Ironheart Read online

  Ironheart

  J. Boyett

  Published by Saltimbanque Books, 2016.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  IRONHEART

  First edition. February 19, 2016.

  Copyright © 2016 J. Boyett.

  Written by J. Boyett.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  SIGN UP FOR THE MAILING LIST

  Further Reading: The Little Mermaid: A Horror Story

  Also By J. Boyett

  For Mary Sheridan.

  For Pam Carter, Dawn Drinkwater, and Andy Shanks.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Kelly Kay Griffith for having read the manuscript and given valuable advice.

  Thanks to Brent Nichols at www.coolseriescovers.com for the cover.

  And thanks to you for reading! Please consider visiting me at www.jboyett.net and signing up for my mailing list.

  One

  The Canary formed itself a patch at a time, unmelting back from the void as it came out of hyperspace. If anyone had been watching, even most computers, it would have seemed to pop into existence instantaneously. But in fact it did reappear piece by piece, the sequence of those appearances being arranged by a system so complex as to look random to almost any known intelligence.

  The fat gray bulb of the ship floated in space a moment before heading toward Planet XB-79853-D7-4. The hyperdrive that made up most of the ship’s bulk existed only in hyperspace and was undetectable in this dimension—ninety-nine percent of what showed up in realspace was the vast curve of the cargo hold; there was a box attached to that curve that was given over to living quarters, far away from that box were the thrusters, and here and there on the smooth surface were sprays of antennae. The ship’s realspace thrusters were modest, but it would reach its destination soon enough. The pilot, Willa, was a highly skilled intuiter and had managed to bring them back to reality deep within the solar system itself.

  As usual, once they were back in realspace, Willa collapsed into sobs, slumping over so dramatically it seemed she would slide right out of the pilot’s chair. The transparent half-sphere of the intuition bowl remained suspended over her head.

  There were three men in the pilot’s room with her, the rest of the crew. Fehd, the captain and owner of the Canary, was grinning lopsidedly; it was the nervous grimace he always wore when Willa cried. He pulled a medallion out from under his shirt and kissed it, then tucked it back under his clothes. It was a way of thanking some goddess local to his homeworld for safe passage. He pushed his blue cap further back on his head and managed to keep grinning while still looking like he wished he were somewhere else. Madaku, who was primarily the engineer, gazed down at Willa with tender concern, wishing as always that he could make this transition easier for her.

  Burran, the security specialist, Willa’s lover, paid no attention to her fit. Madaku always thought Burran should try to console her—in Madaku’s opinion he was too crude and insensitive for Willa. In any case, it was clear that the man had trouble looking at her when she came out of the intuition bowl. Burran moved to the nearest console and checked the readings.

  “Everything checks out,” he muttered. “She brought us in adequately far from any danger points, but right in close to the target planet. Amazing control.”

  A renewed flurry of tears burst out of her. Burran ignored it.

  Madaku slipped over to join Burran at the console. Making as if he were also there to study the readings, he instead murmured, “Maybe you should be more interested in comforting her, when she brings us out of hyperspace.”

  Burran narrowed his eyes at Madaku in a disdainful smirk, as if to say that Madaku wanting to sleep with Willa didn’t give him the right to tell Burran what to do. Madaku felt a blush blazing over his pale skin.

  “Excessive worry can be an insult, you know,” said Burran. Unlike Madaku, he didn’t bother to keep his voice low—Willa wouldn’t be able to understand them yet. “You don’t need to be so concerned over Willa. Do you know what her scores were, at the intuiters’ academy? This ship is damn lucky to have her—she’s going to wind up being one of the greatest pilots of all time. She was trained in the Jeatty hyperfield method, you know.”

  Madaku found it shocking that the guy could be so cavalier about his lover’s suffering. As for her having been trained in the Jeatty method, that was one of the reasons they’d gotten her cheap. Pilots had been intuiting their way through the hyperfield just fine for thousands of years, and non-humans had been doing it for millennia before that—after all this time and experience, there was almost a whiff of madness around a belated innovator like Jeatty.

  Embarrassed, still grinning, pushing his cap back and forth on his head, Fehd came over, to discreetly break them up and also to get some distance from Willa. “So what we got?”

  Madaku was too flustered to answer, so it was a good thing Fehd was talking to Burran. Switching his attention away from Madaku and back to the console, the beefy brown-skinned security specialist squinted his blue eyes at the readings. “Looks good,” he said. “So far everything matches what the surveys decided centuries ago. Planet has a little more than two G’s mass. Thick atmosphere, poisonous to us. Could be some pretty rocks for us to take home. But like we figured, the easy money’s in the orbiting planetoids. Great big cloud of everything from pebbles to moonlets, millions of them.”

  No surprises. The only thing remotely exotic about XB-79853-D7-4 was its location—the system’s star was one of the very last sparks before the great intergalactic dark. Most of the “stars” visible off the Canary’s bow were in fact galaxies.

  But not even that was particularly interesting. After all, there were many millions of other stars, also out on the edge of the galactic rim.

