Nara

by M. L. Buchman

  She forced her attention outward, away from the past. The lingering memory of smoke filled her suit until she had to cough several times to clear it out of her lungs.

  Bryce led them to the very edge where a support strut reached from the L1 deck all the way up to the L4 roof. As if by mutual consent, they stopped there and each wrapped an arm around the post.

  Beyond the edge was a vista of stars. They swept unbroken before her except for the glittering crescent moon, the narrow sliver of the glass surface shone in the sun which was somewhere behind them.

  With the reminder of dead Nara behind her, Ri could breathe here. Deep. Slow. Calm. The pressure of the corridors dropped away. There was freedom among the stars. She blinked and then rubbed her stomach with her free hand. No nausea. She’d never been afraid of heights, but living in the spinning world of Stellar One she’d nearly forgotten that the myriad stars were not moving with them.

  “Damn.” Bryce’s whisper reminded her she was not alone. “Damn, that’s beautiful.”

  “Damn,” she echoed softly. She could find no better words. The Earth was a silvery white crescent off to the right. The glittering moon was setting as they soared around the planet. The sun was automatically blotted out by their helmet screens.

  “Moonset.”

  Bryce twitched and turned away. “Hate that.”

  “But…” It was the perfect counterpoint to the image that filled her apartment wall.

  “Bad memories.” He turned himself using the pole until he was facing her, though she couldn’t see his face. “Okay, why are we really here?”

  Ri unclipped the suit-link cable from her utility belt and handed the end to Bryce. She couldn’t see his expression, but his pause was as articulate as a raised eyebrow. Finally he clicked the connection home and her helmet became alive with the sound of his breathing. It was as if they were sitting inside the same suit. She was glad he couldn’t see the heat rising to her cheeks.

  “Voice check. Can you hear me, Ri?”

  “Loud and clear. Is your radio circuitry off?”

  Two clicks sounded loudly in her ears. “Everything except the tracking beacon.”

  Ri did the same and felt suddenly cut off from the ship. Except for a light tether and their arms around the post, they were no longer a part of Stellar One. Alone and self-reliant, they were now in their own little self-contained world.

  “Well?”

  Every word she’d practiced on their way here flitted out of her grasp like a seal swimming off into the bottomless ocean of stars before them. The soft sound of his breathing made it impossible to concentrate. She tried to wipe her forehead. Her suit glove clicked on the faceplate.

  She swung around the post until she was face-to-face with Bryce. Against safety rules, she dropped the heavy, silvered shield from her helmet and saw that Bryce had already done the same. Because they were holding onto the same post, they were nearly nose-to-nose. He smiled at her from so close she could kiss him with barely moving, except for the two helmets.

  “There was a message. A while ago.”

  This time she could see his eyebrows raise.

  “ ‘All my hopes live on in you.’ ”

  He flinched as if she struck him across the face.

  “It was signed: BRS.”

  “I know.” His voice was barely audible despite the clarity of the link and he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “We never announced that. How could you—”

  “I know.” His voice was flat.

  “There was more.”

  “What?”

  “An attached file, a big one. We don’t know what it is. We can’t unlock it.”

  That got his attention back to her.

  “I’ve set up a lab. The Icarus crew are helping me. And many of the Stellar’s scientists. We’re hoping to solve the crisis before we are all dead. We’re missing a crucial element. And when I realized that your parent had sent that message, I wondered what he had sent and if perhaps you could unlock it.” It all came out in a single hurried breath. And she didn’t dare breath in against the possibility of hope.

  Bryce’s eyes unfocused for a moment and then shot wide.

  “The genome data. You want the fucking genome data?”

  She was so taken aback by his shout all she could do was nod.

  Bryce pushed away hard. The short belt-line that attached her to his suit jerked him to a halt as she banged her head against the back of her helmet hard enough to make her vision swim. Her arm, still around the post, was nearly dislocated.

  “You’re insane!” His voice pounded against her ears. “Are you sure that’s what it is?”

  “I think so. It’s certainly big enough. But it’s encrypted and—”

  “Do you have any idea what you’re asking?”

  “I think I do. I…”

  “You don’t have a fuckin’ clue!” Bryce pointed toward the blinding face of the bright Earth. The motion caused him to spin slowly clockwise. He corrected with a vicious sweep of his arm.

