by Wen Spencer
When Mikhail moved forward, though, Hardin focused on him. He cocked his head to one side as he studied Mikhail. "Volkov?" Hardin tapped his nose in the spot where Mikhail's had healed crooked. "You look so damn young, Volkov, I thought maybe they cloned Viktor again. I remember you breaking your nose, though, and not letting them fix it."
Mikhal had been thinking that he and Hardin were virtually strangers to each other. He'd forgotten that being Viktor's clone gave him celebrity status even at the academy. Hardin might know him in great detail despite the fact that they never directly interacted. "No, there's been no new clone."
"I would say something about Novaya Rus weeping over its lost prodigal son, but I guess they'll just make another once they realize you're not coming back. God forbid, they let someone new take command."
Odd, how having someone else voice his opinion made Mikhail's hackles rise. "Unfortunately, we Volkovs are just too damn good at it."
"Good is the enemy of great." Hardin smiled as if trying to take the sting out of his words. His eyes stayed hard and bitter. "But that's not ours to worry about now seeing that we're stuck here. Welcome to my paradise."
"Paradise?"
Hardin laughed at the skepticism in Mikhail's voice. "Yes, paradise. Look around you." Hardin swept his hand out to take in the endless blue water and the sky. "The Nippon call this the Cradle of Life; where God tested creation before he made the universe. Perfect air for humans. Water easily made drinkable. A sea teaming with life. Open your eyes and see the bounty! A hundred planets worth of living space all at ideal human conditions. Best of all—no nefrim. This is the salvation of man."
"Put that way, it would seem a paradise. I'd argue that the obvious problems with landing safely outweighs its benefits."
A frown flitted across Hardin's face, but he forced himself to laugh. "Yes, a few kinks to be worked out." He looked past Mikhail to study the Svoboda. "Christ on a donkey, Mikhail, but God does love the Volkovs, doesn't he?"
"Pardon?"
"You hit land. Do you know how rare that is? Fenrir here is considered a good landing, despite the fact they didn't hit land so much as sink beside it. Half their human crew dead. A mutiny within the first week killed what they had in the way of officers. But still, a safe harbor and supplies enough to make a go at it."
"All gone now."
"Yes. Shame about that." Hardin pulled his gaze away from the Svoboda to sweep over the rubble. "They'll be back. You err toward overly cautious here. Without fishing boats, this rock doesn't produce enough food to feed more than a dozen people. You protect the boats first, then organize supply chains to feed workers. A hard thing to do when everyone scattered to friendly ports up and down the axis."
Friendly ports? Then there were unfriendly ones too.
"Any come to the Dakota?"
Hardin frowned at him. "No."
"Why not?"
"That's a long sad story."
"If you hadn't noticed, I'm not going anyplace anywhere soon."
"True, true." Hardin sighed. "The Dakota is gone." He made a fist and then flung open his fingers, like a star going nova. "Poof. There one minute, gone the next."
Mikhail waited, giving Hardin silence to fill.
"We'd been under heavy fire off the shoulder of New Haven, providing cover for the evacuation of civilians. When the order came through to jump out, and the warp field powered up, we actually cheered because we thought we'd survived."
Hardin glanced to Mikhail. "You've been through it. That blinding blue where there should have been black. A few seconds to think you're in shallow orbit around a planet. Desperate maneuvers to pull out of a gravity well—and all you've done is make matters worse. Then you're in the water and sinking with a ship full of people who have no clue how to swim."
"Your damn Volkov luck put you down on land. We landed in deep water." Hardin moved out into the blazing sunlight. "You would never know how by looking at it, but water is dark as space when it gets deep."
Harden fell silent. The sea birds cried overhead like lost souls. After several minutes of the wind whirling fine rubble about their feet in dust devils, Mikhail asked, "You had to abandon ship?"
"We had no choice. The pressure started to crush the ship. You could hear the metal groaning. We deployed everything we could launch off of the Dakota. Troop landers. Fighters. Escape pods."
"How many were you able to save?"
