Ada blinked, but as the rumble in the ship grew louder she quickly feeling herself move down again. Still gently falling, she eased herself along with the others down onto the walkway. “Zhilik, what -”
The humans were talking again, and Jhoru made a following motion with her hand. They could walk normally now, thankfully, but Ada grumbled, wishing more than anything that she could see the planet before it slipped out of view.
“Isavel.”
She reached into her suit and found the locator stone. It still pointed towards its sibling, down on Earth, down on that forested, craggy ocean coast. She held it tightly in the palm of her hand and took a deep breath.
She was here to find answers. She had told Isavel so. If she didn’t find answers, she was a liar, a failure, a wreck. This would all be for nothing. It couldn’t all be for nothing.
If she wanted answers, she would have to know what these damned aliens were saying. So took a deep breath, and started listening.
She followed them down the halls, mulling their words over in her brain, trying to find their centers and peripheries. They didn’t exactly make sense, but they echoed, familiar patterns hiding beneath the surface. Whatever their language, it had likely descended from the same language of the ancients Ada’s had.
Then they stepped into a room with a window - if a pane spanning the floor and ceiling and everything could still be a window - and looked down. And there, underneath them, was Earth encircled by the ring. They were still remarkably close, close enough that it didn’t entirely fit within her field of vision yet. But they were moving. She stared at her planet and its jewelry as they slowly shrank, and around her the room emptied, leaving only Zhilik’s familiar breathing and a human woman occasionally speaking into a communicator. Quietly, not saying anything, Ada kept her eyes on Earth and her ears on the sounds coming out of that woman’s mouth.
This would take a while. It would be worth it.
She looked at the locator one last time, saw how it pointed towards her homeworld, and then tucked it away by her chest, turning away from Earth for now. She had a lot of work to do.
As minutes on this strange ship multiplied into hours, she quickly realized that following Jhoru and Zhilik around wasn’t going to be any help figuring out what these dumpy little humans were saying. She wanted to resent them for changing their language so much, but her own ancestors having done the same, she could hardly complain. She had to admit she needed help.
The woman who seemed to be following her much of the time was young-looking, black-haired and golden-skinned like herself. Ada had also seen her following the older, grey-haired woman who seemed to be a leader of some kind, so she might be well-placed to answer questions. When she had decided to ask for help, she found the young woman poking at a clear rectangular device covered in moving images. There was writing there; she slowed time to read, but it wasn’t clear what it was about. There were a lot of abbreviations, and several unfamiliar words. She searched the woman’s face for Isavel, on instinct, but there was nothing there. Of course not.
The woman looked up at her and jumped in surprise. She stammered at Ada, ultimately settling on a single syllable. “Hi?”
Ada nodded. That made sense. “Hi. I need help.”
The woman’s eyes were darting all across Ada’s face in fear, from the tattoo-like code on her arms to the advanced suit she was wearing. An old-looking, brown-skinned man stepped out of the room and froze when he saw them. He asked the younger woman a question, and she responded with a single curt, unfamiliar word.
Ada reached out and grabbed the woman by the hand. She looked alarmed, but the old man muttered something and made a shooing motion. It was in everybody’s interest that they figure out how to communicate, after all. So the alien woman led her through the ship to a room with a small round window, mostly filled with storage compartments and a table, and they sat down together. Ada stared at her, pointing. “Start talking.”
Whether or not she understood, the woman started talking, and Ada tried talking back, trying to mimic what she was saying. At first it was halting, and they had no idea what was going on, but Ada had dealt with this before. From the ancients to the outers, she was familiar with how words twisted and curved to fit new tongues, and it wasn’t long before she started realizing the turns she needed to take to make her words sound more like theirs.
She sat there for hours, interrogating the woman with basic words and mangled sounds and awkward gestures, trying to pick apart her sentences. The human was showing her pictures of things, objects, and naming them. Ada tried repeating the names, tried saying her own words in ways that sounded more like how these humans spoke.
