THREE MONTHS LATER
“CQ CQ CQ MG, this is Kilo Echo Zero Delta November Bravo, monitoring.”
Five minutes of silence passed.
“CQ MG, CQ MG…” Chillicothe turned the mic off to pause for a second, then closed her eyes. She felt a rawness in the tips of her fingers, exhaustion creeping in like a parasite.
Why was she even bothering to do this anymore? She hadn’t hunted for grief cubes in days, was subsisting off the small tin box filled with them in her depression nest room. Every time she went outside she was afraid she’d end up in the back of a military van, or even just a regular van.
If it were just the public threats of conscription, it’d be fine. She was used to that by now. The growing silence on all sides of her, on the other hand, was terrifying. Terre Haute had missed the last couple of nets. Columbia--the city, not the girl--was already setting aside office space for a squad of military MGs to move in. What little information she could squeeze out of the place suggested they had plans to scale up to an entire platoon over the span of six months. Seemed the government was planning to make good on its promises to retake St. Louis. The public craved a morale boost, it wanted a little more justification for this particular dispensation of its taxes.
And no one from Kansas City had responded to her or anyone else in weeks. There was no outward sign of it (not that she had been outside recently to witness any such thing), but she had to assume the government had her written down in a spreadsheet somewhere and was closing in.
She started to cry a little bit, affording herself a couple whuffing sniffles. God, she was fucking pathetic. They’d had a good thing and it was all over now. Maybe she should just get it over with, stop using the cubes. Fade away with the rest of the ghosts at the touch of dawn.
Chillicothe had no energy for this, she decided. Right as she went to thumb off the transceiver for the night, a voice crackled in.
“Sounds like things have gone down the shitter. I’m sorry to hear it, over.”
She wiped the snot with her grimy sleeve and sucked in a quick breath, keying in the mic. “Hey Boonville, reading you loud and clear. You could say that again. I thought you were out of the loop? Over.”
“Well, it doesn’t take me long to get back up to speed. I figured I’d check in and see how you’re doing.” A couple seconds floated by. “Oh, yeah. Kilo Alpha Zero, uh, Romeo Tango Alpha, go ahead.”
Chillicothe smiled in spite of things. “That’s more like it.” She sighed openly. “I don’t want to talk about all that right now, it’s been awful here. Can I ask you something instead? Over.”
“Shoot, dear.”
“When did you get your license to broadcast? You’re kind of bad at this,” Chillicothe laughed, an airy, shaky sound that surprised herself. “Sounds like it’s been a while.”
“You’re right on both counts. I told you before, I’ve been preoccupied. I first tested in ‘94 and just barely passed in ‘96. Not really my calling if we’re being honest, over.”
Chillicothe frowned at her radio assembly. “I’m sorry, I could have sworn I just heard you say 1996.”
“I said ‘96, not 1996. Close enough. Whoops, shit, sorry for interrupting, over.”
“So you’re, what, in your forties? Go ahead.” It was hard to keep the skepticism out of her voice, as polite as she was trying to be. This was a dumb joke.
“Oh, not nearly that bad. I’m in my late 20s, if I remember right. Time gets kind of weird out here. I got certified when I was eight and haven’t seriously used a HAM since I was fifteen, so sue me if I’m a bit rusty, over.”
“... Sure. That must be quite a story, over.”
“Like I said, it’s a long one. I don’t feel like telling it all, certainly not on air. Over.”
“Well,” Chillicothe searched for the words to humor this nonsense. “That’s understandable. It’s not exactly safe for us anymore. Less even than usual, I mean.”
“I could always just tell you in person.”
She boggled vacantly at her speakers. So Boonville was just crazy, then. This girl must be fucking cracked if she expected Chillicothe to broadcast her home address for the entire upper band to hear. “Yeah, I mean… sure? You got a phone number I can text or something? Go ahead.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, hold on.”
