S.J. Shank

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Mountain Fast

Hungary, 1468.At Kuszkol, the old-timers say, shadows walk and men go mad. But sixty years after the remote mountain fortress was first abandoned, it is attracting soldiers once again.The bishop’s messenger András carries a letter for the new commander. On his party’s northward journey, he downplays the old tales. Yet he cannot explain why the castle’s beacon should burn the night before their arrival. Nor why, once they arrive, the garrison is missing. Nor can he explain the mysterious charcoal figures they find etched on the walls.By the time they settle down for their first night at Kuszkol, András faces an even more pressing question—why is he speaking in his dead wife’s voice?

Carthago Nova Press, 2024

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Rare Specimen and Other Stories

An oracle whose gift for prophecy is infectious …A watchwoman who guards the mouth of a wormhole …A monster hunter who worships her quarry …A mage whose sorceries are trapped by stitched lips …Welcome to the dread futures and grim antiquities of S.J. Shank. Together, these eight stories weave a feverish tapestry of misplaced loyalties, tainted victories, and survival by the leanest of margins.

Carthago Nova Press, 2023

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Mountain Fast

Chapter 1

Pál’s knuckles rested on the table. Dry blood filled their creases and flecked his swollen lip. A fissure in the wood held his attention. Like a convict marching to the stocks, he would not look at me. Nor would my brother-in-law answer. I tried again. “Did you know this lad? Was it one or many?”He stared down with such force his pupils bobbed beneath the lashes. He did not move his eyes from that dark little cleft.“Perhaps you were simply misunderstood,” I said. “It has happened to me. You must be mindful of others and how they take your meaning.”He slid a crumb beneath his thumb.“At your age, boys turn savage,” I said. “Some men never outgrow this.”Pál flicked his head. I could not tell if he meant to shake it or to dislodge a hair from his brow. I waited for him to say more, to tell me I was wrong. To tell me that there was good reason for this latest scrap. That it was not senseless and that he was no ruffian. For a time we sat in silence, just the two of us, alone as we had been these last months. No stew bubbled on the fire. Half a week’s dirty crockery crowded the table about our elbows.Soon I would have to go. I tried one last time. “Did you know this boy? Tell me his name and I will make this right.”Pál’s voice broke, “I did not know him.”I leaned toward him and reached for his wrist. He shifted his arm before I could take it.“A stranger did this to you? Why would he do that?”He flashed his eyes at me. Despite Pál’s new height and the size of his hands, I thought that if I continued to prod, tears might flow. I could not decide if this was for the best. He had come to me an orphan but he was well down the road to manhood. How far, I could not tell, nor why he so easily strayed.“You owe him nothing,” I said. “You must not protect him. Tell me his name and I will speak to his father.”“His father?”“Yes,” I said. “I will not stand for this brute treating you so.”“You have no grounds to speak. Not on my behalf.”He pulled his arms across his chest and found a tower of clutter on which to rest his gaze. There was no chance of loosening that tongue now.I pushed back from the table and stood. I studied Pál for a long moment. He did not look up. He had Annaka’s stubbornness and of late he had developed his sister’s talent for pique. It did not matter if I told him to stay indoors today to tend the fire. He would not listen and I could not blame him if he left. This cottage had become unbearable since we lost her.“Terézia will be by later with our supper,” I said.“My great luck.”“You are in no position to complain.”“Even a beggar would protest eating her tripe.” He turned those fierce eyes towards me. This time he did not look away.“Only those new to their vocation,” I said.“I will not count slop among my blessings.”“Terézia has only treated you well. You must never repeat such nonsense outside these walls.”“Else what?”I let his childish defiance hang, awaiting a flush of shame. But there was only anger coloring those cheeks. His thrust-out chin did not lower an inch.