Phoenix Feathers, Part II Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Joss is Boss, and this 'Verse is his. Phooey.

***

They came out of the Black.

It had only been one vessel, but in his dreams the raiding party became an armada of ships that lunged hungrily at the defenseless world, bent on destruction.

The first sign of the impending attack came with the massive sonic boom that tore through the sleeping town’s skies. Startled livestock looked up at the heavens as lamps clicked on and shutters opened in the houses around them. People trickled into the town’s streets, shielding their eyes from the searing light caused by the friction of the ships’ hulls attacking the atmosphere at hundreds of miles per hour.

The light from the far-off ships intensified as their engines lit off. The artificial stars seemed to waver, as if deciding between too many delicacies at a buffet table, then curved towards the village. A second later, the ships went into a hard burn, briefly turning night into day as the air behind them ignited and burned fiercely.

The explosion blinded him, although he hadn’t been there to witness it.

Then the attack came, without mercy or reason. The ships buzzed the village on their first pass, knocking people flat and bowling over buildings with the weight of their passing. Then they came back, arcing about with lazy gracefulness, and the slaughter began. They strafed the town, killing townsfolk where they stood and setting several houses afire. The villagers, at first transfixed, now fled in terror, stumbling over the dead and dying in a vain attempt to find shelter from the demons above them.

It was at this point that his father always left him alone in the forest, running back to the town to die. No matter what he did, no matter how desperately he babbled in his crude child-speech, he couldn’t change the outcome. His father always lowered him to the ground, kissed his forehead, and left him to gaze up into the night sky and listen to the screaming.

In his dreams, the horror didn’t end there. His consciousness, freed from his fragile body by his imagination, returned to the town with his father. He saw the raiders land and start their hunt. He saw them ruthlessly seek out and kill those who had escaped the guns of their ships. He saw them kill his father. He saw their delight as they found what they came for amidst the rest of their plunder. They had left, then, their mission complete, but in his dreams they did not.

In his dreams, they came for him.

*** Phoenix woke with a start, clawing at the receding vision. He sat up in the bed, shivering, then ran to the door of his room and leaned heavily against it. He took a deep breath, then pushed it silently open.

He stepped out into the Stallion’s main corridor, studying the sleeping ship. Across from his bunk, the Pilot’s light was still on, despite the late hour. Her door was opened just a crack, leaking a bit of warmth into the darkened corridor.

Phoenix moved on towards the bridge, passing several empty rooms. He paused in front of a well-worn door. Some of its color had been lost from sliding in and out so often, and it probably had a nasty squeak to it, but it served its purpose. The Captain’s.

He passed the First Mate’s room and the Mechanic’s room, both of which were empty. One was orderly, the things in it placed with precision and care. The other room was chaos, with clothes and gadgets strewn over every available surface in a jumble.

Phoenix continued on, pausing by another pair of doors, these ones closed tightly. One was locked and uninviting, the other cold to the touch and did not bear the same signs of constant use as the rest. The Doctor hid herself away behind the first; the Tracker exiled himself from their company entirely.

Phoenix now stood just outside of the bridge. He badly wanted to explore it, to lose himself in the ship’s controls or to press himself up against the glass viewport and count the stars. It would have to wait, though, because the Captain and the First Mate were in there, talking.

He crept down the stairs next to the bridge, moving into the belly of the Stallion. It got warmer as he approached the engine room, the heart of the big ship. Phoenix stepped over the Mechanic, curled comfortably up next to his halfway-repaired engine, and stepped into the ship’s hold.

Most of it was strewn with spare parts and tools. A large, battered ground vehicle lay in a corner, dormant. To Phoenix, the hold didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose. What was kept in here could easily be accommodated by the main cargo bay. The room was a relic from a time when there was still work aplenty. Even next to the noisy engine room, the hold was quiet and lonely. It was a forgotten place, but it spoke to him.

Phoenix knelt, then lay down, pressing an ear to the cold grating of the deck. This was better. From here, the mess of tools looked much more orderly. Phoenix crept along the deck, making his way across the room on his hands and knees from one tool to the next, intent on the varied relationships that they had to one another. Every place has its history, its secrets, and he was beginning to see the secrets of the hold unravel before his eyes.

