"This one is Sodom, right?" Charlie said, looking at the starship on the seabed.
It will be in an ancient silver starship. If we rise again, Maria thought, it won't be in this little machine. With all the damage, she would likely never fly again.
For all intents and purposes, maybe she was just a submarine now. The Kinnara was a quad-craft, built for land, air, space, and water. A warp engine slept deep in her belly, crumpled, leaking, its inner crystal cracked. The stumps of severed wings stuck out from her hull the wings had shattered in battle. Treadmill tracks lined her underbelly, tattered and jammed. In truth, the Kinnara was not merely a submarine. "I gotta go … rearrange some stuff." The boy fled the cockpit, racing deeper into the submarine. "You didn't look between my Tiger-Man comics, did you?" He gulped. I wonder what else you have hiding there." "Well, it's your magazine!" Charlie said, brandishing it. "You're literally hitting me with a dirty magazine, Mom. "Shut up, you!" Charlie said, slapping the boy with a rolled up magazine. The teenage boy stood behind them, a scrawny fellow with a thin mustache and mischievous eyes. "Well, you should be fine then, Mom," said Rodrigo. "Your point being?" Charlie dabbed her eyes with a tissue. "Charlie, who cares about your makeup? We're on a submarine thousands of miles away from the shore, thousands of leagues beneath the sea, and there are only a few of us here." "Damn it, Nini, you're going to make me ruin my makeup." "On Earth," Charlie whispered, and her eyes dampened. We can sail the cosmic ocean in a ship of legend. "It's the largest starship humanity has seen in centuries. "That starship can save thousands of souls," Maria said softly. The people of Bahay called out for salvation. He crushed this beautiful world under his heel. A man in black robes, an inverted cross hanging from his neck. The crows feasted.Īnd from the ashes, like a dark phoenix, a new evil had arisen. Survivors crawled through the wreckage, seeking hope, finding none. The war was over, but Bahay still smoldered. A terrible war had ravaged Bahay-flattening villages, burning forests, slaying millions. The crew had been trapped in this crucible for many days. The cockpit was small, the hold cramped, and everyone was getting cabin fever. The submarine was all function, no comfort. The Kinnara rattled closer, engines rumbling. The rest of the crew gathered around them, gazing through the viewport. A sunken masterpiece of elegant lines, crystalline facades, and cavernous engines flooded with dark water.Ī grin split Charlie's face. There she lay, a legendary starship lost to history-until now. Her mind quickly returned to the starship ahead. She just wore a tattered white dress and sensible slippers. She was still Charlie Wonder, queen of the bargirls, and fabulous through and through. She wore a skintight dress of dazzling red silk. "You think she has a bar?"Įven here, thousands of leagues under the sea, trapped in a cramped metal box, Charlie's makeup was perfect. Standing beside her in the cramped submarine, Charlie squinted and tilted her head. Centuries ago, she ferried the first colonists to this ocean world. "There she is," Maria whispered, gazing through a porthole. The creaky submarine chugged through the water, heading toward a sunken starship of myth.