“It frightens me,” I said, “your ignorance of how far a man might fall.”His smile broadened. I left him grinning like a fiend.I saddled Fejes and began the short ride into town. Soon I passed through the gates and was climbing the plaster and timber corridors of Veszprém’s narrow streets. My destination was the palace upon Castle Hill, where my master, Bishop Albert Vetési, would hand me a letter to deliver. I would depart at dawn, and if His Excellency’s correspondent lived in Sopron, I would return in five days. If he had written to Székesfehérvár, as little as one. If Debrecen though, eleven or twelve nights might pass before I was back home again.The townsfolk squeezed past my horse and jostled my knees. I paid them no mind. Instead I studied the sky, searching for the cause of this unseasonable warmth. The mellow autumn light easily rolled back the chill of long nights, and the quiet breeze whispered no word of rain or snow. Ideal weather for travel. Good fortune for the days ahead, but at that moment I felt no gratitude.A child darted in front of me, bringing Fejes up short. The boy carried a roll of leather in the crook of his arm. He gave no backward glance at me, and I watched as he rushed beneath the awning of a cobbler who stitched hide cutouts into useful forms. The cobbler marked me and bowed his face, and at his word the boy turned and shouted an apology.A little apprentice. Five years younger than Pál, and already more advanced in his career.I had never had such thoughts before my wife died. No one had fixed my future, so I suppose I had expected Pál would find his own way. Now I knew I had erred. I was losing faith that he might find success through chance. He was not fit for a life of accident. Annaka was no longer there to care for him when I was on the road. In her absence, he had taken to tramping through town, seeking out his new friends who passed their shiftless days talking of bold futures, only to pester townsfolk for coin enough for wine.At the gate to Castle Hill a grizzled old-timer leaned against the wall next to a cold brazier. He appeared to be sleeping on his feet, but the sound of Fejes’s clopping hooves opened his eyes a crack. This veteran was named Jakab, the least valuable member of the king’s Black Army. He had arrived the past summer, and I gathered he was sent to Veszprém as a sort of exile. It was said he was as vicious as a weasel in close-quarters, but since arriving he had only distinguished himself by running dice games that ended in hard words. That, and his penchant for drink. He was suffering its after-sickness now, I guessed, and had no doubt been assigned this standing post in punishment.Recognition took and sleep lifted from his eyes though he made no move to right himself. His watchful look lacked any deference or hint of amity. I commanded none of the former, for it was not my rank but only my role as messenger that set me ahorse. As for the latter, I knew him only by his reputation, and perhaps he divined from my own expression what I thought of him. And perhaps he only knew me by my reputation, or more correctly my wife’s, for the story of her life and death was well known throughout the town. In the months since, strangers sometimes crossed themselves when they thought my back was turned.“Has the bishop’s visitor from Croatia departed?” I asked.The veteran stared at me. A vague hostility, like that of a dog whose boundary marking had been crossed, kindled in his eye.“Has he?” I repeated.“How the hell should I know?”I had half a mind to dismount and box the man’s ears. That would be a mistake, not least because I owed my calluses to handling tack, where his were earned drilling that he might better kill.Fejes, knowing what was best for me, stepped forward. As I passed, Jakab pressed a thumb to one nostril and fired the other like a cannon. He closed his eyes again.My horse led me to the stable. I left her there with the stable boys before crossing the yard’s pavement on foot. From the glowing ovens wafted the smell of the evening’s bread. In the palace, the vestibule blazed with candles illuminating a sainted heaven upon its ceiling.The bishop’s apartment was closed, so I set down my messenger satchel to wait, wondering if the maid Sára might wander by to wish me a good day. By some twist, this maid had come up in my last conversation with Terézia, and my sister was so full of details about the young widow I wondered if she had come prepared.My sister had said that, like me, Sára was alone. She was still young, had kept her figure, as I had no doubt remarked, and her two little girls were the sweetest creatures. And strong. Both had stayed dry-eyed the day their papa went to the churchyard as they held up their mother’s arms. Sára came from farmers attached to one of the bishop’s manors, simple folk who had not hesitated to take her in when her husband was lost. Word was her grieving was near its end and she was looking to move on.Perhaps this maid and my sister colluded. All I knew was that Sára always smiled when I spoke to her, showing the tips of her teeth, and that she looked at the floor when she curtsied in a way I found most charming. But Sára did not come along to dust the corridor’s statuary this day, and I waited alone, idly twisting my wife’s silver betrothal ring about my finger. I exchanged