His hand jarred against something. It was a ridge of metal running a few meters through the center of the hold. He looked around the floor for anything that connected to it, but he couldn’t find anything. It had to be a door. Phoenix struggled to pry it open, shifting his grip to try and work his fingers under the lip. He forced it open, centimeter by centimeter, fighting against the lifeless hull of the ship.

He couldn’t get it open all the way, and he guessed that that part was handled by some heavy-duty pistons. Putting his eye to the floor, he could see a dark, boxlike space. It had to be an egress hatch that allowed vehicles like the one in the corner to ferry loads into and out of the ship’s hold. It wasn’t a very large door, just big enough for one person, and Phoenix couldn’t find any more cracks in the hold, which suggested some sort of massive elevator that moved the entire floor away for loading operations.

Phoenix wedged himself into the small opening and felt blindly for the bottom of the space. Squirming and wriggling, he forced his body through the gap and down into the dark interior of the Stallion. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the interior of the small space, and saw an array of pulleys and pistons that confirmed his suspicions. The purpose of the hatch itself must have been to allow maintenance of that system.

It wasn’t very big or comfortable, but Phoenix was grateful for the solitude it offered him. The scant amount of light that shone in from the partially opened door was the only reminder that a larger world waited beyond the confines of the crawlspace. In this box, Phoenix felt safe for the first time that he could remember. Here, there was nothing but the rhythmic thrumming vibrations of the ship’s engine.

Phoenix curled up into a ball inside the Stallion’s ventral elevator system and slept.

***

The village still smoldered as the light of the rising sun reddened the morning sky. Birds sang as they always had, but to him they seemed subdued. Ashes from the burning town rained down on him in a slow deluge, stinging his eyes and tender skin as he struggled onwards towards the site of the destruction.

The child made it to the town square before his diminutive legs gave out. He fell to his knees and silently took in the carnage that surrounded him. Bodies lay where they fell in the streets, mangled and torn by bullets. Smoke rose from the collapsed farmhouses and demolished corrals, billowing upwards in a black swirl.

The thick cloud blotted out the sun so that he could barely see. The storm of ashes settled on him, pressing him downwards into the dirt. It clogged his lungs and suffocated him. The boy had lost everything. All he had known was this life, but it had been torn from him. How could he go on? The ash grew heavier on him until he felt like lying down in the wreckage with the dead.

A rough hand grabbed his shoulder and drew him to his feet. The man gasped, horrified by his soot-blackened skin. He turned and yelled back into the smoke.

“Captain, we’ve got a live one over here!”

“Hold on! Doctor’s on the way!” came the reply.

The man stared wonderingly at the child. “He’s not hurt…”

The child’s rescuer carried him back through the dead town to the large freighter that had landed amidst the rubble, nestled in the blackened patch of ground where the village hall had been. It was the only standing structure in sight.

The ship’s doctor came running over to meet them as he had done every previous time, abandoning the last of the dying villagers to clean up the child. The dream always ended the same way, with the man handing him over to the doctor’s care. The child took his last look at his native world as he was brought on board, and bid it farewell for the thousandth time.

But he didn’t wake up.

The dream continued, only things had changed. The doctor took the child to the infirmary and forced him into the operating chair with his blue hands. A second man grabbed the child’s skull while the first raised a scalpel high-

***

Phoenix screamed. He struck out and the hands that held him down, only to hit the solid metal walls of the Stallion’s crawlspace. He kept weeping for a long time after his convulsions stopped, horrified by the new direction of the dream, knowing that he’d see it again.

Instinctively, Phoenix’s hands went to his head where, in the dream, the blue-handed men had cut into him. His fingers gently caressed his scalp as he sought assurance that it was just a bad dream, that it wasn’t real, just imaginary.

He jumped when he felt the first bump. It was tiny, no more than a centimeter long, and had to be indistinguishable from the rest of his scalp, but it was there.

Breathing hard, Phoenix hesitantly felt the top, back, and sides of his head, plotting out the network of scars that marked where his brain had been violated.

His stomach reacted and he retched, but there was nothing for him to throw up. His trembling hands sought out the sides of the compartment as he squeezed his eyes shut, willing the waves of horror and nausea to recede. Who would do this? He whimpered at first, then, overcome with revulsion, wept.

In the darkness of the crawlspace, Phoenix screamed and screamed and screamed.