"Less than a thousand."
Thinking of Eraphie, Mikhail asked. "None of your Reds?"
Hardin stepped close and spoke lowly. "We were adrift for a long time. Sacrifices had to be made."
Meaning he had killed all the Reds that had survived the crash.
Hardin saw the realization in his eyes. "Don't you judge me," he whispered. "You landed pretty but you used up all your luck. You don't even know how badly you're screwed."
"Trust me, I'm aware that my situation is tenuous, but that does not mean I'm helpless."
Hardin glanced at the Reds. "Yes, I can see. But a warship is stocked with only a hundred days of rations. Once it's gone, you don't have the tools to catch enough to feed your Reds. Or the knowledge. All that muscle bulk needs twice the food as a normal man, and they start to waste fast."
"Did you just sacrifice Reds, or did you have to move up to humans too?"
Hardin scowled darkly at him. "No."
Mikhail gave Hardin silence to fill.
"We were spotted by Tonijn Landing. They're a small subsistence landing. Once we were able to cobble together the Red Gold, we went nomadic. We move around the Sargasso without a home landing."
"The Sargasso?"
"One of this place's many names. The Sargasso Sea on Earth was known as a graveyard of ships. It seemed fitting to name this place after it."
"What do you think this place really is?" Mikhail asked. "Was it made? Or is it natural?"
"Well—it's not the afterlife. I don't believe in the afterlife. We live and then we die. All we get is the time between that first breath and last to chisel our name into stone."
"And a billion of humans over thousands of years have been wrong?"
"Heaven is a placebo for the poor and helpless. It deludes them into thinking that their existence has meaning that will last. That their life long struggle leads to something more than a puff of dust. When I was a child, you had to take your ID chip with you to the bread lines. It had your genealogy records; you used it to justify your existence to get your share of food. It had my parents, and grandparents and so forth back ten generations. Hundreds of people reduced down to some ones and zeroes on a data chip and nothing else. Their own flesh and blood knew nothing about them beyond that. If it wasn't for a hundred pounds of meat on two feet, it would be as if they never existed."
"But there was you."
"Ha!" Hardin spread his hands to take in the world around them. "And I'm there to stand testament? Hell, no, I'm stuck in this obscure corner of nowhere. In the mysticism of immortality, the ancient Egyptians stumbled across the truth. Tutankhamun. Nefertiri. Ramses. Seti. We know their names a millennia after their language stopped being spoken. That's immortality."
"Biblical heaven implies a time longer than millennia."
"Well, I'll settle for a few hundred years."
They were ranging off the subject. Mikhail pushed to get it back on track. "Is there any proof that an alien race created this place?"
"None that humans have found. If another race knows, it hasn't told us."
It stunned Mikhail that Hardin could speak so causally of alien races. The nefrim had been humanity's first encounter with another race.
"Exactly how many alien races are there?" Mikhail asked.
Hardin actually had to count on his fingers. "There's the Hak, the minotaurs, the civ, the obnao, the kites—although I'm not sure if they're intelligent per se—the barbies, the kelpie, the nixies. Ten. Maybe eleven. That we know of."
Hardin hadn't named the nefrim as one of the other races.
"Their ships are here. No one has ever seen a live nefrim though; there's something that kills them here."
"And how many human ships?"
"How many arrived here?" Hardin shrugged. "Countless have vanished without a trace. There are a hundred human landings. The largest and oldest is Ya-ya: the Yamoto battle ship and the colony ship Yamaguchi. They landed about ten miles apart with a Hak spiritual retreat between them."
"A what?"
Hardin considered for a moment, rolling his hand as if flipping through possible explanations. "According to the Nipponese, the Hak are zen mystics who only use this area as a retreat from the real universe. They like to sun on a rocky island that's now in the middle of the city. I hear that they come and go without anyone seeing them move, so that might be true."
"The Hak know how to leave this place?"
"If they are leaving, they're doing it without a spaceship." Hardin smiled and Mikhail wasn't sure if he was telling the truth. He suspected that the man was and wanted Mikhail to disbelieve merely so he could have his ignorance expounded upon.
