Moral and Orbital Decay Read online

The gravity stone strained against its shackles. Beneath Esper’s palms, the granite sphere shook. In its fear, it could not escape the words of Esper’s spell.

  …Of Mort’s spell, that is.

  Mort recited. Esper mimicked. If the universe was in on her secret, it offered no hint. All her life, Esper had angels and devils whispering in her ears; this was the first time in a long while that she listened without hesitation to the devil.

  It was working.

  Though she squeezed shut her eyes, Esper could feel the station’s place in the cosmos. Their spin slowed. Their angle of descent toward the lifeless rock of a planet shifted. The gravity stone protested but obeyed.

  Esper was sweating. They weren’t safe yet. She knew she was only buying time, not enacting a miracle. That was the way of demonic bargains. Dark power came with a heavy price to the soul and never delivered on all that it promised—except perhaps in the most literal and legalistic of manners.

  “Can’t…” Esper panted between refrains. “Can’t keep this up.”

  “You’ve done enough,” Mort judged. “Get back to the ship. These poor bastards have a fighting chance of their station sorting its buttons and bells into the right piles before they splatter. It’s more than they had before.”

  Esper’s heightened consciousness could foresee what that would look like. No longer minutes from disaster, they were now safe for a day or two at best. They would brush gently against the upper atmosphere at first. Then the station would heat up and lose speed. It would fall faster toward the planet’s surface as the interior became an oven, baking the trapped inhabitants until finally slamming mercifully into the surface to end their suffering.

  “No.”

  Esper pressed her hands firmly against the protesting gravity stone and renewed the chant that Mort had taught her. She didn’t need him to repeat it. The syllables were carved into the flesh of her throat—she hoped not literally. They would come by an act of willpower, not memory.

  The floor shook.

  A horrible creak of tormented steel split the air.

  A voice called from light-years distant.

  “Esper… we have to get out of here…” It was Cedric’s voice.

  “Must finish.”

  She took up the chant again. Esper began to feel lightheaded.

  The space station fluttered. It wobbled from upright to tipped the opposite direction and back again. Soon it was oriented upright and stable.

  They might be safe a week or longer.

  Strong hands wrapped around Esper. Without looking back, she shoved Cedric roughly away.

  Once more, she recited.

  This time, without pausing to worry about the spin of the station confusing her sense of direction—or the gravity stone’s—she pushed firmly against the planet, yanking the station into higher orbit.

  Now, when her vision saw the station’s future, it would be months before its orbit clipped one of the circling moons. There would be no dipping into the gaseous quicksand of the planet’s deadly atmosphere. Surely the station would regain its self-control long before the moon threatened them.

  That was good, because Esper was spent. As the floor of the gravity stone chamber rushed up to grab her, those same strong hands closed around her. Esper floated atop a pair of thin but surprisingly firm arms. Her head lay limp against Cedric’s chest.

  “You’ve done something amazing.”

  Esper didn’t have breath to respond. The best she could manage was a weary smile.

  # # #

  Carl was still watching through the canopy of the turret when he heard the commotion. Indistinct shouting carried through the cargo bay doors and meandered up to his seat above the back wall of the common room.

  This wasn’t one of those moments where Carl had to take a wait-and-see attitude. His finger stabbed the comm button to the cargo bay. “What’s going on down there?”

  It was Shoni’s voice that came out of the panel. “They did it! They did it! I can hardly believe it, but they did it.”

  “That’s nice,” Carl replied calmly. Despite the smooth in his voice, his spirits were bobbing to the surface of an icy pond, cracking through the frozen surface for a glimpse of sunlight. “Who did what, exactly?”

  “The station moved. We’re not in a death spiral any longer.”

  “Great! Is Roddy there with you?”

  “Um, yeah.” The mechanic’s voice sounded choked off and strained. “We’re all happy down here. We can wait out the station coming back online.”

  “Whoa, there, cowboy,” Carl replied, patting his hands in the air though no one could see him. “Let’s not get behind ourselves. We’re still largely responsible for this mess. There’s going to be investigations and all that jazz. If there’s one thing I don’t want to be around for, it’s investigative jazz.”

  “Broaden your horizons a little,” Roddy replied. Carl could hear the smile in his friend’s voice, though. “That million-terra guitar can play more than Chuck Berry and Van Halen.”

  Carl snorted. He wished his guitar could play Van Halen.

  “Just make sure we’re ready when the kids get home. Plan stands; we’re just fleeing a comatose station instead of a dying one.”

  “Roger that.”

  Switching channels, Carl opened the comm to the cockpit. “Day saved. Outlaw Escape Plan Bravo in effect.”

  “There’s no money to take before we run,” Amy pointed out.

  Carl shrugged. “Hey, no plan ever goes by the book—or the song. Plan A is always having our cake and eating it too. Plan B is tucking tail and running with whatever we can stuff in our pockets. But I was right.”

  “About what?” Amy’s voice was wary. She must have sensed that this was one of Carl’s little verbal traps.

  “About everything working out just fine. See? There was nothing to worry about after all. Just trust old Carl, and you’ll be fine. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “You had, if possible, less than nothing to do with this.”

