Chapter 1
The morning after the Love Boat I regained power, Mariah woke hungover.
And she’d never even gotten drunk.
Or, to practice radical transparency, she’d gotten drunk back on Earth more than once, but she hadn’t done it last night on synthequer. This was an emotional hangover, which she’d also practiced more than once on Earth, and which she swore was worse than Everclear punch.
Each moment of the evening had been more…
momentous than the last. When Remy and Ikaryo had sung together with such breathtaking, wordless beauty.
When the anomaly had responded in a spectacular lightshow of cosmic wonder.
When the captain and Felicity had explained to them all that they’d witnessed what was essentially the birth of love on their plane of reality.
That wasn’t quite how they’d worded it, but Mariah was a student of esoteric cosmology and had just enough grasp of astrophysics-for-newbies to make her a menace on an actual, real-life spaceship.
Which she’d cheerfully admit.
Or she would be cheerful again—as soon as she shook off this odd malaise.
She drank a glass of water, peed, wolfed down a few of the sugary alien fruit balls from the in-cabin snacks, and trotted off to the all-hands meeting. The captain had said he’d share all they knew about the resonark.
Maybe she’d suggest a more meaningful name for it.
Resonark. That sounded like a hairball—the aggravations of which she had more experience with than Everclear punch while supplementing her fiber fine arts with mittens and socks made from, like, Mittens the twenty-year-old tortie and Sox the continuously shedding sheepdog.
What would be a more lovely and mystical name, to match the anomaly itself?
Before she could come up with any suitable suggestions, she was among the throng of crew and fellow passengers streaming into the Starlit Salon. Everyone gawped at the resonark, shining above them, as awe-inspiring as the night before.
And Mariah had to say, its cosmic charisma quite elevated the looping, vibrant veils she’d knitted last minute at Felicity’s request. The cruise director had only told her they needed some décor for Remy’s impromptu concert—not that it would be the resting place for a quasi-celestial entity.
Too late to put that on her farmers market vendor applications.
Soon enough, everyone was distracted from the resonark by the reveal of the breakfast buffet. Chef Styr was hovering beside the waffle station, eagerly pointing out the myriad toppings. “No chocolate,” they said sadly. “We ran out.”
Was that a sidelong gesture from the tall Elnd chef toward the ship’s owner? Mr. Evens—also something of an oddity, name-wise, Mariah mused—was apparently the resident expert on the resonark and had secretly accompanied this inaugural cruise to study the anomaly.
Despite Mr. Evens’s rank, Mariah had the clear impression that Captain Nehivar also had no love for his boss, and the Earther man sat alone at one of the corner booths meant for intimate conversation.
Not that she’d signed up with the IDA to fret about other people’s relationships, but…
They were still very far off course to be fighting amongst themselves.
Mariah accepted a waffle with a waggle of her cupped fingers—the closest she could approximate the Elnd gesture of gratitude.
Chef waggled their phonoplasts back at her. “I hope you enjoy your waffle as much as I loved creating it.”
She took a deep whiff of the perfectly golden disk, its sweetness overlaid with the tart scent of berries. “I can taste the love already.”
Her universal translator used the English word for taste since Elnd had no equivalent receptors; they consumed soundwaves instead. Maybe a relationship with an Elnd would be perfect because all the snacks would be hers.
She swung past the bar to grab a cup of tea and chatted with Remy who was helping Ikaryo serve.
On Earth, Remy had been an aspiring pop star under a different name, and here on the Cosmic Connections Cruise, she’d basically summoned an elemental wave-particle, much like a star.
Now she worked with an alien bartender in harmonious synchrony, supporting each other’s efforts like a dance.
And when they touched… Unlike their recital last night, they didn’t strike sparks on any wavelength visible to Mariah’s eyes, but she sensed it anyway.
It was so heartening to watch the separation between crew and passengers evaporating, all of them coming together—at first under duress, then moved by desire.
Feeling bad for the lonely figure in the corner, she took her waffle and tea—a bright green tea made with sustainable bactoalgae, how interesting—to the booth.
She smiled at him. “Company?”
“The Big Sky Intergalactic Dating Agency, LLC and Transgalactic Corp.” He blinked up at her.
“Oh. You didn’t mean what’s my company. Please, of course, sit, Miss…
Juraszczyk.” It was a valiant attempt at the pronunciation but he grimaced.