one-word greetings with the clerical secretaries who brushed past, and adjusted my footing as my knees began to ache. I had done nothing wrong, but like Jakab, I was left standing.The memory of the miserable old dog chased away all thoughts of Sára’s slender wrists. Suddenly, and with a sinking heart, I saw how Pál might turn out.The bishop’s door opened. Out stepped a big man who boomed his farewell, the Adriatic still sparkling in his eyes. The Croatian ambassador glanced me over, noticed my messenger’s bag, then returned his gaze to study my face. I had become accustomed to this sort of lingering appraisal. He, like so many far and wide, had heard the story of the messenger’s doomed wife.Pál, I realized, must encounter this same look every day.“András. Enter.”The sun threw fishnet shadows through the leaded glass. The bishop sat alone at his table, poised over rows of letters and charters that covered the surface like overlapping scales. Upon these records he had laid a bounded volume, his lectern forgotten in the corner. I recognized the book as a work of Greek statecraft. He had had me fetch it from the Universitas Istropolitana in Pozsony that summer. Despite the warmth of the light splashing across his broad shoulders, His Excellency wore a fine velvet cape, as red as ripe cherry, for later that day he would preside at the wedding of one of the Essegváry heirs.He waved me forward without looking up from the tome. His finger slid down the parchment and turned the leaf. He contemplated the new page for a moment before he placed a string, closed the volume and set it aside.“You travel to Buda.”“Yes, Your Excellency.” Four days.“I would that you hand my missive to the chancellor directly.”“Understood, my lord.”The bishop withdrew two sheets from a leather portfolio and reviewed them. I waited with my hands behind my back as he scratched out a postscript. Needless to say, Albert Vetési was one of the greatest men in the realm. He was once the land’s chief justice. He led the king’s delegation to Naples. My place as one of his messengers was secure, but Annaka always wanted me to make better use of my position. I had always resisted, until I surprised myself this day by speaking out of turn.“I have a brother-in-law, my lord. A boy yet, really more of a son.”Vetési’s eyelids fluttered as he registered that I had broken my silence. After writing another line, he set aside his quill and looked up from his desk. “Yes,” he said. “You spoke of him once before.”Despite my twelve years of service, I squirmed beneath his gaze. The gold upon his fingers, the precious stones at his neck, did not hint at his authority. Albert Vetési had met the Pope in Rome. He owned this city. The county was his.I was mortified to have broached the matter with my master. It was not my nature to preconceive the path ahead, I just followed it. It had been she who had pestered me to raise Pál’s career with the bishop. She had harried me since he was eleven. It had been the great quarrel of our life together. With Annaka’s death, I had surely prevailed, yet here I was suddenly capitulating.It was the latest instance of a strange new habit of mine, as if some rebellious part of me thought to make up for Annaka’s absence by acquiring her concerns. I often found myself thinking of tasks outside my domain, matters I had never paused to consider—the washing, grinding corn, batting cobwebs down from between the rafters—chores I now paid a neighbor to perform and towards which I felt a new and vague disdain. I found myself thinking, too, of grander matters—the movements of the Black Army from front to front, whether the revolts in Erdély would spread west, the rumored estrangement between the Archbishop of Esztergom and the king. The affairs of the great, upon which few as powerless as she wasted a thought. Even I did not, though as His Excellency’s vehicle, I often passed through the thick of it. I had never cared.The bishop watched me closely. He showed great patience, even interest, I would say. I had been told that he spoke to Annaka privately in her cell the day she died. Perhaps she had asked him to look after Pál.No. The bishop had not even intervened to save her. Yet they had spoken, about what I did not know. It was a question I had tried to leave unanswered for it sickened me to dwell upon it.“He is near enough a man,” I found myself saying. “I have no proper trade to pass on to him. It is time he found his place.”The bishop returned his attention to his papers. Instead of resuming his letter, he moved the leaf aside and replaced it with a fresh page. As he wrote, he said, “They need men at Kuszkol. A fortress in Trencsén County. It is comparatively safe. Send the boy to the garrison with my recommendation. The marshal will look after him.”Without a further word I had secured Pál his future. Two hundred miles from home.