  Madaku double-checked Burran’s findings. He nodded. “There’ll be more than enough minerals to make the trip profitable.”

  Fehd rubbed his palms. “Nice,” he said. “Not like Lohani.” The Canary did the mildly dangerous (or, really, just mildly unpredictable) work of exploring systems that had been catalogued centuries ago, or millennia, but never yet actually visited by sentients. In return they got first pickings of the mineral resources. The scopes were accurate enough that almost nobody ever got stuck visiting a system that lacked adequate resources to make the trip worthwhile—anyone who checked knew what they’d find beforehand. But one time, seven years ago, Fehd had somehow wound up at a system called Lohani that turned out to be nothing but dirt and ice and common rocks, and the unprofitable trip haunted him. Neither Madaku nor Burran had been with him then. Willa hadn’t been with him either, of course—she’d joined up when Burran had.

  They brought the ship into orbit while Willa calmed down, gradually coming back out of the state of wobbly vulnerability the hyperspace-interface (the hyperface) put her into: that fluctuating mental state in which the layers of personality and socialization between her deep-rooted computational abilities and the symbol logic governing her real-world choose-reflexes all melted away. Often she came out of the hyperface with a psychedelic uncertainty as to her name, gender, language, age, and general place in the roil of history, unable to decide whether her personal memories or her memories of various vids, novels, and rumors were the better, truer representation of whatever the
“self” was she was meant to be looking for. It wasn’t so extreme as that, this time—but always, she spilled out of the intuition bowl in a thick soup of anger, grief, glee, horniness, confusion, and fear.

  But soon enough she was able to join the three men on the observation deck, a pink blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a steaming mug of tea between her palms, face red from crying and from scrubbing the tears and snot away. She laughed at herself easygoingly. It seemed to Madaku that Willa was trying to comfort Burran, to signal to him through gestures, glances, and intonations that everything was all right. It was almost as if she were the one making apologies, for having upset him by getting upset herself. Even though it didn’t seem to bother her, it offended Madaku that she should be the one to have to make that effort. It wouldn’t have been that way if she had been with Madaku instead. There was nothing special about Burran, nothing he gave Willa that Madaku couldn’t.

  Though he hated to admit to such petty jealousy, Madaku couldn’t hide it from himself, at least. Why shouldn’t Willa have been with him? He was just as special as anyone else was.

  The cloudy green-blue swirl of XB-79853-D7-4 filled three-quarters of the observation window, bright and beautiful in the gleaming white frame of the deck’s walls. Fehd whipped up a bunch of pink hula-berry doughnuts from the protein matrix and brought them to the others on a tray. It was customary for the intuiter to name a planet that had been physically contacted for the first time, but none of the Canary’s crew got too excited over the honor. For one thing, even if no known intelligence had ever visited this system, it had been catalogued millennia ago by simple telescopes, along with the couple hundred billion other planets in the galaxy, and its properties had long since been analyzed more fully by remote spectroscopy. When the Galactic Registry had first been set up, over seven thousand years ago, XB-79853-D7-4 had been uploaded. In the intervening time it had caught the interest of half a dozen scientists and prospective miners, three of whom had dubbed it with their own sobriquets, one in a human language that the modern humans of the Canary could no longer recognize, and two in alien tongues, whose sounds they didn’t even try to parse.

  So it was kind of a silly custom. Still, whatever name Willa chose would go into the Galactic Registry, where it would stand alongside the catalogue-name of XB-78953-D7-4 as the planet’s official word-name. It would probably continue to be used, especially if the Canary managed to set up a profitable exploitation-chain. So it was not a name that would be forgotten, at least.

  Sipping her tea, gazing experimentally and mischievously up at Burran with her huge eyes, she said, “Maybe I could name the planet Burran?”

  Madaku didn’t know whether Willa was joking, but Burran seemed to think not: “No,” he said.

  Burran picked up a stray tablet from the tabletop, called up readings, and began grimly scrolling through them. It struck Madaku that the hyperspace trips affected Burran almost as much as they did Willa, but inversely: he clammed up and became even more his sullen, silent, macho self.

  Burran continued to scroll through the readings. He said, “You know, XB-79853-D7-4 may be deadly to us, but it’s almost a perfect habitat for zyblots.” He said this almost with satisfaction, albeit a mirthless one; as if all of a sudden the thing most important to him was depriving Willa of the right to name the planet by proving there might be someone else there first, just to make sure it didn’t wind up being called Burran after all.

  Of course, Madaku knew that would be a crazy thing for Burran to want, and that he, Madaku, was himself probably just being the asshole.

  Fehd stood up and started pushing his cap back and forth again as he walked over to Burran, looking worriedly back over his shoulder at the planet in the window. “But there’s no evidence of zyblots, is there?” The eccentric zyblots had been known to set up colonies in remote areas and go centuries without registering them. But even an unregistered settlement would still control the exploitation rights for the planet and its orbiting planetoids.

