Chapter 58
In Which the Abominable Man in the Med-Bay Has Woken. In Which His Cackling, Even When Heard through the Distance of a Recording, Has Raised Goosebumps on the Captain’s Arms. In Which Everything Is Slipping Out of Their Control.
The polite and friendly sorcerer refused to have his brain chipped.
Without it, the ship-crafted prosthetics still worked, but at a fraction of their potential capacity. No thoughtlessly smooth motion, no transmitted sense of touch or temperature.
He’d communicated his own desires to the ship, demonstrating with sketches.
The ship got to work fast, whirring over the limbs, painting alien symbology using blood taken from the woman.
It was utterly strange and barbaric. While the golden-haired man bounced about, polluting the stream with his nonstop chatter, the other two finished their work, chanting in a language distinct from the conlang—after minutes of frowning, Gita matched it to spell words from Legends of Larnia.
The captain suspected the ship had known this from the start and simply neglected to share.
Something . . . happened, after the recitation.
Captain Abel felt it as a tingle on their skin.
Across the cabin, Gita shivered violently.
They caught a whiff, faint enough to be almost imagined, of unfamiliar spices.
The ship wasn’t all that large, but to have affected them from the opposite end of it?
“Ship, I need a reading on the chemical composition of the med-bay air. And energy readings. I have some concern that whatever happened just breached quarantine.”
The ship did not respond.
“Ship!” barked the captain, for once not subvocalizing.
Text filled their eyeglasses: EASY, CAPTAIN ABEL. WE’RE MAKING HISTORY, REMEMBER?
“They used magic,” said Gita, her amber skin ashy with fear. “Look at how he moves that arm—that’s not possible without a chip. It’s magic, Captain.”
A glance over at the drone wrangler brought no relief.
His shock of red hair, grown overlong in a rebellion against space-faring standards, lay plastered against his skin with sweat.
Their assigned ambassador had not yet cleared them for landing, so the ship hovered in an isolated patch of space over Mare Cognitum, the Sea That Has Become.
“They’re working on the leg now!” Gita spoke with a near-hysterical edge, also abandoning subvocal communication. “We’ll feel it again!”
IF I MIGHT INTERJECT???? scrolled the ship, and the captain felt relief at the prospect of submitting to a stronger will. THE BOUNDARY IS GONE. MAGIC IS NOW A PART OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM. WE’RE IN A NEW ERA! LET THE DRAGON CAST HER SPELLS, WHO CARES? THIS IS ALL SO MUCH FUN!
The engineer began to weep, fat droplets dripping off her chin onto her sari.
CAPTAIN ABEL, flashed the ship across their eyepiece, WHY DON’T WE LET GITA COMMUNICATE WITH OUR GUESTS DIRECTLY? SHE’LL SEE THEY’RE ONLY HUMAN. IT MAY HELP WITH HER FEAR.
The captain slashed dissent with a hand—but too late, the cabin’s broadscreen minimized all visuals, upscaling a med-bay feed. Three Terran faces looked in sudden alarm at the camera.
“Ship, are you projecting us to them?” the captain subvocalized, tilting their head meaningfully toward Gita.
“I’ve added a filter to give you all friendlier smiles,” the ship whispered in their ear, “and erased the tears. That seemed appropriate.”
“Did it?” They tried a real smile; it felt as stiff as cheap plastic, and as likely to crack.
“Hello?” said the golden-haired man. The captain knew this wasn’t his true voice, only a simulation playing translated words in real time, but it surprised them, nonetheless.
“Greetings!” they replied shrilly. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’ve all been wondering. How is it your companion is harnessing his prosthetics without a neural chip? Is there an alternate technology, perhaps, that you’ve made use of?”
“Uh . . .” The man side-eyed his companions, who stood staring into the transmitter with predatory intensity. “This might be a long shot, but have you heard of ‘magic’?”
Gita shrieked. Frantically, the captain gestured at the air. “Cut it off, cut it off!”
With a wink, the faces disappeared.
“That did not,” breathed the captain, “help.”