Editor’s Note: In Devon Eriksen’s breakout novel, Theft of Fire, asteroid miner Marcus Warnoc’s ship is hijacked by a cunning, gene-twisted aristocrat. In Chapter 3 (included below), locked out of his own systems, Marcus schemes to uncover her destination. What secrets hide in Sedna’s Tombs? Read on.

Our first day of travel starts with a jolt.

There’s no warning. The deck just leaps up and slams into my spine. For a moment, I think I’m about to get crushed between high-grav acceleration and steel deck plates, but we stop ramping up at what feels like one gravity. Not that the fall doesn’t hurt. Why didn’t she sound the acceleration alarm first?

Because she doesn’t know what she’s doing, that’s why. A fully automated luxury torchship, something built by SpaceX, or Faulcon-DeLacy, would trigger one automatically before drive spinup, but when I set up the Cat, I just rigged a button labeled “XL WARN” on the controls and called it a day. And she didn’t push that button. Of course she didn’t. Probably didn’t even know what it meant.

Amateur hour. Good thing I already secured for maneuvers, or I’d be under a pile of loose gear right now.

I’m still picking myself up off the floor and grumbling when she comes down the ladder, glowing with satisfaction at having figured out how to use a standard software tool designed for user friendly operation. And of course the first thing out of her mouth is a complaint.

“Do we really have to climb up and down this ladder all the time?” she asks, looking up as the first of the robotic crab-spider bodyguards descends after her, all sectioned limbs and disturbing, fluid grace.

“Look, lady, what the hell do you expect? Elevators? A grand spiral staircase? This whole crew section is just a cylinder sectioned off into decks. Stacked on top of each other, you know, like a…” I trail off, searching for an analogy that works.

“Can of pineapple rings?” she offers, brightly.

“What’s a pine-apple ring?”

She peers at me, cocking her head to one side like an inquisitive kitten. “It’s a ring. Of pineapple. From a can? Pineapple? You know, the fruit? From Earth?”

I close my organic eye and massage the bridge of my nose with my fingers. “Asteroid miners,” I say “do not eat fruit imported from Earth.”

“Well, you should. It’s delicious. Anyway, it’s a bad design. They should have used a wider, flatter cylinder and put more compartments on each level. That way, you wouldn’t have to—”

“Dock at a standard size station berth? Maneuver next to a spinning rock? Retain hull integrity when I’m pushing ten thousand tons of ore barge? Look, Princess, this is the ship you chose to hijack. You don’t like it, that’s on you, ‘cause I’d have been more than okay with you ruining somebody else’s day instead. So, now that we’re under way, you wanna tell me where the hell we’re going and what it is you want me to help you steal?”

She tries to drag a low padded bench away from the bench press station, maybe towards the nearest window, but it doesn’t budge. The drones climb into the equipment, one on the top of the squat rack, the other clinging to the lat machine. They seem to like high places.

“No,” she says, and tugs again, like she’s expecting to rip out the ten-millimeter bolts I clamped the gym equipment down with. Does she not know what happens with loose gear on spacecraft?

“Our mission is strictly need-to-know,” she continues. “Top secret. I’ll tell you what you need to do when you need to do it. I—we—can’t risk you blabbing all over the internet.”

She gives up on rearranging my observation deck and sinks her shapely little butt onto the bench right where it is. The gray pencil skirt clings to her hips and thighs, and I wrench my eyes away—I’ve been alone in space far too long already.

I hate her, but I can’t stop looking. I need to get away. Clear my head.

The drones bristle as I pass within a few meters of her, but she doesn’t say a word as I climb the ladder, leaving her there to ponder the stars by herself. Or play games on her neural lace. Or plot how she’s gonna drain the blood from her next victim. Whatever.

Above the observation deck, the access tunnel is enclosed, a tight vertical tube of gray epoxy paint on steel. Above me, hatchways open off the shaft, at different angles, not always directly opposite the ladder. Dad and I aren’t architects or interior designers. We kinda worked them in wherever they fit.