So Mikhail moved on. He'd go back later, or ask Eraphie. "What's the total human population then?"
"Less than a million. Because Yamaguchi was a colony ship, Ya-ya has the means to support scientific research and a college, but most landings are hand-to-mouth."
"And you consider this paradise?"
"Ya-ya is proof that humans can prosper here given the right equipment and a large enough population pool."
"And luck at landing."
"If I could get out and gain access to the right equipment, incoming ships could have safe flight paths and a selection of landing sites." Hardin said it as if it was something he'd put a great deal of thought into. Was his arrival at Fenrir after the engine warped out no more coincidental than Mikhail's?
"Have you figured out how to get out?" Mikhail asked.
Hardin gave a weak laugh and shook his head. "No."
"Someone here at Fenrir figured it out." Mikhail waved a hand at the rubble around them.
"This isn't proof that it went back home. It could have just gone to another dimension we don't know about. Or reduced down to a black hole which collapsed." Hardin paused and cocked his head. "But you should know. You jumped out of normal space after the implosion. Did it show up?"
To hesitate in answering would be the same as admitting the truth. Denying it would limit what he could ask Hardin without tipping his hand. So Mikhail nodded. "It came out of warp near Plymouth Station. No survivors. No explanation as to where it had been. No clue as to what happened to the rest of the ship and why only the engine appeared."
Hardin looked stricken. "So Command doesn't know about this pocket universe?"
"It knows that Fenrir is in an ocean someplace." Mikhail didn't elaborate on what else Command knew and feared.
Hardin looked out at the dazzle of sunlight on water where Fenrir lay.
"Do you know who was working on the engine?" Mikhail pressed for answers. "How they modified it so it could function in this place?"
"No."
It was a quick, firm denial. It could be the truth if Hardin had little to do with Fenrir's people. Or he could be lying.
14
Blue Blood
There was a storm coming. The heart of the storm, according to Moldavsky, was still two hundred kilometers off, but already the winds was blasting over Fenrir's Rock. It was clearly visible to the naked eye, a black wall sliding toward them over the darkening ocean.
"You're making it challenging to come and go." Eraphie said when she appeared at his side while they were setting up perimeter security monitors around the Svoboda. Once again his personal guards had yet to notice her standing beside him, well within striking distance.
"Yes." Mikhail decided that he was partially at fault too. The clothes he'd given her could be easily mistaken for standard issue uniform at a distance. "Entirely too many things are coming and going unseen. Like you."
"Pft, Reds are easy to get past. Stay downwind, move silently, keep to shadows and whoosh." She made a sliding motion with her hands. "You are super ninja."
"Super ninja?"
"Super ninja!" She repeated only this time with a thick Japanese accent in a deep bass voice and made several karate moves, complete with quiet little 'ya's' as she chopped the air. While it was only mock fighting, her moves were clean in form, indicating that she'd been trained to fight. "It's a game we played as kids. Super ninja. Hide and seek. Marco Polo. Blind man's bluff."
"And you always won?"
She laughed, relaxing out the fighting stance. "No, no, Reds are good, but Blues are scary."
It was the second time she mentioned Blues in a way that didn't fit what he knew—but he was by no means an expert in them. Viktor had outlawed the production of Blues in Novaya Rus shortly after he came into power. He foresaw Reds were going to form the bulk of the military force against the nefrim and thus a necessary evil. Blues, though, were created only to fill the sexual desires of their owner. Other colonies still produced Blues, and many of the envoys that visited the palace certainly owned one or more. Knowing Novaya Rus' stance on them, the envoys always left their Blues behind. The pictures he'd seen of the women were always stunningly beautiful, as perfect in form, dress, and makeup as china dolls. Mikhail couldn't imagine any of them roughhousing with Reds and coming away the winner.
"What exactly is a Blue?" Mikhail asked.
