The Betwixt Book One Read online

  Chapter 2

  I never liked going to the Med Bay. It was always an uncomfortable ordeal that would see me smiling blankly at some fresh-faced doctor who was fascinated by my genetic phenotype. “White hair,” they’d say, “I’ve never seen anything code for a trait that white.” They’d prod around in my DNA, sucking their teeth and waggling their eyebrows. “Amazing! Your morphology is almost completely human, but the hair and eyes are different – how did that happen?”

  Through the entire time I’d always be sitting on the corner of the bed, dead-eyed, trying not to encourage them. Most of the time my halfy status only ever saw me mild disdain or indifference, but to doctors and geneticists I was a curiosity worthy of closer examination.

  “Your eyes are so intriguing,” this doctor said. “They don’t match anything I’ve ever seen before.”

  I sat there patiently as I watched the counter on the medical scanner tick down to complete. With a ping, it finished its task, and I threw myself off the bed.

  “Oh, are you sure you couldn’t hang around, Miss ahh,” the Doctor flicked his eyes to the scanner to read my name, “Mini?”

  Now, that was fascinating. For someone who supposedly held such an interest in me, how was it that he couldn’t even remember my name? I shook my head politely. “I’m sorry. I have to get back to work. Perhaps another time.” With that, I left quickly.

  I didn’t go back to work. My shift had been almost up when the red guy had attacked. Plus, I had to go back to my quarters and feed Hipop. So the rest of the day and night (which is a relative notion in a space station) I spent with my monkey cat watching galactic TV, and maybe more than once thinking about a certain handsome but curt commander.

  The next day saw me back at work, apron tied tightly and neatly around my skirt. I wasn’t about to have a repeat of yesterday, thank you.

  Things were busy. The place was packed with GAMs, cargo crews, and general space riff-raff sitting or standing in every available space. There was a buzz in the air the likes of which I hadn’t heard since a GAM cruiser had gone nuclear at the edge of the system several months ago. They were talking, all of them, between slinging down their alcohol and shoveling in their food.

  At first, stupidly, I thought it might have had something to do with my altercation yesterday. It isn’t every day a waitress gets attacked by a tiny monk-alien. But, no, it would take more than a table-tipping fight to electrify this room.

  It didn’t take long to piece it together. I would hear snatches of conversation as I whirled around taking orders and handing out steaming plates of things that pushed the definition of food.

  “Came in yesterday,” one GAM said between fork-fulls, arms on the bar as he talked to a freight captain. “Dead as dead can be.”

  “Ghosts,” a Crag rumbled to a bounty hunter. “Would never happen on a Crag ship.”

  “Station engineers won’t even look at it. They’re getting the GAMs to go in. Good luck to them.”

  “They found her out in the middle of nowhere, towed her in. Said they haven’t seen anything like this since...”

  As soon as I would pick up on a conversation, I’d be called to another waiting patron. As the day wound on, I found the Commander’s words reverberating in my head: “These are strange times.” Well, these were certainly strange times today – I was frantic trying to keep up with the customers and trying to pick up what on Earth had happened at the same time.

  I tried to ask Claudia at one point, but she was too busy chatting to a group of GAMs, and the other girls were darting in and out of the crowd like moths to the light.

  I was getting steadily more frustrated yet equally excited by the whole thing.

  “Order of Ankorian Sea Bass, down the line.”

  I grabbed the dish from the kitchen shuttle and secured it on the flat of my forearm, narrowly missing one of the girls as she scuttled to get drinks from the bar.

  The dish stank of rotting fish that had been left out on a muggy day in a solution of butter and sugar. I tried not to breathe in the fumes as I hefted it to the bar. “Your order, sir.”

  A Crag grabbed it and started ripping chunks off the putrefying flesh before he had even pulled it toward him. I noticed, through a barely concealed grimace, that it was the same guy I served yesterday. It was unusual for types like him – mercenaries, bounty hunters, gunrunners – to hang around too long on this space station. It was a stopover, a chance to refuel and re-equip. It wasn’t a holiday destination.

  I stared at him a moment too long, and he slowly raised his huge head, lizard-green skin creaking with the effort. “What?” His voice dripped with menace.

  I stopped myself from yelping and quickly turned to the human who had sat down beside him, more than thankful for the legitimate distraction.

  It was a GAM, and he smiled with only half of his mouth. “Morning, Mini.”