  “I saw what he did with that damned knowledge. I lost friends to that damn data! Good people! One day your best engine man doesn’t show up to the project. You give a call and find out he never existed. All records gone. Connie. God! Connie! You want to uncork that madness? Who made you God?”

  Ri wanted to curl up and hide from Bryce’s fury. She hadn’t lived through the years of the terror perpetrated by the WEC forces and their portable genetic testers. She took a deep breath. But she had survived a terror of her own. Nara. She had faced the aftermath of Nara and survived to witness, not to generate, the data of Wilkson’s Nara Effect. She wrapped a length of the belt-line in her fist and gave it a sharp pull.

  Bryce was jerked toward her because her arm was still anchored around the post. She ignored the wrenching pain. Bryce braced himself off the support, but she grabbed him by the chest plate and hauled him in until their helmets clicked together.

  “I lost people too, goddamn it! Don’t think I don’t feel the same pain and fear. You’re right, I don’t have a clue what it was like to lose your people. I don’t know what it is like to swim in the fear of his memories. But you sure as hell don’t know what I’ve lost either. The damned WEC even watched and measured our deaths in Nara without helping. You have no idea how I feel.”

  She pushed him away. He’d suddenly gone limp like a rag doll and simply floated to the end of the tether and hung there.

  “I’m way open to ideas, Bryce. But at the moment, this is the only one I’ve got. The Icarus crew risked their lives to set up a safe lab. Stellar One’s bioengineers have agreed to risk their lives inside that lab. I just need the goddamned key to unlock that data and see whether or not it will save us.”

  For a moment, Bryce stared at her, then he focused somewhere else. A shiver ran across his features.

  “No. I’m sorry.” His voice sounded small and far away. “I remember what it can do. Especially in the wrong hands.” He looked down at his gloved hands, perfect copies of his parent’s, for a long moment before closing them slowly into fists.

  “I can’t.”

  Fury washed through her. She unclipped her safety line and threw it at him. She kicked off the post back toward the center of R1 and the unfinished lift shaft back to the core.

  “Wait.” She’d forgotten about the suit-link spooling out behind her. “I can’t get back aboard without you.”

  She was half tempted to unplug it and leave him here. She rounded on him. “Why are all men so weak? Levan wasn’t weak. Nor your parent by the sound of it. Where is a Bryce Randall Stevens Sr. when I need one?”

  “Destroying Japan and leaving you to rot.”

  Sliding her silvered helmet shield back into place, she unplugged the suit-link before he could say more. She didn’t turn on the suit radio during their return journey. O
nce she’d hatched him through to where he could unsuit and drop back into R4 without thumbing in, she continued on her way. The few who saw a person in a full suit moving through the R1 residence levels did nothing more than gawk.

  In L0, she dumped the suit and ran. She ran through the pain in her side. The pain in her wrenched arm. The pain in her still unhealed kneecap. The pain in her heart.

  She ran until her anger at Bryce, and Jackson, and Levan, and the Zenbu had burned away. She raced out of reach of Jackson’s broad smile and Bryce’s gentle one. At last nothing but gasped air and pounding feet remained. Nothing beyond an orbit within R1L0 aboard a spaceship circling a dead planet.

  “Shit.” The real world slammed back in with that thought and she staggered to the side of the corridor. She caught her shoulder on a maintenance ladder and spun to the decking. Her legs screamed for oxygen, the lactic acid was a million sharp knives racking her body. She couldn’t stop the tears. She curled up and wept until the pain receded.

  At length, she struggled up the ladder that had tripped her and entered L1 opposite the hatch to the Icarus. She stumbled in only to find the entire crew in the lounge eating dinner.

  “You look like shit again, Ri.”

  “Thanks, Donnie.” She did her best to return the woman’s grin.

  “Want to join us?” Sicily started to rise, but Ri waved her back into her seat.

  “Need a shower first. Okay if I bum one?” She could feel herself stinking up the room just standing there.

  “Want someone to scrub your back?”

  “Dumb, Cap. I keep telling you, dumb.” Donnie clearly hadn’t cut her boss any slack since this morning’s fiasco.