Nothing happened for several minutes. Respectfully, she refused to break in until the other girl signaled she was done talking… but with each passing minute she felt the pit of annoyance in her belly growing. She almost wished that Boonville hadn’t said anything, she felt like such a fool for indulging this crap. Let her wallow in her misery in peace.
Just when she was about to give up, suddenly all her innards were scooped out with a spoon, forcibly turning her inside out. It wasn’t even painful and lasted only a brief second, not even long enough for her to scream, and then her vision whited out, overloaded by a fearsome glow.
After a bit, she squeezed her eyes open a tiny fraction of an inch, realizing she had unconsciously thrown her hands up in front of her. To protect herself from what, she had no fucking clue.
Opening her eyes further, she realized that she was now somewhere else entirely.
“Hello, Chillicothe.” The voice belonging to Boonville issued out of a healthy looking adult-–definitely not a teenager, a fully developed adult standing in front of her. She was dressed in a tight fitting gray coverall, not even proper shoes. Was that her magical girl costume??
“Wh-–” Chillicothe coughed hard, spitting up some bloody mucus onto the steel panel floor. “What the fuck was that? Over.”
“We’re not on the radio anymore, silly billy. Sorry for not warning you, I didn’t want to give anything away on the high band.” She turned around, dirty blonde hair cropped at the shoulders and swishing airily as she walked over to a dark window. “Come here a sec.”
Chillicothe felt at herself to make sure nothing was missing, on the outside at least. Reassured that all her limbs were in place, she followed the weirding woman and looked out the window.
Her jaw promptly fell open, and the asshole actually had the temerity to lift it back shut for her.
“You’re aboard my ship, the Concord,” she beamed as they looked down upon the Earth. Clouds like ripped cotton swirled over America, sweeping across the land from Washington to Florida.
Her first thoughts, weirdly, were that it was a lot grayer than she had imagined it would look. Try as she might, though, no words came forth.
Boonville chuckled, turning back to her guest. “Yeah, I felt that way too, when I first got up here. You never quite get used to a view like this.”
Her mouth was bone dry, and she had to suck some moisture back before she could speak, smacking her tongue and lips. “Was this… did you wish for a spaceship? ”
“Not in so many words,” Boonville grinned. “I’ll tell you the full story later. For now, I want you to look over there,” she pointed off into space just to the left of their marbled home. “See anything?”
Chillicothe wasn’t quite sure her eyes were working properly yet, but she peered close anyway. There was something like a smudge on the glass, a blurry fuzzy shape that seemed almost to glitter against the void.
“... Is that another ship?” No telling how far away it was, or how big.
“Got it in one. Next, I’ll give you a hint for free,” the captain turned to look at her passenger. “It’s carrying a very important person. The most important person, maybe.”
“What, you gonna tell me the President is there?”
“Ooh, good,” she tittered. “As it happens, that is exactly who is on that ship.”
Chillicothe openly stared now. “... Why?” There was a pronounced sense of dizziness infiltrating her brain. None of this made any sense. The world had already turned upside down and now it was threatening to turn again, to invert itself into a living nightmare. Could she catch a fucking break already, god damn.
“Hard to say, though it sounds like he’s keeping to himself for some reason. Anyone who’s gotten close gets shot to pieces in seconds.”
“There’s more of you out here?”
“Oh, dear.” Boonville turned back away from her, tutting. Actually saying the word “tut,” who even does that? “Sorry, I’m used to all this by now. It’s easy to forget what people don’t know, down there.”
Gesturing to a couple plain metal chairs set in the unadorned wall, a rather spartan viewing deck, Boonville strode away from the window. Her hair bounced maddeningly with every light step. “You’re looking a little green, you might want to sit down for a spell while I fill you in.”
Indeed, Chillicothe felt that she might hurl her fucking guts out onto the viewport. Her stomach roiled like the ocean as she took the offered seat, breathing deeply to try and keep herself from spewing. A glass of water appeared in front of her. Magic or the ship? Who cared, she decided as she started sipping at it. Surprisingly, she started to feel better almost immediately.
