with concern.
“When she was telling us about her escape,” Pilar said, putting something together, “Corantine said Ari couldn’t bring herself to hurt her. She shot Mingxia, but now we know it was just a way to embed this bug in her armor.”
“Babes, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Ariadne’s feelings for me are a liability to this plan of hers,” Pilar explained. “She took on all that love so this copy of her wouldn’t feel it. The future Ariadne loves me, loves all of us, twice as much as she did when she built that thing. She’s not prepared to hurt the people she loves.”
“I’ll be damned,” Blue said. “Her weakness is that she loves you too much?”
Pilar laughed. “Well, I didn’t need a simulated copy of her to tell you that,” she said. “It means we stand a chance.”
“How are we gonna use her love for you to stop her?” Blue asked.
“I’m not particularly interested in stopping her,” Pilar admitted.
“Kid?”
Pilar slumped down on the hotel bed.
“When we were young, and her parents were still alive,” Pilar said, “we had this agreement called the Omega Contingency. If they tried to recover her, she put on an explosive vest, which I was to detonate if they got her.”
“You never told me about that,” Blue said indignantly.
“You wouldn’t have approved,” Pilar shrugged. “Hell, I didn’t approve, and I hated her parents more than she did.”
“Would you have done it?” Blue asked. “Could you have?”
“No,” Pilar admitted. “I lied to her. If she was taken, I would’ve fought through hell and high water to get her back. Probably would’ve been captured and executed, just like my parents. At least I would’ve committed my crime.”
“I’ve fought you,” Blue said. “You probably would’ve succeeded.”
“I’ve always been prepared to die for her,” Pilar said. “I’ll never be prepared to let her die for me.”
“Take it from a widow,” Blue sat down on the bed next to her, and put her arm around her shoulder. “Nobody wants to be the one left behind. It’s a hell of a lot easier to be the one that dies than it is to be the one who has to wake up the next day.”
“If I have the opportunity,” Pilar said, “if I’m blessed with the chance, I’m going to try and save her. I won’t let her die for me. Not then, not now, not 20 years from now.”
Blue squeezed her shoulder, and gently placed a kiss on her forehead. “Kid, neither of you little shits is allowed to die,” she said. “I’ve lost too many of the people I love. So, anything I can do to keep you both around, consider me your fairy godmother.”
Pilar smiled. “Maybe just pray on it, for now.”
Sasha lay in bed, with the elder Mingxia snoozing in her right arm, and the younger Sweettalk idly scrolling on her communicator in her left.
The communicator pinged as a message arrived, and Sweettalk let out a light “yes!”
“What’s up, babe?” Sasha asked.
“Text from Blue,” Sweettalk said, “she just caught Taryn and Tosin making out.”
“Oh, you’re just gonna be insufferable about this, aren’t you?” Sasha asked.
“I’ve been pushing this for years, Sasha,” Sweettalk said. “Wake future me up, she’s been pushing it for way longer.”
“I’m not waking her up,” Sasha laughed, “this looks like the first peaceful sleep she’s had in years.”
Sweettalk grinned widely and tapped out an incredibly long message. It took long enough to type that Sasha took notice of it.
“You have no information on this,” Sasha said, “how can you have this much of a response for Blue?”
“Blue is not the only person I text,” Sweettalk replied.
“Tell me you aren’t describing Tosin in detail to Beam,” Sasha told her. “For context, or whatever.”
“Nah, I did that months ago, Beam knows all about Tosin,” Sweettalk said. “I’m actually texting the man himself.”
“What?! Why?!” Sasha would’ve sat up sharply, if such an act wouldn’t wake her sleeping wife.
“Congratulating him?” Sweettalk asked. “Pumping him for information, a little bit?”
“You’re going to embarrass him!” Sasha said. “He’s gonna know Blue texted you about catching them in the act.”
“No, it would embarrass Taryn if I texted her,” Sweettalk said. “Tosin will match my energy. I’d bet money he doesn’t even ask how I found out. That won’t even occur to him.”
“Ghostrunner is going to kill you when I tell her about this,” Sasha said. “Leave it be!”
“You don’t have to tell her,” Sweettalk pointed out, and her communicator pinged again. “There, see? Look, he thanked me for my congratulations. Actually phrased it like that, too, ‘thank you for your congratulations.’”
The communicator pinged two more times. Sasha leaned over to see the screen. “What’s he saying?”
Sweettalk read out, “apparently she’s sleeping now, but they just laid out the terms of their relationship in no uncertain terms, and he’s really pleased with where they left it.”
“Real romantic, that one,” Sasha laughed.
“Actually, for him, it kind of is,” Sweettalk said. “He doesn’t like to assume anything, and Taryn just spent the last hour outlining exact parameters. She’s got it bad for this guy.”
“So what are these exact parameters?” Sasha asked.
“Standard boilerplate stuff,” Sweettalk said, “boyfriend and girlfriend, fidelity is important, they’re gonna take it slow physically and see where it goes, blah blah blah.”
“They needed an hour for that?” Sasha asked.
“I thought you didn’t want to be involved,” Sweettalk said.
“No, I didn’t want you to be involved,” Sasha replied. “Now that it’s a losing battle no matter what I do, I’m deeply invested.”
“Yeah, they needed an hour for it. He could’ve assumed all of that, and she could’ve left it unsaid,” Sweettalk said. “But he never would, and she promised him absolute clarity.”
