Chapter 15 — by pixelmum 

picture credit - Ron Miller (Stocktrek Images)

Hana and Sanju trudged on leaden feet to the great circular door of the Strawberry Mollusk's transit hatch, separating the ship's habitat ring from the central fusion core. H'ver glided after them at a distance, lights blinking in a frenzy along its equatorial axis, as if the little golden sphere was trapped in a cycle of immense processing of his own making.

She could scarcely believe that Phili had been taken from her so easily. It had all happened so quickly. She should have fought for him, somehow. But, he'd died protecting her, and her little one. Second to Hana herself, he'd been the baby's greatest champion. He'd often look at Hana's belly with such delight, as if he sensed that Earth's mysteries were unfolding in there. But, it was now over. Phili was gone, and without his books and theories and wanderlust, there was no hope of finding their lost cradle.

They'd come so far that the route back to Paghūṛā was just as treacherous as the path ahead to an Earth that perhaps no longer existed. Hana's brain skirted around the terrifying thought before it could take hold of her — the very idea of limping back to Paghūṛā to live a life with no baby was too devastating to contemplate.

She needed to keep herself busy, distracted. She hovered around Sanju's hunched form, arms flapping. "Let me help!"

A limp-crested and yellow-spotted Sanju shook xeir head, Phili's still body hanging in xeir arms. Sanju had insisted on carrying Phili to the stasis pods unaided. "I must do this alone. Besides," a smile lit xeir face briefly, "you have a precious enough weight to bear."

Hana slapped at the gravity buffer switch, the hum of bearings signifying the slowing of the Mollusk's ring rotation. They passed through the transit hatch and into the weightless core, Hana guiding Sanju across a traverse of tethers and rings embedded into the corridor walls towards the stasis chamber. The baby leapt as they went, as if the weightlessness had given him room to toss and turn. Hana clung tight onto a handhold, her other arm sweeping across her belly.

"Is the baby all right?"

"Yes. He's fine. I hope."

Sanju smiled, xeir crest fluttering briefly. "I know what you're thinking. You can't go back to Paghūṛā."

Hana swatted away stray tears. "He's gone, Sanju!"

"Don't lose hope. We're close to Earth, I know it. We owe it to Phili to continue."

A neat row of pods lined the stasis room, ALI clicking open the first pod as Sanju approached. Xe lay Phili reverently into the pod, Hana pressing a kiss to Phili's slender hand before pushing the lid shut under the whir of locking mechanisms.

Iridescent yellow blotches grew and shrunk on Sanju's skin. "Goodbye, friend. I'm sorry. I promise that I will atone for this."

"It wasn't your fault, Sanju! I should have negotiated with the Vipa crew! I should have stopped Phili from jumping in front of me! I should have..." Hana glared at the two black Latrodectus rosettes tattooed into her skin, before covering her face at the onset of a fresh flurry of tears. "...why admit me into the Brood if they didn't even protect me? Protect my friends?"

"The Latrodecti have honour. They took Makuy and Blarj as prisoners to atone for Phili's loss. I don't know what their fate will be, but it will not be pretty. Don't blame yourself. It was my fault. I thought that gaining amber was my key to status and power with TAS. Greed and ambition drove me to follow you, and my feud with Makuy led to this." Xe waved a hand at the stasis pod, Phili's face visible through the frosted lid, as if he were in peaceful sleep.

Hana had warned Phili of the dangers of their journey. She'd urged him to stay, but he'd been determined. "Phili's desire to know his Human side brought him here. He knew that this journey would be dangerous, perhaps futile, but he insisted on helping to find Earth. Now, I fear that we never will."

Sanju drew a shaking hand over xeir crest. "Phili gave himself so that your baby would see Earth. Let's honour his memory by hoping."

No sooner had they returned to the ring than ALI gave a warning of drive power loss. The ship hung in star-spangled blackness, immovable. So much for keeping hope alive.

