An hour later, we met back up with Apollo and Dare in one of the ship’s enormous crew cafeterias. It was eerily empty of anything but tables and (randomly sized) chairs. But at least it was clean. Sparkling clean, actually, which totally went against the mental image I’d had of a place where space pirates would eat. I was pretty sure the whole place was pristine enough to perform surgery in. Seriously, we were the dirtiest things in that entire cavernous room.
Persephone was in a corner of the gigantic place, barely visible as she had some kind of conversation with both Cerberus and Andromeda while playing fetch with the former. She was throwing this large metal ball that was as big as her head, then watching as the robo-dog chased after it, his three heads taking turns (well, mostly taking turns, there was a little snarling involved now and then) to grab the thing before he brought it back to be thrown again.
“Well,” Dare herself started after giving a curious look around the room that told me she was thinking the same thing about it being weirdly clean as I was, “Miss Chambers and Mr. Frey, why don’t you and the others start things off by telling us how your side of this investigation went? I take it you successfully summoned the captain’s ghost?”
Glancing to the others for a moment, I nodded. “Yeah, with a lot of help to make it work without taking a lot longer.” My head shook then as I snorted, “Did you ever think you’d ask something like that back when I was still in your investigation track? You know, seventeen and a half years ago.”
Her response was a raised eyebrow before the woman dryly replied, “I assure you, I learned quite early on in your time at Crossroads never to make assumptions about what sort of questions I would eventually be asking you. Among other things.” Her gaze moved to take in everyone around us, then the room we were in before admitting, “Though I will say that this situation is… perhaps a bit more than what I would have seen as my wildest imaginings.”
“Yeah,” Shiori cheerfully agreed while giving me a side-long look from nearby, “Flick does have a way of taking crazy situations and making them exponentially crazier.” The way she said it made it clear that she couldn’t have been happier about that. “But at least you’re never bored.”
Theia, of course, piped up then with an equally cheerful, “Oh yes. Even while I still wanted to kill her, I never thought she was boring. Fighting her was a lot of fun. Actually, so was fighting you. Remember when the three of us were at Wonderland with the werewolves and you both had–”
“Okay!” I quickly put in, raising both hands before that could go any further. “I think that’s enough of a trip down memory lane for now. How about we focus on this whole Whispers thing, huh?”
“Yeah.” Doug’s voice was a little tight as he gave a single nod. “I think that’s a good idea.” This Whispers thing was definitely getting to him. I couldn’t even imagine what it had been like to be in his situation. He and Sulan had accidentally released the creatures that killed… so many people back on the colony world where he’d grown up. And now he found out that this ship had those same anti-Whisper spells on it, implying that… what, that they had been here too? The idea that those things, whatever they were, could be somewhere else in the universe, that they could be anywhere and could possibly show up sometime, really wasn’t exactly doing wonders for him.
Apollo, who had been standing up and pacing a bit back and forth at the far end of the table, apparently lost in his own thoughts and musings, pivoted on one foot to face us. “What did you find out from the captain’s ghost?” His voice was serious, one of the few times I had seen him without a broad smile or even a knowing smirk. This Whispers thing was important to him too. Probably because he was still trying to figure out what the connection between them and the Seosten was, given the way those spells affected his own people vaguely similarly. Plus, while the Whispers didn’t exactly possess people, they simply… well, whispered in their ears and drove them crazy violent. Seosten possessed and controlled their victims like slaves. Whispers were invisible creatures who drove their victims to do horrific things by constantly whispering to them. Maybe it was just coincidence that the same spells that blocked the Whispers from doing their thing to someone would also allow a possessed person to retain partial control of their body, but it all seemed a bit too coincidental. So yeah, no wonder Apollo wanted to figure it out. Sometimes I forgot that he had been a scientist for his people too. Being an incredible researcher was the whole way he and Sariel had even gotten started on this entire life, after all.
After those thoughts passed through my mind, I realized everyone was waiting for me to do the explaining part. Avalon even nudged me gently while murmuring, “He was your ghost, you tell it.”
“He wasn’t my–” Flushing slightly, I shook my head. “Never mind. Yeah, well, first the guy told us the same thing that Gala lady did. They limped their old ship in on its last legs and just stole this one from a refueling depot before leaving the survivors there. Well, most of the survivors.”
