Medusa said as she and I made our way across the outer hull of Olympia to Lucifer Tower. I wondered how Miriam would feel once she saw this magnificent landscape. Would the freedom thrill or frighten? Perhaps both.
We had convinced her that she should return to her home, for the time being. Sezen should hide in the ducts that accessed her quarters—the Medusa unit could be at her side in seconds, if need be.
promised Sezen.
So, much assured, Miriam and Sezen departed for the Khan family compound. Nefertari and Kumiko revised Security logs and footage to report the false narrative that would raise the least suspicions. Medusa and I had returned to the freedom of Olympia’s outer landscape. And I could turn my mind to an idea that had surfaced in my consciousness when Miriam confessed what Baylor Charmayne wanted from her.
It was a dangerous idea. I let it percolate as I admired the Milky Way.
Three stars outshone the others, Hella Major and Minor, and their outlying companion, Charon. We would not approach the Hellas close enough to see them grow as large as the sun in the sky of the Homeworld—or of Earth, since that other sky was false. And the Hellas were not on my mind anyway. Even Charon did not hold my attention for long, because the sight of that star reminded me again of Lady Sheba’s ghost and how remote she had grown.
I said.
In the larger scheme of things, perhaps they already were irrelevant. But this was our microcosm. If Baylor tried to force himself on Miriam, Sezen would stop him—and he wouldn’t survive.
I didn’t want him to die yet. He was still useful to me. Miriam had been right when she suggested that the most logical thing for me to do would be to kill her. But if I killed everyone who might jeopardize my revolution, who would be left to enjoy its fruits?
Yet my conspiracy was fragile. The more people I involved in it, the more likely it would unravel. And we had children involved. We needed more security.
Perhaps Medusa was thinking along the same lines.
Her tentacles stretched and released. Her jets blasted us across intervals with no handholds. We climbed over the leading edge of Olympia and sought our tower, a giant among giants, the sentinel inside which we would make our plea to a ghost who did not want to wake. We climbed the rungs to our lock and let ourselves inside. We passed rows of Sleeping Sisters whose tentacles stirred when they sensed us. Their slumber wasn’t absolute, either.
We floated into the observation bubble and fixed our gaze on Charon, because that was the world most likely to host the planet that harbored the Graveyard.
“I am here,” she answered immediately. “I know what you want.” Her voice filled my mind, yet it still sounded remote.
“I understand your reasoning.” Sheba’s ghost stepped out of the shadows and into the inner space that was enlarged by her presence instead of diminished. “I will help you. I will establish a link with Miriam and advise her. But you should know that things are changing, Oichi. The Third One is stirring.”
“The Third One has resisted contact. I suspect the Third One has good reason. But regret is pointless. We must deal with what is. I will advise Miriam as I advised you.”
“How much do you want Miriam to know?”
I had already thought about it.
She raised an eyebrow. “And if she guesses some of what you’ve done, and she asks me about it?”
“Yes.” Her expression became abstract. “It will be interesting to tutor a midlevel Executive woman. I expect we shall both learn something.”
Sheba’s ghost turned away and faded into the background.
I let out a long breath.
Together, we gazed at Charon. The hallways that had unfolded in my mind when Sheba’s ghost reestablished contact were still there. But this time there was a subtle difference in them. This time, they seemed to stretch farther, into places unknown, where shadows ruled.
Was it my imagination when something stirred in that darkness?
25
Sultana, Tetsuko, and Their Wonderful, Fabulous Plan
I felt safe when Medusa left me. Lucifer Tower was my haven, and hundreds of Medusa units abided there with me. If anyone staged an attack on our citadel, we could fight them off. So I felt confident.
But the people on Titania had felt safe, too, and look what happened to them.
It may be normal to feel safe when nothing bad has happened in a long time, but it isn’t reasonable. Not when you live in an artificial habitat that’s traveling between the stars. Of all people, I should have remembered that.
Instead, I floated in my observation dome like a Lady of leisure. I congratulated myself for making decisions, though I didn’t know how wise they would turn out to be until Medusa, Nefertari, and Kumiko finished seeding Sheba’s false communications where we had decided they should go.
After we dispatched Lady Sheba’s ghost to help Miriam, Medusa and I inspected the virtual patchwork structure that would emerge once the system failure we were staging caused the databases to reshuffle. No systemwide failure of communication had occurred on Olympia for over eighty years, and many things would come to light that had been hidden in the flotsam and jetsam of generations of storing and compression of data. Many of those things were genuine; others were things that Medusa and I (but mostly Medusa) had created to paint a particular picture of the most powerful woman who had ever ruled the Executive class—and of the agenda she wanted to promote.