I don’t even know where I’m going, I just know I need to get away from her. We’re gonna spend however long this flight takes stuck together in the space of a fifty meter cylinder, most of it occupied by instruments and machinery, with nothing to do and no one to talk to but each other. Oh, and the internet only available with minutes if not hours of lightspeed lag.

Great.

The cabins are two levels above observation, just past the galley and supply stowage, where the shaft opens up into a little access space. Four gray metal hatchway doors divide in an arc across the inside of the… ah… “pine-apple” ring. Can’t get that image out of my head. Three cabins, and one door spray painted with those ubiquitous little icons of a stick figure man and woman, to which Dad added, in a slightly different shade of white, a robot and what looks like a goat. Underneath, block letters read “WHATEVER. JUST WASH YOUR HANDS.”

The second hatch from the left is hanging open, revealing a small glimpse of a bag strapped to the zero-g tiedown points, its rich burgundy synth material textured to look like… no, wait, that’s probably real leather, isn’t it? From an actual animal.

The second door. She’s taken Dad’s cabin.

I have the fleeting urge to rip the door open, grab every scrap of luggage I can lay my hands on, and tip it down the access shaft to land on her miniature aristocratic head. Instead, I pull open the door to my own cabin, lock it behind me. At least she can’t follow me here. I reach over, yank the grip handle, swing the bunk out from the wall, and sit down heavily on the smartfoam without bothering to roll aside the zero-g net.

Great. I’m hiding in my room from a girl who’s less than four feet tall, is built like a wisp of sunlight, and smells faintly of vanilla. Wonderful start to the great space pirate resistance, there, Marcus.

So, how to fight back? I call up my neural lace display, try the navcomp again.

“ACCESS DENIED. Please contact your network administrator.”

Fuck.

I’m the network administrator. The White Cat isn’t one of those fancy automatic SpaceX torchships, with everything from drive and nav control to the thermostat and sound system under the control of a centralized, shiny, pastel-colored interface. Single sign on, cloud integrated for service calls, probably calls SpaceX to tell them what music you listen to and whether you jerk off in the shower.

Fuck that.

Dad just found some stripped secondhand hull sections… I bought telescopes, signal gear, and a used lidar array, installed the cooling system with plans I downloaded from the internet, blew in fresh rad shielding, ordered custom cargo racks, and so on. Then we strung the whole thing together with YCloud and a network of secondhand servers I bought from a decommissioned data center in the L3 trojan point.

Homebrew has come a long way since the days of NASA.

Except now she’s locked me out of all of it. Maybe had some techs come in to do it or something. I have no idea what weakness they found, but I’m not surprised they did. I’m no programmer. I just make do. Up until now, anyway.

Access denied. To navigation. To sensors. To fusion core direct access, attitude thrusters, power systems, everything. Even, and I don’t know why I tried this, because I don’t see how it would help, life support. And then finally, to backup and restore. Restoring an earlier network image over the current state—that was my last idea.

No dice. The White Cat’s whole computer network is compromised. I don’t know how they did it, but my user account is now marked as a ‘passenger,’ and so… Access denied.

On that SpaceX, or Orbital Dynamics, or Faulcon-DeLacey ship, that would be that. I wouldn’t even be able to operate anything but the light switches and doors. Everything integrated. But Cat’s not like that. They say, “Ya Ain’t Gonna Need It” and if I didn’t, I didn’t put it in. A lot of the lights are on switches, the cabin climate control’s a bunch of thermostats on the wall, and, hell, the lock on the docking port airlock is mechanical, takes an old-fashioned mag key. It was cheap and why the fuck not?

So what can I use? Well, there’s the cargo crane in the hold. That just has a simple passcode so the longshore crews can use it, and unless she had that changed, too, I can…

I can do what? Move some cargo containers around? Yeah, real useful.

