“Demeter to Ocean, over?”
She heard him before she could see him.
“Hear you loud and clear, Demeter. This is Captain Kal Black Bear of the Ocean.”
“Captain, good to speak to you. I’m Roan Morra, chief of biohab. I thought it was another name.”
“There’s some catching up to do. Short version, both pods have separated, with the rest of the travelers aboard, including Captain Sasha Sarno. We had a safety matter that required decisive action.” It was all true, as far as it went. No need to mention yet the decisive actor had been Rai. “I’m acting captain. There is one traveler who is confined to the quarantine bay and will be for the remainder of the trip. All’s well, pretty much, other than that. The pods are on the same trajectory but will be a couple weeks behind by the time we reach Demeter.”
She heard a crackle of silence. “That’s a lot to take in, Captain Black Bear.”
“Call me Kal.”
“Roan.”
“Where’s your holo?”
“You’re not seeing it?”
“No.” Kal’s stomach flipped. “Can you see me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Crap.” He could see her but she couldn’t see him. Through great strength of will she kept her hand from touching her hair. “I mean, uh…hi.” She smiled.
“Hi. So you’re alone there, except for a passenger in quarantine.”
“That’s right.” It sounded a little nuts, hearing someone else say it.
“Who can’t be let out until you arrive.”
“Maybe not then, either.”
“You’ve got a situation.”
“We’ve got a situation.”
“Are you safe, Kal?”
“Safety is relative, like time. I’m relatively safe.”
“Do we need to get with you on isolation protocols? We’re taking that shit pretty seriously.”
“It’s not a bacteriological or viral or parasitic factor.” Kal stopped. Or was it, in a way, parasitic? “It’s a longer conversation.”
“Lucky for you, I’ve got nothing but time.”
Kal thought about Sasha, wishing she could talk this over with her before she said anything to Demeter. She was the captain now, and Demeter did need to know about Sif. As they needed to know about Rai. It felt like selling out Rai to tell Demeter about all the things she’d done under the influence of Sif. Kal couldn’t wait and call Sasha every time she had to make a decision. She’d stepped up, and now she needed to take the heat.
Kal tried not to sigh but didn’t quite succeed. “You remember the Carys.” It wasn’t a question.
Roan made a sound in his throat.
“We haven’t seen the last of the Carys, as it turns out.”
He was silent for a while. “Did something happen in the portal?”
“No, nothing like that. We had no trouble there.”
“What does that ship have to do with this trip?”
It was bad luck to mention the Carys. But Kal thought she had more reason to think so than Roan could.
“I need you to listen. Don’t interrupt me until I’m done. Ask me any questions you have then, and I’ll answer them if I can.”
“All right.”
Kal struggled to go on. She hadn’t thought it all affected her too much, not deep down, but telling it was reliving it. She told him as quickly as she could. “I don’t know what Sif was like before. We have one crew member who knew her before. I’d say the Carys holds more sway than Sif.” She stopped speaking.
Grabbing a cube from the chair, she brought it to her mouth and slurped it down, wiping her face with the remnants, forgetting for the moment Roan could see her. Roan hadn’t spoken. He knew how to follow instructions. Always good to know who could do that. It wasn’t as common as she’d thought.
“The Carys doesn’t care too much about human life,” she finished.
That moment, of all moments, Roan’s holo image kicked in, so she could see him. It was all white around him, as if he were in some primitive idea of heaven. He was leaning toward her, his forehead scrunched, something more than concern and less than terror. His forehead was wide, his hair sticking up everywhere, a crew cut grown out. A smudge he’d missed on his cheekbone.
Looking at him, she could tell he didn’t know she could see him yet. He rubbed his cheek with the back of his hand and his lips disappeared as he sucked them in. He let out a silent stream of air through a whistle-shaped mouth.
“And your AI came back to your side,” he said finally. His eyebrows were higher than they’d been before.
“So like I said, relatively safe.” Kal took in a big breath. “That’s all.”