“Well, congratulate them for me,” Sasha said.
“Just did,” Sweettalk replied. “Gave him a nice little ‘attaboy Rockstar’ from you. He texted back a mango emote.”
“The hell does that mean?” Sasha asked. “Is that good or bad?!”
“It’s good, it means he’s happy,” Sweettalk told her. “I’ll get you in a text chain with him, you’ll get used to how he texts pretty fast.”
“I’ll never understand how that boy’s brain works,” Sasha said.
“Uh huh,” Sweettalk replied. “Hey, quick question. In that, uh, the old book you read, right when we started going out? The one Pilar got you when she shook down that Wagoner with the chain bookstore?”
“Dune?” Sasha asked.
“Yeah, why not,” Sweettalk replied. “Remind me, what was the thirteenth word on page 304 of that?”
“’Sacrifice,’ why?” Sasha replied, without missing a beat.
“No reason,” Sweettalk smiled.
“What?” Sasha asked. “It’s on the shelf over there, you can look! Go check! I promise, it’s ‘sacrifice!’”
Sweettalk laughed. “No, no, I believe it’s ‘sacrifice.’ I wouldn’t expect you to forget the thirteenth word on the 304th page of a book you read seven years ago just like that.”
Sasha’s nose wrinkled. “Why does everyone keep asking me random questions like that?”
Alicia lay in her quarters, staring at the circular light on the ceiling. Blue was away, most of the rest of the crew was asleep, and she was all but alone with her thoughts.
She looked at the ring on her right hand.
“How do you stand it?”
She understood the question all too well. The loneliness. The isolation. It had plagued her, every day from the moment the black bag had come down over her head, to the second she’d agreed to join Ariadne’s crew, and remained haunting her periphery from then until the day she met Blue. She shrugged. “You get used to it.”
There was silence in the room for several seconds.
“When?”
Alicia smiled sadly. She was already feeling Blue’s absence, and there would be no time for shore leave. For the next few weeks, her life would slip back into its cycle of work and rest, and the loneliness would once again creep into the tattered edges of her emotions. She could handle it, though. She needed to, for Ariadne’s sake.
“I’ll let you know,” she said.
She felt tears well up in her eyes, and brought her finger to wipe them away, but found her lashes surprisingly dry. Her finger pulled back and she saw no sign of moisture on it. These weren’t her tears.
“Thank you, for spending time with me. Nice thing to do, for a dead girl.”
“Anytime,” she said, and held out her hand to the empty room. She felt a small, soft hand close around hers, and she gave it a squeeze, but she knew there was nothing there.
The room fell silent for a few minutes while she sat quietly and held a hand that wasn’t there.
“Just a few more weeks,” Alicia said. “I promise.”
The lights in Spec Ops were all filtered through blue gels, so the gals who lived and worked there could work in their preferred state of darkness without allowing their eyes to adjust to light.
No matter how their eyes adjusted, they wouldn’t see Daeschler, who’d been embedded at the back of their facility ever since Shubin had left to tilt at the windmill that was Tosin and Taryn’s impending teenage hormonal clash. She was desynchronized enough from the timeline that she couldn’t be seen or detected by any of their instruments, but remained bound to its flow in real-time, and just close enough to the local “present day” that she could still see and interact with the world around her if she chose.
She was, at the moment, struck absolutely speechless by what she’d seen. She knew from Shubin’s research of the Divoratori War’s aftermath that this crew was uniquely experienced in reverse-engineering alien tech, but this was truly beyond the pale.
The gals in Spec Ops were calling it the “genetic spoof.” They had isolated the biomorphic code in Ellesmere’s DNA, a unique identifier sequence which allowed their tech to recognize their biological signature even as their bodies were transformed into different species whole-cloth. On its own, their gear would be useless to any human being who did not have the proper genetic credentials.
Using that, and their scans of Ellesmere’s equipment, they were able to crack the encryption, and build a device which would, when fired at a target, temporarily modify their DNA with a dynamic nanite-controlled sequence which could detect what signature was expected by any given device, and forge that signature. With a device like this, anyone could use any of their equipment.
Taryn had suggested the concept. Sasha and Cyan had provided and analyzed the necessary tissue samples. Ariadne had designed the device and sent the schematics down to Spec Ops so they could create a prototype in secret.
Daeschler looked down at the prototype device on the workbench, built into the frame of an old blaster pistol, but the plasma canister had been pried out, and a modified nanite manufacturing cylinder had been slotted into its place, allowing the effects of the genetic spoof to be applied by simply pointing and shooting. What a curious design, she thought, for something that is decidedly not a weapon.
She didn’t have to be a member of Speculative Operations to know what application something like this could have. This was a skeleton key that could blow the syndicate’s whole infrastructure wide open. In the wrong hands, this could even hijack Director Kalrax’s terminal.
She couldn’t just destroy it, or the crew would be alerted to the presence of a saboteur, so she took a full atomic scan of the device, and opened up her communicator to requisition extraction so she could report the device to Director Kalrax.
Before she sent the request, she considered the implications of such a device for a moment. Ellesmere was a company man to the core, she reasoned, and would never dream of turning against her superiors. She and Shubin, however, had been biting their lip for several days, ever since Director Kalrax had shut down their request to investigate Spacebreather’s murder.