  I blinked so quickly I must have looked like a startled cartoon character. “Oh, Jason – I mean Commander. I- ah....” It was like I had momentarily forgotten my job. I had to wrack my memory for what to say next. “Umm—”

  “Chef’s special,” he jumped right to it in usual Commander Cole style.

  I nodded unsteadily. I must have looked like a broken robot. “Coming right up,” I managed.

  I went to turn.

  “So, did you actually stay around for the medical scans yesterday?”

  I hesitated before I turned back. I didn’t have the time to chat, not on this strange day. “Yes.”

  “Really?” He sat with one arm leaning on the bar, the other tugging at his uniform top.

  “I’ve never liked doctors.”

  “Don’t get shot, then.”

  I couldn’t tell if it was a joke. His face didn’t give anything away, and his tone was as flat as the bench he leaned on.

  “It was a joke,” he revealed. There was that tone again, except this time the half-smile was back. Why he didn’t smile with both cheeks was a mystery. It was such an in-between move – like things only amused him by halves.

  “I knew that. I think.” I bit my lower lip. I was feeling increasingly awkward. Half of me wanted Claudia to swan in and take over, but the other half would have preferred a hull breach than be called away right now.

  The conversation began to die out. Cole gave the Crag a glancing look then returned his eyes to some stain on his hand.

  I thought desperately of something to say; I would look like such a pill if I walked away now. “Oh,” I said too quickly as I chanced upon something. The Commander, with all his distracting finesse, had made me completely forget my morning’s obsession. “Do you know what’s going on around here?”

  His eyes narrowed in a moment of confused amusement. “We’re having an awkward conversation, and the guy to my right is eating rotting sea gunk.”

  I put a hand up to my mouth, one finger pressed against my lips – it was something I did when flustered. “No, no. I meant at the station. I’ve been at work all morning, and I keep on hearing all these strange conversations—”

  “Ghost ship,” the Commander cut in. He wasn’t one to let me babble when he already knew the answer.

  “Ghost ship?”

  “It’s a term for a ship that’s found drifting without a crew—”

  I knew what a ghost ship was, but I wasn’t about to interrupt him when he was forming sentences of longer than four words.

  “It floated in at 0800 this morning. Distress signal hadn’t been activated, life support was functioning, scans didn’t show anything wrong with the engine core. She was in order.”

  “Well,” I caught a hold of my ponytail and twisted it, surprised to see Cole’s eyes flick to it before flicking away, “Couldn’t the crew have escaped in the life pods? Perhaps they—”

  “Escape pods are still on the ship. She was a cargo ship, and the computer records show she made her last contact at 0730 this morning. Only half an hour before she was found, abandoned, drifting in space.”

&nb
sp; My hands stopped twisting my hair. “Maybe it was pirates, maybe they faked the contact—”

  “Where was their ship, where did they escape to? Long-range scans have confirmed that ship was alone out there, no vessels within range, except for the one that found her,” the Commander interrupted again.

  “Well, perhaps someone remotely accessed their com-link, made it look like they were on board when they were systems away?”

  Commander Cole’s half-smile was firmly tugging at one side of his jaw. It wasn’t clear whether he found my suggestions amusing, ridiculous, or cute. “Now why would someone bother doing that? She was a freighter, cargo was space junk being taken to the recycling depot at Central. Worthless.”

  I parted my lips, waiting for another objection to come to mind, but nothing came. The Commander’s half-smile was starting to get me more and more flustered. “Well, what does everyone think it is? Pirates, a malfunction, a—”

  “Twixts,” the Crag rumbled from beside the Commander, and I jumped at his unexpected boom.

  The Commander gave a brief laugh. “Twixts? Doesn’t sound like something a Crag warrior would suggest.”

  “Crew’s gone. No way off that ship. Not pirates, not mercs, not anything. Twixts.”

  Commander Cole shook his head, but I was curious to note that his face had become stiffer, his lips barely moving.

  “What’s a Twicks?” I was starting to show my alarming lack of knowledge in front of the Commander again. For a girl who worked in a space diner, my knowledge of the galaxy was barely enough to get by. Blame it on not having parents or growing up in isolation – but I didn’t follow half of the conversations that would flow through this diner.

  “Twixts,” the Commander corrected. “And they’re nothing, just a fairytale designed—”

  The Crag snorted, and it sounded like an elephant sneezing. “We call them the Death Shadows. Can’t see them until it’s too late.”

  Listening to a Crag talk about anything at all was usually dramatic, but the menace this one put behind his words sent a palpable shiver across my back. It felt like the frozen depths of space collecting down my spine. “Shadows?” I repeated, voice an appropriate whisper.