“We’ve got plenty of vertigo meds,” Boonville explained. “You need them a lot up here for reasons I’m sure you can imagine.”
She could imagine, sure, but there were some questions she had which were far more pressing. “It’s not just you, then?”
“For a while, it was just me.” Boonville took the seat right next to her guest, crossing her legs and arms comfortably. “I wasn’t the first, apparently back during the Space Race you had a lot of wishes for shit like this. Pretty sure they’re all dead though, I’ve been up here for fifteen years now and I never saw anyone else up here in that time.
“This ship isn’t the best, anything Kyubey’s got makes it look like a child’s toy, but I specifically made part of my wish to be able to go and explore other star systems. I was smart enough to make sure it didn’t take forever, either, so I’ve been going back and forth out there for a while now. Studying the odd planet that looks interesting, making friends with the neighbors, so on.”
Chillicothe decided this wasn’t too shocking. Somewhere in that jolted brain was the knowledge that Kyubey was technically an alien, it only made sense there would be others. She would have to do the hard work of processing that casual information another time. “So why come back here?”
“I visit any time I start running low on cubes. Sure, I can hunt anywhere I find emotionally-capable life, but wraiths get weird depending on cultural or social patterns. Familiar territory makes a big difference. I last left almost two years ago, so imagine my surprise when I came back this spring, went downstairs, and everything is on fucking fire.
“Not only that, but when I got back up here I noticed other ships in orbit. Not just the President over there, some of the major cities have a few fellas up here too. The girls in New York have a station of their own, there’s a group from Germany, and a couple others I haven’t talked to yet. I imagine there’ll be even more before the year’s out.”
Chillicothe had closed her eyes, soaking this in as she sipped the tonic slowly. “This is the first I’m hearing about any of this.”
“Well, in fairness to you, things were simpler until very recently.” Boonville leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, her face somber. “Some of the places I visited out there, they’ve been at this longer than we have. The Concord is the only one I know of that can go between star systems very easily, but there’s plenty of people on the cusp of that. Maybe no one here, but out there. Space-faring races that are taking their first steps into the wider galaxy.
“I think whatever the Empire of Chicago did last year catalyzed our development as a species. When you fuck things up like that, you get a lot of desperate people doing unprecedented things, and certain ideas tend to catch on. I’m honestly surprised there’s not more of us up here already.”
The spacefarer leaned back again, sighing gustily. “Which brings me to you. You seem capable enough, a bit stiff but technologically minded enough. Competent. Desolate.” She winced a bit. Unnecessary, if accurate. “That’s a potent combination. I want you to come with me and become my first crew member, working comms. You’d have to pick up some other stations too, until we find some more people to fill them out.”
Chillicothe choked on her water, forcing blood into her face and making her eyeballs pound painfully. Once she managed to clear the pipes, she got up and walked back over to the window.
“Sheesh, you can just stick to comms if it makes you feel better.”
“No, that’s not it.” She looked down on the slowly tilting orb floating aimlessly in front of them. A strange levity filled her at the prospect of not having to go back. She almost thought go home but, in truth, it hadn't felt like home for a while now. “You want me to stay here with you?”
Teeth flashed in a grin. “Is it that awful of a prospect?” Her voice carried strong, but a crinkle around Boonville's soft brown eyes betrayed a little fleck of hurt.
“No, actually. I was more afraid you’d force me to go back.” Hell, she had been outright terrified. The constant fear of being kidnapped or killed somehow had draped itself over her like a blanket, and for the first time in weeks she felt the weight lifting, affording her some breathing room.
“Man,” Boonville snorted, “I’m not about to bring you up here, show you all this, and then pat you on the ass and say goodbye. What kind of shit head would I have to be?” She laughed, a rich and hearty sound, more than welcome after the pervasive loneliness and fear of the last few months.
“Besides,” she shrugged as she lazily waved a hand over their beautiful, fragile home, “with the way I hear things going, there’s no way in hell I’d want to be down there right now.”