HV-2 Hazardous Cargo

Avda considered for a moment: "The average Hutanari can be made useful, but accounting for will and experience? Four in ten."

Sophine nodded and noted the prior and its probability, "And evidence, the first?"

"She is a stowaway."

"And the likelihood a stowaway will be productive?"

"Three chances in one hundred."

Sophine combined the chances. "Evidence, the second?"

"She is the sister of the ship's captain."

"And its weight?"

Avda considered longer, "Good confidence."

Sophine translated that into mathematical notation and continued, "Evidence, the third?"

"She is a Hazard."

Sophine said, "Shall we include in this evidence that she is a Hazard when the ship has none?"

Avda thought and nodded.

"And its weight?"

They traced through the relevant evidence for an hour, and the arbitress kept her tally of their confidence.

*

Back in the warm garden, now all three of the crew were dressed in their pressed, stylish naval blues. In the garden's clearing they surrounded Rewan, who had managed to make herself look ridiculous with the red and purple of foraged berries smearing her lips and fingers. Avda, tall and formal, stood before her sister who looked up to her from a head and a half less height. The girl bore a slack, listless posture that accentuated the height difference. If not for that same pink hair-and perhaps the resolute cut of their noses-it would be hard to imagine two more different Hutanari.

"We are not so far out from Hutana. Are you resolved to be of use to the Hutana Van and its mission?" Avda asked formally.

"Resolved enough to worm my way aboard and sleep crooked up in a cupboard for a month!" Avda chuckled as she wiped the juice from her lips.

"I will interpret that as a 'yes'," Avda said, "Then, as Captain of the Hutana Van, given your enduring presence here, I am forced to impress you into Ezwenari service. Should you decline, you will be confined without privileges until such a time as you may be disembarked in a port of reasonable safety and in the custody of any local authority."

"In this case, that seems like a pretty dumb option. I mean it's kind of 'be impressed' or 'be marooned' out here, isn't it?"

"Yes. Should you decline, we would be forced to return you to an arbitress of Hutana to be judged for that impact upon the voyage. Your answer?"

"Wait was it a yes-or-no question? I don't want to answer wrong, and yes-or-no questions can go either way sometimes," Rewan rambled.

Avda spoke with distinct control, "Do you decline my right to impress you into service?"

"See? That's confusing! If I say 'no' does that mean that I don't decline or that I don't think you can impress me!"

"'I accept' or 'decline' will suffice, Rewan."

"Okay, yeah, good: I accept, then," she said.

Avda continued, "You will be a yeowoman in the Naval Command up to the duration of the voyage of the Hutana Van, entitling you to—"

Rewan interrupted, "Yeowoman? Aren't they the ones that do all the shit-work?"

Avda nodded with a satisfied, narrow grin, "Well, it is not very fitting for the ship's officers to scrub decks and wash laundry, is it? Do you refuse impressment?"

Rewan looked to the other two for support. Sophine gave her a friendly nod of encouragement and Fathema just grinned with the captain.

"I am a Hazard! I should be an officer!" Rewan said.

"Do you refuse impressment, then?" The captain extended a hand to the little Hazard.

"To be marooned or shuffled back to Hutana? No!" She took Avda's wrist and shook it once, "You won't scare me off so easy, Daavi."

"From now on, that will be 'Captain Avda' or 'Captain' whenever we are acting as agents of the ship and the Ezwenari Command, Yeowoman Rewan." The Captain turned to Sophine, "Anything to address before we proceed on our exploration plan, Arbitress?"

"As you were, Captain." Sophine emphasized the title-a point of naval protocol that she still struggled with.

Avda gave her quick orders: "Helmswoman Fathema, ready the helm. Yeowoman Rewan, come. You will learn to trim the ship's sails."

*

In the Hutana Van's ready-room-one ancient, stone-wood bulkhead separating them from the howling void-Avda rechecked her pack and turned to Rewan's. The Hazard had already secured the thin, heavy slab of stone-wood to her back with the straps. The filigree of gold on it whorled into a pair of concentric gold circles at its center.

Rewan asked, "These are the void-bubbles? Less resisting than a soapbubble, but strong enough to hold back choking, frozen infinity?"

The captain assured herself of how Rewan had strapped on her pack and said, "Yes."

"Can I see yours first?"

