And then she remembered that this was the place that, but for a quirk of fate, would have forever trapped her, drained and broken beyond healing.
She was safe. She was just on the shallow end of deep spaces. They couldn’t harm her.
“Here.” The Shadow’s Child kept her voice steady, and called up the sensors for Long Chau. A viewscreen hung in front of her in the room rather than a straight beam, as she’d not granted Long Chau any implants access.
The Three in the Peach Gardens had been a larger ship than The Shadow’s Child. He had survived the wars and the uprising, but not the technical malfunction that had blown the motors and half of his heartroom, cutting off coms. By the time anyone realised what was wrong, the ship was already dead, the passengers struggling to reach shuttles without any of the protections the shipmind had afforded them against the deep spaces. Some of them had made it, but not all.
The wreck was lit with washes of light, as if a child were painting over it, over and over—every few moments the colours slowly shifted, and not in a uniform way, patches of deeper radiance spreading from random areas on the wreck of the hull. Here and there, the light snagged on something: a piece of stray metal, a fragment of glass; the lighter shape of a corpse.
Such a waste. All these lives, extinguished so fast. Her sensors could pick out fragments of jade, implants, teapots and tea cups: too many of them with the same delicate pale green eggshell pattern, they must have been from The Three in the Peach Gardens’s personal stores—and his burnt bots, each loss a wound; though he wouldn’t have suffered, would he? At least it would have been fast.
At least...
Watch over them, A Di Da —may they reach the Pure Land and be cut free from the cycle of rebirth and pain...
Long Chau watched the screen. Nothing in her expression changed: she might as well have been admiring a painting or a particularly fine poem. “Here,” she said, making a gesture with her hands. Bots ran up, clinging to her wrists. She shifted the view with sweeps of her fingers until it settled on a particular shape. “This one.”
A middle-aged woman, with loose, mottled skin hanging loose on rib cage and pelvic bone, her shape already compressed into improbable angles by the pressures of unreality around her—she’d had a shadow skin to survive the vacuum of normal space, but of course it wouldn’t have survived the plunge into deep spaces: the long, dark tatters of it streamed from her corpse like hair, or threads tying her to an impossibly distant puppet-master.
“Why that one?” A stupid question. She’d said any corpse would do.
Long Chau watched the corpse like a hawk. “Because it’s wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“You’ll see.”
Long Chau fell silent, and The Shadow’s Child wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of asking questions. The sooner she got the corpse the faster they’d get out, and the sooner she’d get paid—though part of her still yearned for the comfort of being there, of coming home. She sent her bots out and one of her antiquated escape pods, just large enough that the bots could manoeuvre the corpse into it.
Long Chau watched them intently. “Don’t fold her,” she said, sharply, as three of the bots started dragging an arm towards the open hatch of the pod. “No, not that way!”
“You’re quite free to handle the bots yourself,” The Shadow’s Child snapped.
For a moment she thought Long Chau would ask to. It would have been a headache and a waste of time, as Long Chau’s dexterity with bots was far inferior to The Shadow’s Child, but then she subsided in sullen silence. “Try not to damage her,” Long Chau said.
The Shadow’s Child opened one of her empty bays. Cold blew in through the open airlock, a wind that seemed to freeze all feeling out of her, followed a moment later by a blast of shrivelling warmth, and a faint sound on the cusp of hearing, like the chittering of a thousand crickets. Colours shifted and played across the walls of the bay—again and again, the pressure subtly changing as they moved. The pod docked with a crunch. She clenched the airlock closed. The pressure differentials slowly smoothed themselves out, and silence spread across the bay. She found her core beating hard and fast, the connectors trembling in her grasp.
Breathe. She could do this.
The bots dragged the corpse out of the pod. Their feet clicked, one by one, on the floor. The corpse was a heavier, harsher weight—not the suppleness of tissues, but something more akin to polished stone, soundlessly scraping against the floors of the bay. The Shadow’s Child adjusted the temperature downwards to prevent further decomposition. It lay there, staring at the ceiling: its eyes had started to harden into jewels, the cornea looking more like ivory than tissue. The nails had started to bulge outwards—faint drops of blue pearling on their edges, with the dirty rainbow colours of oil spills—and the entire skin had taken on the translucent brittleness of jade.
As Long Chau headed there—still utterly unfazed by the alien traceries of light that deep spaces caused to play on the walls and floor—The Shadow’s Child reviewed the bots’ data.
By the time Long Chau reached the bay, she was thinking, hard.
“We might have a problem,” she said, because she didn’t want to admit out loud that Long Chau had been right. Her voice echoed in the empty bay, the words multiplying for the briefest of moments, shifting into a crooning lullaby.