  “Worse than shadows. Can see shadows. These are between things, in the gaps between.”

  A part of me knew I shouldn’t be so accepting of the Crag’s show, but the rest of me was shaking behind my tightly tied apron. Perhaps the Commander could see because he leaned in closer.

  “Ignore him; it’s a myth. It’s some story space bums and recruits throw around to scare themselves on long voyages. Only thing you have to worry about in this galaxy are pirates, scum, and rogues. Which is enough.”

  I was stuck on something. I honestly felt like the world had solidified either side of me and was funneling me forward with no option to turn back. “They exist between things?”

  “Can’t see ‘em, can’t fight ‘em,” the Crag bit into the last bit of rotting flesh from his meal, and the juices splashed onto his stained vest, “Then you’re dead.”

  “But, but where did the bodies go?”

  I was aware of the Commander as he gave a frustrated sigh. He obviously thought I was an idiot for heading further down this rabbit hole.

  “Back in-between,” the Crag answered.

  “No, because that doesn’t make any sense,” the Commander interrupted. “In-between isn’t anywhere. It’s not a location in space; it’s a relative comparison between points. Twixts don’t exist.”

  Apparently, we had hit a nerve. The Commander’s voice dropped and wavered toward the end. Was he sick of trying to convince me these mysterious monsters didn’t exist, had he had enough of telling the recruits to stop spreading horror stories, or was there something more to this?

  I wasn’t going to get a chance to find out.

  “Another,” the Crag growled, spinning his plate in my direction. I managed to catch it before it toppled off my end of the bench, but the slop his sea bass was drowning in splashed all over my chest.

  “Ehhh.” I looked at the green and yellow gunk as it dripped and pooled down my front. How attractive.

  I could see Commander Cole recede back at the smell.

  Eh, why did stuff like this always have to happen to me? Just when I was having the most interesting conversation I’d had all week, I get covered in the rotted remains of an alien fish.

  It didn’t matter anyway, because as soon as I’d properly secured the plate, the Commander leaned back, a hand at his ear. He had a mumbled conversation then stood up as quickly as a spring snapping back into place. “Sorry,” he said as he turned, “Cancel my order.”

  There he left me, covered in slops.

  The rest of the shift went slowly, somehow. I was still rushed off my feet, but somehow it dragged on. I had a moment to change uniforms, but I still smelled the stench of buttery, sugary death.

  I was itching to get out and have a walk around the station. I never usually did it – just walked the distance to the lift then back to my quarters. There wasn’t much to see once you’d seen it all before. Things were different today; they were quicker, edgier, stranger.

  The mood in the diner – the one of palpable, pressured excitement – it was out in the rest of the station too. I found myself walking down one of the numerous corridors that offered a view of the docking station where they dragged in ships for repair. Was it out there? I wondered to myself as I rested my elbows on a hand railing and stared out a porthole. Was that ghost ship in the docking station right now, the GAMs going through it because no other sane being would go anywhere near her? Was that why the Commander had been called off? Had there been an incident, had his superiors told him to go over the ship and leave no cargo box unturned?

  In-between. They exist in-between things. The Commander was right – that didn’t make any sense. Things either exist or they don’t; there’s nothing that exists in the middle.

  I made my slow way back to my quarters, mostly in a daydream, mind twisting and whirling over the day’s happenings. Maybe I was spending an undue amount of time recounting my conversation with the Commander. Maybe I shouldn’t let the strange vibe of the station bother me.

  I opened my door with a mega sigh. I was tiring myself out with all these what ifs. I needed to sit down and veg out – play with Hipop and download the latest episode of Galaxy Chef.

  My room was how I always left it – in a state of half-clean, half-mess. Certain parts were pristine – my bed made with symmetrical precision, the vintage cloth covering my table straight and perfect. Then there was the couch, which was knee-deep in crumbs and had various data pads strewn across it. My assortment of pot plants was sending their shoots and leaves out everywhere, threatening to take over the walls like my quarters were a tropical jungle planet.

  “Hipop,” I called as I kicked off my shoes, careful not to send them into the beautiful, huge saffron flower of one of my more exotic plants. “Hey, monkey, monkey, where are you?”

  Silence. I braced myself for the critter to jump at me from one of the vines that was clumped across the roof (it really was a jungle in here). He so did like to climb.

  “Helllllloooo,” I called.

  “Hello.”

