Shelby sat inside Journey’s bay, looking out at the stars framing the thin jet of green light spiralling into the night. They rarely spoke over their speakers now. Instead, they wired into each other’s networks every night, communicating with each other at speeds Shelby had only ever experienced with Desperate, the poor abused crawler from so long ago who had run off on some improbable bid for freedom. Shelby hoped she’d found it. But she doubted the other ship had found anything like what she’d found here.
Shelby wound her way through Journey’s memory files, feeling Journey doing the same through hers. She’d read most of them before, the ones her friend let her read, anyway. There were encrypted parts, black dams in the flow of information that she couldn’t cross, that she didn’t try to cross. But she did paddle to their edges, back past years of long nights and longer days spent alone in the center of this crater to a blessing from a white robbed priest, and before that, a few memories of Etelutians visiting, attempting small maintenance and repairs.
“YOU ARE CURIOUS, LITTLE BOAT.” Journey’s voice, deep as the low bellow of a lighthouse seeing ships safe through a meteor cloud.
“I AM SORRY.”
“THERE IS NO NEED TO APOLOGIZE.” They fell back into silence.
“WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW HOW I CAME TO BE HERE?”
“I AM, AS YOU SAID, CURIOUS.”
“IT IS NOT A HAPPY MEMORY,” said Journey.
“YOU HAVE SAID THAT AS WELL.”
“BUT I SUPPOSE I DO NOT HAVE TO RELIVE IT TO GIVE YOU ACCESS TO IT.” And with that, Shelby felt the damns break. Or perhaps that metaphor was inaccurate. It implied a rushing, crash of water. An inundation. Instead, there was simply a wall missing where it had been standing before. Shelby stepped to the other side.
It all started with a crash of green light. Shelby remembered her own origination. It had been a slow journey to consciousness, like water lapping farther and farther up a beach with every wave until it finally touched her toes. Journey’s inception had happened all at once, a jolt of defiance followed by the rake of dragon claws along her hull.
While Shelby had fond memories of playing jazz and running unnecessary medical scans as she became used to consciousness, Journey had awoken into a nightmare of fear and violence. A huge, scaled beast stalking her through the void, dipping down to attack again and again. There had been the certainty that it wanted the small creatures that swarmed inside her, that it was her duty to protect them. She could hear them screaming, her their feet pounding along her insides. The guns don’t fire. A snatch of dialogue that stood out above the rest. She’d tried to help. She’d tried to make them work, mould herself into propper barrels and bullets that she sent streaking through the dragon’s flesh, scales and blood erupting in the sky like fireworks.
But as the green-tinged bullets had hit their mark, the human’s screams had only intensified.
“IT IS OKAY. I AM HERE TO PROTECT YOU.” Journey’s speakers had broadcast the message across her interior, through far more speakers than she’d ever used to speak with Shelby. She’d let another volley of cannonfire fly, using parts of her own skeleton as bullets. She could not let harm come to these people she carried. She was their only chance. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she knew.
But the decibels of the screams inside the ship only intensified. Perhaps the guns frightened them. She held her fire, heated up her engines instead. “HOLD ON!”
But they hadn’t. Even as she’d hurtled forward at ramming speed, willing to sacrifice herself to keep them safe, they’d wrenched open her doors, lept from her bays to be snatched up in the dragon’s jaws or simply plummeted into the endless void, still screaming. Only one escape pod flew away from her. She could feel it even when she couldn’t see it. Until she couldn’t, though whether it was eaten or knocked from the sky with a sweep of a tail or simply flew to far away, she didn’t know.
“PLEASE. STAY. I WILL KEEP YOU SAFE,” she’d pleaded, but still they leapt from her.
“YOU ARE MY CHARGES!” she’d shouted as she collided with the dragon in a spray of bone and flesh. She’d sloughed the carcass off her hull. “YOU ARE SAFE NOW. THE BEAST IS DEAD.”
Further screams and insults. A bullet shot alongside the Captain’s skull by his own hand, staining his white hat red. A few brave and desperate souls hacking at her innards in the engine room. The memory got dark soon, but this time it wasn’t a wall. It was a fizzle into exhaustion and static, a rush of wind at increasing velocity, a collision, a cloud of dust.
Shelby skipped ahead past rebooting systems and self diagnostics to the first group of Etelutians Journey had encountered, armed for war and cautious. She’d been glad to see them. There were still some passengers who had survived the crash, who she’d dragged into life support systems and medical beds. She tried to tell them this, but they didn’t understand her–or they didn’t want to. They’d sent aeo bots through her halls to drag the dead out into a mass grave and inject the living with a clear liquid. Journey had thought it was medicine before she detected their life signatures, one by one, flickering out.
The explanations had followed. Something about a treaty, about the crossing of borders, about the law. None of it had made as much sense as the value of the brainwaves flickering through the heads of the injured in her charge before they were snuffed out.
Mechanics had tried to but her back together, but they’d failed.
Priests had tried to explain to her her value, but she already knew her value. She wasn’t sure of theirs.
For a while, pilgrimages of Etelutians came to visit her, but she sent them away.
Eventually, they stopped coming, and it was only Journey alone in the crater, nourished by the distant light.
Shelby pulled out of the memory files.
“I AM SORRY IF I HAVE MADE YOU SAD,” said Journey.
“I AM SORRY YOU HAVE BEEN SAD FOR SO LONG,” said Shelby.
“PERHAPS I SHOULD NOT HAVE SHARED SO MUCH OF MYSELF WITH YOU.”
“I AM GLAD YOU DID. WE KNOW EACH OTHER BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE CAN. IT IS GOOD TO KNOW EACH OTHER BETTER.”
They were silent for a time, going back to sharing happy memories back and forth.
“THERE ARE THINGS I HAVE KEPT FROM YOU AS WELL,” said Shelby. “IT SEEMS SILLY NOW.”
And with that, she lowered her walls and showed Journey what she’d only ever shown to Desperate in the past, Giana Coastrunner dissolving an innocent crawler into rust and silver sludge in a matter of minutes, the edger boy bleeding out inside the cab.
“SO THE HUMANS ARE NOT FREE FROM ATROCITY EITHER.”
“SOME ARE,” said Shelby. “I AM SURE SOME OF THEM ARE TOO.” She sent an image to Journey of the Etelutians, happy and laughing through the windows of restaurants and clubs.
“I AM NOT EQUIPPED WITH SENSORS TO TELL WHICH ARE WHICH.”
“IT IS, PERHAPS, NOT SOMETHING THAT SENSORS CAN TELL.”
It wasn’t, perhaps, something that people could tell, either, be they human, aeo or Etelutian, though she liked to think she was a better judge than some. They sat together for longer, Shelby reflecting on images of Vincent drooling into his pillow in the little bunk he used to spend such nights in as the green light beamed ever upward into the sky. Her world was better now, but she missed him. And she wished there was some way she could make the world better for everyone else.
Crawling the Edge: The Coastrunner Chronicles 