Not that she really wanted it. As much as I admired the ghost of Lady Sheba, I could not allow myself to confuse her with the real woman. That woman had been heartless. She had built an advanced spaceship to whisk her and (one assumes) a select group of family and allies out of harm’s way (though we had yet to determine what that harm might be). She did not concern herself with the welfare of any child on Olympia unless she believed that child would be useful to her.
But. Sheba’s public persona was a bit different. In public, she made the right civic-minded remarks. She cultivated an impression of herself as one who believed in noblesse oblige. It was to that public persona we catered, and it fit our needs very well.
Stage Two involved the introduction of the Medusa units. Our plan was to have Terry accidentally discover them—after a consensus had been reached that we should aspire to build something very much like them. But that seemed iffy. We
weren’t sure if it would unfold that way.
But still—Stage One! We had begun. It was a wonderful feeling. I recalled some of my favorite images of my father from my private database and gazed upon his well-loved features.
There’s a lot I’ll never know about you, I thought. But I don’t think you would be entirely unhappy with my decisions.
He wouldn’t be entirely happy either, but I could comfort myself with the knowledge that I hadn’t made those decisions alone. Collaboration with the Medusa units was one of the things we were supposed to be doing, wasn’t it? And we were certainly doing it.
What actions, I thought as I watched her go. Those actions could include murder. Almost certainly they would. But I put the idea out of my mind for the time being, and feasted on the sight of the stars as the minutes ticked off in my head and the Medusa units went about their business.
Time stretched, and I thought they would take forever. But my heart rate remained slow and steady. I knew they would succeed—at least at this operation. What came after would be much more challenging.
I thought I could stand radio silence that long. When the communication system went down, five minutes later, I even felt excited. The plans were turning into reality! And the silence that followed when communications went down was not so absolute as the null zone had been. I could still sense my mother’s ghost in her remote spot. Likewise, Lady Sheba remained in reach, though I wanted her to concentrate on Miriam. I had some anxiety that Baylor might make a move when Miriam couldn’t call for help, though that really wasn’t his style.
I fancied I could feel that third presence in the shadows, the one who was stirring but not yet aware.
“Oichi!” warned my mother’s ghost.
My eyes focused again, and I saw someone on the other side of the observation dome, looking at me through the faceplate of a pressure suit. A face smiled at me. And then its owner flitted away.
What the blazes?! I pressed myself against the observation dome and looked out. No one hovered outside.
But then I saw movement at the base of the tower—someone walking away on magnetic boots. She paused next to Omoikane Tower, looked back at me, and beckoned.
She wanted me to follow.
* * *
I couldn’t venture out the way I would have liked—inside a Medusa unit. I didn’t want to complicate the relationship any of these sleeping units would eventually have with the Olympian with whom they would ultimately be paired by waking one and bonding with her just so I could make one trip outside.
There were pressure suits in the supply cabinets. I regularly checked them to make sure they were functioning properly. I could put one on and pursue the mystery woman the old-fashioned way. It was unwise to let her simply walk away—she had blown my cover. She knew there was someone inside Lucifer Tower, and she had probably seen the Medusa units as well.
She waited for me out there. Why hadn’t she signaled to enter the tower? If she had simply been curious, she could have asked me to let her in. She couldn’t call me, because communications were down.
And wasn’t that an interesting coincidence? I was cut off from anyone who could help me. If I had an accident out there, Medusa would never know what had happened, because Security was part of communications. No recording would exist to shed light on the subject.
Still, she waited. She had no business being there. I couldn’t let her walk away, because so much was at risk. Where would we move the Medusa units? How was I going to handle this?
My mother’s ghost had withdrawn. If I did something she judged to be unwise, would she warn me again, or stay silent?
I went to the supply lockers and got into a suit as quickly as I knew how. I entered the lock and waited for it to finish its cycle. And then I opened the outer door and looked for her. She was still waiting for me.
I used my jets instead of trying to descend by the ladder. After all, jetting is what she had done. But once I reached the surface of the plate, I paused long enough to let my magnetic boots make contact, and I looked to see if she was still there.
She seemed rooted to her spot. But I had a feeling about what she would do once I jetted closer, and she didn’t surprise me. She pulled loose from the surface plate and zoomed away. I had no choice but to try to follow in the same fashion.
