“Apparently quite lost.” Jin tightened his hold on her, as if he expected her to collapse. Considering how weak she suddenly felt, it was probably a good idea.
“Lost! Lost!” cried the crows in her dreams.
She realized where she must be. She had fallen straight to Esme. “You’re part of the tengu crew of the Tianlong Hao.”
“I was the Captain.”
“Was?”
“This is the Dahe Hao.” Jin leaned over her shoulder to tap on the window, drawing her attention back outside. “There’s the Tianlong Hao.”
The ship had continued to rotate and a vast debris field of broke ships slid into view. The great long cylindrical ships were shattered to pieces. Parts were folded like soda cans. The space around them hazed and glittering from frozen moisture and oxygen trapped in the same orbit as the ships. The bodies of astronauts tumbled in among the litter.
She covered her mouth to keep in a cry of dismay. Still her shock came out in low whimpers.
“The Dahe managed to rescue most of my crew minutes after the accident,” Jin said quietly. “We saved crew from the Zhenghe Hao and the Anhe Hao, but the Minghe Hao re-entered before we could get to it, along with parts of what we think was the gate.”
“Jin!” A female voice called from beyond an open hatch. “Did you find what the hell made the loud bang?”
“Yes!” Jin shouted. “We somehow picked up a visitor.”
“What kind of visitor?” The female snapped.
“The gun-waving elfin kind.” Jin shouted.
“Have you fucking flipped?” The female voice drew closer. “An elf?”
“Yes, an elf,” Jin called.
“Jin.” There was something familiar about the female’s voice. “There were no elves on any of the crew lists.”
Jin cocked his head at Tinker and made a slight noise of discovery. “You did fall from Pittsburgh.”
A purple-haired woman appeared at the door and Tinker recognized her. It was Esme. She hadn’t changed from when Lain’s photo had been taken, with the tiny exception of the bandage on her forehead. On her temple was a pink line of recently healed flesh. Like Jin, she was marked with soot, blood, and exhaustion.
“Well, I’ll be fucked.” Esme had Lain’s voice, only slightly more raspy, as if she had shouted her throat raw. “Well, it’s about time you got your scrawny ass up here.”
“You had a gun-waving elf princess on order?” Jin asked.
“Not exactly. I had a dream. And you were there.” Esme pointed at Jin and then Tinker. “And you.”
“I’m starting to understand the appeal of Kansas,” Tinker grumbled.
Jin looked at Tinker in surprise. “You forgot your little dog.”
“I’m Dorothy,” Esme corrected him. “She’s the scarecrow. So, how the hell did you get here?”
“I fell,” Tinker said.
“Down the rabbit hole?” Esme asked.
“More or less,” Tinker said.
“Great, you can get us out of this fucking mess,” Esme asked.
Tinker could only laugh bitterly. “I not even sure where I am, let alone how to get out. What planet is that? Elfhome? Onihida?”
Esme glanced at Jin with narrowing eyes. “Onihida?”
“The tengu homeworld,” Tinker said. “Or don’t you know about the tengu?”
“We’ve covered that little speed bump,” Esme said dryly, still looking at Jin. Then she shrugged. “All things considered, finding out that half the crew isn’t human is just all part of the weirdness.”
“It doesn’t matter which planet it is,” Jin said. “We’ve lost all our shuttles in the crash. We can’t land. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, the ship is designed to support its crew for decades — but we’ve got the survivors of four ships on board.”
“I think its Elfhome.” Esme turned back to Tinker. “At least, Pittsburgh is down there. Every now and then, we pick up a FM station.” Esme named a couple of Pittsburgh radio stations. “It sounds like a fucking war has broken out.”
“More or less,” Tinker said.
“Oh joy.” Esme indicated that they should start in the direction she had come from. “Hopefully you have something other than straw in that head of yours, because I’ve got a mess for you to fix.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the expert?” Tinker let Jin pick her up and carry her. All the little speed bumps, as Esme would put it, had finally gotten the best of her.
“Yes, I am,” Esme lead through the next section of the ship. Smoke hazed the air here, and red lights flashed unattended. “But you’re the scarecrow.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Tinker asked.
“It means what it means,” Esme opened a hatch, stepped through and closed it after Jin. The light was dim in this section, but air was clean. The floor was cluttered with crew sleeping. At a glance, at least half of the sleepers were wounded. “All fucking logic went out the window about seven days ago.”
Stormsong had said that when her dreaming powers had told her that Impatience was no longer a danger to them. Esme sounded like she was operating on the same skewed logic — she wanted Tinker to fix the mess that the colonists were in because the dreams said she would.
Oh great, yet another group of people expecting me to pull rabbits out of my hat.
For the first time in her life, Tinker felt intimidated by a piece of hardware. She knew that a spaceship was a delicate balance of systems, a spider web pretending to be a simple tin can, with the lives of everyone inside dependant on it. “Look, I really don’t know a whole lot about spaceships.”
“I’ll use terms you can understand,” Esme said. “My ship is sinking and I can’t bail fast enough.”
“Okay,” Tinker said. “Exactly how does a spaceship ‘sink’?”
“The jump did something to my computers.” Esme stopped beside a work station with a monitor showing static. The front panel had already been pulled, and the boards inside gleamed softly with magic. “I’m getting — all sorts of weird errors — and I’m starting to lose systems completely.”
“Well, doh,” Tinker dug through her pockets until she found a length of wire and her screwdriver set. “Magic is causing your systems to crash.”
“Magic?” Esme echoed, looking mystified.
Tinker realized that none of the colonist could see the magic. “That’s Elfhome and this universe has magic. Your computer systems aren’t shielded for it.”
“Oh fuck, it is blindingly obvious, isn’t it?” Esme pressed her palm to her forehead, took a deep breath and let it out. “I should have thought of that when I started to dream true again. Okay. This system controls my engines. Right after the crash, I pulled into what should have been a stable orbit and started up the rotation that allows for the artificial gravity. We’re drifting though. If I don’t correct our orbit, we’re going enter the planet’s astrosphere — and my ship is not designed to survive retry.”
“Okay.” Tinker took the lantern from Jin and started to strip it for parts. “We need to first siphon off the magic, and then create shielding for the system. Here’s what I need…”
Tinker had never worked with astronauts before and was amazed how quickly they learned. While Esme had fired the positioning jets to stop the ship’s rotation and pulled them back into a stable orbit, Jin drafted a team of people to drain excess magic off the computer equipment. Despite Esme’s “you’re the scarecrow” statements, everyone seemed hesitant about Tinker actually working with the ship’s systems. After Tinker trained the astronauts, she found herself in a supervisory-only position. She floated in place, stranded by the lack of gravity, with an ice pack strapped to her ankle.