Roan rubbed his chin, which was rough with stubble. “You’ve got a situation all right. I don’t envy you, what you’ve been through. Our ride was plenty hair-raising without a bodysnatching AI.”
“Um. Yeah.” Kal had never thought of it quite like that. It felt a little strange discussing this for Rai’s consumption. What did Rai think of it all? Kal would have to ask her. But not today. Kal had spent enough time thinking about what Rai thought for a lifetime. “How was your trip? Give me some details.” She really, most of all, wanted to hear about Demeter, but it was only polite to follow up on his comment.
“The run-up to the jump was hairy. We couldn’t find the portal. Wasted three days wandering around like Hansel and Gretel with no bread crumbs. The captain was pulling her hair out. Crazy calm on the outside, you know how they are, but you could see her screaming internally by end of day two. If the jump station had been up it would have been a different story, a place to regroup for a while, but of course that was still a year out.”
A space station was under construction, to be in permanent orbit of Saturn, as a way station for travelers and a resting spot for starships. It was in the developmental phase and had been non-functional for both the Land and the Ocean. If it kept on schedule it would be available the next time one of the two starships jumped back.
A grin cracked Roan’s face wide, which changed his demeanor so drastically Kal’s mouth dropped a little. When he wasn’t smiling he looked stern and a little scary, like Gunn. Maybe he’d waited a long time to tell this story to someone who didn’t know it. “Our captain would rather have stalked the rings of Saturn until we ran out of everything and floated away than declare a misfire.”
Kal allowed Roan a degree of hyperbole here, to make his story better. She couldn’t help feeling a little smug about how quickly she’d found the portal when it had been her turn.
“So along about the third day, our pilot’s gone gray and jumpy, the captain’s all grim and quiet, you could hear a pin drop on the bridge. One of the crew rated for our ship puts up a shaky hand. ‘I’ll give it a shot.’ Everyone glares at her, but what else are we going to do? They’d even tried autopilot to see if the AI, Mech, could get us through. No dice.”
Kal couldn’t keep her thoughts from showing. Imagining someone taking the controls from her for the portal, the best part, was horrendous. She couldn’t blame the pilot for glaring. It was all about the mission, though, and in the end every crew member and passenger had to acknowledge that and not let ego get in the way.
“Pilot, called Stacer, she unbelts herself—we’d all been in the damn belts and suits for three days, so you can imagine the state of us—stands up, and gives a three musketeers bow to Tess, the adjunct pilot, shall we say…”
Kal laughed.
“Tess gets herself slithered into that pilot’s seat quick as a lizard. Dead silent on the bridge again. Until Tess starts singing. Some song for calling in the fish for those out at sea. And damned if within twenty minutes aren’t we lit up infrared like a stage set and locked in. Slipped us through like parchment under the door.”
Parchment…Kal wondered if Roan was from one of the islands that had reverse engineered themselves into a pre-digital age. The word parchment gave her a warm feeling, like words that evoked her special place on Earth: qui
ll (porcupine quills, such as her aunt had used to make art in clothing and purses), hickory, arrow, calf. Parchment, the way he said it, was a call to home, and she heard it. He missed Earth.
“Slick as a whistle.” He glided his arm forward in a snake-like motion.
“It was a smooth jump, then.”
Roan made a face and looked up out of the corner of his eyes, like someone remembering something unpleasant.
Kal grinned. “Have some barfers, did you?”
“The smell, Kal, I’m telling you. And we couldn’t get it cleaned up for ages even though everyone was so rattled and sick—we had to spend the whole time running check after check and looking out for asteroids off Sextant and comparing holos with the explorer unit to make sure we’d emerged in the same place. It was refined chaos, but chaos nonetheless.”