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Rare Specimen and Other Stories

Para Bellum

A new star appeared between the moons of Szent Amnesztia. It flared, magnesium-bright, so brilliantly that for an instant it drew aside the veils that darkened the lunar plains. Those who witnessed it were left to ponder the image fading from their retinas. In high orbit, klaxons blared.Erna tumbled into the cockpit, thumbing thruster dials reflexively, her consciousness still catching up to the adrenal conditioning that had sprung her from her cradle. She slipped into a billowing silk robe and silenced the alarm.“Go ahead,” she said.The ship did not respond.She slunk into her harness and placed an anti-nausea tablet beneath her tongue. She approved the intercept course and settled her feet into their gel contacts. She slid on her ceremonial headdress and batted aside its drifting tassels. She checked the clock.Forty seconds since the gate had disgorged the new arrival. In eight years, it had never taken the ship this long to issue its Gate Event Summary Report.The ship engines erupted. She ignored the pleas of her compressed organs and switched the projection to optical output so she could study the newcomer’s vessel. A three-meter-wide glass marble with a human ribbon at its center. Someone was in there, suspended, a quadrillion kilometers from home. The last of the exotic matter that sheathed the surface flamed out of existence and the vessel became invisible in the planet’s shadow.“Report?”“The analysis will be completed imminently,” the ship said.“What’s the delay?”“Irregular chemical and quantum signatures.”“Where’s it coming from? ”“Indeterminate. Analysis complete. Gate Event Summary Report—.” Erna muted the interface. She read the text superimposed across the star field.>>Vessel class: Single-use vitrified lifepod.>>Provenance: Unknown.>>Manifest: Human (1)>>Hail: Unacknowledged.>>Analysis: Emissary 0.03%; Prophet/monk 1.0%; Refugee 68.43%; Scholar 0.05%; Other 30.49%.She stared so hard at this last figure that the ship automatically highlighted the digits in violet.“Run that report again,” she said.The report refreshed. The Other score rose to 30.51%.Of the dozens of vessels Erna had received over her interceptorship, she had never seen an Other score higher than 0.0067%. A genuine Other event had not been recorded in almost two hundred years, not since the Inimicus had sent a plague vector through the gate that nearly wiped out the entire northern hemisphere.For the first time in months, she checked the status of the ship’s emergency systems. All clear.Winches whined. The scoop lowered from the ship’s belly. She watched the newcomer’s lifepod, now visible on the projection only as a mandala of data points, grow as her ship swooped in.She checked the calendar while the marble moved into the safe zone beyond the gate’s halo. The Feast of Szent Dialektus. They had moved her father yesterday. She had meant to call. There was a message from her sister. She didn’t need to read it to know Ágota was pissed.Her ship caught the vessel and the scoop retracted. Once they had settled into a stable orbit, Erna kicked out of her harness and floated down to the observatory. On the display she watched the marble roll into the reception hall.Beneath the devitrification lamps, the honey-colored lifepod sublimated like a ball of dry ice. The preservation glass steamed away, its radius shrinking until at last she could distinguish the newcomer beneath the thinning medium. The toes appeared, the top of a head. Erna’s gut clenched. Whoever had crossed the galaxy to secluded Szent Amnesztia was tiny. Childlike.The protocols made no special exception for children. An obligatory one-year quarantine in the empty cities of the western moon. At the height of the Thousand-Year Rain, when twenty thousand refugees came spinning through the gate every day and the sky strobed with their arrival, those cities were the largest in the system. But now, to be a child there, all alone…Let it be a child, she thought.The mists dissipated. It was a girl—the shoulders, so narrow, the arms, so thin. But bracketing the mouth, deep lines. Upon the chest, a woman’s bosom.“Is Orbit Control getting this?”“Yes.”“What do they say?”“They say to proceed per standard protocol.”Exiles always spoke about the grotesque aesthetics that proliferated in those regions of the Orbes Antiqui that had submitted to the Inimicus. The domain of the so-called new humans.“Do they think she suffers some developmental disorder or has her growth been stunted?”“Indeterminate,” the ship said.The stranger’s eyes were open.“Can she hear me?” Erna asked.“Yes.”The newcomer raised her chin to better let her eyes roam the reception hall. She fixed on the sensor beads. On the vents, which sucked out the last wisps of the sublimated glass and cycled in fresh air.Erna telescoped the seraphic rods of her office and motioned for her image to be projected within. She crossed the angel-tipped scepters above her head and opened her arms as though in embrace. “Welcome, traveler. You have arrived at the Commonwealth of Szent Amnesztia, known elsewhere as Adpersean Termen 46B7Y. I am Interceptrix Erna Merkúr and it is my privilege to escort you to the salutarium.”She paused as the newcomer flexed her fingers, then retracted her arm as though to test her strength. Most newcomers were slack-mouthed sacks of drool at this point in their resuscitation.“It is my sincere hope,” Erna continued, “that your days will be glad and tranquil in this refuge.” Now came the delicate part. The newcomer trained her attention away from the projection, to the sensor beads. “I trust you know that our gate is unidirectional. Your travels end here.”A small smile. Not childlike at all.“I will now conduct you to the salutarium. If you have the strength, please indicate you understand.”The stranger closed her eyes. The smile remained.Erna gestured for privacy. “Did she understand me?” Erna asked.“I believe so,” the ship answered.“Provide a translation anyway.”The ship replayed the greeting in the four most common tongues of the Orbes Antiqui. The ship projected a perfect re-creation, mimicking her own pitch and diction.The newcomer reached for the tether but was too weak to grasp it. When she tried to speak, she wheezed as through a noose. The syllables lapped one into another, every vowel indistinct.“She still needs to warm up,” the ship said.“Sleep if you can,” Erna addressed the newcomer. “When you have recovered, speak to the ship to summon me.”Perhaps the spasm that crossed the newcomer’s face was a byproduct of renervation, but for a moment Erna could have sworn the woman sneered.