  Except, Madaku reminded himself, there was no reason to suspect a zyblot settlement was here, other than the bare possibility of it. Either Burran was having fun stirring up shit, or else this was his paranoid security training.

  Fehd was obsessively confirming and reconfirming that they hadn’t actually seen a settlement. Burran kept calmly shaking his head, acting like he’d never implied that they had. Since Fehd kept asking, Burran shrugged and told him he would amp up the sensor power to begin a more thorough sweep of the planet and its environs.

  Fehd grimaced and winced, probably regretting his big mouth. Madaku was annoyed. On the off-chance that there was a settlement below, one not actively broadcasting its presence, their ideal scenario would be to not notice it. Then they would have zero legal obligations. Actively looking for someone was crazy.

  Burran might say that it was always a good idea to do a sweep, in case the hypothetical undetected presence was a threat. But, while there were still some irrationally belligerent space-faring species out there, most of their members had been wiped out during one of the Great Galactic Hygienes. It was true that the occasional individual psychopath did get hold of a ship; still, it was absurd to go looking for enemies. In a galaxy where resources could be plucked from any one of billions of worlds no one had yet had time to visit, where the worst annoyance you had to worry about was that you’d find a system occupied and so would have to move on to the next one, why should anyone fight?

  Burran kept his eyes on the tablet and the planet outside the window throughout his discussion with Fehd. He spoke with a nonchalant professionalism and acted like he didn’t notice his other two crewmates. But something about the amused, possibly sad way Willa kept eyeing him suggested to Madaku that she also believed he really had gone off on this tangent at least partly because he’d been embarrassed by the suggestion that the planet be named after him.

  Eventually Fehd and Burran left for the bridge. All the same data was available from each console or tablet in every room of the ship—the only advantage of the bridge was that there were bigger walls to project the readouts upon, and being more easily able to enlarge or shrink or otherwise move around the images aided in thinking problems through. By rights, Madaku should have accompanied them while they all left Willa to finish recovering. Neither man beckoned to him, though. Madaku thought there was pointed, deliberate contempt in the way Burran declined to look his way. As if he were saying, See how little it threatens me for you to be alone with my woman.

  Madaku watched Willa a few moments. Her gaze stayed on the beautiful silent planet filling the window. Madaku waited for her dreamy eyes to flicker up his way, but they remained fixed upon the world she’d guided them to. Eventually he said, “He should have just gone ahead and let you name the planet. That’s your right, after all.”

  She looked up at him, startled. Madaku acknowledged that it was weird, the way he was almost trying to comfort Willa for not having been able to name a world after the man he considered his rival. There was no trace of hard feelings in Willa’s bright voice as she said, “Oh, no—I just teased him a little too hard, is all. And anyway, he’s right, we should do a thorough sweep. That’s the only way to be safe, technically.”

  Madaku’s mouth twisted as if he had something sour in it. He nearly said something critical about the paranoid level of Burran’s zeal. Instead, he said, “I don’t think he has any right to be difficult, right when you come out of the hyperface. That’s when you should be, you should be pampered.”

  Willa didn’t turn her head, but her eyes slid his way. Madaku withered under that gentle look, and tried to tell himself he was misinterpreting it: a mild mixture of amusement, apprehension, pity, and offense.... As for the apprehension, who could blame her for that? Surely, on such a tiny ship, for him to threaten the group’s stability by coming between the security specialist and the intuiter must be irresponsible. He should be working harder to control himself.

  He couldn’t help it, was all. W
hen Burran and Willa had joined the Canary a year ago, Madaku had had no personal feelings about either of them, aside from a mild distaste for Burran. Gradually, though, he’d become all but obsessed with Willa. He couldn’t even have said why—it was just that he had a sense that she was something special, that there wasn’t anyone else quite like her. Of course that was ridiculous. There were trillions of other humans in the galaxy, not to mention all the other sentients. Any one individual’s traits must be reproduced a billion times over.

  He lowered his gaze, dreading that she might call attention to his indiscretion.

  Instead, she gave him a bright smile, and said, “He only gets that way because he can’t stand it, seeing me suffer when there’s nothing he can do.”

  Two

  It turned out that someone had beaten them to XB-79853-D7-4. When Burran delivered them the news, in his deadpan way, Fehd clapped his hands over his face and swore an oath by one of his goddesses. Madaku threw up his arms in disgust. Willa gazed worshipfully at Burran as if he were the most ingenious sleuth the ages had ever known: “How did you ever find them?”

  Burran shrugged. “Looked,” he said.

  They could discuss the situation in any room in the ship, but for the sake of formality Burran called them to the Discussion Room. The small white room’s walls were covered with detachable tablets functioning as monitors, but that was true of most of the ship. The Discussion Room’s distinguishing feature was the round white table in its center. They all entered the room together, grabbed a tablet off the wall, and took the first seat which presented itself.

  The good news, said Burran, was that it wasn’t a settlement. At least, he’d so far found no evidence of one—only a lone ship. A ship by itself would have no exploitation rights, unless and until it registered a claim with the Galactic Registry.