Unidentified Funny Objects 7 by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire [Alex Shvartsman, Edited by]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alex Shvartsman

Seanan McGuire

My ship—the dazzlingly shabby Mercury Midway, which was a lie in multiple directions at the same time, since she wasn’t built on Mercury, and she wasn’t big enough to contain anything resembling an actual midway—spun lazily in the void of space, not seeming overly concerned with which way was supposed to be “up.” The crew spun with it, all three of us floating in the middle of the cargo bay and trying to ignore the way everything around us occasionally shifted.

It wasn’t easy. The effort was worthwhile, if only because vomiting in zero-gravity is less than no fun at all. Puke goes wherever it wants when the gravity is on. Without it . . .

Washing someone else’s vomit out of my hair was awful enough. I didn’t want to wash it out of my eyes.

“I told you not to hit the gravity generator with a spanner,” said Doc, his sour tone somewhat underscored by the fact that he was currently, to my admittedly biased perspective, floating upside down. One of the bows in his beard had come untied and was drifting serenely away, a ribbon of silver spangle in the otherwise dull air.

“I’ve done it before,” I protested.

“And every time you’ve done it I’ve asked you not to do it again, on the theory that one day something exactly like this was going to happen. Well, it finally happened. You finally shorted out our one reliable source of gravity while we were too far from any planetary body to get a tow. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

I offered him a toothy grin. “Sort of, yeah. How’s it going over there, Vi?”

Violet Whitman, scientist, techie, and occasional repair bot, pulled her head out of the gravity generator and glared at me. Her curly red hair formed a corona around her head, snarling on everything it could reach. At least she was putting it to good use: she had two wrenches and a handheld torch shoved into the tangles I could see, and more than half of her hair was out of my line of sight.

“You know my father designed this,” she said.

“I do.”

“He worked long and hard. He missed dinners and forgot about my school recitals, because he was making a better, sturdier gravity generator for short-range ships.”

“I know that, too.”

“You know all that, and yet you broke it.”

I put my hands up, a gesture that would probably have been more effective if I hadn’t been rotating gently in midair. “You’re the one who told me you usually started repairs by hitting things.”

“Yes, hitting things like a professional, not like I was playing Whack-a-Weasel.”

“First, it’s Whack-a-Mole, and second, you shouldn’t insult the games that pay for all this.” I waved my arms to indicate the ship around us, setting myself spinning harder in the process.

There are no carnivals in space. Nowhere to set up the midway, no way to keep the Ferris wheel turning. But as long as people like me can keep flying, the spirit of the carnival will live on.

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