Erna conferred with Control. They cautioned her to remain in orbit until the research automata had completed their analysis of the unfamiliar signatures. They had determined that the orb’s preservation glass was the source. Already the automata were running two models that, excitingly, might also link these signatures to subtle shifts in the gate’s fields over the last decades.She skimmed articles on the Inimicus. Szent Amnesztia was isolated on the edge of populated space. Her planet’s knowledge of the Inimicus came from the refugees that still traversed the wormhole to escape its cruelty. These reports varied, but all agreed the distant enemy was gluttonous for war.She read the new message from her sister. Their father had been successfully moved to the guest house at the local abbey. Ágota said he was comfortable and that he had asked for her. The terminal prognosis had been revised downward from one month to two weeks.Erna stared at Ágota’s sign-off. Sis. If things went badly up here, if Orbit Control decided this was a genuine Other event, that Erna’s ship was contaminated. If she wound up in quarantine…“She’s awake,” the ship said. “She has not responded to my queries, but she has begun to knock on the walls.”Erna drifted down the ship’s neck to the observatory. The newcomer was tapping the bulkhead near one of the vents. Erna had expected to find her pounding in frustration—panic was a common side effect of devitrification. But the newcomer’s rapping was rhythmic, sequenced in an almost-familiar pattern.“Perhaps she is mute and using a knock code to speak,” the ship said.“Can you decipher it?” Erna asked.“No.”“Let’s try this again. Put me through.” Erna withdrew her batons and parted them in welcome as her projection re-appeared within the reception hall. “I trust you are feeling better,” she said.The newcomer stopped tapping to stare.“If you are able to speak, we will continue your processing. Please state your name.” She added privately to the ship, “Better translate that.” The newcomer returned to tapping.Once again the ship interpreted, replaying and subtly altering Erna’s projection so that the words appeared to be shaped by her mouth.The newcomer turned. There was no mistaking her glare. “You let this machine assume your voice?” she croaked.Erna did not let her smile slip. “Has your society placed interdicts on such technologies?”“I would allow no machine to speak for me.”“Please state your name,”The newcomer stretched forward, doubling up like a cliff diver. Then she reversed the pose, arching backwards like a bracelet, back so far she clasped her toes.“Your name,” Erna said. Still the newcomer did not respond. “Do you understand you will never leave this system? The gate is unidirectional. There is no going back.”The newcomer stretched her legs at boneless angles.“Who are you? Have you come to seek asylum?”“No.”In Erna’s periphery, the ship refreshed the Gate Event Summary Report.>>Other 99.96%.“Are you a scholar, then?”“What has light to learn from shadow?”“An emissary?”“Of sorts.”Erna studied the newcomer’s face. Her elfin cheeks and chin. Her deep sea eyes. Orbit Control was monitoring the conversation. Any moment now, she expected them to issue new orders. To take over the interview, even. Until then, all she had was protocol.“I invite you to state your credentials.”“My message is not for you, gatekeeper.”The newcomer showed no discomfort with the lengthy pause that followed. “You do not come in friendship?” Erna asked.“No.”The tips of Erna’s rods dipped. “What then?”“You know who I am.”“I would not presume to say.”“I am the Sun come to dry up all the Rain.”When Erna finally found her voice again, it was whisper quiet. “What do you mean by that?”“Even the Thousand-Year Rain must come to an end.”“Cut communications.”Erna’s projection winked out.“She can no longer hear you,” the ship said.In the reception hall, the newcomer somersaulted. Erna’s gaze drifted down to the triple-winged angels that adorned the tips of her batons. One held a sword aloft. The other a shield.This is really happening, Erna thought. They’ve finally come.Every exile community carried stories of the Purgatio Mundi. The World Purge. The four horizons quick with flames, cinder plumes rising to the edge of space.She remembered footage from their last contact with the Inimicus two centuries earlier. How temples had become pest houses, their thresholds slick with pus.If there was any mercy in the universe, her father would be spared. Her sister, though… She imagined Ágota afforded no death bed. Thrown moaning into the back of an automated refuse cart.Her mind raced. “She said Thousand-Year Rain.”