"How can we have loss of drive power?" Hana leapt to the navigation console and began to run reports. "All six fusion reactors are online, ALI! And you didn't report any hull damage or power outages when the Vipa attacked us!"

"I'm sorry, Hana. Whatever Makuy and the Latrodecti did to the ship, I am not updated enough to detect it. It must be a very new virus."

Sanju slammed a fist on the console, xeir face awash with flashing orange dots, like so many fleshy indicator lights winking on and off. "We TAS agents are experts at designing viruses. Makuy must have instructed Blarj to sabotage ALI with a novel AI virus to kill the fusion drivers."

"So, how would a TAS agent get us out of this?"

"Simple." Sanju prodded a digit at the coordinates of a planet on the navigation console, a nearby hydrogen giant orbiting a binary brown dwarf system. A flashing neon marker on the coordinates indicated the presence of a jump gate next to the planet, and where there were jump gates, there were colonies. "We find a fusion reactor engineer."

Ngaro the hydrogen giant was the most beautiful planet that Hana had ever encountered. A vast golden brown ball, it hung against ink-blackness wearing a broad skirt of icy rings. A cluster of moons housed colonies which serviced the jump gate that lay close to Ngaro's north pole. As their lander approached Shimla, the largest of Ngaro's moons and the jump gate's main port, Hana could make out a vast mooring that teemed with fleets of ships large and small. None looked as haggard as the Strawberry Mollusk as it limped into the moorings driven only by ion power. Ships peeled off from the group every now and then and disappeared into the jump gate. Clouds of hydrogen and dust snaked off Ngaro and into the bellies of hundreds of humming fusion drives, creating a brisk wind that buffetted them as they stumbled out in space suits and air tanks.

Shimla's port city boasted a large Human colony serviced by dive bars, dubious hotels, and a workshop owned by a smiley reactor engineer called Leela. Definitely a Human under her lightweight spacesuit, Leela's skin was so dark that it almost looked blue under the light reflecting off Ngaro's rings above them.

"You have a magnetic virus in your reactor's electronics. Nasty."

"A magnetic virus?" Hana shook her head, mystified.

"It's a new family of viruses recently designed by TAS. It blocks magnetic containment of fusion plasma. No fusion plasma, no fusion. And your AI is too old to realise what's wrong." Leela twirled a data drive between gloved fingers and tittered into her helmet. "Luckily I'm good at hacking vintage AI."

"Blarj, that plork-fucker!" Sanju yelled up at Ngaro's rings. "He must have installed it."

"Blarj? That's a name from Earth-23, right? Don't go there. It's populated by Vlerns now. Those guys are very unlike Humans, and they'll probably kill you."

Hana looked down at her spacesuit boots. "Actually, we did go there and... now we have a deceased member of our team on board. A Hiwjshi and xeir spy, Blarj, implanted the virus into our ship's AI to capture it. The Hiwjshi tried to kill me. My friend, part Shozien and part Human, threw himself in front of me and took a direct hit by a needle gun. He..." Hana's throat rolled in an effort to hold back tears, "...he died to save me, and my baby."

Leela pressed a gloved hand to Hana's helmet. "I'm so sorry. Why did the Hiwjshi attack?"

Sanju yellowed, a stray tear falling. "Xe was a TAS agent. And so was I. We were both tracking Hana since she was looking for amber. My rival Hiwjshi attacked the ship to steal a non-existent amber hoard."

"We're actually looking for a Human called Amber. We think she discovered Earth and," Hana ran a hand across the bulge in her spacesuit, "we need to get there so I can have my baby naturally, safe in Earth's microbiome. We're down to my last ooblets but I'm sure we're close to Earth. If you know Earth's coordinates, or any clues—"

"No, Hana," Sanju cut her off. "I would have been paid handsomely by TAS for finding amber. But, now, this journey to Earth is priceless to me. I know that it won't bring Phili back, but we're spending my ooblets from now on."

Leela pointed at Hana's belly, clearly agog at the sight of a Human gestating right in front of her. "If Earth microbes are the only way to save your child, then I'll help, for free. Humans have populated a lot of planetoids across the entire Orion Arm, but the real Earth must be nearby, somewhere."