Avda opened the thumb-pad of her glove and pressed her skin against a circle of gold on the side of her pack. With a whisper, pale pink silk encompassed her in a smooth, transparent bubble. It pressed against the floor at her feet, bulging out at the sides. Rewan stepped toward the captain, reaching out to touch the bubble, but her fingers went through it like air.

"Nothing," Rewan whispered.

When she took a few steps forward-the bubble taking in her wrist, elbow and then shoulder-the pink surface of the void-bubble wobbled like jelly and then it was a warped ovoid encompassing both of them. Rewan breathed deeply, eyes closed, analyzing.

"That smell," she said still lost in thought, "the Tower believes that it's no smell at all-just the pure, clean air that the Forebears breathed, unmixed by our fallen world."

"That does not seem to be a very fruitful insight," Avda said.

Rewan's eyes flashed, " 'How does this meet the objective'?" She aped some imaginary fool, "That's the kind of hyper-focus that keeps the Navy's Hazards dependent on the Towers." She too thumbed-on her pack and her bubble popped to life, joining Avda's in peanut shaped coalescence, "Let's get on with it, then."

"Not so fast, Yeowoman," Avda stopped her. They carefully walked through the process: ready-room tethers secured, pairing tether secured between them, ready-room debris check. Each one checked off, Avda went on to describe what would happen next: At the pull of the lever, the stone-wood bulkhead would open in the blink of an eye. The void would yank the air from the ready-room-and them with it. They would flow with the pull. The facsimile of world-pull that the ship bore would be gone, but the ready-room tethers would catch them and they would swing down to the deck and secure their primary and redundant lines to the deck. Then, they would begin the real work of loosing the sails and hauling them into their places.

"That sounds like just about what I would've done anyway," Rewan shrugged.

Avda was unflapped, "Yeowoman, for all our precautions, we take our lives into our hands every time we step from this door. When separated out there, we will not be able to speak, and you do not yet know the gestures. I need to know that you will follow my orders to the letter."

"Beasts and blood, Avda, I'm not an idiot! I've survived a lot since I've been gone."

"Captain Avda, Yeowoman. And I will have your word on the matter," Avda said.

Rewan looked solemn, "You have my word that I will not put being cute above our very lives."

The Captain accepted and forced down the heavy lever. The hidden mechanism slotted into contact and silently they were plucked from the ready room. From there-Rewan's flailing aside-it went largely as Avda had foretold. Soon Rewan was climbing up the long mast with Avda on the deck below her, the captain's one hand holding her fast to the decklines and the other feeding out Rewan's tether. When the Hazard had reached the top of the mast and held her place there, Avda leapt at a single bound to the mast's crossbeam. Her thighs holding the crossbeam, she pulled herself to "sit upright" with Rewan, their void-bubbles merging into a near-spherical ovoid at their closeness.

"Well why didn't I get to do that?" Rewan seemed to shout at the invisible arc of the Captain's leap.

"Because I did not want to wait for you to haul yourself back in when you missed. We will get plenty of that soon."

Below them-by the orientation of the ship-the Hutana Van was a massive gilt-limned raft of stone-wood. It was a hundred yards at its breadth and over a thousand from bow to aft. The Navy's Hazards had cleared away much of the mysterious clutter that had decorated the Van's deck, so that now landmarks were few among the heavily gilded emplacements where unknown relics had once been mounted. At the prow, there was the heavily rigged receiving deck for departing from and landing on the ship in the void. At the center of the prow squatted the massive ballista with the laminite anchors and lines secured along the gunwale. Sternward, there was the huge aftcastle that housed the ready-room and access wells. The rest of the space of the aftcastle was consumed by inextricable Forebear machines only a fraction of which were in use and a somewhat smaller fraction of which were well understood.

"Now comes the exciting part?" Rewan's eyes glittered.

Avda rumpled her face, "Dancing in the void-weightless and a dragonfly's wing away from an awful death isn't exciting, Rewan?"

"Yeowoman Rewan, Captain!"

"Don't you—" Avda cut herself off and changed her mien: "Yeowoman, first: It is not your place to question your superiors' application of protocol. And second: no one is purely their rank and role. When you are not actively operating in your capacity as an agent of the Command, you are free to use whatever terms of familiarity you wish. In fact it is encouraged, as it helps differentiate the role and the woman."