They had reservations, and they had seen firsthand what Director Kalrax had in store for agents with reservations.
The rumor among new recruits was that traitors were forced through a threshold and erased from history. Of course, with the full training, they’d know how silly this would be. Such an act would undo all of that agent’s temporal interventions, which would likely cause a core meltdown at Headquarters, creating so many ripples that the entire agency would need to be recalled from the field to put out the fires before they consumed the Syndicate whole, if they even could after the collapse of HQ.
The reality was quite a bit more horrific. These agents would be converted to a species found deep in the recesses of a dying galaxy in a forgotten time period, whose bodies had so many powerful pain receptors a slight breeze would send them into conniptions. They would then be placed in a field which activated those receptors, and placed in a short time loop so they could be held in a state of constant agony until they became numb to it. At this point, usually after a few weeks or so, they could be reprogrammed as “effective” agents.
The traitors were the lucky ones. The failures, on the other hand, would be forcibly stranded in the region of their deployment, and left to be consumed by the time-storms, a method of death which rips its victims in half, dragging part of them kicking and screaming to the beginning of time and the remainder of them kicking and screaming to the end of time. This was an incredibly painful process which was not only shockingly non-lethal, but also went on forever.
Everything might turn out okay, but she couldn’t count on that. She knew that agents who ran afoul of the Director stood a better chance of avoiding their fate if they had an escape strategy. This device would allow her to fight back if, god forbid, it ever came to that.
She closed her communicator without sending her request or report. She then took out her own personal pocket fabricator, created a copy of the device, and tucked it into the lining of her coat.
Here’s hoping I never have to use it, she thought.
She would likely never realize that the device had, in fact, been crafted and placed there specifically for her benefit. From its inception to the copy in her breast pocket, Ariadne had placed the bait, and Daeschler had failed to notice the hook.
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Ellesmere was spending the afternoon as she had spent every recent afternoon: handcuffed to an armed pirate.
It was currently Ghostrunner’s shift, which was also a frequent occurrence. Most of the crew couldn’t stand Ellesmere, with her prying questions and strange fascination with the minutiae of their personal relationships. They spent their shifts counting the minutes until they could pawn her off on the next person.
Ghostrunner didn’t have this issue, since she actually had music playing in her noise-canceling headphones for once, preventing her from hearing Ellesmere’s questions, and her own tendency towards silence and stealth meant Ellesmere quickly got bored of trying to get her attention.
Instead, she sat in Ariadne’s garage, where the captain was recuperating from a day playing the villain for the Whiptails on the simulator. At the moment, the form that recuperation took was “tinkering with a junked ship she’d recovered the previous year.” Ordinarily, she’d be hanging out with Sasha and Sweettalk, but they were otherwise occupied with Sweettalk’s future self, and besides, Sasha made an effort not to be in a room with Ellesmere. Her oath to do no harm was often at odds with an overwhelming desire to slap Ellesmere across the face.
“Be honest with me,” Ellesmere said, “you sent the anime girl and the walking daiquiri away so I wouldn’t grill them about that romance they keep hurtling towards.”
“I told you,” Ariadne said, “we need ships I can’t hijack.”
“And you sent your wife…?”
“My wife is my first mate on this crew,” Ariadne said. “We’re co-equal commanders. If she felt her presence necessary on this mission, that’s her call.”
“Now, what’s the story there?” Ellesmere asked. “I mean, did you two start robbing people first, then fall in love, or did you just wake up one day and say ‘you know what’s missing in our relationship? Larceny.’”
Ariadne’s grip tightened on her multi-tool as it slipped loose on the bolt she was trying to tighten.
“Let’s talk about you for a while,” Ariadne said.
“Oh, I know all that stuff already,” Ellesmere replied. “What fun is that for me?”
“You know,” Ariadne told her. “People around here are actually usually pretty open to letting people get to know them. I met the triplets because they stole my identity, and now we’re close friends.”
“Then why am I having such a devil of a time getting anybody to give up the ghost?” Ellesmere asked. “I’m here for two months, just waiting, and I’m so bored.”
“Because we’re not a TV show,” Ariadne explained plainly. “You want take, you need some give.”
Ellesmere pouted. Ghostrunner bobbed her head along with her song.
“Tell me something about you. You’re a space alien, where are you from?”
Ellesmere sighed and relented. “World… Oh, now that’s strange.”
“World?” Ariadne asked.
“I guess the translator gave the literal meaning of the name,” she said. “Odd, that. Just as well, the real name doesn’t sound right unless you say it underwater.”
“So you’re from an aquatic species,” Ariadne said.
“Quite a bit like yours in shape,” Ellesmere said. “Without all this lovely hair, and all these these delicious curves, though.”
“Be normal.”
“Bit smaller, and I’m never quite used to not having claws,” Ellesmere said. “I had the sharpest in my brood. Not that I’ll ever see any of them again.”
“You can’t go home?” Ariadne asked.
“Afraid not,” Ellesmere said.
“As in, you’re not allowed to, or as in, it’s not possible?”
“Little of both, honestly,” Ellesmere said. “Technically, I was never born.”
“Is the explanation for that going to piss me off?” Ariadne asked.
“Standard syndicate protocol,” she said. “Our pasts bind us to where we’ve been. What if we make a big change, and our past self decides not to join the syndicate? What if we make a little change, and a slightly different version of us tries to join the syndicate? Things get messy when two of the same person are walking about.”
