Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book 1)

by Meg Pechenick

  Zey nudged me with his elbow. “Eyvri? They’re waiting for us.”

  I trailed him down the flight of shallow steps to where the khavi and both of Zey’s brothers were gathered around the conference table, absorbed in a discussion. As we drew closer, I recited their names and titles in my mind. Saresh: Hadazi Takheri. Hathan: Suvi Takheri. And, of course, Khavi Vekesh. He must have been conscious of our approach, but he didn’t glance up until we had joined him and the others on the lower level. He remained seated while Zey said the official words of introduction. I didn’t understand half of them, but Zey had explained in the corridor beforehand that he would essentially be presenting me for service and asking for the khavi’s approval. He had assured me that the latter part of the speech was only a formality.

  While Zey was speaking, Khavi Vekesh looked me over thoughtfully, his eyes taking in my inexpert salute, my patterned duffel bag, and my borrowed uniform. After a pause that made me itch, he nodded. “Very well. Welcome aboard, Novi Alkhat. Novi Takheri will show you to your quarters.” To Zey he said, “Help her get settled. I’ll expect both of you at the evening briefing.”

  “Yes, Khavi,” said Zey. Apparently we’d been dismissed, because he turned and started back up the stairs. Before following him, I glanced at the other two Takheris. Saresh caught my eye and smiled briefly, then returned to the display he was studying. Hathan didn’t look up, although I lingered for a moment, trying to catch his eye. I felt a surge of renewed unease. Was it possible that I already had not one but two enemies on board?

  Outside the axis chamber, I stopped and extracted my notebook from my bag. “What are you doing?” Zey inquired.

  “Drawing a map. I should have started it before. Okay, so we landed in the . . .”

  “The hangar. That’s on helix one, with the storage chambers. You’ll see those later. Then there’s helix two, which houses most of the ship’s major systems. The axis chamber is on helix three, along with the mess hall, the galley, the exercise room, and the medical clinic. Helix four is the smallest—just the lounge and living quarters.” He watched with a proprietary air as my map began to take shape. “That’s about right. You won’t do much better than that with a two-dimensional picture. But the central corridor isn’t straight.” He took the pencil and sketched in a lazily spiraling line. “Like that.”

  “Oh,” I said, illumination dawning. “That’s why each level is called a helix.”

  As I shaded in each section of the map, it reminded me more and more of the interior of a seashell. The ship’s structure was roughly conical, with a single main passageway corkscrewing tightly around the vertical axis. Rooms opened off of the passageway at regular intervals. The largest chambers, the hangar and storage rooms, were placed at the wide end of the seashell, the lounge and living quarters at the narrow end. I liked how the rooms fitted together, each chamber echoing the shape of the one before it.

  The novi quarters, at the extreme end of the spiral, were tiny. Zey hesitated before opening my door. “I don’t know what you’re used to, but novi quarters aren’t very big. They’re really just meant for sleeping.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be fine,” I said. “How do you open the door?”

  “Like this.” He passed his hand over a section of the doorframe, an echo of the gesture I’d seen him make in the hangar. Just as before, a matrix of lights appeared.

  I leaned in for a closer look. The lights were in fact tiny, softly illuminated symbols. I didn’t recognize any of them. “What are these? They’re not letters or numbers.”

  “They’re . . .” I didn’t know the word he used. “More complex than letters. There are forty-nine of them. You’ll see them everywhere. We use them for keys and codes.”

  “Forty-nine?” I repeated.

  Zey laughed. “Don’t worry, you’ll learn them quickly. I’ll help you make a list.”

  “You’ll have to.” The symbols had faded away. I waved a hand, and they winked into visibility again. “Okay, show me how to open my door. Slowly.”