That made Dare squint my way, her tone curious. “Most of them?” she echoed while casting a brief glance toward Apollo. He looked just as interested in that, but remained expectantly silent.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “Most. I guess no one else knew about it, not even First Mate Gala. But there was one guy, a troll with these like… mix of cybernetic and magical intelligence enhancements or something. Motzer said his name was Occillo.” That was Latin for ‘smash’, but I didn’t need to tell them that. “He was supposed to be like… super-intelligent thanks to those enhancements. Not just for a troll, but anyone. Motzer said this guy was the smartest person he ever met.”
“Sounds like someone I’d like to meet,” Apollo murmured thoughtfully before focusing. “But I can’t say as I’ve ever heard of a troll like that. I take it this Occillo wasn’t left behind with the others.”
“No,” I confirmed. “Like I said, no one else knew about it, but he convinced Motzer to take him with and drop him off at another station on the way. He stayed in the captain’s cabin for the next week or so and got smuggled out in one of the resupply crates at some space mall or whatever. It was a big trading hub. The pirates dropped the remains of their old ship off and sold it for scrap, and while they were doing that, Motzer made sure Occillo got out safely and secretly.”
Dare was frowning. “What did he trade for the passage that Motzer didn’t want the rest of his crew to know about? That seems like the only reason the two of them would go through so much trouble to keep his presence on the ship secret, even letting him stay in the captain’s quarters.”
Doug and I both exchanged brief looks before I nodded for him to go ahead. After all, this whole thing was more his situation than anyone else’s. So, he turned back to Dare and Apollo. “Yeah, turns out Occillo was never part of the old crew of this ship in the first place. He just booked passage because he was trying to get to that trading hub. So he offered Motzer the same thing he offered the first captain, information about where something called the Pale Ship was.”
Well, Apollo definitely had a reaction to that. I saw his eyes widen as he actually sat back a bit as if he’d been physically shoved. Suddenly, he was staring intently at us, his gaze switching from Doug to me and then back again. “He said that?” There was an intensity to his voice that hadn’t been there before. He’d been serious about this Whisper situation the whole time, but this was something even more than that. “With those exact words. He called it the Pale Ship?”
“He used the Latin version,” I pointed out. “But basically, yeah. Why, is it something important? Motzer said we should ask you about it, because he didn’t feel like getting into the details. And Theia said she’s heard the term before, but never actually found out what it meant.”
“To be fair,” the girl herself put in brightly, “I didn’t care at the time. It was something my mother was talking about to one of her subordinates who came to the house. I was supposed to be focusing on inscribing prototype spells on my bones to help me stop possessing people.” Sagely, she added, “It did not work the way she wanted it to. But I can do this!” Holding out her arm, she pulled the sleeve up and touched one finger to the space just past her elbow on the inner side. As she did so, a pair of half-moon and plus sign runes began to glow with a faint blue light right next to that spot. “It’s not actually useful right now, but if I ever find a way to possess an inanimate object, this’ll help me get unstuck.” In a stage-whisper, she added, “It only actually works on things that aren’t alive, and I can already get out of dead things just fine.”
For a second, Apollo looked like he might pursue that whole prototype spell thing, mouth opening. Then he shook that off and focused. “Yeah, the Pale Ship. It was–” He cut himself off, considering briefly before asking, “You all know the story of Tabbris. The original Tabbris.”
Blinking at that, I exchanged a look with the others before slowly nodding. “Yeah, Athena told Tabbris and me about it. He was the Seraphim guy who fought for better treatment of non-Seosten. When he couldn’t convince the other leaders, he bought an entire planet, surrounded it with every weapon and anti-Seosten defense he could buy, borrow, or steal, and let anyone who wanted to live there safely. And when that wasn’t enough, he gathered a bunch of magical energy from all the other Seraphim using traces from their own signatures so he could use their own power to make that entire planet disappear. Like, no one has any idea where it is, and they’ve never found it, even though it happened like a hundred thousand years ago. He literally erased its location from the mind of every person in the universe who knew about it and wasn’t living there. And from all the records and all that. His spell made all of that go poof.”
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That prompted a bit of conversation back and forth with the others about how exactly that worked, and I explained about Seosten putting bits of magic into their legal signatures and how Tabbris the Elder spent a Seosten decade (eighteen years of Earth time) attaching siphon spells to those signatures to gather everything he needed from the other Seraphim so he could make the entire Seosten leadership look like idiots, and protect everyone on his planet at the same time. And now he was basically a legend amongst the Seosten, while being seen as a fool by the leadership at the same time for ‘wasting all that effort’ to protect a bunch of non-Seosten.