“You’re telling me,” Ariadne laughed. “So you, what, smothered yourself in the cradle?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ellesmere said. “Only about a quarter of recruits go that route. I applied a covert genetic modifier on my mother’s arm three weeks before she was set to conceive me. Sterilized her for six months, unstuck me in time.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ariadne said. “Sounds like a loyalty test to me. Prove you’re willing to give everything to the syndicate by wiping every other part of your life off the map.”
Ellesmere narrowed her eyes. “Of course it’s a loyalty test,” she said. “I’ve never once regretted passing it.”
“All your friends, your family, gone?” Ariadne asked. “Not one bit of resentment for all that?”
“Wouldn’t be Syndicate protocol if it wasn’t what was best for the universe,” Ellesmere said. “Doesn’t matter a lick how I feel about it. We’re the good guys, sometimes we have to make sacrifices.”
“At what point are the sacrifices too much for ‘the good guys’ to ask?” Ariadne asked.
Ellesmere scoffed. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”
“I’m having a conversation.”
“You’re trying to drive a wedge between me and my employers,” Ellesmere said. “You’re right, I paid a terrible price to be where I am. Every member of our syndicate did. But it’s worth every blood-soaked obol to be able to keep the universe turning.”
“I didn’t mean to offend,” Ariadne said. “I just… look, I didn’t have the best childhood, and even I wouldn’t want to erase it.”
“Well, you’ve got your business, and I’ve got mine,” Ellesmere replied.
“Are you starting to understand why people don’t take it well when you grill them?” Ariadne asked.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
Ariadne sighed. “Nevermind,” she said.
“What about you?” Ellesmere said. “I showed you mine.”
“I suppose fair’s fair,” Ariadne replied. “My mother and father were high-ranking government officials. They made three big mistakes in raising me. First, they gave me the finest education an obscene amount of money could buy, so I was able to hack into my father’s briefcase when I was eleven. Second, they shielded me from their politics so effectively that it came as a surprise to me when I found out they were fascist warhawks. And third, they were just abusive enough that I didn’t think twice before running off.”
“Where are they now?” Ellesmere asked.
“Dead,” Ariadne said. “They both committed suicide, thanks to me.”
“Now there’s a story I’d like to hear,” Ellesmere said.
“When she gets back, ask my wife about it,” Ariadne told her. “My parents killed hers, and she still took me in.”
“No resentment there?” Ellesmere asked pointedly.
“She might have resented me, if I didn’t hate them as much as she does,” Ariadne said. “So much so that I thanked her when she killed my mother.”
“I thought you said your mother committed suicide,” Ellesmere said.
“Well, she was a complicated woman,” Ariadne shrugged. “Point is, Pilar took me in and loved me, even though she had every reason in the universe to hate me. Even when they were stealing my identity, the Triplets were never our real enemies.”
Ellesmere shot her a sharp look. “You’re still doing it, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Ariadne said. “You caught me, trying to make you feel welcome.”
Ellesmere rattled her cuff. “Yeah, real welcome,” she said. “Practically rolling out the red carpet.”
Ariadne picked up her multi-tool and flipped a switch, causing it to let out a small digital whir. The shackle came off Ellesmere’s hand.
“Trust,” Ariadne said. “Don’t make me regret it.”
Ellesmere looked at her wrist as though it wasn’t real.
“You must be daft,” she said. “I could be here to destroy you all. You’re giving me free run of the station?”
“I could’ve been loyal to my parents,” Ariadne explained. “The triplets could’ve been loyal to their cult. Vigil could’ve been just about anything. You said you’re here to help, and I’m choosing to trust you. If I end up with a bunch of messes to clean up, at least I’ll be able to say I tried.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Ellesmere said. “This is the first room I’ve been able to leave of my own accord all week, and it’s also the first conversation I haven’t been kicked out of.”
“Well, it’s not like me to break a streak,” Ariadne said. “Head down to the mess hall, get something to eat. Find a group, sit with them, and tell them a little about yourself, then see if they don’t let you in on the hot gossip.”
Ellesmere stood up, and looked to Ghostrunner for her signal. Ghostrunner nodded in assent.
“I’ve got to see the away team off on their mission,” Ariadne said. “If you can do something to contain that threshold, make it safer, I’d really appreciate it.”
In the hangar bay, Taryn and Tosin had already strapped in to their seats on the Apanqura, while Blue kicked up her feet and chatted with them about everything she loved about Titania, the moon of Ouranos they’d be carrying out their mission on.
Alicia had just finished loading a motorcycle Ariadne had built for Blue on her previous birthday into the Apanqura’s cargo area, so they could get around on Titania without drawing too much attention, and was chatting with Pilar, who put something in an interior pocket of her poncho, thanked Alicia, and kissed Ariadne goodbye.
Alicia brought the mission manifest up to Ariadne, signed and certified that they had all the equipment they would need, the budget for any incidentals.
“Wedding ring typically goes on the left hand,” Ariadne said, gesturing at the silver band on Alicia’s right ring finger.
“What, this?” Alicia asked. “This isn’t a wedding ring.”
“So you’re still pretending you aren’t married, then?” Ariadne asked.
“Yup!” Alicia said brightly.
“Got plans tonight?” Ariadne asked, “my better half and your… other half are both away on business, I figured maybe we could get a drink down at Vigil’s.”
