The Silent Fringe: Phantom Traveler, #2

By R J Theodore

An engineering failure has left Ehli stranded between the layers of reality. Her only companion is BEETL—a scarab drone programmed to terminate any iscillian who endangers the ship.

Ehli definitely qualifies.

She must repair the ship's disabled gate drive to free them from dimspace. But once she does, will she be free to search for her homeworld, or will BEETL's deadly protocols activate the moment she fails to set course for an impound dock?

When Ehli inadvertently involves another iscillian in her trouble, it's not just her own life she's risking.

The rebellious engineer must solve both moral and technical quandaries before she destroys another crew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robot Dinosaur Press
• Release date: Aug 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781732525948

R J Theodore

R J Theodore is hellbent on keeping herself busy. Seriously folks, if she has two spare minutes to rub together at the end of the day, she invents a new project with which to occupy them. She enjoys design, illustration, video games (mostly spectating, for she is not as adept at them as she would prefer), reading, binging on media, napping with her cats, and cooking. She is passionate about art and coffee. R J Theodore lives in New England with her family. She co-hosts The Hybrid Author Podcast and writes non-fiction as Rekka Jay.

Book preview

1 DIMSPACE

Ehli watched the vented cloud of isotopes slip away as her ship began to move. She had samples and a destination. There was no point in staying in one place. Venting the gases had not restored the Landor to one dimension or another, had not restored the color to her body, and the Xendari crew had not reappeared.

The dimspace curtain slipped over the ship with a ripple, distorting her view of the stars beyond. The gate drive was designed to move the Landor through dimensions, not physical space. Ehli half-feared the ship’s other propulsion system, the pulse drive, would not work in between, but navcomp confirmed they were gaining on their destination, so she silenced the emergency alerts, overrode its lockdown procedures, and shut off the display projection.

She stifled irritation at her protective plastic suit as she pushed away from the terminal. Her invertebrate hydrostat body was unaccustomed to clothing. She felt restricted, forced to maintain a stretched, upright posture to keep the inseam of the suit from chafing her, and to keep her torso and neck stretched so she could see through the faceplate of its helmet. But the suit, sized for the larger, vertebrate Xendari, had saved her life. She would have to tolerate wearing the thing until she knew it was safe to remove it. That would be the first order of business.

BEETL moved behind her like a shadow as she entered the antechamber at the aft wall of the command bridge. The scarab drone’s presence made her uneasy. Partially because it hovered just outside the peripherals of the visible area the suit’s face dome allowed her, so she knew it was there but could not see it.

But mostly because being alone with the drone, and behaving in a way that directly countered ship protocols, she could not help but recall Laness alone in the lab bay. Murdered by another drone, taken apart piece by piece.

Ehli could not scrub the security footage from her memory. Such was the nature of her Iscillian genetic design. Clever, docile, duty-bound, and complete with eidetic recall. In her four years, she’d never seen anything to haunt her dreams before.

She was overdue for sleep, but rest seemed unimportant now. Adrenaline and cortisol did their part to battle the scheduled flood of melatonin, leaving her with an intense, crystal-clear focus, despite having little which demanded her immediate attention.

It seemed imperative to get out of the suit sooner rather than later. It was imperative to her, at least, thanks to the wrinkle of plastic, the stale air, the dragging extra pair of sleeves, and the physical discomfort of keeping herself shaped for the ill-fitting equipment. She needed to figure out what havoc the isotopes were causing on her systems, aside from turning her color-shifting flesh as black as the space between stars.

The antechamber completed its rotation and she considered the corridor before her. The Intraship Molecular Shuttle hatch was centered in the opposite bulkhead. To one side was the small, squared panel that led to the access tubes. As a bantam custodian of the ship, she was expected to traverse the ship using the tubes and stay out of the way of the larger Xendari crew. But there were no Xendari anymore. Ehli was more than the ship’s custodian now. She was its acting commander. She outranked BEETL, at any rate.

Her decision made, Ehli palmed the control. But as the transport chamber door slid open with a low hum, BEETL darted between her and the entrance. Its alarms whined, its tool panel covers flapped on their hinges, and the LED display in its upper dome, which lent it the anthropomorphic impression of a face, blinked red lights at her.