“She did,” the ship agreed.Her eye traced a rod’s filigree. It made no sense. It defied an elementary, observable fact of nature, like the planet’s rotation.“That expression was coined on Szent Amnesztia.”“The cyclopedia attributes it to the poet Zelóta Nektár,” the ship said. “The incipit of his poem Si Vis Pacem. Written in the year 623, at the height of the exodus.”“Then the cyclopedia is wrong. No information can pass through from our side.”“It cannot. Perhaps the term was carried by an exile from the Orbes Antiqui. Perhaps Nektár was a plagiarist.”“Or perhaps,” came the woman’s voice from the reception hall, “we’ve been listening all along.”The woman no longer stared at the sensors, but at the wall, behind which Erna watched.“I told you to mute me,” Erna barked.“You are muted,” the ship said.The newcomer retreated to the far side of the reception hall then threw herself again at the wall, shoulder first.“What you say is impossible.”“You who dwell in this stagnant pond presume to dictate what is possible?” the woman laughed. “You are the dregs of the Great Society. The unfit and outcast. We re-engineered this wormhole while your people were tinkering with monsoon cycles.”The woman threw herself at the wall a second time.“Kill the display,” Erna said. The image disappeared.She kicked her way back to the cockpit. Her anti-nausea pill was already wearing off. “Put me through to Control.”Twenty seconds passed. She could hear the newcomer’s thumping echo through the ship. Aggressive. Disquietingly rhythmic.“What’s the holdup? Get me Orbit Control.”“I am running a diagnostic on my radio array. It has ceased functioning.”“You choose now to break down?”“I am getting unusual readings below deck. Subsector H9.”H9 was mostly plumbing. Waste pipes. Life support. Communication conduits that fed the radio array.“Show me.”The ship brought up twelve panels of scrolling data and views of interstitial dead space, crowded by tubes, thick cable bundles and narrow reservoirs. She was no technician and had never poked her head down there, but she spotted the problem right away. “That tank is bulging.”She could only watch as the metal grew shiny from interior stress. It ruptured, tearing a gash along the tank’s length. She winced, but no liquefied gasses geysered through the tear. Instead, glassy tendrils sprouted from the breach and fanned out like a hydroponic root system getting its footing.“What the hell is that?”“The preservation medium,” the ship said.“The lifepod?”“It has self-organized.”The tendrils anchored themselves onto the tank’s outer surface and a glistening mass heaved itself out.“It’s breaking free!”Despite the analogies that came to mind—reaching anemone beds, lungs inverted to reveal greedy, grasping bronchioles—there was nothing animal or vegetable about this seething heap of glass. This was Inimical technology at work.One word resounded through her head. Contaminated.The preservation glass flattened like a thousand-armed starfish. Polyps rose across the mottled surface. She noticed these just as they exploded in a flurry of vitreous whips. All views of H9 went black.Tainted.“Flush it,” she said. “Blow the service hatches, I don’t care. That thing can’t be allowed to roam your guts.”“I cannot. The medium has knocked out sensory couplings E17 through H231. I am receiving no inputs from Sector H… Interceptrix, I feel strange.”“If you can’t isolate H, flush Sectors D through G. Forget life support. I’ll roll myself up in my cradle and let Control handle the cleanup. And sedate the newcomer!”The lighting dropped by a thousand lumens.In the sudden dimness, Erna recalled the void through which she sailed.“What’s happening?”The glow from system and environmental reports, normally subdued, seemed to blaze above her head. They stuttered with a campfire flicker. None of the values were fluctuating like they should.