Over Freezing Altitudes

1 Scout Shannon felt her steps slowing as she reached the end of the long white hallway that connected one airlock to the other. She was getting to the end of what had become familiar to her, and as far as she could tell, what lay beyond it was nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing but the black of space and the faint, distant twinkling of stars. She knew the warm, close feeling she'd gotten from the Tajaki trade dynasty ship had been the work of an illusion, making the walls look like wood polished until it glowed like honey, lit by what appeared to be flickering flames over brass fixtures. She didn’t know what the ship looked like when it wasn’t projecting that fabricated image, but even bare metal would be warmer than what lay ahead of her. Which was nothing. Just the cold vacuum of space. She knew that wasn’t really true. If it had been true, she’d already be out in it, sucked out the end of the hallway with her fluids boiling away and cold frost creeping over her. She had seen it happen to her friend Seeta just days before. She had felt her friend’s cold-stiffened limbs with her own warm hands, and her mind could too-readily imagine what the process must feel like. Cold invading her very bones, stiffening her muscles to an icy rigidity. But it wasn’t happening, Scout reminded herself. She was walking normally through air she could breathe, and she was no colder than she normally was since she had left her warm prairies behind to travel through the corridors of space-bound ships. Scout bent to pick up her white rat terrier Shadow, holding him tight and burying her face in the fur of his neck. He didn’t need to be carried; his injury from a few days before had been slight and handily healed by the nanite the doctor had injected into his leg. But she needed the comfort of his warmth, the familiar smell of the dusty prairies of home that still lingered in his fur. Not exactly like home—it wasn’t tongue-coatingly thick, capable of turning the saliva in her mouth into a gritty, metallic-tasting sludge—but enough to summon the image of days spent pedaling her bike down a narrow track in an endless expanse of red-gold grasses. It felt like a lifetime ago. It had been barely more than a week. Her other dog, Gert, was too large to be carried. Normally she objected to Shadow getting more attention than she was getting, but the rapidly approaching end of the hallway was making her nervous as well, and she pressed close against Scout’s knee as she walked at her side, looking up from time to time with her big brown eyes. Scout bent a little to pat the top of Gert’s head and try to lend her a little comfort. Scout didn’t have much of it to spare. The six tribunal enforcers walking with her were technically human, but not the sort of humans that lent anyone any sense of comfort. It wasn’t just the air of formality that radiated from their long blue robes and tall, straight postures as they walked with their folded hands hidden inside their sleeves. All of that was little different than the uniform of a security officer, and Scout had known many officers who still did what was needful to put others at ease. It wasn’t their silence; Scout had grown used to that. And she had been practicing paying attention to their little gestures and glances, the rapid shifting of microexpressions that was their chief form of communicating. Scout didn’t know what they were saying, but at least she knew when they were “talking.” Yes, they were definitely odd, with their shaved heads and skin that no matter what color they had been born with was pasty, almost waxy now. They lived in deep space, far from the burning rays of sunlight Scout had spent her whole life protecting herself against. Perhaps that was why Scout felt like they were too emotionally distant to feel any empathy for her. Their life experiences were as opposite to hers as it was possible to get. On the other hand, people had told her the tribunal enforcers had evolved under the influence of some sort of mind-altering symbiotic organism no one had yet managed to identify. That might have been what made them seem so alien to her. Scout’s thoughts scattered away as the first of the tribunal enforcers finally reached the end of the hallway and stepped out into the beyond. The hallway connected the two airlocks; that was its function. Scout had crossed it before, from one conventional ship to another. The tribunal enforcers were simply stepping inside of their own airlock. But to Scout’s eyes, they seemed to be just stepping off into space, walking implacably forward until the dark swallowed them up. She didn’t realize she had stopped walking until she felt a soft touch at her elbow. The young tribunal enforcer, the one who had worked so hard to get her to crack the code of their unique form of communication, had deliberately brushed against her without removing their hands from their sleeves. The smile they gave Scout was not quite natural. Not spontaneous, Scout decided, a touch too formal. But they were really trying to be friendly. Scout looked in their eyes and was sure she was right about that. They just didn’t quite have the knack down. They were too used to expressions meaning so many specific things. Scout supposed trying for a friendly smile for them must be a bit like if she tried for a friendly burst of noise without making words. So-called normal people were likely just as odd to the tribunal enforcers as the other way around, she guessed. Scout smiled back and tried to mask her anxiety. But then she ran out of hallway and found herself standing on nothing, with nothing around her except stars scattered over a black sky, and her stomach lurched horribly. It was worse than she feared. And she was about to embark on a five-day journey on this ship. She took a breath and then another step, further away from the edge of the hallway. She felt like she was falling forwards, tumbling through space, but then her foot touched the floor just as her other had, and she was standing as solidly as ever. The young tribunal enforcer smiled that forced smile again, indicating with a sweep of their hand that she should continue further in. Scout was about to try another step when she realized Gert hadn’t come with her. She turned back to see the big black dog lingering at the end of the hallway, looking not so much frightened as confused. Scout hugged Shadow tighter in her arms, knowing that wherever Shadow went Gert would follow. Scout took