Nara

by M. L. Buchman

  Hank rejoined the conversation like a clap of thunder. “So you wish us to discard a fascinating possibility in exchange for being turned into an advanced brute squad. And what specific plans do you have for the ‘Icarus Squad’?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “What?” Hank burst to his feet forcing Ri to give way in the small space and sit on a stool by the Wanderer model. “You come to us with a wild notion of understanding the human psychological motivations, something that no one other than the world leader, Premier Stevens, has ever dared attempt, and you toss that lightly aside. Then you ask us to assist in arming the ship against her own inhabitants and you offer no suggestions?”

  “Nope. Not a one.” It wasn’t the right moment for a smile, but Ri couldn’t help herself. She covered her mouth with one hand and was only rescued by Sicily slapping his butt affectionately and bursting into laughter herself.

  “Well, I certainly haven’t a clue. I’m an astrophysicist,” Hank grumbled still pacing. Then he pointed a finger at Sicily. “And don’t you get any ideas, girl. You aren’t young enough to learn a new trade either.”

  Sicily pulled him back to the couch and kissed him on the cheek. “I love you too, Henry.”

  “Need some damn psychologists and an armed brute squad.” He looked only slightly pacified.

  Ri nodded her head. “Sounds fine, but all I have is you guys.”

  “We have a command center. That’s a start,” Jill Emers, the ship’s pilot and second-in-command, pointed a long-fingered hand at the decking. She pushed her shoulder-length hair back behind her ears.

  Donnie sat up, accidentally planting an elbow in Wright’s belly. He let out a whoosh and a groan which she ignored.

  “I could hack into Stellar’s data banks. You’d be amazed what you can learn from a little statistical analysis of things.”

  “Like what, you young pup?” Hank leapt back to the attack.

  Ri knew from the records that she and Donnie were both in their early twenties. Donnie might pass for sixteen with her close-cut dark hair and round face, but she gave back as good as she got. Far better than Ri would.

  “Like is it always the same folks landing in the autodocs? Might that be interesting, you old windbag? Like what group’s having the worst sickness records and what do the suiciders have in common? Maybe we’ll even find serial killers and death games and secret—”

  “Kindly put your overactive imagination on hold and save that for your vids.”

  Jane, the chief mechanic, didn’t move at all from her slouch in a chair. “We can review the schematics of the ship and see what might be useful for crowd control if things grew a little too rowdy.”

  Ri watched as they brainstormed the problem. She understood now why Jackson let them go rather than attempt to control them. The Icarus crew had to be small, so every person had to be excellent in their own field, as well as adaptable to whatever was needed for the next task. They proposed and solved problems she’d never considered. She knew about the ship’s present security systems and some of the computer’s data structures, but they were rapidly making the idea their own.

  Donnie didn’t even bother to ask her for any codes. She swung a terminal into place and dove in. By the time Ri could dodge past Hank Christianson’s flailing arms as he wafted one idea into extinction while giving birth to another, Donnie had already hacked into the system. Within moments she was code-deep in places Ri had never seen.

  Jackson drew up his legs and shifted until he was sitting upright in his chair. Everyone fell silent, even Hank, despite being in the midst of explaining to anyone who would listen the proper structure to manage a team of eight, scientific or not.

  Captain Turner slowly looked around the room receiving a nod from each of the other seven members of the crew. Finally he faced Ri. The entire crew kept their eyes on him and she realized that if he said no, that would be it. No anger. Perhaps debate, but the final decision was his no matter how casual he was about it. He commanded this crew because he had their respect.

  Ri had led her hunters because she was the best. It suddenly struck her that no matter how he made it appear, Jackson Turner was the best at what he did as well.

  His face was calm for a long moment as he looked at her. There wasn’t even a breath to be heard, everyone must be holding theirs just as she was. Then a smile burst forth and lit his whole face.

  “You have your team, Security Chief Jeffers.”