Alicia looked down at the ring on her finger, as though considering it. “Anytime,” she said. “That’s the beauty of this place. Never have to be lonely.”
Alicia laughed, as if she’d just thought of something funny, and then walked back towards the ship, humming a bar of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
Blue then sauntered up, took note of the ring on Alicia’s fingers, and took the opportunity to kiss Alicia goodbye, but unfortunately for everyone else present, this took just over a minute, which unsettled no one more than Taryn, who had only just learned Blue was her late father’s ex-girlfriend, and preferred not to consider whether she was quite so affectionate during their relationship.
The journey was short and uneventful. They saved some time by teleporting near to their destination, outside of sensor range so their unconventional propulsion method wouldn’t be detected, and fly the rest of the way. Blue had a great deal of opinions on Titanian delicacies, which allowed Tosin and Taryn to wordlessly avoid direct conversation until they arrived.
Their luck, however, ran out upon their arrival at the motel Ariadne had arranged for them to stay at during their mission.
“Me and Blue are gonna make a run to Winter’s for supplies. We’ll need food for while we’re here, any clothing you might need for the mission, and I want to pick up a few books to read while I’m stuck in the hotel room waiting for you” Pilar said, tossing them a small wad of bills. “Use this to pay the guy for both rooms, and put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door.”
“Aye,” Taryn responded. Pilar handed her a small scanning device.
“Perform a sweep for recording and surveillance devices immediately upon entering the room,” Pilar told them. “if you find any, hit this button. It emits a pulse that feeds any recording device an uneventful feed of a quiet, empty room.”
“We just… have a holo-scan of this hotel room?” Taryn asked.
“Me and Ari stayed here a few years back, had a quiet weekend, just to get the scan,” Pilar explained. “We try to do it in most localities. Only way to ensure we’re prepared if we ever need to rent space.”
Tosin chimed in. “Do you think it’s… I mean… is this the sort of motel where it’s likely they record the guests?”
“No,” Pilar said. “But every motel might be. At least if this one is, we’re ready.”
“Is this why the Whiptail recruits have to do so many motel robberies?” Taryn asked, “are those motels that you find cameras in?”
“Some of them,” Pilar said. “Listen, I really gotta go to Winter’s if you want to eat this week. You want anything specific?”
Taryn considered this. “Ramen?”
“The crazy-hot one, right? With the Korean hot sauce?” Pilar asked.
“Yeah,” Taryn said. Tosin shrugged. He liked spicy ramen, and couldn’t think of anything in particular they needed.
“Jesus, guess the apple doesn’t fall far,” Blue said. “Good taste runs in the family.”
Pilar and Blue took their leave.
The air on Titania was just warm enough to avoid freezing, but was nonetheless cold enough that the motorcycle Ariadne had built for Blue was already covered in a slick, dewy layer of condensation that caught the light of the neon-colored sunlamps that streaked every building this far out in the solar system. The scenery on Mars was all brickwork and faded murals, but in the colonial moons around Saturn, Jupiter, and Ouranos where they needed a substitute for natural sunlight, they loved a sleek, glass-covered building with lots of brightly-colored lights.
Pilar preferred the cold weather. Unlike her wife, who’d split time during her childhood between suburban Appalachia and her grandmother’s house in San Juan, both of which oscillated between temperate and sweltering, Pilar had grown up on Mars, which remained pleasantly chilly year-round.
Ariadne kept the station at a comfortable temperature for herself, which is a part of why Pilar always wore sleeveless shirts and breathable fabrics. Here, it was properly cold, and they’d draw too much attention wearing their climate-controlled combat armor. Pilar was comfortably toasty in an alpaca poncho and hat she’d received on a family trip, which she was sure Beam would be thrilled to hear she’d had occasion to wear.
Blue was characteristically underdressed in a leather jacket that stopped just short of the ribcage, a mesh shirt, and denim cut-offs, but if the cold bothered her, she didn’t show it.
Pilar realized why Blue wasn’t cold as soon as she got on the back of the motorcycle and took hold of her waist. Blue was practically radiating heat.
“Do you actually have augments just to keep you warm?” She asked.
“No, stupid,” Blue replied. “They also keep me cool when it’s hot.”
Pilar secured her helmet, gripped her mentor tight, leaned on the leather of her back, and closed her eyes. As rarely as it happened, Pilar loved riding on the back of Blue’s bike. Blue drove like a maniac, but as long as she held on tight, she knew they’d arrive safely. Until then, she could enjoy the small moment of closeness with this woman who’d shaped so much of her youth. The warmth coming off the soft skin between the fishnet threads of her shirt, the way the racing of her heart seemed to blend with the vibration of the motorcycle, and most crucially, the blackberry scent of whatever product she used in her curly, messy blue mohawk, strong enough to overpower the ozone smell of the motorcycle’s engines.
When she rode on the back of Blue’s motorcycle like this, she felt like she was transported back to her fifteenth birthday, when she’d ridden through the streets of Pincerna to a meet-and-greet Blue had arranged with her favorite actress. It was the moment when she’d realized this woman, for all her faults, was her hero, and she held onto this feeling whenever Blue was making herself particularly hard to like.
“Kid, you fall asleep back there?” Blue asked, and Pilar snapped back to reality. She hadn’t even noticed they’d parked in front of Winter’s Department Store.