“What’s your name?”
The woman looked surprised, and responded slowly. “I am Sanako.”
“Sanako.” Good. Introductions. “I’m Ada.”
She glanced down at the writing on Sanako’s uniform, and saw letters printed there. S Oshimi. She kept looking at pictures, learning words. At some point, after hours and a few breaks, Sanako went to sleep, pointing Ada to a bunk next to hers. She considered it, but she was too restless to sleep. An alarm woke Sanako up later, and she pointed to the ceiling, speaking slowly and making a spinning motion with her two hands.
“The ship is turning.”
Ada frowned, not understanding why that mattered, but suddenly gravity started feeling weaker and weaker, and everything in the room started floating. She grabbed onto a handrail, thankful there seemed to be handrails along every wall, and watched as Sanako did the same.
The alien woman looked tired, despite getting a few hours of sleep. She was reaching into a bag attached to her bunk, though, and found something to eat, punting a small bar of food towards across the weightless room at Ada. Ada caught it and ate it, finding it bland and uninteresting.
Gravity soon returned to normal, and they sat at a table in Sanako’s room to keep talking. Ada noticed something on the table, though, an image in a small metal frame somehow stuck to the surface. She reached over to pry at it.
Sanako followed her gaze and looked a bit alarmed, reaching over to pull the image closer. She hesitated, then showed it to Ada and pointed. “My family.”
Ada saw two young women, one of them clearly Sanako and the other likely a younger sister. Sanako was dressed differently, in a dark blue uniform not unlike what she wore now. Standing behind them were two older women, beaming. She looked at Sanako, and back at the image.
She reached for her locator stone, pulled it out, and looked at it. She expected it to be pointing down, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t pointing anywhere.
She froze, and turned it over, but there was no light anywhere on it.
She had lost Isavel, now, well and truly.
“Ada?”
She clamped the locator stone in her fist, feeling more despair welling up in her eyes, but tried to bite down on it. There wasn’t time for despair. If she wanted to return - if she wanted to come back, to find Isavel before something happened or before Isavel forgot about her or before someone else came along - she had to get her answers fast. She had to work. She had to think.
What if she didn’t, though? What if someone else was there for Isavel, when Ada was not?
What if this had all just been one big, long, cruel joke.
She curled up in the chair and looked around for a window, but there was nothing here. Tears. Maybe she was just tired. For a long while her mind was black, with only fleeting memories darting through her mind. Dancing in Hive. Fighting in a flying ruin. Embracing, skin to skin.
After a while, she realized her tutor was speaking into a communicator. “She hasn’t slept yet. Fifty hours. I don’t know, ma’am .”
Ada tried to speak, but it came out as a croak. She tried again. “Window.”
Sanako nodded, snapping the image of her family back into place on the table, and lead Ada out into the rest of the ship. After some time they found an observation room, and she sat down on the thick glass, l
ooking below them. It was as Ada feared; Earth was nowhere to be seen. It was gone. Ada was gone.
She took a deep breath, and heard steps approach behind her. Turning around to see, she found that same old woman there, their leader - or at least Sanako’s. Both alien women were talking about her, but they quieted when she looked at them. She unfurled, stood up, rolled her shoulders, and walked towards them.
“Hi.” She twisted the words so they’d come across. “My name is Ada Liu.”
Sanako made some kind of signal with her eyes, and the blond-grey woman extended a hand. “Vice Admiral Felisha Derksen.” She paused, as though reconsidering - wisely, as Ada didn’t understand any of that. “Felisha.”
Ada looked at the extended hand. It wasn’t the regular clasping pose, but she reached forward anyway, clasping the woman’s forearm in her hand. The colonial human seemed confused for a moment before clasping back.
Ada tried more stunted speech. “Where are we going?”
