Time Past

by Maxine McArthur

  Pause. Boom... boom... the blood in my head, the hum of Farseer ’s engines, the sound of time dripping away.

  Bring the ship back or we will let the Q’Chn loose on the station. Do it now.

  Not fighting over Jocasta. Someone wants Farseer . I bet An Serat has renewed his ties with the New Council to get it.

  Will she carry out the threat? I can call their bluff, but I don’t know where I can go if I do. Jump to Central or run away in flatspace until ConFleet beat back the Q’Chn.

  If ConFleet comes. Last time they didn’t. They left us to the Seouras for half a year.

  I leaned hopelessly on the panel and the monitor flicked back to outside view. Vengeful drifted dead in space. It must have decelerated just before the Q’Chn hit, because its momentum was negligible. Surrounded by a trailing cloud: wisps of atmosphere, bodies, pieces of equipment, and debris. Small ships were docked at its ventral and lateral ports, another under its nose. As I watched, a fourth clamped on to another lateral port.

  And the station? I activated three vistas of empty space on the viewscreen before the white rings of Jocasta appeared. We were quite close. Despite my wavering, Farseer must have kept on course. The New Council freighter was maneuvering closer to one of Jocasta’s docking ports. A number of smaller ships were leaving those ports, and one shaved the larger ship dangerously close in its haste to leave. As many people getting out while they could. Exactly what happened when the Seouras arrived.

  This time not Bendarl marines stalking my corridors. This time the real monsters.

  No. No more killing.

  I wished I could see like an Invidi, but all I could do was what I thought was right at that moment. So I aimed Farseer at the docks in the center of Jocasta.

  I must have blacked out for a few minutes, because the next thing I felt was a jolt that reawakened every ache. I slid down the tilted deck and smashed into the other wall, too dazed to do more than grab weakly at the console. My shoulder made an audible crack as it hit but I didn’t feel anything. Numb all over, feeling in every limb beginning to fade. The thin pain at the top of my head from the link with Farseer overlay it all like a high whine on the edge of hearing.

  Get up, stupid. You’ve docked.

  I tried to repeat the words aloud through lips that didn’t feel right.

  The New Council is here. They’re going to let Q’Chn loose on my station. Get out of this ship and go do something about it.

  I rolled onto my knees and tried to put both hands on the wall for support, but one arm wouldn’t answer. The hatch should be somewhere near here. Open up, please.

  I tried to trace the patterns in the wall surface and visualize the hatch opening, but my fingers slipped and skated over the surface and I couldn’t stay upright without leaning on it. The image of the hatch kept turning into a face, a flat circle with a toothed gash right across it and raised eyebrows that crawled up and down saying, “Assembly of the Poor.”

  I leaned my face on the cool wall like I did in the dock on Vengeful . It dug into my cheek. Etching patterns into me. Eating into me like the Tor programs eat into our systems.

  “Dammit, open the door,” I mumbled. Surely that New Council captain would believe I came as soon as I could. Surely she wouldn’t let Q’Chn loose on Jocasta, like they’re loose on Vengeful at this moment. What happened to An Barik? And Kiri and the corporal.

  Not that on Jocasta, please no. An Serat can have Farseer , just let me keep the station and my friends safe...

  The hatch slid open under my hand and I crumpled out at the base of an Invidi. He towered over me in his silver environmental suit. I let out the breath I’d gulped automatically. Atmosphere available, thoughtful of him. Or someone in the Bubble was keeping an eye on the dock.

  Behind the Invidi, a small shuttle sat squeezed against the wall of the bay. Farseer was skewed across it. The jolt I’d felt had been from our rough landing. I’d directed Farseer into the open docking bay all right, but deceleration was too late. We’d slammed into the far end of the bay, padded and netted for such occasions.

  One of the Invidi’s tentacles reached down and tapped my shoulder. An impersonal touch, as if to confirm my position.

  “It’s about time,” said An Serat.

  Twenty-nine

  The darkness smelled of Henoit. I took a long breath through my nose. It tingled in the back of my throat and streamed warmth into my gut.