“Sorry, lost in thought,” she said.
“Slick move you pulled, giving those two some alone time,” Blue said, walking in the front with her. Pilar grabbed a cart and idly leaned on it as she walked along.
“Honestly, that’s just a little bonus,” she said. “I actually wanted to talk to you about something.”
“What’s on your mind?” Blue asked, mindlessly walking into the women’s clothing department even though they’d come here primarily to get enough food and housewares to cook for themselves in a motel room. Pilar didn’t object, since they had time, and was always amazed at Blue’s ability to effectively shoplift while wearing so little.
Pilar pulled a small, inert device from the pocket of her poncho. It was about the size and shape of a bullet, and the seams on it betrayed that it could unfold to have small legs that looked quite a bit like the ones Ariadne used to get around. It was also bound with two metal rings that kept it from unfolding.
“Impressive tech,” Blue said. “One of our girl’s?”
“Alicia certainly thinks so,” Pilar told her. “It came with the future Sweettalk and Ghostrunner. Looks like their Ariadne built this.”
“No shit?” Blue asked.
“Future Sweettalk said she was shot during their escape, with a physical bullet. No bullet was found embedded in her armor, and the wound in the plating was scratched outwards.”
“Consistent with this little guy’s claws,” Blue noted. “I guess Alicia knew what to look for.”
“Alicia asked our guests about it, and they said their Ariadne used devices like this all the time, and to check Tosin’s lab. She found it trying to embed itself to the fabrication matrix,” Pilar said. “She gave it to me so I could get it far, far away from the station, and find some way to neutralize it.”
“Some bug your wife built 20 years from now scared her that bad, did it?” Blue asked, picking a hot pink crop top and stuffing it down the waistband of her shorts. “The hell was it trying to fabricate?”
“It’s what’s inside it that worries her,” Pilar told her, as they rounded the corner and entered the section of the store that contained air fresheners, scented candles, and interior decorations. “Underneath the titanium chassis, some sophisticated cybernetics, and about three layers of everjade, that’s the chip Sasha put in her head, before the war with the Nameless.”
“Oh shit,” Blue said. Her assessment was spot-on, since the chip in Ariadne’s brain was capable of housing her entire memory and consciousness. If it had been installed in a bug like this, it meant that, in some form, the Ariadne they were trying to escape was already here.
“I want your help trying to access this thing,” she said. “It’s still my wife in there. If I could just talk to her, maybe we could stop all this. Maybe we could get her to--”
“Kid, you don’t need to hard-sell me,” Blue said. “Of course I’ll help you. I love her too, you know that. I just hope you’re prepared for what we’ll have to do, if you’re wrong, and it’s not really her in there anymore.”
“If that’s the case,” Pilar inhaled sharply, bracing herself for what she was about to say, “we do what Alicia asked in the first place. Find a way to neutralize it, bring it back, let her study it in an isolated workshop.”
“We’ll do it in the room tonight,” Blue told her. “I’ll get the food, the hot plate, and the cookware. You swing by electronics and get a cheap holo-emitter, a spool of dynacopper, and a power-cell. With that, I should be able to let us talk to who or whatever’s on that chip. Then head over to automotive and see if you can get some of that spacetight ship sealant they use on hull breaches. Put some of that in an ice cube tray, and even Ari’s bug won’t be able to claw out of it.”
Blue picked up a tall candle in a glass jar, smiled, and tossed it in Pilar’s cart. “What, you’ll steal crop-tops, but you pay for candles?”
“It’s a votive candle, jackass,” Blue said. “The mission we’re on is risky, and you just made it a lot riskier with your little request. If you want my help with this stuff, I’m gonna need to pray for good fortune, and you don’t win the spirit world’s favor by stealing their candles.”
Pilar picked up the candle and took a closer look at it. There was an image etched into the glass jar it was encased in, of a skeleton with a halo, decked out in beads and robes, flanked by the words “LA SANTISIMA MUERTE.”
“The Holy Death?” Pilar asked.
“One of the best, when you’re asking for protection,” Blue said. “Alicia and I know that firsthand. Had to seek her blessing, when we shed our mortality.”
“Don’t let Ariadne hear you’re doing all this spirit ritual stuff on crew business,” Pilar said.
“Kid, I know she doesn’t take the spirit world seriously,” Blue explained. “But she’s heard the call, same as you and me. Where does she think that call’s coming from? If you ever want to know what you’re meant to be doing, just listen to the spirits, and if you want to see disaster, go ahead and ignore them.”
Pilar laughed. “You don’t seem the type to let anybody tell you what to do.”
“The spirits don’t tell you what to do,” Blue said. “Look. You ever try and put up some shelves?”
“You know I have,” Pilar said incredulously. “You made me put up shelves in your apartment when I was 14.”
“And you still haven’t figured out why?” Blue asked. “What was the first thing I made you do, when you were putting them up?”
“Had to find a stud,” Pilar said.
“Exactly,” Blue explained. “You can’t drill shelves directly into drywall. The weight of whatever you put on them will tear right through it like tissue paper. You need to find a stud and drill into that, and your shelves will be secure.”
“Yes, as we’ve established, I know how to put up shelving. You made weirdly sure about that when I was a teenager.”