The rest of the ship’s systems seem locked down pretty tight. The more I scroll through stuff, the more ‘access denied’ messages I get. I don’t even know who she is, or where we are going. If I could only get a look at the navigation plotter…

Wait.

How does the computer do the navigation plot?

Pulsars.

It’s called XNAV. X-ray pulsar-based navigation and timing. The Cat triangulates itself by orienting with distant neutron stars, special stars that spin ferociously, drawing gas off of stellar companions, heating it to millions of degrees, pouring out x-rays. It’s absurdly accurate, precise to a measurement of meters within distances that span the solar system—but it’s useless to me. I can’t detect those x-rays without instruments I’m locked out of.

But the principle is sound. It’s as ancient as the time when our ancestors sailed seas of liquid water with nothing but a sun compass, and a sextant to sight the positions of the stars.

Stars. Now there’s an idea.

With precise angle orientation and timing, a couple of high-res images of stars, taken a few hours apart, maybe with some nearby asteroid shots to get a better parallax reading to confirm speed… I’d have to count pixels in the images, do some calculations, run some open source nav software on the data, but just maybe I can plot two positions in space.

And two points determine a line.

Tricky, of course. Real old-school sailor stuff. Stick jockeys need not apply. But I’m Marcus Warnoc, son of Bjorn Warnoc, son of Olaf Warnoc, of the line of Yngvarr Víðförli, the Far-Traveled.

I also paid attention in physics class. That might have something to do with it, too.

With some good camera shots, I can do this. But where to get the camera? The Cat has a full high-mag telescopic array, two of them in fact, but as long as I’m getting “ACCESS DENIED,” that’s no help.

Hmm. Camera, camera, camera… can’t take pictures with my implant eye. No way to hold my head at the same angle for hours, and the resolution’s nowhere near high enough anyway, I need a hardcore camera like the telescopes, or a recon drone…

Wait. That’s it. There’s a half-disassembled mineral-assay limpet up in the workshop level. Gas thrusters are all busted up, but the core unit, with its cameras and gyroscopes and accelerometers, should not only let me take all the pics I need, but tell me precisely what angle they are at with respect to the axis of thrust. If I just line it up against one of the windows with lots of high-speed tape and cyanoacrylate glue… yes.

Now I just have to go up and get it, then head down to the observation deck, and… damn. She’s down there, isn’t she? Can’t think how I’d explain what I was doing.

Hmm… create a diversion, maybe? Or just wait until she goes to bed?

I hope she’s not a night owl.

 

***

Draw a line.

After painstaking hours of waiting, and fumbling down thirty meters of ladder with detached camera equipment trailing wires everywhere, and more hours of waiting, and drawing diagrams, and throwing away all the calculations and starting again…

…finally, at long last, in the small hours of the morning, when you should be sleeping, draw a line.

A direct line. A line connecting to nothing, nothing at all, not until it reaches the outer solar system, so far away that light from the sun takes almost twelve hours to get there. A line that intersects the orbit of one, and only one, thing.

A destination.

Trans-Neptunian sub-planetary object 90377. Call it by its common name. ‘Sedna,’ after some Inuit goddess of something or other.

Call it a “dwarf planet,” like Pluto, for a lot of boring reasons that have to do with mass and shape and orbit clearing. But don’t bother to explain those reasons. No one cares. You’ll just bore them.

Don’t bother talking about its strange eccentric orbit, either, swinging in an eleven-thousand-year arc between just outside Pluto’s orbit, to way out in the endless night, the frozen dark of interstellar space, where a tiny trickle of sunlight takes five days to arrive.

Don’t use words like “mean anomaly” and “semi-major axis” and “longitude of ascending node.” Nobody cares about those words, either, except pilots, when we have to. And even we don’t use them in party conversations, because that’s not the kind of talk you use to chat up a limber seven-foot-tall Belter girl who can put both feet behind her head.

You don’t need to talk about any of that.

Because when someone says ‘Sedna,’ everyone thinks one thing, and one thing only. The only thing out there worth caring about.