Finally, once I had explained all of that, I focused on Apollo once more. “And now that everyone is caught up, what exactly does all that have to do with some kind of ‘Pale Ship?’ Is the ship connected to this original Tabbris guy somehow? And why do they call it ‘Pale,’ anyway?”
The man rocked back on his heels, taking a breath before he started to explain. “Well, see, there was a ship–no one knows its name anymore for what will be obvious reasons– right on the edge of the area affected by that big spell. It wasn’t supposed to be there. He timed his spell specifically to put everyone he trusted inside the effects. But this ship, it was on its way out of the planetary system and they were running a few hours late. That put them right on the very boundary of where the spell was. They were sort of half-in the effect and half-out of it. It turned the ship and everyone on it into… well, sort of like ghosts. First of all, they were partially remembered. People knew the ship existed, and there were vague records about it, but no specifics. No one knew any names of the ship or the crew, only very general information. And it wasn’t just facts either. The ship and crew were affected physically. Everyone who met them would forget them as soon as they were out of sight. They were invisible to spells and technology alike. It was as though they barely existed, and even then only when they were directly in front of someone. You could have an entire conversation with one, and the moment they were out of your immediate sight, you’d forget you ever saw them, along with everything you talked about. Even our enhanced Seosten memory couldn’t retain anything about them.”
“Hold on.” Avalon raised a hand, frowning. “If no one could ever remember actually talking to these people, how would anyone know anything about them? That doesn’t make sense. If your memories were always one-hundred percent erased, no one would know anything about it.”
Apollo smiled faintly, giving a slight nod. “You’re right, that does seem like a bit of a contradiction, doesn’t it? See, Seosten memories are really hard to fool, and the crew of this ship were only half-affected by that spell. They’re ‘erased’ from our memories in the sense that we can’t consciously recall them, but the memories still exist. If we extract the right memories of those specific moments and examine them using magic, we can see what happened. Like…” He considered for a moment. “I know you’re a little young to have seen much in the way of human film projectors, but have you seen that thing where they take film and hold it up to the light to see individual images on each frame? It’s similar to that. When the memories are in our head, or the film is playing on the projector, we can’t retain it. But, if we take the memory out and hold it up to the light, or view it with a spell, we can see what happened. You understand?”
“Uhh, yeah, actually.” A brief look with the others, I nodded along with them. “I think we get it. I mean, it makes sense in a magic way. So someone at some point checked their memory for whatever reason and that led to finding out about these ghost-Seosten or whatever they were.”
“Pale,” Apollo corrected. “They were the Pale. Or rather, are. Yeah, it was a hundred thousand years ago, but we believe their descendants still exist, and are equally affected by that initial spell. They just stopped trying to interact with the regular universe and became incredibly insular. They stay on their ship, which they’ve upgraded over the millennia, travel where they want to go to collect food and supplies without anyone remembering them, and live separate from anyone else. They are, in effect, their own completely separate micro-society.”
Dare spoke up then. “So this Occillo was supposed to know where the Pale Ship was. But you said it moves around a lot, that it’s still active.” She looked from Apollo to me. “So was he supposed to know where it used to be, or where it was going to go?”
“Supposedly he knew one of their common refueling and restocking spots,” I replied with a shrug. “According to Motzer, Occillo told him the Pale Ship used one main refueling depot whenever they could. He didn’t know exactly which one it was, but he had part of a journal from one of the crew members. And this crew member said something about marking a few specific spots in the main fuel depot the ship always used. There were descriptions about what kind of depot it was, the planets that were nearby, all that stuff. Plus the markings inside the depot. So Occillo tracked down all the possible places that would fit the descriptions and was checking out the insides looking for those markings. One of the options was the place where the pirates took this ship in the first place. That’s why Occillo was there, he hitched a ride on the ship from the first crew so he could check that place out. It just wasn’t the right one.”
Squinting a bit, Dare shook her head. “Sounds a bit fishy, if you want to know the truth. This Occillo guy, a genius troll, finds a journal talking about how to find this long-lost mythical ship just by locating a few markings in a specific fuel depot somewhere? How could he be sure it wasn’t just some random guy making a fake journal to have a laugh at the expense of anyone who took it seriously? What made Occillo or Motzer think there was anything credible about the thing?”
Once more, the rest of us exchanged looks before turning back. Doug was the first to speak. “Apparently the journal pages he had came with a… what did they call it, memory marker?”
“A spell on the page,” Apollo confirmed. “Touch it, say the right word, it puts a memory in your head.”