“Spirits are the same way. If the material world is the house we live in, the spirit world is what’s between the walls. The vents and the ducts and the pipes and the wiring and the insulation and, yes, the studs. You want to hang some shelves, you use a stud-finder and you figure out where it’s safe to drill a hole. When I pray and commune with the spirit world, all I’m doing is checking for studs, making sure I’m not nicking a power line or busting a pipe.”
“That’s why you had me put up shelves?” Pilar asked. “Why didn’t you tell me then? That it was a lesson about the spirit world?”
“It wasn’t a lesson about the spirit world,” Blue explained. “You weren’t ready for the lesson about the spirit world then. I did it so that when you were ready, I could refer back to it and know you’d understand what the fuck I was talking about.”
“You had me do all that, just so I’d have a reference point for a question I might ask fourteen years later?”
“What can I say? When you’re as old as I am, you tend to think in the long-term,” she said. “Just because you’re a master in your own right doesn’t mean I’ll ever be done mentoring you, kid.”
Pilar was oddly touched by this. “Thanks, Blue.”
“Also, I really needed those shelves put up,” Blue said, “and I knew that if I didn’t teach you how to use tools, Ariadne would make me do half the work building that space station of yours.”
“That’s more what I was expecting,” Pilar said.
Blue took out her phone, laughed, shot off a text, and put it back in her pocket.
“That sister-in-law of yours is a real spitfire,” Blue said. “You know Ariadne’s letting Ellesmere loose on the station? Sweets has been grilling her about her home planet all afternoon, it’s hilarious.”
“Okay, I gotta ask,” Pilar said. “You’ve known me for fifteen years now. How come you text every day with Beam and Sweettalk, and not with me?”
“Jackass, I’m in a department store shopping with you,” Blue said. “I’m dating your quartermaster, I see you all the time.”
“Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be you,” Pilar admitted, her face a bit hot, as she didn’t like being forced to admit this. “I’d kill to be in a text thread like that. So why them, and not me?”
Blue put her hand on Pilar’s shoulder, as if to comfort her. “When’s the last time you texted me? Idiot.”
Pilar stared at her blankly. “What?”
“You don’t have to kill to text with me,” Blue laughed. “Just fuckin’ do it. You ever known me not to respond?”
“I don’t know,” Pilar said, dumbfounded, “I’ve never… I guess you always do, but it’s usually only business.”
“That’s because that’s all you text me about,” Blue said. “Look, I don’t mean to make you feel bad. I love what we got goin’, and like I said, I see plenty of you, especially these days. When you want to talk to me, you call me, or tell me in person. But if you want to text with me, just text me, man, I’d love to hear from you whenever you have a dumb thought.”
“So I can be on that text chain, with Beam and Sweettalk?” Pilar asked.
“Oh, fairy gods, no,” Blue said. “I said I’d love to text with you, not that I’m comfortable asking for your feedback on my nudes before I send them to your quartermaster.”
Pilar laughed heartily. Blue was, of course, not at all shy about her body, and just about everyone on the crew had seen her at least topless, just by merit of the fact that most of the few shirts she ever wore were made of mesh, and ever since she’d started crashing at the station for her date nights with Alicia, even more had seen her stumbling around in underwear that left very little to the imagination. Pilar had, in fact, purchased a stack of artistic photo prints of Blue at one of her nightclubs years previously, although if Blue knew about this, she’d politely never mentioned it.
Still, she understood why she wouldn’t want to welcome Pilar into that part of her life so explicitly. She resolved, from then on, to be a bit more active in texting her old mentor. Blue had held up her end of the bargain, maintaining the relationship a caring teacher maintains with her student, for all the years they’d known each other. If Pilar wanted the sort of relationship with her where they could just casually interact as two grown friends, she’d have to start from the relationship they had, and put in the work to build the one she wanted.
“Alright, that’s the last corner,” Taryn said, tossing the scanner onto the motel room’s dresser. “No recording devices. Looks like we can speak freely, and the new class of Whiptails won’t be robbing this place.”
Tosin simply said, “that’s good.” He offered her his candy dispenser, and she presented her palm and accepted five chocolate candies.
“Pilar and Blue should be back soon,” she said. “Now’s the time to call dibs if you want the good bed.”
“The two beds are the same,” Tosin replied. He wasn’t wrong, the two adjoining rooms had almost identical double beds, soft and springy and smelling faintly of disinfectant. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll sleep on the couch.”
Taryn glanced over at the small loveseat, which was decidedly not long enough for Tosin to sleep comfortably on. “Don’t be silly. Whiptails always double up on missions.”
It was not until this exact moment that three things clicked into place with Taryn.
The first was that a significant number of the Whiptails ended up in relationships with one another after going on overnight missions where they bunked together.
The second was that she had spoken to Ariadne before the mission, and Ariadne had told her in no uncertain terms that the reason she was pairing them on a mission was to facilitate them finally talking out their feelings. She’d agreed that was for the best, and the fact that he was here meant Tosin must have, too.
The third was that there were four people and only two beds. Pilar and Blue would have no discomfort bunking together, but she knew Tosin would never be comfortable sharing a bed with Pilar, and she knew she would never be comfortable with him sharing a bed with Blue. The only combination that this particular away team would accept, would mean she and Tosin were now roommates.
“Seriously, I’m okay with the couch,” Tosin said, having already worked all of this out, seconds after entering the room. “You take the bed, I sleep on a couch in the lab about half the time anyway.”
