Sun Dancer – A Tale from the Solar Trading Paths between Titan and L’Lastinar

This one was inspired by the terrific Fantasy and Sci-Fi Writing Prompts page on Facebook, so cheers, Meredith. 🙂

 

They were two days out when they saw it. It danced and span between the nebulas, throwing its arms of fire-laced wind miles out into space. First Mate McGinty said it was a space serpent and the crew weren’t fast to disagree with him.

But he knew what it was. He’d seen one before. Indeed, he’d been through one before. But what Captain Talis would never tell the crew was that the last time he’d faced a tornado, only one man had come out alive. And that was the man now gripping the tiller with iron-tight hands and a face set like plasticrete.

They’d all seen them from afar. It was from tornadoes such as these that tales of space serpents and dragons had sprung. But normally they were half a solar system away, wrapped around some hapless planet or playing marbles with meteors.

This one lay in their path and there was no escaping it. The solar winds took them down paths long travelled and whilst those paths shifted, any brave enough to sail them were still at the mercy of the routes they took. Map makers had long since given up trying to plot the winds. Talis had learnt the routes from his old captain, before the ‘serpent’ took him and the rest of the crew.

Now the Sun Dancer was his and his only hope was that he wouldn’t be the only one left standing when they came through.

If they came through.

A sleepless day and night passed and the tornado filled their future. The winds had rushed them past Sinar, the closest planet to this star and they were approaching what had, until now, always been Talis’s favourite part of the journey. They would skirt the flares on the edge of the star and get the energy to blast out into space and into a new system.

Their destination was L’Lastinar, where they would unload their cargo and take on new for the next leg. It would be nearly two years before they would pass back this way. By then, the storm would have blown itself out. The conglomeration of flares and tides that created one would have moved on.

But none of that mattered now. Talis stared into the tornado, daring it to stare back. It looked like a serpent. It filled space in both directions, a slate grey serpent hundreds of miles wide and endlessly spinning and dancing. From its mouth and claws came fire, solar flares sucked up by the pressure and spat out as warning to the unwary traveller.

But no traveller could see what lay before them and be anything but wary. Talis though his crew were a little more than wary. Some, the older hands, had already strapped themselves to something. McGinty was in place beside the wheel, but he hadn’t tied himself down before strapping Talis’s hands to the wheel.

It was the act of a good First Mate, but there was more than blind loyalty involved. It would be Talis’s steering that got them through the maelstrom. His knuckles whitened against the wheel as he felt the first pull.

Their path was lit before them, streaks of sun fire running beneath the ship, dragged along by the winds. And that path ran straight into the dragon’s belly. He shook his head. Now even he was thinking about it as some mythical beast.

Perhaps that was right. This was no natural phenomenon. This was a monster, to be fought and tamed.

He clenched his teeth until they hurt and flashed a sharp grin at his First Mate. McGinty fired one right back, nodding as the prow of the Sun Dancer began to buck.

One last glance back. His crew were all tied on now, clinging to every line they could wrap their hands around. He would get them through. He would because he had to. The cargo below was too precious to let go to the whimsy of the solar winds.

She was kicking now, bucking and pitching as the tornado took hold.

‘All sails to full.’

McGinty’s eyebrows rose and he swung his head back and forth as though trying to out do the ship. But Talis had seen this before and he remembered what they had done last time. The softly softly approach didn’t work. They had to charge into the eye before they were torn apart.

The winds were driving across the deck, carrying heat with them that burnt away his eyebrows in seconds. It wasn’t the first time. Lines caught and extinguished just as fast as the charms did their jobs. His crew were moving, but too slowly.

‘Sails to full, NOW!’

The men jumped lively, looping ropes around themselves as they crab crawled across the deck. The sails ran up and caught the wind and the Sun Dancer leapt forward like a scalded whipcat. Talis took one last look at the dark of space before they plunged into the serpent.

solar winds

The solar winds wrapped them up and chewed on them. Gusts the temperature of the sun and faster than even the Fleet’s Destroyers hammered across the decks. The Sun Dancer screamed in protest, every rivet eager to escape and join the twisting terror that railed around them.