“Apologies. I make it a point to know all our clients, but I don’t always have a chance to meet everyone in person. I should’ve relied on my translator.”
She chuckled. “Even tech has troubles with Polish,” she reassured him. “Mariah is fine.”
“Evens,” he said with a charming grin. “Much simpler.”
She raised one eyebrow. “I doubt it was simple opening an alien dating service to a closed world. Or discovering a love ghost.”
He looked down at his own half mug of green tea. “I confess, I’ve often made it harder than it needed to be.”
Before she could ask about his meaning, the captain took one long step up onto the stage beneath the resonark.
With all his golden fur barely contained by the silver uniform, he looked very much the regal lion—except for the piratical eyepatch.
“Thank you all for coming this morning,” he said in his low, rumbling voice.
“And for attending the recital. Last night, I told you the essentials of how we got here, but now that we’ve recovered somewhat, I want to explain what’s next. ”
The speech he gave was probably important, but Mariah’s gaze kept wandering from his impressively captain-y presence to the anomaly hanging in her oversized knotwork.
Sometimes it seemed to spin, but she thought that was because its gently pulsing rainbow light wasn’t quite balanced, with some curves of the glowing sphere brightening while other places dimmed in almost imperceptible waves.
Maybe that subtle shadow was more wavelengths she couldn’t see? Or was there a flaw in the pattern?
She stared harder. Was the darker side widening?
“Miss Mariah?”
She jerked her gaze back to her breakfast companion. “I’m sorry, what?” She kept her voice to a whisper since the captain was still speaking while setting up a large-screen datpad on the stage stool.
Evens watched her as she’d been watching the resonark. “You seemed…mesmerized.”
Blinking rapidly a few times, she cleared the shadow that lingered over her vision. “Oh. No, I… I didn’t sleep well. I had a dream.”
“I’ve always believed in the power of dreams.” Evens smiled wryly. “Who else would open an IDA outpost on Earth? What was your dream about?”
“I don’t remember.” She frowned, as if scrunching her face would squeeze out the hazy imagery. “On Earth I kept a dream journal. But coming here, I decided I wanted to travel light. Lightyears, I suppose.” She forced a whispery laugh.
Just as well she had to keep it quiet so he wouldn’t hear the false note.
Had there been darkness in the dream? A feeling-memory of her heart racing?
“…And precisely because we are in this together,” Nehivar was saying, “we will vote on whether we continue on the path we all glimpsed last night.”
Evens scoffed under his breath, bringing her attention back to the meeting. “How can he sacrifice his authority like this? We must go on.”
If the Kufzasin captain’s tufted ears caught the mumbled mutiny, he didn’t show any sign.
“When the anomaly hijacked us, it set us on a collision course with a null cloud. While we were adrift, we learned its energy is resonating into spacetime, connected to…whatever awaits at the end of this journey. But the Zarnax Zone is dangerous, abandoned space.” His gold eye swept the salon, catching the resonark’s gleam.
“If even one of us chooses to return to port, I shall so command.”
The salon was silent, except for the very faintest chime from the strange essence above, a hint of last night’s song echoing in a minor key.
At the diversion, Nehivar finally cast his narrowed eye upward. “You do not get a vote,” he growled.
Over the muted wave of amusement, he continued, “The votes will be anonymous: back to port or onward to wherever this haunted Love Boat takes us.”
When a multi-voice clamor seemed ready to answer immediately, he held up one big paw. “Tonight, your personal devices will receive a message from which you can choose. But first, here’s a review of what we know about the resonark and what we suspect. Chief?”
A hologram bloomed from the captain’s datpad showing half a face for half an instant before it was replaced by a projection of the ship depicted within the Zarnax Zone and a neutrally pleasant artificial voice explaining quantum entanglement.
But Mariah wasn’t really listening.
Because that glimpse of a face…
It had looked like part of an ancient stone statue, hard-edged and icy-hued. A gargoyle, maybe, frozen atop some mysterious, distant mountain. A sharp cheekbone, a pointed ear, and a crest of spiny scales. Watching from that huge, luminous eye.
Chief Engineer Suvan Adrakh. She’d read his name on the ship’s documentation before the launch, but he hadn’t been at the recital. She would’ve remembered such an unearthly countenance.
His was the shadow she’d seen in her dream.