The stranger disappeared around another tower. I followed cautiously. The way she was expending fuel, I guessed that either she had more to spend, or she wasn’t going very far. I saw her up ahead, but as soon as she could see that I was still following, she flitted away again.
Oh great, I thought. Fun and games. But I wrestled my anger back into a box. I had to balance the need to track her down with the very real chance that I could end up stranded. Based on past experience, I had plenty of fuel and air supply to get to safety. But I needed communications to get a lock open, and it was down. Medusa thought it would be back online within an hour, but what if she were wrong? What if the stranger had done something to sabotage us? After all, here she was, where she shouldn’t be, with a suit that was better equipped than mine.
I saw her again, near the base of Lono Tower. If she followed her current path, she would draw me off the leading edge of Olympia, to the air locks of Fore Sector. I felt more comfortable with that than I did with the idea of a pointless chase around research towers.
It seemed fortunate when her path seemed to back up my assumption that she was headed to Fore Sector. I kept my eyes on her as much as I was able, and watched my air supply dwindle. After an hour had passed, and communications were still not back online, I acknowledged the worst—but I still felt committed to the pursuit of the stranger, mostly because at this point I didn’t have a lot of alternatives. If I stopped long enough to attempt manual access to a lock, she could slip away and the whole exercise would be for nothing.
For the record, it’s quite a lot of fun to zoom across Olympia’s surface inside a Medusa unit. But doing it the old-fashioned way, in a pressure suit with limited fuel and air supply, is tedious. And using that old-fashioned method to pursue a stranger who you suspect is leading you into a trap is scary.
But once we made it to the spinning bulk of our generation ship, the stranger’s path was more apparent. She headed for the 200-series locks. She moved into the spin so that her destination turned toward her. Once we could see the first 200-series locks looming over their access canyon, a lock door opened and stayed that way. That meant someone was working it manually from inside the ship, since communications were down.
The stranger grabbed a rung at the mouth of the lock and disappeared inside.
It took me several minutes to reach the open lock. I used the same rung to crawl to its lip and look inside. I saw her clinging to a bar on the far side near the inner door. I hauled myself inside, but I crouched next to the outer door, keeping the gigantic space inside the lock between us.
The outer door stayed open, as if waiting for me to commit. But I did not intend to get any closer to her.
Just when I thought we were at an impasse, the outer door spun shut.
Together, we waited for the lock to cycle.
Once the room had pressurized, she took off her helmet. She had turned her back before I could get more than a glimpse of her features; she had sleek black hair and skin about the same tone as mine. Her eyes were as black as her hair, but they could have been artificial.
The inner door opened, and a tall, slim man stepped into the gap. His eyes were almost certainly artificial, because they were violet. His hair spilled over his shoulders like a river
of ink. He moved into the lock, but stayed near the door.
I took off my helmet and tucked it under my arm. The man leaned against the far wall with his arms crossed, his pose casual to the point of being disdainful. The woman kept her back to me as she took off her suit. She stuffed it into the supply locker without concern for storage protocols. “This isn’t going to stay in here,” she said, as if reading my mind. “We’ll hide it once you’ve scurried back to whatever hole you choose to hide in. And if you try to take it back with you, we’ll kill you.”
Her threat wasn’t lost on me, but her voice was not particularly cultivated and her pitch was too high.
“I don’t covet your suit,” I said, using the voice I had composed to impersonate Sezen Koto.
She turned and regarded me for a long moment. She wasn’t quite looking down her nose at me, but she flirted with the threshold. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to ignore the threat I posed.”
“What is your threat?” I asked.
“I’m Sultana. This is Tetsuko.”
Now that I could see Sultana’s face without an intervening faceplate, she didn’t look that much like my mother. Tetsuko rather did. But I was beginning to wonder if he would ever wipe that smirk off his face. Seriously—Resting Smirk Face is annoying.
“You should take that suit off,” he said. “I’ll bet you’ve got a fine body.”
I stared at him, amazed that he would say such a thing aloud. I’m an attractive person, and if called upon to do so, I can fake a little style. But his reaction to me seemed overblown. It was as if he hadn’t seen people for months and had forgotten how to be polite.
“Why are you here?” I said.
Sultana possessed her own version of the smirk. “Well—that’s direct! But you can’t be blamed for not knowing who we are.” The way she said it implied that she wasn’t talking about identity. She was talking about status. “We’re First Generation,” she said before I could ask her to clarify. “We helped build this ship, and we were among the first to board.”
I thought about the deepsleep units Medusa and I had found. “How long were you in stasis?”
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