***

“The boy’s a problem.”

Monty’s head jerked up in surprise at his first mate’s statement, but Priscilla didn’t back down.

“With all due respect, Captain, we don’t know anything about him. There’s…an oddness to him. He ain’t right. He doesn’t look to be a threat, but there’s just too much going on for me to ignore the facts of the situation. Normal folk don’t turn up with gunshot wounds in the middle of the night in Blackout Zones. Normal folk don’t fix crippled spaceships while they’re doped up on heavy-duty painkillers, and normal folk decidedly do not creep me out like he does.”

“So he’s not exactly normal. So what’s new?”

Priscilla sighed. “I just want to be certain that you know what you’re getting us into, is all.”

“Relax, Prissy, I’m just givin’ the kid a lift. I couldn’t leave him there for the Feds. He hasn’t done anything.”

“You can’t know that, sir.” Priscilla crossed her arms and leaned against a bulkhead.

Monty shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t like arguing with his crew, especially Priscilla, whose opinion he sometimes valued above his own.

“Prissy, that kid isn’t our main concern. Now I’ll keep an eye on him, but right now we gotta be thinkin’ about the job what’s at hand.”

Priscilla nodded, and the tense moment passed. They were back to business as usual.

Business. At times, Monty was grateful for the distance that his captaincy gave him from the members of his crew, with whom he had to live in close proximity. Mostly, though, he was lonely.

If anyone asked Monty about his marital plans, he’d scoff and tell them that a woman got between a man and his work, that they existed to confound innocent space captains and spirit them away from their trade. Then he’d sniffle and mourn his matrimonially-bound acquaintances that had lost their resolve at some point in their travels. Monty was a bachelor and a Captain, and so he intended to remain.

So instead of making amends, which he often wished to do even though no harm had been done, Monty simply pretended that the brief argument didn’t happen. Instead, he began to outline the situation in which the crew of the Stallion found themselves.

“As I see it, we’ve got to head out to the Border Moons, try to find a place to move this cargo. Coulda made a nice profit back on Osiris, but we can’t chance goin’ back there, not with the Feds lookin’ for us. They’ve got us pegged, Prissy. Ship name, ID codes, registration number, everything. Which means, we’re gonna have to swap them out for new ones, at least temporarily.”

Priscilla knew that “new” meant “fake.” Plenty of people in their line of work flew under assumed names, their ships using falsified IDs so that they could keep up their trading without raising the Alliance’s suspicion. She didn’t like the idea, though. Counterfeit IDs were expensive, hard to find, and risky to use, because you had to trust that the guy you paid for them didn’t sell you out to the people on your tail. Unfortunately, the crew of the Stallion really didn’t have a choice in the matter.

Priscilla knew that there weren’t that many places that were open to them. In the Central Planets, there was money to be had- if you could find and reach a buyer. Time was working against them, and they couldn’t afford to advertise their presence to the Feds by making too many Cortex waves. Also, the closer to Londinium you were, the more likely the chances of running into an Alliance cruiser.

Out on the edge of the colonized worlds, more folk would be willing to buy their cargo, but turning a profit would be a challenge. The Border was a dangerous place, though. The crew could get killed out there, if not by gangsters then by the terrible wild-men, the Reavers, who lurked out in the Black. That risk had to be taken, though, or they wouldn’t be able to keep the Stallion fueled and flying. Besides, if they were being pursued by the Feds, where better for criminals to hide than amongst other criminals? Fugitives, thieves, smugglers, and the odd Browncoat thrived or died in the ‘Verse’s cutthroat underworld.

One planet in particular stuck in Priscilla’s mind as the perfect refuge from the Alliance. She looked up. Monty, bless him, was waiting patiently for her input. Priscilla smiled grimly. “To lose the Feds, we’re going to have to disappear amongst other crooks so they lose our scent. If we need to slide into a crowd for a bit, it might as well be the biggest, meanest crowd there is. What do you say we take a trip to D.C.?”

Monty winced. “Hao. Let’s just hope we don’t step on any feet, or we’ll be eating our own quickly enough. I’ll lay in the course, no need to wake Nebula.” He moved to the pilot’s station and began tapping coordinates into the navigation display.

“Next stop, Dyton Colony.”

***