It was fun hearing this now, after the fact, when she knew they’d made it through. The relief of hearing about someone else’s screwed up mission was intense. Her spine seemed to lighten, and her shoulders rolled back easier. They weren’t the only ones playing Cowboys and Indians, (or Indians and Cowboys, as Kal thought of it), for want of a better phrase, yee-hawing their way through space by the skin of their teeth. Roan’s figures of speech were rubbing off on her.
“What about you?”
He put his hand to his chest. She thought he was about to get indignantly defensive.
“Me? You think I was immune? Hell, no. I threw up with the best of them. We’re talking projectile. Let’s only be grateful we have gravity on the ships now, or the whole bridge would have been a floating vomitorium.”
“Oh, no.” Kal squeezed her lips together, trying not to break into laughter picturing the whole scene. She had some kind of rank and decorum to maintain, even though Roan already felt like someone she knew. He treated her as if he’d known her for years, and she couldn’t help but respond. They were part of a rare group of humans, so they were in a sorority of sorts.
“Then the arguments started. Supposed to maintain our rank, decisions come from the captain, right?” Roan shook his head, making a tsking noise with each shake of his head. “Not then.”
Kal’s eyes widened. “You lost chain of command?”
“You gotta consider what types we’re getting willing to do this jump, after what happened on that other ship. We’re half skilled biohab engineers, half daredevils. Get munched by the portal? No problem. Might be lost forever light years from home? Eh, we’ll risk it.”
A grimace passed over Kal’s face like a cloud. It was a cliché, yet too close to true to be disregarded, that spacefarers were lacking internal stimulation and searched for it through wide missions, far away, to get the spice from life more resourceful people found closer to home. It had nothing to do with intelligence, but people liked to say spacefarers didn’t have enough going on inside to have a normal life on Earth and had to go further afield to know they were alive. It wasn’t a compliment. While they were admired, lauded at times, they were also derided for their malfunctioning neurons. Too slow, gotta go, was one of the choice phrases Earth-dwellers liked to say about the spacefaring type. Whether the Earth was too slow or the spacefarers was left up for interpretation.
“How did that affect what happened after you got through the portal?”
“We had an anomaly. It caused a certain degree of panic.”
“We didn’t hear about this.”
“Yeah. Well.”
The Land had been supposed to leave needed information for them as soon as it got beyond the portal’s sway, in tiny satellites launched in orbit around the nearest planet. The Ocean had received documentation about the system and the names they’d given planetary bodies, but nothing about an anomaly.
Roan rubbed at his stubble. He looked like someone who wasn’t sure if he should say something or not. And knew it was too late not to.
“What was the anomaly? Something with your AI? Mech, you called it?”
“No, nothing like what you went through. Are going through. Mech is solid.”
“So is Rai, to be clear. Rai came around. She saved us.” Kal had to speak up for Rai. It gave her a bad feeling thinking someone on Demeter would look at what Rai had done and want to condemn her for it. It hadn’t been right, but Rai had learned. An AI should be allowed growing pains, should be allowed her sins in complex circumstances, just as a person was. Would Rai be judged by someone on Demeter?
Roan’s eyebrows quirked at Kal’s defense of Rai, but he didn’t say anything further about it. “We saw some shit.”
“What kind of shit?”
Roan’s eyes shifted back and forth, like someone in REM. “Our visibility was very low. We were in the midst of the rings of Sextant. It was like a dust storm. We had echolocation to sense any asteroid approach, but it was dangerous as hell.”
“That’s weird. We were clear of the rings when we emerged.”
“You were. Huh. That’s what I wondered. The pilot flying the ship, Tess—not the usual pilot and not the captain—said she knew how to get out of it and wouldn’t heed the captain’s orders. I’ve never seen anything like it in my time.”
“Violated a direct order?”
“Yes. More than one.”
“Did the captain override? Or Mech?”
“Thing was, we were dodging the bigger stuff like…” He made whooshing movements with his arm. “She was plugged into the zone. You couldn’t talk to her. All she was focused on was flying. And she got us out.” He was silent for a bit, chewing his lip. “Meanwhile, when she wasn’t responding to orders, the other crew started yelling at her, yelling at each other until the captain bellowed at them to shut up.”