"What's the Orion Arm?"

Leela swept a hand out at Ngaro's rings, and across the endless star-studded blackness beyond. "Our old name for this local area. Things are complicated because Human colonists named so many places after Earth. I'm from Earth-51 myself. Even worse that Humans terraformed planets, named them Earth, and then moved on. Many of these new Earths got taken over by other species. I guess that's how you stumbled on Blarj and lost your friend."

Sanju flicked a hand across xeir crest, orange blotches shimmering across xeir skin. "Why are Humans so bad at naming things?"

"Closest is Neo Earth. My bot can give yours the coordinates. If it's not the right Earth, I'm sure it'll be close to it." Leela ushered over a bronze bot that glided across the repair station towards them. Modern and sleek, the Human-designed bot was still not as high-tech as H'ver.

The bot approached, but H'ver remained motionless, its axis rolling with ribbons of light, as if H'ver and ALI were locked deep in communication.

"Sh'mer?" Leela bent low to address her bot. "What are the droid and the AI doing?"

"Analysing. Moved by death of crewmate. Comforting each other. Will make introduction and wait." The bronze bot settled next to H'ver, a circle of blue indicator lights blinking for a few seconds, before dimming.

"Before you go, I can do one more thing. I have no idea about Shozien rituals, but I know a little about old Human funeral rights. Being so close to Earth, we still follow some of the old customs. Humans didn't just jettison stasis pods to drift through space for millennia. We kept our loved ones close to home."

Hana turned to Leela, eyes bulging. "What did they do?"

Leela held aloft a bottle of Oolian whisky. "I'll show you."

Bundled into the stasis room, Hana poured a dribble of Oolian whisky onto Phili's pod. She took a cautious sip of the revolting drink and swallowed with difficulty.

Leela took the bottle and sloshed whisky onto the pod before gulping down a long slug. She looked up at Hana. "It's customary on these occasions to give a speech."

"A speech. Yes. Of course." Hana began to whisper through a burst of hot tears. "I came to your library, and you gave me more than knowledge. My dear Phili, you gave me hope, friendship, and the vision of a future for my baby. Goodbye, friend."

Sanju snatched the bottle, tossed xeir neck backwards and downed almost a third of the whisky in swift gulps. "I will live my life like you did, Phili: bravely seeking knowledge, and protecting those I love. Goodbye, friend."

"Goodbye, friend," they repeated in unison, before returning to the habitation ring just in time to see Phili's frost-covered stasis pod arcing away from the Strawberry Mollusk in a gentle parabola, captured by Ngaro's gravity. It glinted under the planet's magnificent reflected ring-light, growing smaller and smaller in Hana's vision. It settled somewhere in the outermost dust and rocks that made up the huge ring plane, destined to orbit the hydrogen giant for millenia.

ALI and H'ver finally separated from their electronic link, as if Phili joining Ngaro's rings marked the end of their period of mourning. Sanju's teary eyes remained fixed on the navigation screen until the great planet disappeared from view.

"Are you all right, Sanju?"

"I'll be fine. I don't know about anything about Human naming rituals, but..." Sanju ran a shivering hand over xeir crest, xeir skin suddenly mottled with a kaleidoscope of coloured spots, as if the poor Hiwjshi was experiencing a torrent of emotions too big to express, "...I thought you might want to call your baby—"

"Phili," murmured Hana. "Whether Human or Shozien, it's a beautiful name."

Sanju smiled. "May your son be as brave and kind as our Phili was."

With that, Phili went to his eternal rest, and his namesake kicked Hana as if delighted to be named after his saviour.

ALI set a course for Neo Earth, unlikely to be the real Earth with such a name, but every kick that baby Phili made against her belly filled Hana with renewed hope.

She had to continue, for the Phili she'd lost and for the Phili who was yet to be. There was no turning back now.

Dedicated to my daughter, Leela