His feral ninja kitten pressed her lips thin obviously weighing what was safe to tell him. "Ya know, when they first made Reds, they were trying to create humans to colonize the first planets that they found. Back then, they thought it would be easier to fiddle with humans instead of trying to fix an entire world."
Mikhail nodded. That was before the development of warp drives that could quickly move the human race to an uninhabitable planet and a host of terraforming tools to make said planet a paradise. The production of Reds probably would have been phased out if not for the nefrim wars.
"Well, Reds were made to be adaptable," Eraphie said. "Not just them, but their kids."
The ramifications were starting to dawn on Mikhail. Reds were never allowed to breed before. Here in this world, not only had they reproduced, with the time dilation, they'd been given generations to adapt.
"And Blues are . . .?"
"When you cross a Red with a Blue, you get a lot more than a pretty kitty. Blues have something going on up here." She tapped her temple. "And the Red brings it out, makes it kick ass. Reds might be stronger, faster, but Blues can out think them. Fighting a Blue is like fighting your shadow."
"Where did the Blues come from? They're not on military ships."
"Here and there. Some of the bigger civilian ship landings have a shit load of Blues. And Georgetown rescued a crèche off of Tau Ceti; it produced both Blues and Reds."
Mikhail hadn't thought to check if White Star Creche had a second production line. No doubt that it did; Blues were lucrative. Sex sold well. But why had the Georgetown survivors decanted both and bred them together?
He had no chance to ask as his guards came alert as Hardin approached from the direction of the salvage yards.
Eraphie looked like she wanted to bolt. It was gratifying to see that she was feral for everyone, and that she'd come to trust Mikhail to some extent. "Did you ask him to . . .?"
"Yes," Mikhail nodded in reassurance. He'd forwarded her request just before Hardin returned to the Red Gold. He'd also set Moldavsky on eavesdropping duty; unfortunately no one on the Svoboda spoke Japanese, so the result of the conversation was still unknown. He wondered if Hardin might have deliberately avoided Standard. Not knowing protocol for Ya-ya, it was difficult to tell.
Eraphie wavered, but chose to stay, hedging a little closer to him.
Mikhail saluted Hardin, who returned the salute. "Eraphie was just asking about her cousin's boat."
Hardin studied Eraphie, looking down o
ver her slowly from head to toe. After a minute, he asked, "Eraphie Bailey?"
"That's me." She held out her hand, demanding a handshake and the respect that went with it.
Hardin shook her hand. "You a Red or a Blue."
"Red." Eraphie raised her chin up slightly as she said it.
Hardin nodded. Nothing in his face changed, but Mikhail had the distinct impression that his interest in Eraphie waned. "Ya-ya port authority says that the Rosetta was towed into their harbor a short while ago. The Rosetta had engine problems and lost their radio too. They didn't have any more information but hazarded to guess that the Rosetta's going to be in dry dock for a while. Apparently Ceri put out word that your cousins will be working under her."
Eraphie visibly relaxed. "Oh good. They're safe."
"I was actually here looking for one of your other cousins. Ethan?"
"Ethan?" Eraphie said in surprise. "Why?"
"He was finding me ships to salvage. He'd sent word he'd heard of something new," Hardin said.
Eraphie shook her head slowly. "He'd found our family a ship that he thought might be a seraphim ship, but he didn't say anything about a second ship. You'll have to talk to him—if you catch up with him."
Mikhail looked at her in surprise. The way she had spoken earlier, he was sure that all of her family had died.
"He survived?" Hardin beat Mikhail to the question.
"God loves idiots," Eraphie snarled. "Yes. He went to Mary's Landing."
"You didn't go with him?" Mikhail asked. Mary's Landing was one of the sites he hadn't been able to gather any information on except that it existed.
"No!" Eraphie cried. "I'd rather be dead than to go to Mary's."
"That idiot," Hardin said. "He knew I was coming. Why did he go there?"
"Because he's an idiot," Eraphie said. "You said so yourself. I don't know what he thinks he's doing; you can't outthink bigotry. I wouldn't have thought anyone in my family would ever willingly go to Mary's Landing."