three more steps, enough to get her to where the tribunal enforcer clearly wanted her to stand. Gert hesitated, but only for a second. Then she bounded after, colliding with Scout’s leg and falling into a sloppy sit on one hip. Her legs looked funny, sprawled across an invisible floor, her tail thumping loudly against nothing at all. Then there was a sound, a clang, and a whoosh, and Scout looked up to see the white hallway collapsing like a telescope, appearing to shrink as it zoomed away until it was flush with the side of Bo Tajaki’s ship. Scout had never seen the outside of the ship. It was just as lovely outside as it was within, a long, delicate-looking vessel tapered on both ends like the boats that used to cross the oceans of Old Earth long, long ago. Its hull had a sheen like grayish-white marble that flashed into a burst of light as the sun rose around the planet off to Scout’s right. Her home world, Amatheon. Would she ever see it again? Scout buried her nose once more into Shadow’s soft white fur. Life on Amatheon—already not remotely easy between the frequent coronal mass ejection events forcing everyone to huddle under protective domes or deep underground and the almost futile effort to eke out crops from less-than-ideal soil—was about to get much harder if Scout failed in what she was trying to do. And she was in so far over her head. The tribunal enforcers with their silent communions were easier for Scout to understand than the word barrages the lawyers kept launching at her. Hopefully, the lawyers waiting to meet her at the other end of her journey on the invisible ship would be better at talking to her in a way she could understand. But even if they weren’t, they were the only ones truly on the side of the people of Amatheon, the only ones who thought the people on the planet’s surface and those still living in orbit around it deserved the right to self-govern. Everyone else was just focused on which member of the family in charge of the vast Tajaki trade dynasty “owned” the planetary system and was in charge of all the people who were their “employees.” Scout had never even heard of the Tajaki trade dynasty before a few days ago. She doubted more than a handful of people on the surface even knew they were supposed to be employees of the company that had funded their ancestors’ journey to Amatheon more than a century before. If Scout and her new lawyer friends failed to convince the court to leave Amatheon in peace, life was really going to change for nearly everyone Scout had ever known. The tribunal enforcer was smiling at her again, an expectant smile Scout knew meant she was supposed to be noticing something. Scout looked around, felt a rush of vertigo as her eyes swept over distant star fields before forcing her vision to focus closer. Gert was still looking up at her, tail thumping loudly as Scout returned her gaze. Beyond Gert, she could see figures moving through space around her. Their paths described lines, and she could infer where the main corridors were, but how did the tribunal enforcers know where they were? And yet each one she looked at was walking unerringly around their invisible ship, turning at corners and negotiating doorways without so much as putting out a hand to run along the invisible walls. Scout looked back at the waiting tribunal enforcer. Clearly there was someplace that Scout was meant to go for the duration of the journey, and she doubted that place was lingering near the airlock. But the idea of walking in random directions until helpful tribunal enforcers or less helpful walls and bulkheads compelled her to change direction didn’t seem like the best plan. Then she remembered: she still had her AI teacher, the one she had named Warrior after the woman who had saved Scout’s life during the last coronal ejection event. “Hello, Teacher,” Scout said. “Hello, Scout,” Warrior said, appearing next to the waiting tribunal enforcer. Although she looked almost exactly like the woman who had called herself Warrior, with the same long, thick, copper-colored hair and Amazonian build, she didn’t look remotely like a warrior herself. Her braid was looser, her clothes softer and more comfortable, the muscles of her arms less prominent. More like a librarian than a galactic marshal, and yet still someone you didn’t want to mess with. “Can you help me navigate this ship?” Scout asked. “I can guide you anywhere you want to go,” Warrior said. “The tribunal enforcers have allowed me access to their systems, including all ship schematics. But it would perhaps be more convenient to just adjust your glasses.” “Adjust my glasses?” Scout repeated, touching one wire bow. The glasses had been a gift from Bo Tajaki, the captain of the ship she had just left behind. They were a necessary item for her to see her tutor, another of his gifts to her. She had sort of known the glasses had other functions—the single lens she had from the real Warrior’s frameless glasses had operated all of the equipment on her belt—but with all the fleeing from deadly assassins and storming the bridge to hack into the communications system to get her call to the tribunal enforcers out, she had never had a chance to discover just what else her glasses did. “With practice, you’ll be able to summon up what you want by eye movements. But in the meantime, use the audio command function,” Warrior told her. “Just tell it to make the walls opaque.” “Okay,” Scout said, feeling intensely silly all of a sudden. She set Shadow down on the floor next to Gert, adjusted the glasses on her nose again, and loudly cleared her throat. “Glasses, make the walls opaque.” And just like that, she was encased inside a ship with actual walls, floors, and ceilings. But it wasn’t metal or the illusion of warm wood tones. No, this ship looked like it had formed out of crystal, a living crystal that grew as it chose, jutting out here, leaving a jagged gap there. Now that it was opaque it looked like it glowed a yellowish-white from within, never so opaque that she couldn’t still make out the stars beyond or the forms of people moving about within. It was still the strangest thing she had ever seen, but Scout was immensely relieved to no longer be facing the possibility of going mad when the ship started actually moving. She could do this. With her dogs and her AI tutor, she could get through the next five days on this alien yet beautiful vessel. She didn’t know what waited for her on the other side, but it just had to be more familiar than this.