"So when you corrected me before, how do you know that I was 'actively operating in the whatever'? Maybe I was just saying something random as a woman?"

Avda discarded the obvious answer and instead said, "Now is not the time to discuss protocol, Yeowoman. We will have plenty of time once we have set the ship about its business." She pointed to the massive coils of thin laminite line bound up to the top of the mast, "First, we need to transfer to the mast-lines and secure the decklines here for our return."

"Damn! Those must go on for miles!" She gawped at them.

"Nearly so: over halfway around the whole ship, but we will get to that."

The Captain walked Rewan through the process and they began. They tied onto the mast-lines and secured their decklines taut against the mast. So readied for the broad openness of trimming the sails, they scooted along the long yard extending bow-ward and loosed the massive laminite sail to unfurl and flap up behind them according to its own forces. When they had made their slow progress to the yard-arm-freeing the sail behind them-Avda called for Rewan to stop, and she did.

"You will want to ready the bow hook and keel hook and tuck them in your harness before you release the sail here."

Rewan did so and looked to the bow, "And then I just jump?"

Avda nodded, "And then you just jump. When you miss your mark on the bow, you may still be able to make your way across the deck if you fall short. If you overshoot? Just haul your way back on the mast-line and I will keep it secured here for another attempt."

"And if the line gives out?"

Avda gave it some consideration, "If you're going to worry about the problems that aren't going to happen, you may as well worry about your voidbubble winking out. Much scarier."

"Fine: I jump. Then what?"

"Then we haul you back in."

"What if I make it?" Rewan asked with affront.

"You won't!" Avda laughed, "A jump like this? Far as I've heard it, no one makes it on their first jump. Something about your body so wanting to anticipate the world-pull. Instead you'll go wheeling out into the void until your line bounces you back."

"We'll see about that." Rewan gathered herself up into a hunker on the yardarm, the hooks of the sail trailing from her harness. She mentally calibrated for a straight leap instead of an arc like on Hutana, tensed, and leapt. But for the stillness of the void-bubble, it was like leaping from a cliff-like a bird in flight. The deck of the Van raced beneath her as she neared, but the trajectory was clear: she would fly far above the receiving deck and out into the void. All her calibration had been futile, betrayed somewhere by her Hutana-bound legs or knees or ankles-some decisionless failure.

The tethering line snapped to tautness above the bow and she bounced away from it. The line vacillated between slack and taut and she was able to position herself to see Avda hauling her back to the yardarm between wafting lengths of the bright white sail flapping between them. Avda added some dramatic over-acting to her hauling. The message was clear, and Rewan decided to ignore it. The next time the flap of the sail revealed Avda, she was staring sternly. She leaned forward and then pulled back hard, yanking Rewan forward. Her momentum carried her forward at a languid, consistent pace and Avda gathered the slackening line into her grip.

Rewan streamed by Avda like a comet trailing her red scarf-ends and the plume of the sail. As she did Avda leapt from the yard trailing her own tether and scooped Rewan from the void. Together they followed the arc described by Avda's tether to slam side-wise into the stone-wood of the mast's yard. The air knocked from them, they clutched the wood as the sail billowed chaotically around them. Their void-bubbles once again unified, Avda spoke around her recovering breath.

"Usually a steady, unified pull results in the easiest return."

"Well, what am I supposed to do?" Rewan asked, frustrated.

She helped Rewan around to wrap her thighs around the yard, and Avda said, "You jump again. You overcompensate more." She shrugged, "Your body learns. Some have made it on the second try."

They recaptured the sail and made ready for another jump. Rewan tensed with redoubled resolve. She leapt into flight again and darted toward the bow. She missed again, but this time came crashing down on the web of rigging laid out on the near side of the receiving deck. She was able to catch herself before she rebounded. Finding her feet she gave a silent, void-bound interpretation of an ecstatic leap as she held herself to the receiving deck's lines.

From there, by Avda's patient instruction and Rewan's dogged attempts, each sail was pinned to the bow, aftward-starboard, and aftward-port; then, like flower petals blooming in reverse, they wrapped each down and hooked them to the golden stud at the center of the keel at the nadir of the ship. They pulled their way back up to the top of the mast where the last free-streaming sheets of laminite sail still flowed. There they pulled in the long curls of their tethers and tied off the sails over and around the mast.