“Well, this memory marker convinced Occillo and Motzer that this was the real deal,” I replied. “It was a memory of someone on that Pale Ship, looking around the bridge, then checking out the computer log and walking through some of the corridors. I guess it matched up enough with what they knew to take the whole thing seriously.”
“We asked if that whole Pale Ship business had anything to do with the anti-Whisper runes that were all over this ship,” Shiori explained. “You know, if they were connected. Motzer said that Occillo was the one who put the runes around here, because the Whispers were looking for the Pale Ship too.”
“He’s supposed to be some big adventurer chasing after intergalactic myths, like Space Indiana Jones or whatever,” I added. “Except Indiana Jones as a giant troll with a bunch of magical and cybernetic intelligence enhancements.”
“In other words,” Shiori quickly piped up, “better Indiana Jones.”
“Don’t say that around Hisao,” Dare murmured, “or you might have a fight on your hands. That man’s love of Harrison Ford, I swear to…” Shaking that off, she focused. “So he’s an explorer and adventurer who knows a lot about different myths across the universe, real and fake.”
I nodded. “Yeah. He knew a lot of stuff about the Whispers, and said they were looking for the Pale Ship too. Apparently they also had a bone to pick with Occillo himself because of something he did a long time ago, but he wouldn’t get into it with Motzer.”
“In any case,” Avalon finished for me. “He put the protective runes around the ship. So he’s the one we need to talk to if we want to find out anything more about the Whispers.”
“And we do,” Doug immediately insisted.
“And we do,” I agreed. “Unfortunately, that’s where we hit a snag.” With a sigh, I explained, “Motzer said he smuggled Occillo to some friend of his who lived on the trading hub. They were supposed to work together to track down that ship, but… that’s all he remembers. He thinks Occillo and his friend used some kind of bare-bones memory eraser that cut out details about who the friend was, what he looked like, where he lived on the station, all that. So he did all that to cut his crew out of the deal just to make himself rich, which meant that when his memory was erased no one else knew anything about it. He couldn’t tell his people about it or they’d know he was trying to rip them off. And he couldn’t explain why they had to stay longer so he could search the place top to bottom for the same reason. So they just had to leave. I mean, he asked around a bit but no one ever saw someone like Occillo there. He thinks there’s magical disguises involved, or maybe the troll just keeps to himself and plays dumb while he’s there. Easy for a troll to blend into the background pretending to be muscle for that friend of his. And that station holds millions of people. It’d be impossible to check everyone.”
Dare summarized. “So Motzer helped this Occillo escape and smuggled him to a busy trading hub, but Occillo and a friend erased Motzer’s memory about who this friend was and where he lived, leaving our dear pirate captain with a station full of a million people to look through and no easy way to find them. I suppose that would be a problem.”
I started to nod, then blinked. “Would be?”
Apollo grinned. “Yeah, see, she didn’t know the whole story, but it turns out Gala paid more attention than Motzer thought. She followed them when he smuggled his new buddy off the ship. Made it all the way to the apartment and saw them go inside and meet this friend. They never saw her, so I guess they never wiped her memory. She didn’t know what it meant or why her captain was smuggling this guy around, but she made a note of it and started digging a little bit. Then all that stuff with Persephone happened before she could get anywhere with it.”
“So… so she knows who Occillo’s friend on that station is, and where he lives?” Doug realized.
“She does,” Apollo confirmed. “And now so do we. She shared that, along with about a dozen other possible sources of information. We didn’t know which one would be important. You guys narrowed that down, and got the answers about exactly who the guy was and why he’s important. Congratulations on that. I ahh, I’ll talk to Athena and see about having some of her people go track these guys down.”
“I want to go.” That was Doug, immediately piping up. “If these people know something about the Whispers–”
“We’ll see what happens,” Dare informed him. “It’s not exactly a quick trip to the grocery store. Athena’s people have ways of getting past the barrier, but it’s– yeah, it’s complicated. Believe me, at the very least, we’ll talk to Sulan and get him involved. And when we find these guys, you can talk to them.”
Doug looked like he was going to argue with that for a moment, before stopping with a soft sigh. “Yeah,” he murmured, “that’d be nice.”
Dare’s voice was gentle. “It may take awhile to organize a group that can pass the barrier, go out to that station, find Occillo and his friend, and get actual answers. But we’ll get there, Douglas, I promise. And in the meantime, perhaps all of you can do the most shocking thing I believe any of us could possibly imagine.
“Actually attend classes for a few weeks.”