  Carl made sure his end of the comm was open as he laughed. “Sure. But that’s part of the beauty of it. The worse things get, the more I know to stick with what I’m good at. I can’t fix a starship or do whatever the fuck Esper just did to move an entire goddamn space station in its orbit. But I sure as hell knew to keep out of everyone’s way while they did.”

  Before Amy could reply, he keyed the comm again quickly. “Oh, and I was the one who found Rai Kub. So there’s that.”

  “My hero.”

  Carl couldn’t tell whether she was being sarcastic or not. Carl Who Believed Everything Amy Said grinned like a schoolboy.

  “Just get those engines fired up and run any diagnostic that’s still running. The instant our wizards get on board, we’re venting this hangar and laying an ion trail.”

  “Um, please remember to have someone seal the station door, sweetie. Don’t want to vent the entire station.”

  Good point. Carl would call Roddy the instant Amy switched off their comm.

  # # #

  Esper stumbled up the cargo ramp of the Mobius as Roddy hurried past them to close and lock up the door to the rest of the station. Cedric stooped at her side so that Esper could lay an arm across his shoulders for support. Her strength was returning, albeit slowly.

  “That was real wizardry,” Mort said. “You might have announced yourself grandly at the outset. As it is, there’s a great feat of mystical mastery that’s going to be attributed to ‘that woman in the sweatshirt’ rather than Esper the Terrible.”

  “Not calling myself that,” Esper mouthed.

  Mort cupped a hand to his ear. “What’s that?”

  In the faintest whisper, Esper repeated herself. “I’m not calling myself that.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t have to. They’d come up with a nickname for you. Esper the Orbital; Esper, Goddess of Gravity; Esper the Enchantress. It doesn’t matter. You’d dine for free on it for decades, Convocation credit be damned.”


  At the cargo bay’s metal-grated stairs, Cedric extracted himself and allowed Esper to plod up. He followed close behind in case she slipped or fainted.

  Esper entered the common room to an impromptu cheer.

  “Hooray!”

  “Way to go, Esper!”

  “That’s why the galaxy needs wizards!”

  It was, for a moment, just a little too much for her. Instead of her initial plan to get to the couch before collapsing, Esper slumped into one of the kitchen chairs with a sappy grin on her face. “Thanks, everyone.”

  Behind her, Cedric cleared his throat to garner the crew’s attention. “If I might have a moment?”

  Standing at the foot of the gunnery chair, waiting to go back up, Carl shook his head. “It better wait until we’re out of here.”

  “Please, this will be brief, and I fear my nerve might later fail me,” Cedric pressed. Carl just shrugged. What else could he do when the saviors of the day came back in one piece with a simple request? “I am grateful for your help. I believe, however, that Esper has something she would like to confess.”

  A jolt of cold fear shot through Esper’s veins. “What?”

  “I’ve read the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts. I heard your mutterings more than once. So many people claim that wizards are no fools, yet for all our failings in technology, they often treat us as such. I know now what became of my father.”

  Carl scratched his head. “Huh? We heard the story. Esper’s not a good enough liar to have murdered him and convinced us otherwise. No offense,” he added quickly in Esper’s direction.

  There was no denying it, now. Cedric was, as he claimed, too knowledgeable to overlook the fit of the pieces he had gathered. Esper closed her eyes and sighed. “In a sense.”

  Everyone talked at once. They wanted to know what she meant. They demanded clarification. Only Cedric—and Archie—remained silent.

  Esper waited until they played themselves out with their badgering. “Mort was dying. Bellamy Blackstone had silenced magic and used tech, just as I said. But there’s a secret in that awful book Mort read long ago that I learned while I apprenticed in Mortania.”

  Carl gasped. “Mort? Is that you?”

  Standing beside the captain of the Mobius, Mort scowled. “Merlin’s manhood, boy. You can be daft as a bag of squirrels sometimes. Shut up and let her explain.”

  “Mort… collected a lot of the bounty hunters who came after them. He imprisoned them in his mind as both a punishment for chasing him and a source of intel, both magical and operationally. That’s part of his success, staying ahead of the Convocation all this time.”

  “He didn’t just use the mental realm, then?” Cedric asked. “He used the Eight-Finger Siphon?”

  Esper nodded.

  “Wait, so Mortania… that place we were in that was full of made-up people… those were all real?” Carl asked.

  “No,” Esper clarified. “Those were figments, just as Mort advertised. The real people he kept locked up in the dungeon depths of his mind—except for his grandfather, who lived in a secluded grove.”

  “Great Grampy Nebuchadnezzar?” Cedric asked. “He died when I was…”

  Realization dawned in the younger wizard’s eyes. The time line of Mort’s disgrace and flight from justice.

  “He killed Great Grampy?”

  “They both claim it was Nebuchadnezzar’s idea. He was dying, and Mort offered immortality. In fact, that was the whole reason Mort read the book—he claims. When Mort was dying, that’s what he confessed to me, and he begged me to do him the same favor.”

  “That’s horrible,” Amy breathed.

  Roddy cringed. “It’s like you stirred his ashes into a cake mix.”