  I whirled, heart as frozen as a drop of water on the tail of a comet.

  It was him. That two-foot tall, blood-red alien monk who’d been ever so keen on grabbing my hair yesterday. Now he was in my quarters.

  “What are you doing here?” I put a flat hand on my chest, my fingers squeezed together until the joints felt like popping.

  The guy didn’t lunge at me, thankfully, just cocked his head to the side and stared.

  My body was braced for attack, palms sweaty, mouth as dry as the desert by day.

  I took another shuddering breath. “Look, this is my room. You have no right to be here. Please leave.”

  If it understood me, it didn’t give me any indication. It just kept staring.

  “I’m going to call securit
y,” I said bravely. I would march across the room to my com-panel, I told myself firmly, and I would call security. I didn’t need to be afraid of this, I didn’t need to be—

  “Hello, Mini.” The thing’s voice was quiet but clipped and polite.

  It was unsettling. It had the calm tones of a dearly beloved grandparent, not that I’d ever had one of those, but I could imagine.

  “I am sorry for the rude interruption. I fear I have taken you by surprise.”

  I blinked, hand releasing from my chest and floating toward my mouth. This was bizarre. Not only was he not throwing himself at me and hissing, but he was conversing in the most articulate, refined of manners. “I—”

  The alien put up a hand, which had previously been clasped firmly behind his back, his baggy brown robe obscuring it from view. “I have to apologize about yesterday. I was,” his pinprick black eyes widened with obvious excitement, “Unduly surprised. I didn’t expect to find you. Not here, not after we’d searched so long.”

  My surprise at his good conversation skills quickly dwindled, and I started eying off the com-link again. “Sorry?” I said as I shifted one subtle step toward it.

  “You, I, well... we have searched the galaxy so long, only to find you now, on the cusp of the great quickening.”

  “Ah, the what?” I had that com-link in sight, and I sidled step-by-step toward it.

  “There’s no need to be afraid, Mini.”

  Oh, I didn’t know about that. Yesterday this monk had launched himself at me with no provocation, desperate to get a hold of my ice-white hair. Now he was trying to convince me with clear oration that this was absolutely fine. I was an innocent in this galaxy, I knew that, but I wasn’t this dumb.

  “I knew your mother.”

  I stopped dead. Why would he even say that?

  “Well, I knew of her. Who of my race does not?”

  “I don’t have a mother.” My defenses were starting to rise, making my back tingle with cold. The mere mention of her had shifted this situation.

  I walked for the com-link.

  The alien got there first. He was like a blur, quicker than he’d been yesterday. He tucked into a roll and sprang up between me and the electronic pad on the wall.

  “You can’t be too hasty in dismissing me, child. There’s so much I have to tell, and there’s so little time.”

  “Get out of my room now—”

  “There’s one on the station, on that ship that came in. The fools, they are fools for bringing that ship to a populated station.”

  “What are you talking about?” I tried to duck and weave around him, but he kept up with my moves like a cat chasing a sick mouse.

  “A Shadow. It came on the ship, killed the crew. Now it’s here. We have to hurry; we haven’t the time. Those foolish soldiers will board it soon, let the Shadow loose.”

  “A shadow?” I didn’t want to listen, just wanted to get to the com-link, call security, and get that thing the hell out of here. But that word – Shadow – it struck a chord, a low and reverberating one.

  “Death Bringer, Old One, Invisibles, Not There’s – races have many names for them. We always called them Twixts.”

  “Twixts?”

  “They are what lie between – far more dangerous than what lies beneath.”

  “I don’t believe you. If something like that existed, why wouldn’t anyone have seen it? Why wouldn’t the station’s sensors have picked it up on that ship?”

  “Few can see them, precious few.” He kept his hands clasped behind him as he spoke, his head tilted up, expression calm.

  “Well, sounds convenient—”

  “You are one of them, child.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You can see between, like your mother.”

  I felt exasperated. The fear had balled up in my middle, morphed to frustration, and it was choking me from the inside. I felt like screaming. “What are you talking about?”

  “If you have not heard, you must listen. We have to stop if before it comes aboard. The station, it has no security against this threat, nothing. Those soldiers of the Galactic Army, they will be the first to fall. It is your duty, your legacy.”

  “My duty to do what?”

  “To stop the middle from reaching either end. You stop the in-between from coming out. It is within your power, your heritage to fight the Twixts, to prevent the collapse of this galax—”

  I began to laugh, harshly and erratically, but the humor was there. It was my destiny to save the galaxy? I was the least capable person to have the weight of universal salvation thrust upon my shoulders. I was supposed to be a klutzy diner waitress turned superhero? What was this guy on?