  When I had successfully unlocked and relocked the door a few times, we proceeded to actually enter the room. I set my bag down and looked around eagerly. It was smaller than my dormitory room at the Villiger Center. The inner walls were roughly perpendicular to the floor; the outer ones sloped inward. On one wall there was a bed set into an alcove with storage space below. Another wall held a narrow table flanked by two low stools. Here, as elsewhere on the ship, walls, furnishings, and floor were subdued shades of gray, blue, and sand. Most of the surfaces were smooth, but here and there a texture provided visual interest: a lattice design on the floor, a pattern like twining vines on the arch of the wall above the sleeping alcove. My gaze was drawn to a small hexagonal portal in the outer wall. I went over to it and found myself looking directly out through the Pinion’s hull into space. The hull was immensely thick; it was like peering down an arrow slit in a medieval tower. The medallion of darkness framed by the portal contained a handful of stars.

  “I didn’t know spaceships had windows,” I said.

  Zey smiled. “Ours do. We like to see where we are. Without viewports, we might as well be underground.”

  He showed me how to raise and lower the room’s lights and how to activate another interactive display set into the wall beside the bed. “This panel shows you the time and your schedule for the day. You can also use it to check updates and messages.”

  “Time,” I said. “We didn’t get to that yesterday. I still can’t read a clock.”

  “It’s not complicated.”

  Despite Zey’s words, it took us the better part of an hour to decode the bedside panel. Then we investigated the fixtures in what Zey called the “sanitation room.” I was deeply relieved to have a private bathroom. I hadn’t asked him yesterday whether the shipboard facilities were shared, because I’d been terrified of the answer. My commitment to the mission was sincere, but the specter of communal showers—let alone communal toilets—would have given me pause.

  “Everyone has a private bathroom in their quarters,” Zey explained. “And every crew member has individual quarters. Even people who might reasonably live together, like couples or siblings. It’s Fleet policy. Tensions rise when people can’t get away from each other.”

  “The Pinion seems pretty spacious to me,” I said.

  “Say that again in six months,” Zey said dryly.

  I was encouraged to find that the fixtures in the sanitation room were more or less identifiable. Evidently the hygiene procedures of our two species were as similar as our bodies appeared to be. The sanitation room was tiny, but it had a recognizable toilet—set into the floor, like the squat toilets of East Asia—as well as a washbasin and a mirror. “Where do I shower?” I asked. “Or bathe. Or whatever.”

  “We ration our water pretty carefully. There are two shower cubicles just down the hall. You’re allotted two fifteen-minute intervals every four days. You can use your intervals separately or combine them. There’s a panel in the hallway where you reserve your time slots—I’ll show you how to do that.”

  We left my quarters and worked our way slowly along the residential corridor, pausing at each door while I added its location and occupant to my map of helix four. Just beyond the last two doors—Suvi Takheri and Khavi Vekesh—were the shower cubicles. Zey helped me reserve a shower slot for the following evening. Between the pictogram code and the arcane timekeeping system, it would have taken me twenty minutes to decipher the display on my own. I felt a disproportionate surge of triumph as I laboriously punched Novi Alkhat into the space I’d chosen. Then Zey keyed open one of the doors and I looked inside. The shower room was larger than I had expected and suffused with a brilliant blue-white radiance like sunlight on the ocean. The floor was tiled with smooth round stones that were clearly meant to be walked on barefoot. “I can see why you have to ration your water,” I said. “I could stay in here all day.”

  “Some people use them as meditation rooms. You can reserve
additional time slots; you just can’t use more than your ration of water. And the system gives priority to anyone who actually needs to take a shower.”

  The tour occupied the remainder of the morning. I did my best to stay attentive, but it was a little overwhelming. The rooms all looked more or less alike, and some of them—the exercise room, the medical clinic, the propulsion chamber—were filled with things I didn’t recognize. Zey assured me that he would help me figure them all out. He had more or less taken over the task of drafting my map, and I was glad of it, because he was doing a better job than I would have. Along the way I met more of the Pinion’s crew members—Rhevi Daskar, the ship’s doctor, a brisk middle-aged woman with silver hair and piercing dark eyes; Rhevi Khiva, who supervised general systems and operations; and Rhevi Sohra, the programming specialist. Of everyone I’d met, Sohra would have had the least trouble passing for human. Her blue eyes and long dark hair wouldn’t have drawn a second glance on Earth, unless it was from an admirer.