  She couldn’t speak. She stood and offered a deep bow of thanks. The Icarus team would make a fine group, as good in many ways as her hunters. And she’d never lost a one. Her breath caught…until she’d lost them all.

  # # #

  Hank and Rolovsky rapidly became involved in an intense argument over the relevance of certain types of psychological profiling systems. Sicily called up an ancient novel that Ri didn’t recognize. She wondered if “wuthering” was a typo or if the word had dropped out of the language. Sicily leaned her back on her husband’s shoulder, rested the palm screen on her knees and didn’t seem to mind at all when he gesticulated grandly in his argument.

  She might be reading, but the comments she dropped into his tirades gave them coherence and direction. Her guidance as essential to his process as his own thoughts.

  Donnie and Wright disappeared into a haze of holos of system architecture of Stellar One. Occasionally a hand would appear, dragging one section aside and replacing it with another.

  The Wanderer’s model was shoved, with no ceremony and little care, into a locker below one of the viewers. Jane and Jill were hunched close together over a tabletop display staring down at various ship’s schematics and making careful notes.

  Jackson had stretched out his legs and closed his eyes. He was asleep almost instantly despite Rolovsky pounding the chair’s arm and accusing the Icarus’ chief scientist of being dumber than a native-born Loonie. There was a smile on Jackson’s slumbering face, all this must seem like home to him.

  No one paid attention when Ri stood and headed from the lounge. A short corridor led past a galley, then two emergency air lockers that looked like they could turn into airsuits if one crawled into the narrow space. Next was the airlock they’d entered by and the Captain’s and pilot’s quarters. Two hatches opened through the floor; perfectly normal in zero gee, but it gave her a moment of vertigo. She stepped across quickly onto the solid deck and entered the control room.

  Levan had taught her to fly flitters and the like, but this was something else again. Controls and displays ranged around the two forward seats. A wide variety of readouts were embedded in the ceiling. There was a clear plas port above and below, probably as some navigation aid.

  Space was tight, not an open bit of wall or ceiling. All the controls and system’s readouts covering the many stations on the command deck of Stellar One were crammed into a space smaller than her security console. She turned around and saw she’d entered through six other stations stacked two high behind the pilots’ chairs. Short ladders led up and down into the spaces for when they weren’t at zero-gee.

  Ri didn’t need to know what each station was to figure out who occupied it. Sicily’s was neat and had some sort of multi-colored, hand-sewn cloth hanging along one side that contrasted nicely with the soft blue walls. It took a moment to realize it was several images, all of brightly-colored chickens.

  Her husband’s neighboring station had clearly been attacked by a whirlwind. Journals, notes, three commpads, including one of Sicily’s, none in their interface cradles, were scattered across the work surface. A large lump of rock was strapped into one corner. That had to be a piece of the Wanderer that he’d collected during the Icarus’ rendezvous before it splashed into the sun. Ri dragged her gaze away from the last remaining piece of the planet killer.

  Donnie’s screen was the one covered with small plas toys that must be aliens from some of her fa
vorite vids. Wright’s nav console directly above displayed several pictures of Donnie clowning it up. There wasn’t a single shot of her at rest. The other two upper stations were relatively neat. Rolovsky apparently did have an interest beyond cooking, a picture of a bound man hanging upside down in a glass tank was pinned to the wall. Paraphernalia from magic tricks lay scattered about. Jane had several ship’s components torn apart on her workbench, each meticulously labeled, and a small painting of a cat.

  The two command seats were impersonal, but there was little room for any trimmings. In addition to the main forward viewers, there were a dozen smaller displays at each station as well as keypads in each chair arm.

  She stepped gingerly over the unbreakable port filled with whirling stars that was the space between the two chairs and slid into the left-hand seat. Unlike the floor portal, the main viewer was compensating for the fact that the ship was docked at the outer edge of Ring One. The image of the stars was steady. The constellation Hercules was off the bow. As they swung around Earth orbit, the constellations slowly drifted past and mighty Hercules gave way to Cygnus the swan and then Lyra. Katakana, Hakuchou, Koto. Old friends of long nights.