She flinched, blinking away disorientation by the pattern of red lights. It was so like the flashes of her own chromatophores, she felt the instinct to respond in kind. She could feel her pigmented cells expand and contract, but she knew her skin, within the suit, remained star-pinned black. She took a step back from the lift and BEETL’s display returned to a steady pulse of blue and white.

The irony was not lost on her. She’d worried BEETL would kill her for acting outside bantam duties, and here they’d saved her life for a second time. The suit might be uncomfortable, but they insisted she wear it lest the ship phase away from her, as it had from the rest of the crew. And now they prevented her from passing through the shuttle’s molecular filters. She would emerge on the other side, cells scrubbed of the radiation that kept her synced with the Landor when every other living thing on board phased out. Clean and healthy. Her skin trembled at the thought and the strange tingling in her flesh intensified.

Clean and healthy were the eventual goal, yes, but before she dared purge the radiation from her body, she had to do the same for the ship.

It would be the tubes, then. She didn’t mind, except for the time it wasted in allowing her to cross the ship. The Landor was sized for a crew of one hundred with room to spare. The access tubes followed the contour of the ship, shaped like the thoracic spine of some slender vertebrate, complete with a few curving ribs. The tubes were quiet and cold, heated only by the minimal transfer of radiant heat through the bulkhead insulation. The chill was just a few degrees below her own cabin’s environmental setting, within optimal range for her metabolism and oxygen supply. Her copper blood came alive in it. The narrow tubes also provided a sense of security. They were good for hiding, for sleeping, for re-centering her mind.

Except the suit didn’t let her enjoy the confines. Where she might have turned a corner by sluicing her flesh around the hard core of her beak without the use of feet and hands, the suit forced her to deal with all of its bulk, cumbersome details that didn’t respond to the changing shape of her body. Before she realized it, she’d nearly condensed herself down one of the suit’s legs, tethered to the spot by the rest of the thing as it dragged behind her.

BEETL stayed close, their magnetic field humming as they moved behind her, patiently pausing when she adjusted her suit to traverse the next interchange. It made her uncomfortable, as though they were breathing down her neck. It was the first sensation she had felt since the accident, but she did not welcome it.

Then Ehli felt a warm tingling in her papillae as they exited the access tubes, emerging on the deck which housed the medical bay. It wasn’t the return to warmer corridors. The warmth didn’t feel like a fever, either, but the sensation was out of place.

With an eager bell tone, BEETL moved ahead into the bay. Ehli unlatched her hood and let the suit fall to the floor. The drone beeped at her from the control panel of the diagnostics booth, impatient to begin the medical diagnostic.

She stepped into the booth and rubbed the suckers on her hands together as scanners unfolded from the walls around her. There was a numbness in the tiny textured cells and her cerata seemed to glow at the edges. The blackness, which overtook her flesh after the gate drive’s radiation pulse, faded by the tiniest increment. She rubbed harder. Color emerged like a formless object floating to the surface of murky water. Her breath caught on her hope. Even with no other Iscillian survivors with whom to communicate, the absence of color signaling had been an overwhelming silence.

But with the color came a sensation like hundreds of burning needles prickling her skin. Along the wrinkled edges where her cerata clustered like ruffles on a garment, the particles of her flesh flared, shimmered, and then disappeared.

BEETL sounded a new alarm as they monitored her phasic degradation via the diagnostics terminal. Ehli was herded back to her suit with klaxons and warning LED sequences.

As she climbed into it, they connected a hose from one station to the back of the hood where shoulders met neck and, after she was sealed in, they returned to the terminal. The display flooded with commands, and a cool rush of relief silenced the tingling at the nape of Ehli’s neck. The pain across her whole body eased to a lingering burning. Then she felt a familiar, welcome tickle as her cells began to regenerate.

Another reason Iscillian were so well-suited as ship’s custodians: they were difficult to break.

But she’d nearly managed it, in the rush to restore her body to pre-accident conditions rather than considering the danger in doing so. That was three times BEETL had saved her.

I’ll have to stay radiated, won’t I?

Her words sounded foreign and loud inside the helmet. She rarely spoke aloud before the ship was empty, now it seemed doubly strange to hear the bubbling sound of her own voice and to converse with a drone that could not reply except in beeps and error readouts. But BEETL seemed, in their own way, to approve of her question as though it were an action proposal.

A few more diagnostics revealed no evidence the radiation was causing her any health issues. At least not yet.