The vice admiral looked at Sanako, wide-eyed, who shrugged in response. Gods, surely they knew where they were going? Sanako looked back up at Ada, cleared her throat, and answered slowly. “We’re near Jupiter. Heading for the Tannhäuser Gate. Jumping to Freyja soon.”
Ada shook her head. She understood some of the words - maybe all of them - but she didn’t quite know what they meant. “Show me.”
“Come.” Felisha motioned for her to follow, and after Sanako nodded, she followed.
The little humans led her through the ship, passing a number of mirrans and a few outers she recognized along the way. Felicia spoke quietly to guards of both species, stationed at many junctures. Ada got the distinct impression that everyone was uneasy with this strange Earth human.
They reached a set of ladders and started climbing. She looked up and down the shaft gingerly, understanding for the first time that the ship was built like a tower. What a strange shape. She started climbing after them, and they climbed almost up to the end of the ladder.
The room they stepped into was round, open, and the whole wall all around the ship was a single reinforced window. Colour caught the corner of her eye, though, colour that wasn’t the black of space she expected. As she walked around the ring-shaped observation deck, she came face to face with something spectacular.
A massive planet hung in space, a great banded reddish-brown sphere that looked like a thousand clouds of mud and blood kicked up in a lake. The ribbons of colour across its surface coiled around each other and rippled, a strange and thick smoke, the whole planet vast beyond comprehension. They were far from its surface, but it looked so much larger than Earth could ever be. Her mouth hung open as she beheld it.
The alien women stepped up behind her, and Sanako entered her field of vision, pointing at the planet. “That’s Jupiter.”
Ada had heard the word once or twice, but it had meant nothing to her until now. “A colony?”
They frowned and exchanged glances, and after a moment Sanako responded. “We’re going through a gate. To Freyja. Not Jupiter. You can watch, from here. Almost there.”
Almost where? Ada didn’t understand what was going on, but a voice was speaking from machines scattered throughout the ship, and Ada began to realize sight of the planet was moving down relative to the ship.
Felisha stepped into her field of vision and stared intently at her. “Why are you coming? With us.”
Ada stepped past both of them, to the edge of the window, wanting to reach out and touch Jupiter. Wishing she had Cherry to help her dive into those roiling clouds. To fly back to Earth, back to Isavel. But. “I have questions.”
The short old woman seemed confused. “Questions about what?”
Something suddenly appeared along the top of the window, and Ada quickly realized the ship was ascending into a ring-shaped artifact. This gate, no doubt. Inside the gate, something was wrong with space. It looked different - another hue, another set of stars.
She realised the voice echoing through the ship was counting down. Numbers.
Questions about what?
“Everything.”
The ship slipped through the gate, and Jupiter vanished.
Isavel stood outside Campus, beyond those city walls that faced the ocean untouched. Orange and red and white fires smoldered in the city, great banners of black smoke billowing out in the wind. What remained of the army was no doubt picking through the ruins, but the rumble of war had calmed. There was no place for her anymore. The ocean wind chilled the tears rapidly drying on her cheek. She walked towards the sea.
Her feet carried her south-east, towards a rock formation jutting away from the ruined city. Real rocks, not forgotten ruins; old geology cracked and worn by water and wind in ages long before humans laid eyes on them. The shuttle was long gone, Ada was gone, and there was nowhere left for Isavel to go. Here on the edge, salt and foam churning just below her feet, seemed like the place to be.
A few small, ugly islets stuck out of the water in the distance, vainly pretending to be land. She knelt down on the cold hard stone below her, scaring away the gulls that were picking between the rocks, opened her heart, and wailed.
She howled herself hoarse, beating at the rocks with her fists, everything around her blurred and narrowed. The ring, that great embrace the gods wrapped around the world, hung impassive and uncaring in the sky. Her voice didn’t even echo, swallowed in silence by the distance and the sea.
