The Fallow Orbits, Chapter 2

Traders in the Mist of Worlds

In Chapter 1 we meet Nathan Demirci and a young thief who refuses to give her name. Both are running for their lives and are holed up in a temporary sanctuary in Istanbul when a mysterious woman, Captain Barad, visits. She needs an engineer with Nathan’s skills on her classic, low-tech finned rocketship. Nathan agrees to go with her but only if she brings the kid too. Barad reluctantly agrees, and both refugees escape from their present peril, into the unknown…

There was a fifth crew member.

Nathan only learned this after a chaotic first hour in orbit. Unstrapping and finding himself bouncing all over the cabin was simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. He had the presence of mind to grab an airsick bag before gingerly launching himself toward the window. He discovered padded hand-holds and straps were everywhere, so he could hold on and look out at the Earth.

Later, he would remember it feeling as if some part of himself he’d never known, suddenly woke with a shout. He hovered, fingers loosely gripping a handle, filled to the brim with the incandescent whites and royal blues, the fine-picked details of storms like intricate lace, the coy arc of coastlines, the streamers of cloud scored on the sky by mountain-tips.

Tanaer was dead. He would never see this. Nathan’s other brothers were too; and his father. Mother’s crypt no doubt desecrated. At this moment his childhood room would be some collapsed V of charred wood and detritus, browed by hovering smoke. All of that might be real yet all of that was somehow simply part of this vast, transcendently beautiful orb, an object of such serenity that nothing could blemish its perfection.

He had to throw up for a while. He couldn’t tell whether it was his emotions erupting or just some dumb physiological reaction. What was necessary was that he find some medication to deal with it; he knew nausea was a common problem for spacers. He found pills in a drawer but then had no idea how to swallow them while upside down. He experimented, eventually jumping across the room while rapidly gulping.

Barad’s voice kept interrupting these activities. “Engineer! Crew meeting in the galley! Where are you? Now!”

He managed to flail his way to the intercom. “Coming, captain.”

Leaving the airsick bag twirling in the light of a glorious planet, he ventured out. In the hexagonal central chamber, he seemed to suddenly remember to hear; and he heard the urchin with the tape shoes screaming.

“We’re falling! Falling!” she was crying.

He banged on her door. “No, we’re not! Look out the window, Kedi. We’re in space. We can’t fall.”

He heard banging sounds, something ricocheting about inside. Gradually the noises subsided. “We’re not going to die?”

“You will if you bash your head in. Calm down. I’m going to talk to the captain, I’ll be back soon.”

“Uh... okay...?”

Nathan flailed his way to the ladder and went up it, or along it. The next level was mostly open; half of it was a galley with food lockers and a glovebox of the sort you used to handle biological or radioactive samples. This was a zero-gee food prep station, he supposed. The other half of the level was a lounge with couches and man-high leaning cushions for low-gravity comfort. Shelves filled the available wall space, with hundreds of colorful boxes of different sizes and shapes jammed and tied in them. On the galley side, Ydes and the captain perched at a metal table, their bare feet stuck through floor straps. With them was Alma, who was dressed in baggy coveralls and curled up like an apostrophe, its top a pair of wide black eyes peering from inside a cowl of frizzy black hair.

Art by Chinonso O

There was another person with them; and while Ydes was amazing, this one was deeply unsettling. Nathan’s first impression was that someone had propped a corpse at the table; then it turned to look at him.