When the last sheet of sail was bound into place, it choked off the streaming sun- and starlight and they were plunged into darkness, there on the far end of the mast. Rewan could hear Avda in their shared void-bubble rummaging in her pack.

"The first few returns will be easier with light, and the void-bubble sustains a torch as well as your breath-though it saps them faster."

With the scrape of a match, a flickering orange flame cast shadows to dancing around the white sheath of sail around the Hutana Van.

"Close your eyes," Rewan warned.

There was a barely audible hum and the orange shadows gave way to a brilliance that cast the whole of the ship's deck in stark, white relief from their position on the mast.

"That is better," Avda said as she quenched her torch.

Keeping the shielded, but still painfully bright white of Rewan's relic-torch above them and out of direct sight, they recoiled their mast-lines and switched to their decklines. After a quick descent, Avda heaved the lever back up and the stone-wood bulkhead of the ready-room slammed back into place, the world pull returned-dropping Rewan's off-kilter body to the deck-and the distant unconsciously heard noises of the ship filled their silence-tuned ears.

"And look! No one died!" Rewan crowed.

"Very good," Avda looked proud and hugged her sister roughly, "That means we'll still have someone to wash our laundry."

Rewan leaned into the hug and held Avda tight, "I missed you, Daavi."

"I missed you too, Rew."

*

When they returned to the Bridge, Fathema was suspended in the arms of the helm. The articulation of the armature's rigid gold and stone-wood moved with organic suppleness-at once supporting her at two dozen points and also allowing her complete freedom of motion as if hovering above the floorboards. Her uniform was stripped down to just the band from her neck to the V of her thighs to allow the relic armature to touch bare skin at every point. She made her smooth motions and the helm relayed her inscrutable commands to the ancient ship. Eventually, the arms settled her broad, articulate feet on the floor. She pulled the broad mask from her face, leaving the mass of gilt stone-wood to hang on the umbilicus that spread up in a prehensile funnel of wild relic-machinery that consumed the bow-ward end of the bridge. The angular curls of her hair swept out in release, their white freeness contrasting with her face's warm, brown severity.

Rewan was unimpressed, "That's it?"

The helmswoman nodded as she picked up her boots and pantaloons where they were discarded. "The sails are holding in the accumulation of weft-ether, and we can see its echo at our destination," she explained.

"But—" Rewan looked to the captain and arbitress, standing in attendance as the helmswoman had performed her task, "But that's it?!"

Fathema seemed unsure of what was expected. "You did very well trimming the sails, young Yeowoman?" She offered.

"But where was the mighty power of the Forebears that bent the span of suns to their will? You just..." She looked like she would lift off with the hot frustration inside her, "You just stood there for a bit and it's done?"

Fathema looked to the captain for support, but clarified, "Not done yet. We must close the weft once the echo has reached its peak. In two days—"

"Two days!?"

Fathema searched for what Rewan was looking for a moment before giving up and looking to the captain, "If I am not needed?"

Avda nodded her dismissal, and Fathema headed to the bridge's aftward hewn wood door, ajar to the ageless stone-wood corridor beyond. Rewan was distracted from her disappointment by the helmswoman's departing ass, cleft and cupped by her chest-piece's tight white rear straps. She stumbled over herself to follow.

"Uh. If we're all free, Fathema-uh, Zafri," she babbled as she caught up, "Do you want to-well, I was cooped up in that hatch for a long time and..."

Her voice faded as she followed Fathema away from the bridge.

"She did well with the rigging, then," Sophine half-asked Avda.

"With instruction. As well as any of us on our first time in the void," the captain agreed.

"Do you feel any differently about your decision?"

"Now you question it? Wasn't this what you wanted?" Avda asked, piqued, but Sophine's high, gentle laugh softened her.

"I'm sorry. I know an arbitress's habits can be frustrating, but we don't need our uncertainties questioned, just our confidences."

"Well, I've no confidence to question, Sophine. She's as headstrong and willful as ever."

Sophine wrapped her arms around the captain from behind, "And what's been the remedy for headstrong and willful crew-women before?"

"Discipline and a watchful eye."

"Discipline," the arbitress purred, "seems to fit."

Rewan returned looking frustrated and rebuffed. "Plainslanders!" She exclaimed as if the conclusion was evident to the others. "Well, what do we do for two days?" She barked.