  Then nausea hit and I curled around it and vomited over the side of the bed. Must be flu again. Grace warned me it was going around...

  But in the out-town I don’t have a bed. I retched again and groaned, hating the taste and the way the blood pooled heavy in my nose, blocking out the H’digh scent that wasn’t real. All in my head. I’ll never see him again except in my head. Nor Will...

  A voice said something I couldn’t catch. Cool hands lifted my dangling head. Something soft supported it from behind. Wetness wiped my eyes and I could see.

  Eleanor’s face, close-up and slightly out of focus. “Lie still.” It had been her voice and this time I understood the words.

  Hiss of injector. The room beyond Eleanor clicked into focus. Secondary hospital block in Gamma, judging from the skylight construction. Now I could feel my whole body properly, not in patches as if through a malfunctioning atmospheric suit. Stiff joints, a throbbing ache above my left eye, and a pins and needles-like sensation in my left arm that indicated Eleanor had used some procedure involving a stasis field, which was usually to help bones knit. I must have cracked my shoulder harder than I thought.

  Memory clicked into place, too.

  “What happened to Vengeful? ” My voice a hardly audible croak.

  “They lost.” Eleanor’s voice was almost lost in the whirr of a suction cleaner as she bent over to clean the floor beside my bed. “The Q’Chn boarded them and now they’re drifting.”

  I thought of the small ships I’d seen coming from the freighter. Small ships with Q’Chn biosignals. Bile rose in my throat again as I imagined the chaos and the carnage when they entered the cruiser.

  “Some of the escape pods and shuttles got away.” Eleanor dropped the cleaner with more force than necessary in its stand against the wall. “We’ve got a few here in the hospital. Most of them headed for the jump point. Some of them even got through.” She rubbed her face tiredly. “It’s a mess out there. Bits of ships and bodies floating everywhere.”

  “I saw An Serat in the docking bay...” I turned and sat up, but it made me retch again. The room rocked gently like a boat in a swell as I just made the side of the bed in time.

  Eleanor glared at me and reached for the cleaner again. “They’re here.”

  “Huh?” Oh, this is a disgusting feeling. “Who?”

  “The New Council. Murdoch persuaded Rupert to give them docking permission.”

  Hard to refuse someone holding an activated weapon at your head—in this case, the threat of the Q’Chn. “Did they bring Q’Chn onstation?”

  “In the docks. So I heard.”

  A nightmare come true. I tried to gather my thoughts but apprehension got in the way.

  A human in nurse’s smock put his head around the door. “They’re doing another broadcast, Doctor. Thought you might want to watch.”

  “Thanks.” Eleanor tapped one of the interface panels on the wall opposite the bed. The comm unit’s visual link brightened to show two figures against one of the generic EarthFleet blue backgrounds used for official announcements. One of them was the captain of the New Council ship, Venner; the other was Stone.

  Venner stood behind Stone, who sat at a table empty of everything but a Confederacy logo in the center. His hands were clasped on the edge of the circle formed by nine thirteen-pointed stars containing a diamond of four stars. Numerical symbolism had been the only kind all members would agree upon. Stone’s shoulders were squared and tense, and although he didn’t look directly at Venner, his eyes flicked sideways occasionally.

  Venner was as
calm as any other H’digh I’d seen or known. I didn’t think it was a facade—Henoit never understood the sharp twist of anxiety I’d get in my stomach before an important meeting or before visiting his parents. He said the H’digh have no equivalent word for “fear,” which at the time I dismissed as hyperbole to impress aliens. Later, thinking it over, I realized he’d never shown anything that could be interpreted as fear, nor did his actions ever seem to spring from that motive.

  So this Venner might be the same. She wasn’t physically much like Henoit, except in her flat expression. Her face was thinner, longer, the pigmentation uneven like dark freckles on the reddish skin. Her vertical-pupiled eyes were dark amber, where his had been pale yellow. She gazed steadily at the pickup—she must have had practice staring down aliens, because H’digh normally did not allow eye contact, unless with enemies or lovers.