  “And that’s everyone,” said Zey after we said good-bye to Sohra. “You’ve met them all.”

  “Really? I’ve met everyone on the ship?”

  He ran through the list on his fingers. “Vekesh, Hathan, Saresh, Daskar, Khiva, Sohra, Ahnir, Ziral, Vethna. And me. And you. That’s it. You won’t see another new face for six months. Well, unless you count starhavens. So, what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  Zey made a sweeping gesture. “The ship. The crew. Everything. Your new life.”

  “I think . . .” I paused. “Actually, I think I’m starving. Can we take a break?”

  Zey consulted a tiny screen clipped to the left sleeve of his uniform. “Sure. Lunch is about to start. Let’s see if you can get us back to the mess hall.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  My first meal on the Pinion felt exactly as excruciating as the first lunch at a new school. By the time I had navigated us back to the mess hall, with a stop by my quarters to retrieve the cooler bag containing my food, the other crew members had already gathered and were eating their meals. As I entered, carrying my neatly packaged lunch on a tray, there was a noticeable hitch in the flow of conversation and the soft clatter of cutlery against plates. For an instant I stood frozen at the intersection of nine different gazes, some indifferent, some unfriendly.

  With an equally noticeable effort, the crew of the Pinion collectively went back to what they had been doing before I arrived. There were three tables in the mess hall, but only two of them were occupied. I followed Zey to a pair of vacant seats at the nearer table, trying not to drop anything on the way. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to veto Max’s idea about eating in my quarters.

  I put my tray down and settled onto the low stool beside Zey. Opposite me was the dark-haired programming specialist, Sohra, who smiled warmly when I caught her eye. At the other end of the table were the man who’d called me a nivakh—Vethna?—and the operations officer, Khiva. Vethna met my curious look with a challenging stare. I glanced away quickly. He didn’t like humans, or he didn’t like me, I wasn’t sure which. It was a question to be answered. Later. I fixed my eyes on my tray and didn’t look up again until I’d finished the turkey and avocado sandwich and the fruit salad—no honeydew, extra mango—that Max had packed for me. Still unsatisfied, I emptied my bag of trail mix directly into the yogurt that was meant to have been my afternoon snack and devoured that too. When I tore open the bag of trail mix something fluttered out of it: a scrap of paper. I picked it up. It was a handwritten note. Food is life, it said. Bon appetit. Max. I smiled.

  As the signals of satiation reached my body, I began to relax. I’d let myself get too hungry. I was going to have to be careful about that. I looked around the mess hall with renewed interest. It was a trove of cultural data, from the fine wood grain of the table—real or synthetic?—to the oddly shaped Vardeshi cutlery to the food itself. Zey had left some of his portion untouched, and I studied it curiously. It looked like black rice with green stew ladled on top of it. Pushed to one side was what I took to be a garnish, thin slices of something yellow and radish-like. None of it looked especially appetizing to me, but my companions had eaten heartily. As I watched, Zey picked up the long-handled triangular spoon next to his plate and scooped up another bite. “What is that?” I asked.

  “A spoon,” he said thickly through the mouthful of food.

  I laughed. This triggered another of those little pauses as everyone at my table—and probably most of the people at the next one—darted quick assessing looks in my direction. I tried to ignore them. “No, I know what a spoon is. What are you eating?”

  “Oh. It’s—” He rattled off a couple of words I didn’t recognize.

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  Sohra spoke up. “It’s a cooked grain. And a soup with vegetables and . . . a type of seed that’s high in protein.”

  I pulled out my notebook and lifted it inquiringly. She took it and the pen I handed her and began to write. “Are you vegetarian?” I asked while she worked.

  “When we’re starside we don’t eat much meat, but it’s for practical reasons, not philosophical. Meat is harder to process and store, and it can’t be produced on board ship.” Sohra nodded at her plate. “All of this was grown in the Pinion’s hydroponics bay.” She passed the notebook back.

  “Hydroponics?” I said to Zey. “I don’t remember seeing that.”