“Talk to me. What’s going on down there?”A shudder passed through the ship. From somewhere, she heard the hiss of escaping gasses. Then a hush. The ship had never been so quiet.“Tell me that was you,” Erna said. “If you’ve lost your verbal interface, give me a sign.”Another thump. Louder, more of a bang. Down in the observatory, as if the newcomer had gotten her hands on a battering ram.Erna flipped open a cabinet and began twisting levers for manual override.A never-used 3-D navscreen dropped from the ceiling on hinged arms. A rudder stock studded with stiff mechanical buttons bobbed up from a compartment in the floor. She set her feet in the gel contacts and took hold of the stock with both hands.The crunch of rending synthetics. The whistle of failed hermetic seals. Her ears popped. She turned as a noxious, acidic stench raked her nostrils. Down at the bottom of the ship’s throat, sinuous and glistening in the emergency light, she saw the preservation glass massing, a mound of heaving snakes. Buried in its center, like a demon trapped in ice, the woman leered.Erna pulled down on a switch above her head. Spring-loaded blast doors snapped shut behind her.She sat, panting, her thumb hovering above ignition.Her choices:—Burn up in the planet’s atmosphere.The ship would disintegrate, but what about the alien glass designed for the crushing forces of wormhole travel?No.The blast doors trembled under impact. Even expecting its follow up, the next blow was so strong that Erna almost leapt from her seat. She nudged the rudder stock and sent the ship into a lazy spin.—Crash into a moon.The blast doors were twenty centimeters thick, but she had no faith they would hold until she reached one of them. It was too easy to envision glassy drills boring through the titanium. Too easy to imagine the medium crashing over her like pitiless amber and the newcomer taking hold of the rudderstock.No.Another impact. The newcomer’s voice.“We have been listening, Interceptrix.”Erna stopped.“We even know all about you. We know what music forms delight you. We know your heart rate. We know about that jaundiced, sliver-thin father of yours. You should have visited him when you had the chance.”Erna stared at the system reports. Frozen data. Pitch and yaw: erroneous.“Your frailties have amused us.”Oxygen levels: already out of date.“And endeared you to us, for you are human—though of a very primitive sort.”Gate field state: inaccurate. And counterfeit.The looping field lines, which one must never fly too near lest the gate’s repulsive forces fling one aside like shrapnel, could not be accurate. They depicted a one-way gate.“Take heart, Dear Erna. Even those born into sin can be reformed.”—Cast the enemy into the pit.Yes.Erna entered the coordinates and dialed the engine to full thrust. She kicked her way into her cradle as the blast doors shook.“We have a place for even you, Interceptrix.”Erna telescoped a rod to full length and jammed the angel’s sword-point into the ignition switch. She was thrown back into her bed when the engines roared. She heard a crash and oaths spit in an unknown tongue.She punched a little red window to expose a knuckle switch. She cranked it so hard she broke its cap off.The door to her cradle slammed shut.She punched a little blue window to expose a metal ring. She remembered to hail all the saints when she yanked the pin.The shock of the immobilizing foam that enveloped her almost distracted her from the sudden drop. Blood rushed to her head.When she could unclench her teeth, she said, “Cradle, do I have voice command?”“Yes, Interceptrix.”“Did I make it?”“Your distance is 17.1 kilometers and counting from mothership.”“Give me a visual.”She watched her ship retreat at full burn. She watched as a great, rope-like arm punched out of an exhaust valve and flailed about, with nothing to grab onto. She watched as the ship’s engines sputtered out.Its momentum did not wane. Nor was it flung away from the gate, like every textbook said it must. It only sped up.She watched as a dark star appeared between the moons of Szent Amnesztia. It gaped, extinction black, and swallowed the ship and for an instant the light from the blessed crescents.She closed her eyes but there was no forgetting.“Broadcast distress call. Say, ‘Our seclusion is ended.'”On the planet’s surface, every siren wailed.