  “It’s good to have them back together.”

  Ri turned to see a wide awake Captain Turner slide down in the other command seat.

  “Haven’t sat on this side in quite some time. Reminds me of when I was first bouncing out of Hanoi.”

  “I’m sorry. Would you like your—” He gestured for her to stay put. The chair that she hadn’t noticed a moment before seemed to wrap around her. How many hours had the lanky Captain Turner sprawled in it? She shifted a number of times but her intense awareness of the contours of the cushions did not dissipate.

  “I haven’t ridden the pilot seat since my first command with ‘your’ Captain Conrad sitting over here. Three weeks as pilot, then I turned Captain. I had the answers to everything back then.”

  Ri looked at him, but he watched the stars.

  “Simpler times, though they seemed pretty exciting to us. We were supplying colonies on two worlds. Devra and I hauled the first ever run of Loonie manufacturing back to Earth. The Juno Jumper was coming into shape in high-Earth orbit and needed materials without having to fight them up the gravity well. I captained the first couple runs of that and Devra jumped from Loonie Shuttle pilot to Captain of the Martian Hopper when Sedgewick ate some stray space junk in low orbit.

  “Devra and I developed the Station Slider over the comm during long hauls for servicing the LaGrange Point colonies. While I was out at Io, they offered Devra Stellar One. Then I grabbed the Icarus for a change of pace. We were supposed to do a Mercury survey on the way home. The whole solar system was just waiting for us to take it, but she always wanted to reach for the stars. They seem awfully far away now, don’t they?”

  Ri could only nod, but he didn’t turn to see. Captain Turner too had dreams. And had lost them. Again, another layer to disabuse his chosen persona of disaffection.

  “Aw, shit.” He slapped a control and the viewers blanked to the same soft blue as the walls.

  “Didn’t mean to go and get all nostalgic on you.” Now that his bright eyes and wide smile were focused on her, she felt pinned to the chair.

  “It’s okay.” Her mouth was dry. She hadn’t eaten today, not even a sip of beer at the Desert Pub. “I really should…”

  “One question they haven’t hit yet.” He dialed up two beers and handed one to her. “Here, this might loosen you up a bit.” His easy manner made it difficult to be offended even if she wasn’t tight-wound. She simply observed before acting.

  She considered dumping it over his head anyway, but her throat was dry and the first sip did taste good going down. She set it in the holder dangling from the under edge of the left-hand keypad.

  “What question?”

  “What happens if things get ugly out there? What level of force will be necessary?”

  “The ship’s article’s—”

  “Are meaningless. My guess is it will get much worse before it gets better. Ring One is all nice and pretty. In R2 I saw a couple of black eyes. I haven’t made it to the other rings yet, but I’d guess it gets rougher the farther you go from command.”

  “It does. Now that you mention it, though I hadn’t noticed it before. We’ve got to do something. I just don’t know what.”

  He slid down in the pilot’s seat and took another swallow of his beer.

  “They’ll figure it out. They always do. Sure is good to have the team together again. You’ve set them up right nice. I owe you, pretty lady. I owe you big time.”

  # # #

  Ri opened her eyes. 0130 hours. 0130 and there was a man snoring in her bed. Snoring loudly. As her eyes adjusted to the dim glow cast by the readout, she saw the ceiling sloping down toward her feet. Not her bed. Instead of a door, an airlock sealed the room. A narrow desk and chair completed the luxury of the Captain’s suite.

  Ri closed her eyes. Her low blood sugar mixed with a pint of beer had aberrated her judgment sufficiently that she’d been swept off her feet by Captain Jackson Turner’s laser-blast smile and hard body. The silken sheets whispered over her skin revealing that her feet were not the only thing swept aside.

  Her feet landed in a wadded up pile of shipsuits and it took several tries before she disentangled hers. It was only when the closure didn’t work normally that she discovered the suit had been turned inside out, for reasons she didn’t want to remember. Sealing the closure anyway and jamming on shoes, she slid out the door and left the sleeping commander about his business.