“Had that happened before?”
“Never. It was like everyone lost their minds. It turned out, she kept hers. We were safe and clear. She guided us right out of it. Some close calls, but barely a scratch.”
Kal thought about how she’d felt in the portal, as if she were guiding the ship with her mind. It hadn’t felt like she was touching the controls at all. It was dark in the portal, so her sensation was all she had to go on. The dark sucked all the light into itself and didn’t give any back. A swooping plunge of absence in her gut brought her back a fraction of the strangeness in the portal, and she lost her breath. She remembered the time left there, waiting for her, she thought, until she came back through again.
“You said you saw some stuff,” she reminded him.
He nodded. “Some of us did. We saw these lights, streaks, as we came out of the rings. Like bioluminescence. I had this moment where I thought we were underwater, that we’d gone from space to water, some giant ocean on a giant planet. And we were traveling underwater like a submarine. I thought something had gone wrong and we were in the oceans of Sextant, that Tess had flown right into the planet and into the sea.”
“Did other people think that?”
“I don’t know. The captain didn’t mention anything, and I didn’t want to be the odd man out, so I waited until later and found a couple people who’d had the same hallucination, or whatever it was.”
“But the others didn’t see it?”
“Nobody else brought it up. The science wonk who saw it said he thought they were trailers and some effect of the ring dust gave an underwater effect, like the bits were like the stuff floating underwater in the ocean when you open your eyes, you know? And some stuff looked like bubbles, and that with the bioluminescence gave that oceanic impression. He conferred with the captain. She didn’t question it, accepted his explanation but she didn’t mention any hallucination.”
Kal sensed he was holding something back. She thought carefully how to get it out of him.
“Was there something more that made you think you were underwater. Something more definitive?”
Roan’s face was blank. He stared at her through the holo. She stared back, keeping her expression neutral.
“I saw a creature.”
She nodded.
“It was like a whale, but
not. It had paddles like a sea mammal, a long neck, a long tail. When I blinked, it was gone.”
“Did you share that with the others?”
“No. You’re the only one I’ve told.”
Kal felt exasperation bubble up like fizzy water inside her. If they didn’t share data they were toast. “Why the hell not?”
“It didn’t make sense.”
“Okay,” Kal said, channeling Chyron, their ship’s therapist, whose patience was legendary.
“I’ve told you now. You had crazy stuff happen. You know what it’s like.”
“That’s true.” She couldn’t argue with that.
“What is Demeter like?”
Roan smiled and tilted his head. “You don’t know.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s bigger than Earth. It has two moons. We haven’t named them, just calling them one and two. Captain thought you’d like to name them in a ceremony once you’re here.”
Kal put her hand over her heart. “That’s very kind.”
“We’re in our biohabs, living in there, but the atmosphere is breathable. Takes a little getting used to. The plains are wide, tall yellow grasses.”
Inclining her chair back a few degrees, Kal felt comfortable enough now to close her eyes, imagining the wonders she would see as Roan told Demeter to her like a fairy tale.
4
Ocean To Demeter
That evening, Kal ran a loop through the ship. Sometimes when she got lonely, she ran, because it felt like other people could be there just around the corner, resting in their cabins or eating in the mess. Inger at work in the infirmary. Sif was the one in a pod, in her fantasies. Why hadn’t Rai tried to get Sif alone in a pod and shoot her off, instead of the reverse? It would have solved the same problem. Or would Sif in a pod be more dangerous than Sif in jail? What would Sif do, armed with a pod?
When Kal had first accepted this was her mission now, co-piloting the ship to Demeter herself, with Rai, she had pictured it differently. Her aunt in holo form was a comfort, she’d thought, and she’d ask her to be around all the time. She’d thought there would be long conversations with Rai, such as they’d had before.
Call of Worlds Page 3
