We wait where the starships fall from the sky.

Tab Hunter says there must be a war between galaxies, in layers of space beyond the reach of our spyglass.

But how would he know that?

We watch for the meteor burn scar that betrays each new incursion, in the long flirtation rain of particles.

Guy Mitchell says we have natural salvage rights to a fortune of beads, coils, braids, lenses, to the glittering screens bestrung with dead devices, to metals that can be hammered and reshaped into cutlass or flintlock.

Marion Ryan claims she once discovered a living pilot who made language noises, before she killed him. Some are human. Some grotesque in unimaginable ways.

This broken-backed warpship gouges a smouldering crater.

We ride horses three days to reach its smashed hull, and enter through jagged rips. It sparks and flares in flickering darkness as we loot and plunder, taking whatever we can carry.

It’s there, beside the capstan that I find her, bleeding in a web of impulse-fibres. I should kill her, of course. But something in her tears stays my hand. Instead, I cut her free, lift her and carry her outside. She holds a kind of pack that she refuses to release. I shrug as I hoist her onto my horse and climb to mount behind her.

The others will not understand. I don’t understand myself. I just do what I must do, what impulse prompts me to do. We ride some distance unobserved to a sheltered valley I’d noted on an earlier foray, with a concealed cave beside a stream that feeds into a clear-water lake. She’s in pain. I set her down just inside the cave-mouth where we’re safely hidden in the silence of trees. I give her water. She talks quickly, we share words, it’s the way she uses them confuses me, but the way she says ‘dimensional rifts’, ‘subspace anomalies’ and ‘contraverse entities’ makes me smile.

She laughs when I say my name is David Whitfield. I can’t pronounce her name, but it begins with Commander Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Hilton. Born in an orbital habitat around a distant sun, into the shifting frontline zone of the Eternal War. She’s seen things I can’t dare imagine, worlds in flame, nebulae the colour of smoke, fleets of a thousand starships above the roaring storm of gas giants. I was momentarily envious. All I can offer her is the raw food I feed her that makes her spew. She’s crippled inside. She screams with pain in moonlight. Then smiles at me with dawn. She sets up what she calls her ‘beacon’, assembled from her pack. It has a blue light pulse that we Scavengers should value. But it is hers. I fear to touch. I fear for her, and fret, without knowing how to help. The others may have cures, but if we are discovered they’ll kill her. We could ride to find a new Scavenger tribe, but she’s too sick to travel. So, I just hold her, which seems to be enough.

On the fifth day I wake to find her cold in my arms. She died during the night. There’s congealed blood in her mouth.

I watch the stream flow, think of coming back again, to let the thoughts run again as the water does. I feel tears well up. Tears are not enough. I howl rage at the sky. As I think and revisit the past, the droplets across my cheek join the occasional spits of spray and the rushing water, we all cry together. 

As I watch the sky, I see the meteor burn scar that betrays a new incursion. This one is different. This one glides, in answer to the blue pulse of her beacon. This one is a human-sized silver sphere that hovers above the sheltered valley, above the concealed cave beside the clear-water lake. It moves noiselessly closer, close enough to touch. A doorway forms in a segment of its curved hemisphere. It invites.

I lift her body and carry her outside of the cave-mouth. Another step takes us across, into the hovering sphere. I feel confined. I fight the feel.

The sphere ascends abruptly, towards worlds beyond the sky. Towards her people…

ANDREW DARLINGTON