  Stone cleared his throat. “Good morning, residents of Jocasta.”

  Eleanor’s timer showed 0800 hours.

  “I have been asked by our friends, the New Council representatives, to clarify a few matters for you. First, the problem of public safety.”

  Venner put a long hand on his shoulder. A proprietary gesture. “We intend you should not suffer from our presence,” she said. “We are your representatives, yes. Our work done is for your benefit.” She spoke Earth Standard. Slowly, and with a nasal accent, but a great concession nonetheless.

  Stone cleared his throat again. “Yes, well, I’m sure we all feel better about that now.”

  Eleanor snorted.

  I watched Stone more carefully. His neat gray suit was the same, his light hair and face smooth. But the hands clasped on the table were whitening at the knuckles.

  “What I’m going to ask you to do,” he continued, “is to cooperate with Security in their work to keep the station running as normally as possible. Now, I realize some of you with business schedules to keep may have some problems. You need to refer these problems to your section administrators, who will record your particulars. We are working on compensation issues”—his eyes flicked back at Venner—“at this moment. Please be patient.”

  Venner’s eyelids twitched in time with a muscle in her cheek.

  The sheen of sweat on Stone’s face began to seep into his collar. Bet he hasn’t taken a pheromone inhibitor. Thinks he can cope with the effect. I’d thought the same in my first days on Rhuarl. But constant exposure without protection means you end up unable to eat or sleep. Stone would learn.

  He glanced down at a handcom beside his left elbow. “There is no access to the jump point at present. Again, please be patient about this, and we will advise you when the situation changes. If you feel you have a case for preferential access to the jump point when it does reopen, please lodge a claim with your local magistrate.

  “I’m told there have been rumors of unauthorized entry of dangerous individuals...”

  It took me a moment to realize he meant the Q’Chn.

  “... this administration assures you these rumors are groundless. Our New Council friends have promised no incursions into the residential areas will be permitted. However, you are once again asked to stay away from the center and to use the spokes as little as possible. Businesses in the spokes are urged to refrain from presenting their compensation requests until the situation clarifies.”

  He leaned forward. “I urge you not to listen to rumor and hearsay, but to wait quietly for further information from official sources. That’s all from me for the moment. Have a pleasant day.”

  The image clouded back to wall surface, but not before we glimpsed Stone pushing back his chair and glaring up at Venner.

  I eased my legs over the side of the bed and grimaced in disgust as I realized both legs and arms were marbled with purplish bruises from burst blood vessels. It looked awful. But at least the room didn’t rock as badly this time.

  “How many Q’Chn are there in the center?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have any ships run away insystem?”

  “Halley, I’ve had my hands full here. You’ll have to ask Murdoch.” She reached under the bed and placed some folded clothes beside me. Dark blue ConFleet uniform, gray regulation underwear. “You’d better go over to Security, don’t call from here. Bill said the New Council can monitor some of our communications. They’ve asked us to minimize calls.”

  I picked up the undershirt and pulled it carefully over my head. Carefully, because even that gentle movement pulled stabs of pain across my shoulders and neck. “Ow.”

  Eleanor reached for the instrument table, then withdrew her hand with an abrupt shake of the head. “You’ll be okay. Your shoulder’s back in and I don’t want to give you anything until your system shows it’s coping with the detox treatment. And I’m rationing supplies. In case this goes on for a while.”

  Her face was tight and pale, three worry lines etched deep in her forehead. “Or in case something goes wrong with the Q’Chn.”

  I knew she meant if the Q’Chn get loose down here. She was scared, which shocked me a little. Even at the worst moments of the Seouras blockade Eleanor had simply grumbled and carried on as best she could. I bit back my complaints, slid into the trousers and off the bed. Knees wobbly.

  Eleanor watched me get my balance, pull on the jacket, get my balance again. I had to sit down to shove my feet into boots.

  “Can’t you give me something for this nausea?” I gritted my teeth against the reflux.

  “Try this.” She handed me a small cup with a tiny dose of dark liquid.

  “It smells revolting. It’s going to make me worse.”