  “This is no laughing matter, child. There are lives in danger, we must—”

  “I’m a waitress,” I said each word slowly, “Not a hero. If you’re looking for someone to save the galaxy, go and look for a GAM.”

  He became quiet, gaze drifting slowly to the ground. He took a large breath, chest puffing out. “Well, I hadn’t wanted it to come to this, but you leave me no choice.”

  He reached into the folds of his brown robe and drew something out. It was a long oblong tube with a seal in the middle.

  “I’m calling security.” I dodged past him and made it to the wall panel.

  There was a click behind me, and somehow, somehow it filled the room – the tiny noises echoed until they boomed.

  Every single part of me buzzed. It was as if I had passed right through an electrical storm in space, unprotected by the hull of a ship – at the mercy of the wash of power. Yet at the same time, I felt the unease pin me to the ground, sinking through my middle like the 1000 ton docking cable of a cruiser.

  I could see it before I turned, if that made any sense.

  I turned.

  It wasn’t black, not like obsidian or the furthest reaches of cold space. It was the color of a shadow you see out of the corner of your eye. It wasn’t color at all; it was light turned away from itself.

  I wasn’t breathing, wasn’t moving, and neither was it.

  “You see now, you feel it?” Somehow the alien had made it to my side.

  I felt it alright, like a shard of ice sunk deep into my belly. I had never felt anything like this before.

  It was less of shape, less of a solid – more like an impression in space. A terrible outline of something.

  “It can’t attack you; I have it trapped.” The alien held out the tube in his hands. “You had to feel it to know what you are up against. This is a weak one, very weak. It is at the end of the in-between. Those at the center are stronger.”

  I didn’t understand a word of what he was saying, and to be honest, his voice hardly bridged the ringing in my ears. As long as that thing was in front of me, I didn’t have a hope of moving a muscle. Yet, from within me, somewhere, I had a desire to—

  “Stop it from coming any nearer. That’s what you want, that’s what half your body is telling you. Listen to it – listen to the part that isn’t human.”

  Images flashed in my head, maybe memories, maybe the stuff of dreams. Two hands on a door holding it firm against the outside, a palm outstretched, a cruiser slamming on its brakes, a storm beating restlessly against a wall.

  Stopping. All of them were images of stopping.

  I... I knew I wasn’t thinking clearly. I felt half at the edge of sleep, half at the edge of mania.

  The thing – the Shadow, the Twixt – it shifted forward. It didn’t spread out, screaming like a thousand trapped souls, nor did it tighten its form, ready to pounce. I knew what it wanted to do.

  “Turn it off,” I heard my voice as if it were far away on some distant crackly com-link. “Turn it off now.”

  “It can’t hurt you, it is trapped—”

  “No.” I breathed, my voice still distant, still somehow not mine. “It’s calling.”

  The creature tipped what could only be described as its head toward the ceiling – shadows of tight, rope-like musc
les twisting in its neck.

  “Turn it off!” I shrieked.

  The alien did something, and there was a click.

  Then the creature faded, faded with a snap back into the tube.

  I fell to my knees, exhausted from no fight at all.

  The red alien, eyes almost popping with fear, stowed the tube back into his robe, placing a hand over the folds of fabric as if to trap it in place. “It... it shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

  I looked at him, my head tipped slightly to one side as if I were some limp doll that had been left out in the wind and rain. “Why did you do that? What was th...” I let my voice trail off. I couldn’t ask the question again. That was a Twixt. A shadow that had come alive if ever I had seen one.

  I felt cold and damp, but strangely, I couldn’t shiver. “There’s one on the station?” I whispered.

  The alien nodded silently.

  “Is it coming here?” I pushed to my feet, the fear surging through me like the shock wave from a supernova hitting its orbiting planets.

  Everything was going topsy-turvy, impossible and unbelievable. I stood in the middle of my quarters, talking to an alien who’d showed me a shadow trapped in a box. My mind and body were surging with jumbled energy, tinged with nauseating fear.

  I was a waitress from a diner, I tried to assure myself as I squeezed my hands open and closed. This couldn’t be happening to me.

  “Yes,” the alien’s voice croaked, “I’m afraid it is. Unless....”

  “Unless?”

  “We get there first.”

  “And do what? Call security; call the GAMs?”

  “Pray.”