“Wait, you do?” Taryn asked.
“Fabrication can take a while, when you’re working with some of the more complicated materials,” he said, “easier to check progress that way.”
He continued laying out a blanket he’d brought with him on the couch, then took several small bars of scented soap from his pack and set them on the armrest.
“Don’t trust the hotel soap?” Taryn joked.
“They’re not for washing,” Tosin said, but didn’t elaborate.
“They’re not?” She asked.
“No.”
If it had been anyone else, she might’ve thought he was mad at her, but she remembered that he often didn’t volunteer information unless asked.
“They’re very nice scents. What are they for?”
“In the cloud cities, everybody carries these around. The strong perfumes are good to have on-hand when that rotten-egg smell gets in from the atmosphere outside. Reminds me of home. Helps me get to sleep in an unfamiliar place.” He held up a bar. “I keep this one in the pocket of my lab coat, even though I don’t have to worry about that sulfur smell anymore. Settles my nerves when I get anxious or overwhelmed.”
It clicked with Taryn. “Spearmint?”
“A little embarrassing, I know,” he said. “But the fragrance in these soaps is the same one my mother favored to keep the manor smelling fresh. Makes me feel not so far away.”
“That’s sweet,” she said. “You know, that’s why I keep that photo of the Pincerna skyline in my room, back home.”
He smiled. He’d felt a bit exposed, taking the soaps out, but Taryn often knew what to say to make him feel less like a fool for doing the things that made him comfortable.
“Tosin, remember how I said I would try and be… more honest, about what’s going on in my head?” She asked. “How if I decide to swallow my feelings, then they’re my problem, and you don’t have to deal with them?”
“Of course,” he said, continuing to set his bedding on the couch.
“I think you’re offering to sleep on the couch because you think I’d be uncomfortable sharing a bed with you, and that I’m just too polite to say so.”
Tosin didn’t know how to react to this. It always annoyed him when people were dishonest about why they were doing what they were doing, so he had learned to simply offer no explanation at all when he had reason to want to keep the truth to himself. He felt a pang of guilt, though, because he also made a point to never assume motivations on behalf of someone who hadn’t stated them, and that was what Taryn was accusing him of doing.
“Am I wrong?” Taryn asked.
“No, you’re not,” Tosin replied.
“Remember the other part of our agreement?” Taryn asked. “That I know you’ll take me at my word, so I’ll say what I really mean?”
“Of course,” Tosin replied.
“I don’t want you to sleep on the couch,” she said. “In fact, if I let you sleep there, I’d spend the whole night uncomfortable, wishing I’d corrected you for thinking I didn’t want that.”
Tosin was shocked. He wasn’t expecting this at all. Taryn had been avoiding him, of late, ever since they’d started discussing their feelings, and a visitor from the future had blurted out that they were a couple where she came from. He assumed she’d gotten cold feet about the whole thing, and decided to respect that and give her space.
Ariadne had told him, before the mission, that she wanted the two of them to talk to one another and hash things out, and that the mission was a perfect opportunity for that, and he’d agreed.
He had expected Taryn to tell him she simply wished to remain friends, and had prepared for the sting of this by reminding himself that he loved being friends with her, and that his friendship with her was hardly a consolation prize to scoff at.
“Are you sure?” He asked. “If it’s an issue, I really am okay with--”
“Tosin, we had an agreement,” she said. “I tell you exactly what I feel, and you take me at my word, and if I’m lying, that’s my problem, not yours.”
“Are you lying?”
“No.”
Tosin smiled softly.
“I’ll gladly bunk with you, Ms. Taryn, if you’ll have me,” he said. “And remember, if you change your mind, all you have to do is say the word.”
Tosin picked up his Cytherian soaps and brought them over to the nightstand on the bed.
“And, uh… I’d…” Taryn stammered, her face hot and the bones in her hand aching from anxiety. “Tosin, as long as we’re… I mean, as long as I’m being honest, and you’re taking me at my word and all, I’d like you to, uh…”
Tosin looked up at her, his wild eyes peering over his round sunglasses. “Yes?”
She knew he was too respectful to do it unless she asked. She also knew that she was far too nervous to actually put it to words. So, on impulse, without even realizing this was what she was doing, she used the same move Blue had used on him, and lunged in to kiss him.
In the corner of the room, still invisible to the naked eye and their scanners, Shubin punched the air in triumph.
It was hard for Tosin to misinterpret this signal. He wrapped his arms around her and felt fireworks go off deep in the pit of his chest.
He gripped her tight and she kissed him passionately. He could feel her heart racing, and her fingers gripping the soft fabric of his shirt, when suddenly he heard laughter and she pulled away from him.
His heart dropped in terror, and he assumed at first that he had somehow been pranked, but when he saw her mortified face looking at the doorway, he realized the laughter hadn’t come from her.
Pilar and Blue stood there, carrying several bags of supplies from Winter’s.
“Guess there weren’t any cameras in here,” Pilar said.
“You don’t know that,” Blue said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt, but we bought all these supplies and lugged ‘em back, so the least youse could do is help put ‘em away.”
He looked at Taryn. She kissed him again, this time just a light peck to let him know everything was okay, and they set to work unpacking the groceries and supplies.
They weren’t worried. Now they knew they were on the same page. They’d be alone again soon enough, and could hash out the details then.
[suggested listening]
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