Wolf Who Rules

"What the hell does that mean?" Tinker asked.

"It means what it means," Esme opened a hatch, stepped through and closed it after Jin. The light was dim in this section, but air was clean. The floor was cluttered with crew sleeping. At a glance, at least half of the sleepers were wounded. "All fucking logic went out the window about seven days ago."

Stormsong had said that when her dreaming powers had told her that Impatience was no longer a danger to them. Esme sounded like she was operating on the same skewed logic - she wanted Tinker to fix the mess that the colonists were in because the dreams said she would.

Oh great, yet another group of people expecting me to pull rabbits out of my hat.

For the first time in her life, Tinker felt intimidated by a piece of hardware. She knew that a spaceship was a delicate balance of systems, a spider web pretending to be a simple tin can, with the lives of everyone inside dependant on it. "Look, I really don't know a whole lot about spaceships."

"I'll use terms you can understand," Esme said. "My ship is sinking and I can't bail fast enough."

"Okay," Tinker said. "Exactly how does a spaceship 'sink'?"

"The jump did something to my computers." Esme stopped beside a work station with a monitor showing static. The front panel had already been pulled, and the boards inside gleamed softly with magic. "I'm getting-all sorts of weird errors-and I'm starting to lose systems completely."

"Well, doh," Tinker dug through her pockets until she found a length of wire and her screwdriver set. "Magic is causing your systems to crash."

"Magic?" Esme echoed, looking mystified.

Tinker realized that none of the colonist could see the magic. "That's Elfhome and this universe has magic. Your computer systems aren't shielded for it."

"Oh fuck, it is blindingly obvious, isn't it?" Esme pressed her palm to her forehead, took a deep breath and let it out. "I should have thought of that when I started to dream true again. Okay. This system controls my engines. Right after the crash, I pulled into what should have been a stable orbit and started up the rotation that allows for the artificial gravity. We're drifting though. If I don't correct our orbit, we're going enter the planet's astrosphere - and my ship is not designed to survive retry."

"Okay." Tinker took the lantern from Jin and started to strip it for parts. "We need to first siphon off the magic, and then create shielding for the system. Here's what I need…"

***

Tinker had never worked with astronauts before and was amazed how quickly they learned. While Esme had fired the positioning jets to stop the ship's rotation and pulled them back into a stable orbit, Jin drafted a team of people to drain excess magic off the computer equipment. Despite Esme's "you're the scarecrow" statements, everyone seemed hesitant about Tinker actually working with the ship's systems. After Tinker trained the astronauts, she found herself in a supervisory-only position. She floated in place, stranded by the lack of gravity, with an ice pack strapped to her ankle.

For some reason-whether is was because Tinker missed the event, or because she was the ultimate outsider as an elf, or because she had magically appeared - the astronauts started to tell her their stories. They gone through a harrowing experience, filled with confusion, death, lucky chances, small miracles, and a great deal of heroics. At the core of it all was Esme, riding roughshod over rules and logic, ruthless in purpose, making one lucky guess after another. Esme, everyone agreed, forged a miracle, salvaging what should have been complete disaster.

Even Esme opened up to Tinker when they found themselves alone together. "One summer, while I was in college, I went to visit my older sister on Elfhome. Two months on another world - it seemed like exotic vacation. Then the dreams started - like I had some third eye that had been forced open and I was made to see. Some of what I had to do was so very clear, like changing my master's degree to astrophysics and applying to NASA. Some of it was - blind faith - that it would matter. Somehow."

"I hate to tell you this, but I have no idea how to help you beyond this."

"This buys me time, which is what I needed most, Scarecrow" Esme scowled at her screens. "It gives me a chance to figure out what the fuck to do next."

"Don't call me Scarecrow. I rented the movie and watched it. Everyone in that movie was a dysfunctional idiot."

"You didn't read the books? The scarecrow is the wisest being in Oz and rules the kingdom after the wizard and Dorothy leaves."

Tinker found the news vaguely disturbing. "That doesn't help."

"It's like flying blind in the clouds - you have to have faith in what instruments tell you. The dreams tell me that I needed you. Things are still iffy-but I have a chance now to make everything right."