  “We can swing by before the evening briefing.” He rose and picked up his tray. “Let’s go. We have a lot to do.”

  I followed him into the galley, where he showed me the waste disposal, the water tap, and the basin designated for my dirty dishes. When we’d cleaned up, we headed for the cargo holds, into which my gear had been deposited seemingly at random by Vethna and Ahnir. Organizing my equipment took all afternoon. My medical supplies had to be transported to the clinic, my food to the galley, and my personal items to my quarters. It would have taken at least a full day to carry the crates by hand, but Zey taught me how to use the hoverlifter, which looked like a thin metallic sled. It was placed on the floor and loaded with heavy items, then activated by touching a control on one edge, at which point it rose slowly to waist height and hovered in place. When aloft, it could be steered through the air with the lightest touch.

  Afterward, as promised, we stopped by hydroponics. The bay was long and narrow, and every inch of it was filled with Vardeshi plants in orderly profusion. They climbed the walls and burst out of elaborate tiered hangers extending from floor to ceiling. My imagination had conjured the lush greenery of an Earth hothouse, but as I stood looking around in amazement, I couldn’t spy a single green plant. Instead I saw strangely shaped leaves and vines in a hundred shades of blue and red and gray. The warm air was heavy with fragrances, some sweet, some astringent, all unfamiliar. We had only been in the room for a few moments when something made me sneeze. I turned to Zey and saw my own panic mirrored in his face. He grabbed my elbow and dragged me bodily out into the corridor. I had been right about one thing: the Vardeshi were stronger than they looked.

  “That was a bad idea,” he said when the door had closed behind us. “I never should have taken you in there. I’m calling Daskar.”

  “Don’t,” I said quickly. “Not yet. I think I’m all right. If I were having an allergic reaction, the symptoms would be getting worse. Just give me a minute.”

  He frowned and tapped a command into the screen on the cuff of his left sleeve, but did as I asked. I fumbled through my bag and extracted the EpiPen Anton had instructed me to carry at all times. Then we waited. For good measure I took a couple of puffs from my handheld oxygen inhaler. When it was clear to both of us that I wasn’t going into anaphylactic shock, Zey heaved a sigh of relief. “Sigils, that was close. I could have gotten you killed. Both of us, actually—if you die on my watch, my father will flay me alive.”

  I smiled. “He’d have to do it intergalactically. Isn’t your father on Vardesh Prime?”

&
nbsp; “He’d find a way. He’d get my brother to do it.”

  “Saresh? He seems so nice. I don’t think he could flay anyone.”

  “Hathan could,” Zey said grimly.

  “I still think he doesn’t like me,” I said. “This morning, in the axis chamber, he didn’t even look at me.”

  “He wasn’t ignoring you. He’s a navigator. We were getting ready to leave orbit. He was doing navigator stuff.” Zey looked back at the door of the hydroponics bay. “Promise me you won’t go in there again. Please.”

  “I promise I won’t go in there again,” I said wistfully. My glimpse of Vardeshi flora had been tantalizingly brief. There must be some piece of technology, either in my gear or in the Pinion’s medical supplies, that would let me explore the room safely. Maybe Daskar could refit an oxygen mask to filter out pollen. If nothing else, I could borrow a pressure suit and breathe canned air.

  We weren’t technically late for evening briefing, but we were the last to arrive, and it would have been impossible to enter the axis chamber discreetly in any case. No one commented on our near-lateness, but as we took our seats I saw Hathan, who was seated across from us, fix Zey with a look of cool reproach. Zey ignored him, apparently absorbed in accessing the meeting agenda on a thin semitransparent tablet he seemed to have conjured into existence while I’d been looking the other way. I glanced around. Most of the others were holding similar tablets, but a few people seemed to have accessed computer interfaces built into the surface of the conference table. Saresh, sitting to my left, was one of them. As I watched, he flicked the fingers of his right hand, and an array of luminous orange and white glyphs slid down the table and came to rest in front of me. I recognized it as a digital copy of the agenda in front of him. “Thanks,” I whispered. His answering smile was brilliant and swiftly gone.