  “What’s it like having a secondary intellect within your own?” Shoni asked.

  “Annoying,” Esper answered. “Mort pesters me regularly to tell you all. But what was I going to say? Look at the way you’re all reacting now. I would have spared you the weirdness of this all and allowed you your grief.”

  “But… he’s kinda not dead. Right?” Carl asked carefully.

  “There, we go!” Mort cheered, pantomiming clapping Carl on the back. “Not as dumb as a frozen fish after all!”

  “He insists he’s not,” Esper said. “I’m supervising his penance, hoping when he slips away he will make his way to heaven.”

  Roddy crinkled his nose. “I was about to ask if we could do that Mort trick and hang out for a while with the old relic. But not if your brain is a cathedral dungeon.”

  “More of a lakeside resort with a bowling alley,” Esper admitted. “Mort plays in a league with everyone he murdered.”

  Carl burst out laughing, breaking the tension of the room. “Oh, you’ve got a mean streak. How about this: let’s get the fuck off this limping space station and then see what we can do about Mort.”

  # # #

  Pins crashed. Balls rumbled. Shoes slipped and slid.

  Carl tilted back a beer that tasted just like Martian Stout. The label was Esperville Brewery, but that didn’t matter. For a non-devout drinker, the girl had done a pretty damn good job mimicking the flavor. He imagined that in her pre-pious days, this was what she and her friends must have drunk.

  “You’re up,” Roddy called out to him, dusting off his hands after yet another strike. Built low to the ground and with a head for spatial relationships, the laaku was proving to be an annoyingly good bowler.

  “Get ‘em, kid,” Mort encouraged him.

  As the only non-wizard on Team Brown, Carl felt it was his duty to represent the best of his mundane peers. He’d have felt more at ease in a pool hall, but being around Mort made the choice of game irrelevant.

  “Remember where you’re sleeping tonight,” Amy taunted from the other side of the seating area, where she sat with Esper, Roddy, and a dead wizard by the name of Julian.

  Carl took his ball and held it like everyone else did. He measured off his three steps up to the line and took a steadying breath.

  He sucked at this game.

  Then he remembered that this was Esperville. It wasn’t like Mortania in a lot of ways, but there were certain aspects he imagined were common to both. If he played by the laws of physics, those pins might as well have been welded to the lane’s polished wood surface.

  Taking three quick steps, Carl released his ball skyward with a twist. The ball sliced an arc through the air, its spin causing it to swerve in mid-air. The ball landed in the middle of the pins, knocking over six of them amid an ear-splitting crash.

  On an overhead projection of the score sheet, Carl saw Esper’s hand mark the six in grease pencil next to his name.

  Roddy sniggered. “Even trying to cheat, you suck.”

  Carl threw his second ball along the floor, knocking over a single one of the remaining pins before retreating to his beer.

  “Hey. It’s a game, right?” Carl asked nonchalantly.

  “Maybe we can invite these nice folks to join a league,” Nebuchadnezzar suggested, clapping a hand on Carl’s back mid-swig.

  Esper perked up. “I’d never thought of that. What would everyone think?”

  Roddy lowered his mug. “Wait a minute. You mean, coming in here on a regular basis, getting drunk for free, and living three weeks a night?”

  Mort harrumphed. “I used to be able to manage over a year a night. She’s an amateur.”

  Cedric looked at his father with wistfulness in his eyes. “But none of it would be real.”

  Mort hugged his son. “Boy, nothing’s real. Everything is. Philosophers debate that claptrap, but it doesn’t make a sniff of difference in the universe. Plus, it would be nice having a variety of company in here.”

  Esper smirked. “Plus, he could use the extra arm on his bowling team.”

  Carl watched with curious detachment. It could be a nice little life here on the side. Maybe he and Amy could give a quiet, planetside life a test run. As Shoni ambled up to the lane with her bowling ball, he imagined he could se
e similar musings in Roddy’s eyes.

  This place was no substitute for the real world, but it was better than any computer game he’d ever tried.

  When Carl’s turn came up, he passed his mug to Mort. “Hold my beer. I’ve got something I want to try.”

  # # #

  Yomin laced her fingers with Archie’s. The robot sat inert on the couch as Yomin watched Days of the Last Continent on the holo-projector. The Mobius was deep in the astral, drifting along with no particular destination in mind.

  Around the kitchen table, the human and laaku crew linked together in a circle of hands, all fast asleep. They looked like the “after” picture of one of those suicide cults.

  She gave Archie’s hand a squeeze. Supposedly, all the wizards agreed that the best thing they could do for the robot was to give him time and refrain from using magic. He would either awaken again, or he wouldn’t. No one was willing to put a number on how long they would wait.

  Yomin was feeling the effects of all the beer she’d drunk and decided to head to her quarters to relieve herself. The clutching hand in hers tightened and didn’t let her leave.

  “—have a better idea where our stuunji friend might be.” Archie looked all around. “What’s going on? When did we get back to the Mobius? Why is everyone slumped over the table like a litter of puppies?”

  On the couch cushion beside him, a miniature Rai Kub spoke up in a squeaky voice. “You lost power. But everything is fine now.”

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