Free Be My Enemy by Ian McDonald

even if I did, the impeller pods are frozen solid. And that's before I get on to the steering gear. And the ballast; it's ten tons of solid ice in there. I cannae work miracles.”
    “I'm afraid nothing less than a miracle will do, Mr. Mchynlyth.” Captain Anastasia turned her gaze to Everett. “Mr. Singh, two questions for you. What is the difference between ‘think so’ and ‘know so’?”
    “‘Think so’ means the power hookup mightn't work. We fire up the jumpgun and go nowhere. Or the interface mightn't mesh, and we'd go nowhere. Or there could still be a bug in the system and we wouldn't go nowhere, we'd go everywhere. Each atom would be sent to a different universe. Like vammm ! So fast you wouldn't even know it.”
    “My next question: how long until we get from ‘think so’ to ‘know so’?”
    “Ten, fifteen minutes.”
    “That thing will be on us in five. We were lucky once, we will not be so again. Sen, on my command. Mr. Singh, bona speed.”
    “Ma’am.”
    As Captain Anastasia turned back to the window, Everett saw Sen slyly turn up a card from the Everness tarot. She saw him see. She showed it to him. It was not one Everett had seen before, but that did not surprise him. He was beginning to suspect that Sen owned many, many more cards than she carried in her deck at one time. The picture on the card, drawn in ink, was of a flock of crowned butterflies—or were they moths?—chained together wingtip to wingtip, flying up to the smiling moon. The name of the card, written in very old, beautiful, faded handwriting, was Powdered Wings.
    What does it mean? Everett mouthed silently.
    “They travel together to a far goal, and that can be like a big hope thing, or a completely hopeless thing,” Sen whispered. Everett had noticed that Sen's voice, the words she used, the structure of her sentences, changed when she spoke of the Everness tarot. Who had taught her the voice of the cards? How had she come by the cards? “Or, they want to fly free, but they never can. Always two meanings.” She folded the card back into the deck. She turned away from Everett to her flight controls, but he could read from the set of her shoulders and the tension in her arms that she was troubled by what she had read in the card. She would never tell him. He was not Airish, so he would see bright Sen, sassy Sen, feisty Sen, brave Sen, smart Sen, but he would never see scared Sen. Her fears, her dreads, these she would always keep closed up with the cards, next to her heart. Forced to live close to each other, the Airish built subtle, strong walls around their lives. It made him sad. When Captain Anastasia had asked him his professional opinion, he had glowed with pride. He was respected, accepted, one of the crew. Family. Now, in the way Sen turned her back and turned her face to a mask of everyday and busy work, nothing wrong and don't ask , he saw that there were places in the lives of all these people around him where he could never go.
    The power hookup lit green on Everett's control console. Lightscame on in the handle and barrel of the jumpgun. They shifted red to orange to yellow back to red. What they meant he had no idea. But when he touched the jumpgun, it felt warm, it felt charged, it felt alive and powerful. He dragged a multiverse address from the Infundibulum into the Jump Controller window. The code sat there, the JUMP button remained grey. Everett hissed a shit through his teeth and went down into the code. From the corner of his eye, past Captain Anastasia, who was once again at her accustomed place by the window, he could see what looked like a blizzard on the forward horizon.
    Everness shook. Everness shook hard. Loose fittings rattled. Dust and dead, dried spiders fell from the many cavities and crannies of the ceiling. Everyone on the bridge looked up from what they were doing. That's the biggest one yet , Everett thought. He looked over at Sen. She silently mouthed the words I's seen it. It's real.