Controlling the timing of the doses would be the trick. She touched the tip of her tongue against the roof of her beak and watched BEETL monitor readouts from the personal biochip installed in her sinus cavity. Bathing herself in isotopes worked well enough, but unless she wanted to stay in the suit indefinitely, she needed something as efficient that didn’t depend on her living in a plastic baggie for the foreseeable future.

She would have to dose herself from the inside, out.

Ehli had BEETL enter parameters for the proper level of isotopes and she wrote a protocol to have the chip signal an alarm whenever she wavered out of balance.

Her last meal had been before Engineering Commander Chezni surprised her with the gate drive upgrade, and she’d not developed an appetite to digest it, or to eat again. Her crop still held the gelatinous nutrition cubes. With all organics expelled during the accident, they were the only food that remained on the ship.

Her upset stomach had saved her in the same unexpected manner as BEETL. Eating irradiated food would keep her body’s radiation levels where they needed to be to preserve her dimensional sync, but first she needed to replenish the ship’s supplies.

She led BEETL back to the access tubes and up several decks, ignoring the sensation that she was visiting a grave.

The Sciences lab was equipped to clone tissue from samples of any organic matter. Though she would have preferred not to be subjected to the large needle BEETL brought to bear on her, there was a chance of ruining the food in her crop with digestive fluids if she regurgitated it.

As she opened a gap in her suit’s front, Ehli clamped her beak shut against the fear of the needle, the drone, and the quiet Sciences lab where Laness met her end. BEETL efficiently retrieved the samples, then set to work culturing new cells.

Ehli usually never had reason to be curious about her food’s ingredients beyond a passing thought, and its bland flavor inspired no theories, but watching as BEETL grew specimens of the individual nutritive sources contained within, she tried to imagine their natural sources. Aquatic prey from bodies of water or vegetation from breeze-crossed clearings. She could not help but visualize the familiar, instinctive colors of her paintings in the conjured scenes.

Inspired by the notion, Ehli brought the lights up and calculated the size of the Sciences laboratory. She was not prone to believe in spirits or posthumous presences, but she felt Laness might like to see her cultivate a garden here, in this dark cabin where she had spent the duty shifts of her life. The room that held one set of answers for them once, would now hold the answers for Ehli again.

In a matter of hours, an accelerated growth of genetic samples produced a small tank of wriggling fish and several hydroponic pottings of various citrus, cruciferous, and deciduous plant-life, as well as a cascade of orange-fleshed tubers. Scans showed all to have high levels of the dimspace isotopes. A bounty for her to eat, and a bounty for her cells.

She and BEETL constructed a framework from which to hang both the roots of the plants and the tubes of water that fed them. Ehli considered the tanks of fish, and hooked up a recycler so the waste water from those would feed the roots of the plants in a continuous loop of life support.

She stood back to consider their work when it was done. BEETL hovered, quiet and awaiting her next command. Full spectrum lights filtered through the tangle of vines and roots, reflected up from the water to dapple light across the leaves from both sides. Tubes of water gurgled while the tank-bottom filtration hummed.

Ehli thrilled. With green, blue, and dappled light dancing in her vision, she was reminded of what she could gain from this tragedy.

It required testing.

Cautiously, she slipped free of the suit and saw a faint sparkling in the air as the isotopes it had bathed her in dispersed into the air. She reveled in the sensation of her skin against anything but the crinkled plastic, despite the pervasive numbness from the radiation. It was like running a sharp point against a sleeping limb, and at any other point in her life she would not have called it pleasant. But she was free of the suit. She fervently hoped the food would be enough to keep her out of it.

Her reflection in the darkened terminals appeared as a void in the fabric of reality rather than a being with a face and a name. She activated all the displays, trying to wash out the sight with lit readouts.

She ran another round of diagnostics on herself, then plucked a ripened fruit from its bough. She reveled in the feel of its soft, juicy flesh. She had never eaten anything except the nondescript cubes. Had never known eating could bring on such a variety of sensations. The pomaceous fruit was fragrant, with a slightly earthy edge. Its flesh was soft, cool, and yielding. The snap of its skin as she broke away pieces in her beak was sharp and loud against the quiet hum of her new garden. The flavor was sweet, but not cloying, and the juices left a tingle on her dry tongue before she let them run down the back of her throat.

She waited a