Eventually her face and eyes had dried, her throat raked, and there was still nothing to say or do. She reached into her brace and pulled out the locator stone, watching the glowing blip on it point vainly up into the sky. She clasped it in her fist and wound her arm back to throw it in the sea.
Isavel held it there for a long moment, her muscles trembling, until finally her arm failed her and fell limply back down to her side. The stone still pulsed. She looked at it, wondering what good it was at this point. She might well never use it again.
But she might. And if she ever needed it, she knew she would be sorry not to have it.
She laid the stone in her lap and called up the tiniest blade of light she could at her fingertip, digging slowly and carefully into the bare uncoded part of the stone until she had created a smooth hole all the way through. She tore at the fibers of her pants, wrenching off a tattered white strip, and wound it through the stone, knotting it behind her neck and letting the locator rest cold and hard against her sternum.
Ada was gone, for now. But the idea of her, the hope of her, their mingled tears drying on her cheeks, was still all Isavel had left. That and her damned questions for the gods. She looked back out to the sea and rested her hands on the ground, breathing heavily. It was quiet here, for a long moment, and she just breathed.
Eventually a sound started filtering through the air, a thrumming hum slowly approaching. It sounded familiar. Perhaps they had finally found her, and were going to try to put her down for her crimes.
She looked up at the ring. “Haven’t I done what you wanted?”
The thrum grew louder.
“I tried! I tried to protect people - to keep them alive - to put an end to the fighting -”
A hauler pulled to a stop not far behind her, quieting down.
“I’m sick of this. I thought I had something - someone to look forward to. Why not? What did I do wrong?!”
The gods never answered her. They had no voice here, even though in legend they were said to speak with the wind and the waves. They didn’t care about her - that was all she could imagine. She had served her purpose, done her duty, fulfilled some objective never made clear to her, and now what? They were done with her and would cast her adrift, leave her to be executed on a rocky shore, blood to the sea.
She hung her head, reaching up to the stone against her chest, pressing it between her fingers.
“Isavel?”
She blinked. That voice.
Suddenly Hail’s arms were around her, and her voice was in Isavel’s ears. “It’s you!”
>
Isavel turned around to look at her bodyguard, unharmed and alive. “Hail?”
Hail squeezed her again, and Isavel looked behind her to see three others standing by the hauler. Erran, that good-for-nothing walker who turned out to be good for something. Beside him stood a vaguely familiar face, one of Ada’s friends from Campus - Tanos, she thought. His hand rested on the shoulder of a red-headed woman Isavel had also seen before - Sam, another ghost.
Hail reached for her face. “Isavel, are you alright? You look terrible.” She pulled back and looked Isavel in the eyes, checking her over as though trying to find an injury somewhere.
It wasn’t like that. “No, Hail. I’m not okay.”
Hail stilled, trying to understand.
“She’s gone. She... left me here.”
All at once she was wailing again, her face buried into Hail’s shoulder, trying to howl out the cavernous ache in her body. The rest of the group closed in around her, kneeling down but quietly averting their gazes. Hail embraced her and rubbed her back. She didn’t complain as Isavel howled incoherently right next to her ear.
After a moment the pang subsided again, and she fell quiet, empty. She suddenly couldn’t imagine feeling anything but empty. As the others looked at her, Tanos reached out to pat Isavel on the shoulder, and the empathy startled her a bit. Hail pulled back and sat across from her on the rocky shore, and the rest followed suit, sitting silently as she listened to the ocean crashing against the rocks.
In the distance, one of those strange black code creatures was slowly creeping towards them across the rocky shore, wavering in the wind as it went. She watched it for a while, wondering if it was looking for a fight, but it was slow and seemed content to explore.
Isavel finally looked back to the others and took a deep breath, wiping her eyes. She reached out to Hail and started inspecting her, and a strange look crossed Hail’s face. “Isavel, are you looking for lice?”
Isavel grimaced and shut her eyes for a second. “Gods, no. I want to see if you got hurt.”
Second Contact Page 29