His face cracked and burnt, and he watched the skin on his hands peel in seconds. The sails cracked and snapped beneath the pressure, but they stayed whole. And the ship moved forward, cutting through the storm.

Screams reached him but he couldn’t look back. His eyes were fixed on a point far ahead of him. It looked like the tavern he knew awaited them on the docks of L’Lastinar. It looked like the pint of beer that would be thumped to the wood and the woman who lived above the tavern who had promised to keep her bed warm just for him.

He saw all of those things in his mind’s eyes and he knew he would see them for real in only a few short days. The winds screamed and his crew screamed and still he faced forwards. Some primordial creature had hold of a whip made from baking hot wind and drove it across his shoulders.

Talis dropped to one knee, held up only by the ties that kept him attached to the wheel. He heard the crew gasp as one as they saw their captain fall. For a moment, Talis contemplated staying on his knees. The winds would tear the ship from his grasp and his arms would break. The Sun Dancer were be swept away and he would no longer have to cling on.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw the eyes that begged him. He gripped the wheel tighter and pulled himself back to his feet. His men neither cheered nor clapped, but he could feel the change, the belief that came flooding back just as quickly as it had fled.

The ship was turning, the tornado threatening to pull it off course. He heaved on the wheel and McGinty joined him, adding his weight to the effort. Slowly, agonisingly slowly, the Sun Dancer came around. The path they followed was visible only as the lightest, palest lines that ran at odds with the storm. But it was there, guiding them on.

He held the wheel as the storm held his ship and he steered them through.

Tears ran down his face and his shoulders ached when the sound dropped and the serpent spat them out. Ragged cheers rose up from the crew but he turned so fast and so aggressively that they were silenced in an instant.

‘We’re at the centre, no further. This is the calm, gentlemen, prepare yourselves.’

There were groans and mutterings, but there were just as many shouts and exhortations. Already they had done what so few lived to tell. They were halfway through and they could make it the rest of the way. Talis faced forward, face set.

The second part was always the toughest.

The calm gave them time to reset and check the sails. Six crew were gone, stolen from the decks, but the rest stood firm. His chest swelled. It had taken years to lure anyone back to the Sun Dancer after he had limped into port, a lone sailor with no words to describe what had come before.

He closed his eyes, seeing again the storm that had stolen his captain and his friends. In his mind’s eye, he imagined the serpent had swept its claws across the deck and gobbled up his companions in greedy jaws. But when he opened his eyes, all he saw was the wall of wind, filling his horizon and mocking him.

There were no serpents. There were just the vagaries of a universe that mocked all and any who tried to tame her. He was one such and he knew he would never tame her. But a beast didn’t need to be tamed to be ridden. He just had to hold on hard enough and long enough.

‘WE’RE GOING IN.’

The prow shifted, the pull of the wind jerking at the wheel. Talis set his feet and held on…

 

The Sun Dancer limped into port three days later. The stern mast was gone and the port side cabin nothing more than a pile of twisted metal and plastic. Of the twenty seven men who had set out from Titan, fourteen remained.

Those fourteen were changed. Their eyes stared wildly about them, as though searching for danger in every place they looked. They tramped down from the ship and into the tavern where their Captain bought them all drinks. He sat himself on the stool at the far end and sipped quietly, watching his crew. The locals said that his eyes were different. From his eyes, it was said, a serpent stared back.

The precious cargo was unloaded later that day and beneath the watchful eyes of the crew, twenty four barrels were rolled gently down the gang plank and along the quay. Stamped on each was the word that made the contents of the barrels worth more than any amount of guns or liquor. They held the one thing that the men who rode the Sun Dancer would go back through the tornado for again and again.

McGinty settled himself beside Talis, thumbs hooked in his belt. ‘Chocolate’s unloaded, Captain. What are we taking on for the next leg?’

 

 

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