  The lounge was silent. Rolovsky’s massive frame snoozed on the couch, someone had draped a blanket over him. He slept quietly, unlike his commander. The table display was covered in electronic notes nearly hiding the schematics of Stellar One beneath, Jill and Jane had clearly spent hours dissecting the ship’s systems. The cycling of the main airlock didn’t cause Rolovsky to twitch in the slightest.

  0130. Two-and-a-half hours until her watch. Not enough time to sleep, she knew that all she’d do is berate herself for giving in to Captain Jackson Turner’s dubious charms. Obvious charms, dubious chance of any meaning behind them. A good run would at least purge the last of the beer from her system, but she certainly didn’t want to run in her usual R1 maintenance level, passing beside the sleeping Captain every three kilometers.

  R2L0, when she finally arrived there, was all torn up. The mess from the explosive decompression accident still hadn’t been cleaned up. It looked little different from her inspection shortly after the patch had been put in place. Shoring girders turned the corridor into a tangled maze.

  The peephole in the emergency airlock revealed nothing at first. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see stars up and to the right where the L1 blowout had occurred and taken over a hundred people with it. They would never know the cause. The engineers swore it wasn’t their fault which left few other options, some drunken idiot taking a moly torch to a portal is about the only thing that could cause such a breach.

  Of course Ri could attest to how stupid beer could make someone. She was now a conquest of Captain Conrad’s friend. She started her journey over to R3, she’d never run there before.

  Where would his charm be next directed? The dashing redhead? Would he even miss a beat because Ri wasn’t there when he woke up?

  And there went her chance of working well with the Icarus crew, she’d just slept with their beloved Captain and then snuck off like a thief in the night. Maybe they were used to that, but she wouldn’t be able to face them. She needed their skills. She needed the enthusiasm and energy they’d shown last night. Time for a new plan, Ri, you certainly botched the last one.

  R3 had a composting unit disassembled for maintenance. The parts were scattered across the corridor completely blocking her efforts to wear out her body. This was really getting r
idiculous.

  What degree of stubbornness dragged her back up to the core and down to R4L0 was hard to determine, but if she kept going at this rate, she just might end up running out in the vacuum of the unfinished wreckage of R5. And it wasn’t even spinning, no rotationally induced gravity there.

  She trotted along for the first lap of Ring Four, beneath the green of the ag bays, white piping of the Arctic, and the green of the next ag bays. Another quarter rotation and she’d have found a clear route to run, far from the madness of Ring One. Far from her command duties. Far from the gravity well of Captain Jackson Turner.

  Ri leaned into the ever-upward slope as she headed beneath the green-brown of the jungle’s support systems. Full circuit. No obstacles. She kicked into a hard run, her body screaming at first, but by the end of the second lap she’d settled into the long, loping run that had once been so natural to her. Natural as breathing, natural as running through Nara. Here she didn’t even have to worry about attacks by predatory cadres. No one to keep safe.

  She flew down the corridor. By lap three, kilometer nine, the oxygen deprivation had set her legs to tingling until she lost awareness of when they were in contact with the decking and when they weren’t. The echoing slap of her footsteps became a mesmerizing song, a symphony of flowing air and blood, a concert of silence. No one to need her. No one to find her. Perfectly invisible within a ship of thousands.

  The soft echoes of her own feet, could be the Cadre. She had built the most feared hunters Nara had seen in a long time. Perhaps the most dangerous in the entire history since the Crash and Smash that had destroyed her race, her country. The economic Crash and the engineered earthquake Smash, the end of Japan and the creation of her world. She could feel Ninka off her right shoulder and Koukou close behind. She narrowed her eyes to the merest slits against the wind and sailed down the passage with her memories wrapped close about her.

  A great blackness slammed down in front of Ri.

  No chance to scream before she crashed into it.