Starship Ragnarok: A Norse Gods Space Opera (Space Gods Book 1) by Alex Oliver

Author:Alex Oliver [Oliver, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-10T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Back to the Raggy

Desultory insisted on coming with them for the chance to spend an hour or so in the ship with the spacesuit off, and though Yas felt the Ocuilin would slow them down considerably, he didn't have the heart or the authority to insist otherwise.

The trip back to where they had left Raggy was routine now, though in the dark it was interesting to see the houses lit by their fire-pits, and mutual neighborhood cook-outs going on in the streets. They slid through the music of several performers—someone on the harp, someone else on a whistle or recorder made of bone, a choir singing oddly atonal music in their throats, and a storyteller whose out-flung arm drew the onlookers' gazes to their carriage. They could see a brief glimpse of dropped mouths as they sped past.

Raggy should at least have had her running lights on—a spotlight picking out her name and strips of warning lights delineating her slumbering engines and her two cannons. And these they should have been able to see, floating in the air above the city of the wheel. But the sky was utterly black, without a star, and certainly without a looming spaceship.

Yas stood on the platform and cursed. Who had taken her? Where had they put her? "God damn it!"

"Do not waste your energy on complaints," snapped the doctor, his bedside manner as abrupt as always. "I am connected to the mainframe and the connection has not faltered. Wherever they have taken the ship, it is not end-of-the-rainbow, deep, outlying, far."

"Can you feel it? Do you have a tracker?"

"I have a tracker," Desultory offered. "The suit is tagged in case of tether failure during EVA. It has a homing device installed. Give me a moment."

He extended the suit's left glove and rotated in place. Yas followed the gesture and was not at all surprised when the pointing fist came to rest directed at a mountain about five miles away. Not a mountain, he corrected on second glance, but an artificial mound, like the mounds that had been built before the first colonizers came to the Americas—smooth sided, perfectly circular and with a small flat top. If it was visible from here, it must be huge.

"Fine," he sighed. "We are just so discrete walking around like this. We're going to have a crowd after us."

"A specific human skill is indicated," said the doctor.

"Yeah? What?"

"Lying. State emphatically that we have Freya's permission to get to our ship. For the natives here, it is unthinkable that we would act against Freya’s will. Therefore let us rely on our interlocutors not to think it."

Yas laughed. He guessed the guy had a point, but it was funny being lectured about how human assumptions worked by a non-human. That was one of the nice things about the Alliance. You saw yourself more clearly if you had lots of different points of view to compare with. "Lead on then."

They did attract a crowd, almost instantly. But when Yas explained—with

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