  “Drink it, or put up with feeling sick.”

  It tasted even worse than it smelled.

  “It’s based on a Garokian herb,” she said, handing me a towel to sputter into. “We’ve had some good results with it so far.”

  I started to glare at her, but found that the nausea was already subsiding.

  She handed me a comm link. “Halley, you’ll do something about this mess, won’t you?’

  I opened my mouth to say something sarcastic about everyone being content with Stone as head of station when things were going right, then glanced down at her fingers, clenched on my arm with sufficient force to make new bruises. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, the skin around them red and swollen.

  I fastened the comm link around my wrist.

  “We’ll manage,” I said.

  How did I sound so convincing? That gap between what we think and what we say. The potential to dissemble. It had always frustrated Henoit. Perhaps that was the biggest difference between H’digh and human—they perceived the world as a dichotomy-less whole. No life-death, black-white paradoxes. No lies. Intrigue, yes, but no falsehoods to your face.

  No falsehoods, like me telling Eleanor we’d cope. Why did I say that? Memories of the Seouras blockade taunted me—over the six months of the Seouras blockade 214 Con-Fleet and EarthFleet personnel, 136 registered residents, and approximately 270 illegal residents died. Not counting those who tried to get away when the Seouras first arrived, and whose bodies we couldn’t retrieve. At that time, Jocasta’s environmental systems were stretched by double our optimum population of thirty thousand plus five to ten thousand illegals.

  The hospital corridors I walked along were full of maglev gurneys and trolleys, cleaning bots, nurses and technicians. Business as usual, although people’s faces were taut, their voices sharp.

  The hospital door opened into the artificial sunlight of Gamma—artificial in that this level received a smaller amount of the sunlight directly reflected from the main mirrors. The throughways and residences here relied largely on secondary reflectors and luminescent panels.

  I stepped into the throughway, and was immediately thrust aside as a line of people curved to avoid a pile-up between two huge trolleys, which should have been using the freight lanes at the edges of the ring. Two groups of blue-skinned Dir stood in the middle, arguing at the tops of their v
oices. They had all flicked their cloaks and bonnetlike headpieces inside-out to show two different guild colors, a declaration of war. The luggage from the trolleys fanned out across the throughway in a swathe of metal artwork, boxes, foodstuffs, rolls of cloth unraveling, and countless other wares.

  The words “evacuate,” “New Council,” “spokes,” and “business” could be heard amid the shouted insults and the grumbles of the people trying to get past. All the humans had faces drawn with worry. Some of them were shoving those in front with unnecessary violence.

  Fear hung in the air like the red banners that clung to the upturned Dir trolley and draped the upper story of the building across from the hospital. Red banners to welcome the Q’Chn. Or deflect their anger. Legend said that red was the only color the Q’Chn saw, and the residents of Jocasta were willing to back any possibility.

  A single security guard tried to direct pedestrian traffic around the accident, persuade the Dir to shut up and get rid of the mess, and reroute any automated vehicles that might try to pass. The guard shifted from one side of the throughway to the other, hands waving and alarm shrilling in short bursts. I dodged most of the people and got as close to her as I could.

  “Constable?” My voice was still croaky, but I could yell. “Have you sent for backup?”

  She blinked at my face, then checked the rank stars. “Yes, ma’am. But I don’t think there’s anyone to spare.”

  “I’m heading up to the main office now,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She nodded and turned back to the Dir. One of the boxes had split, and now small crablike animals were scattering from it. This disrupted the crowd’s otherwise orderly detour, and I left curses and squeals behind me.

  The sounds around me were different from yesterday. Yesterday the station had hummed in a way I’d never known before—busy, profitable, peaceful. In the seven years since I first came, we had experienced varying degrees of siege, terror, occupation, and uneasy cease-fires, but never peace. Today things were back to “normal.” The background opsys noises formed a random pattern of cutouts, backups kicking in and small alarms as subsystems gave up the fight to stay active. Somewhere in the section a proximity alarm blared, set off probably by a faulty connection, or unauthorized access.