The Tombs.

For thousands of years since humanity learned to rub the sticks together and make fire, we’ve looked up at the little lights in the night sky and wondered if we were alone. “Fermi’s Paradox,” they called it, which is a fancy name for a real simple question… “Where the fuck is everybody?”

Philosophers argued about it, scientists speculated about it, novelists wrote things. For decades, wild-eyed enthusiasts with small government paychecks and really huge radio telescopes listened to the static hiss of the universe, straining to catch some stray signal that cried out “Hey! We’re over here!”

But nobody was calling. Or sending emails. Or whatever it is you do when you’re talking to someone who doesn’t share your basic biochemistry, much less your computer protocols. So either nobody’s home, or they’re all being really, really quiet. And for decades, we could only wonder if nobody was home, or they were hiding from the scary monsters, or maybe it was just because we have too few limbs, or smell bad, or are the interspecies equivalent of that one dude who tries to talk about orbital mechanics to Belter girls at parties.

Finally, in the late twenty-first century, a Martian mineralogist, one Derrick Blake, looked at a spectrographic telescope display and said the least promising historical words ever:

“That doesn’t look natural at all.”

Say those words anywhere in the solar system, from a casino orbiting Saturn to an ice mine on Europa to a Terran political prison, and everyone, literally everyone, will know exactly what you are talking about. It’s one of those quotations that transcends all context and needs none, like the naked and dripping “Eureka!” of Archimedes, or the questionable Latin of Erik Nyberg’s “Habe Quiddam” or the static-laden recording of Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

And everyone, literally everyone, has seen the photos taken by the first Sedna expedition when they went to take a closer look. The bizarre and convoluted structures, without symmetry or right angles, jutting out of a desolate moonscape, almost black against a field of stars. The antiquated NASA-design vacsuits, standing over row upon row of empty, open pods, or perhaps coffins.

The Tombs, they called them. But where were the Tomb Builders?

And no one knows how they came here, thousands of years ago, when our ancestors were first learning to till the land and chart the seasons. No one knows why they vanished, with their work left apparently unfinished, or where they went.

We’ve searched the skies for wherever they might have come from, or where their modern counterparts might be. Searched and found nothing, nothing but the static hiss of cosmic background radiation, and the equally meaningless academic babble of endless theories, with zero concrete results.

Are they all dead in some war or cosmic cataclysm? Exploring elsewhere? Avoiding us? Did their civilization advance to the point where they live in computerized virtual realms, or left the galaxy, or the material universe altogether?

We haven’t a clue. They’re nowhere to be found. But we indisputably are not, or at least—a few thousand years before the Egyptians started piling up rocks—were not, alone.

Had that been all we found, just a strange and empty necropolis, then I suppose only the philosophers and scientists and nerds would have cared, in the long run.

But they left artifacts as well, bits and scraps of things whose purpose we mostly can’t figure out. Much of modern civilization is built upon those pieces of their junk. The nanoscale fabrics in our spacesuits. The high-tech voodoo trick that compresses gaseous hydrogen into stable fuel pellets of shiny white metal. The materials that make up the biocompatible computer chips and interface wires we lace into our bodies and brains. But most of all, the nuclear fusion reactors and spacecraft drives.

Twelve interplanetary corporations fought a shooting war over that dead site and its secrets. Thousands have died trying to seize that knowledge, or keep it from others. Fusion drives, reverse engineered from their broken fragments, and fitted with our computers, lifted fully a third of humanity out of gravity’s greedy claws, sent us out on the great Diaspora to populate the solar system from Mercury to the Kuiper Belt.

And today, you can sail from one to the other in the space of perhaps two weeks, balanced on a pillar of nuclear fire, accelerating, then decelerating, at one comfortable Terran gravity for the whole of the journey. If you can afford one of those drives. Which not everyone can, but those who can, well, they can go anywhere they want.

Anywhere, that is, except Sedna.

We don’t go to Sedna.