  Ri made a show of opening the front of her shipsuit as she walked up the corridor toward Jackson’s quarters. “Sure, that’d be great.”

  “What?” Donnie screeched.

  “Told ya.” Jackson’s whisper carried to her as he rose from his chair. Let them argue it out. She just wanted to let go and forget everything. Stupid bartenders and no genome data for the scientists. They might as well just open the whole ship to vacuum right now and be done with it. Considering Nara, it might be the best idea.

  Her shipsuit in a crumpled pile on the floor, she cranked up the temperature until she could barely stand the steaming water. Jackson came in as she moved fully under the spray.

  “Now that’s about the prettiest thing I’ve seen in a good while.”

  Ri ignored him and stood with her face in the water letting its scorching heat wash her body and her soul clean. She closed her eyes and tapped for a round of soap. She started to rub it into her hair when another hand took over the job.

  “Shit! Ow!”

  She laughed as he scrabbled around and the water temperature dropped right to cold before recovering to lukewarm. Men were so useless.

  “You may have the nerve endings of a desert fox lying in the sun, but I sure don’t.”

  He resumed scrubbing her hair, his strong fingers digging at her scalp and she reveled in the ecstasy. Another round of soap and his touch began to drift down her body. She folded her hands on top of her head and leaned back against him as he traced the lines of her ribs.

  Ri let herself float in his arms as he explored her skin with soap and gentle massage.

  # # #

  Ri slapped Turner’s hand aside and rolled as far away from him as the bed allowed. Finding her mood not conducive to more sex, he rolled over and was snoring softly in moments. Middle of the late watch and now she was wide awake. Nara had trained her to be a light sleeper and to go on full alert immediately. There was no way to go back to sleep. She did lay there trying to decide why she’d ended up in his bed again, but had no idea.

  It was just as well he’d woken her, she had too much to do to sleep through a whole watch. She rose from the bed and pulled on a fresh shipsuit from a stockpile of various sizes she found in a drawer. Decent of him in a sick sort of way. She eased out of the room and closed the door on his building snores.

  She tip-toed through the lounge where Wright was crashed on a sofa. Donnie had probably wrapped the brightly-checked blanket around him. She continued down the corridor and descended into the starboard aft hold. Jenningson, a wiry little wisp of a man, sat at the console against the plas window.

  “Who’s inside?” The only other person present was inside the dirty lab. Jenningson barely glanced at her feet before turning his attention back to the console.

  “It’s Bamker here in the tank.”

  “What are you working on?”

  Bamker’s voice replied over the closed circuit. “Mouse tests. A while ago I altered this breed to have a significantly more human hypothalamus. We’re trying to understand how the endocrine system effects their eating habits.”

  Jenningson managed a nod of agreement from his position next to her. Ri pushed to her feet and paced the hold. She reached a wall and turned. In far too few steps she once again faced the chief scientist delicately pipetting single drops of clear liquid over mouse food. She turned away again and once more arrived at the window far too soon.

  “What’s that?”

  He didn’t falter or spill a drop as he replied. “Sugar placebo for the control group.”

  She was juggling the Icarus project. Station security. She hadn’t checked on the biomes in days. She still hadn’t caught up with the ag-bays never mind checking on the teams who’d been locking down vacant spaces.

  She turned and glared at Jenningson until he looked up at her.

  “A dozen biochemists, bioengineers, and geneticists can simultaneously carry out overlapping research on the finest workstations and equipment ever built by human engineering and you’re hand feeding intelligent mice. Can’t they do it themselves? They’ve been doing it for millions of years, you know, even without enhanced brains. Well?” She leaned over him as he cowered back finally throwing himself over his console to protect it. “Well?”

  “But Commander, you asked us to be sure it was safe. We’re using this as a subject to test the viability of these isolation systems and…and…so forth.” His initial burst of eloquence flagged as soon as he realized he was speaking aloud.

  Bamker crossed to the glass. “He’s right, Ri, we have to be very careful. Did you have any luck on the ‘how’ you went after?”

  She shook her head.

  He nodded and finally shrugged before turning back to his mice.

  He knew as well as she did that it was hopeless without the genome data.

  # # #

  Bryce lay in the small clearing and watched Jaron dancing around the sensor array on the far side. Jaron dodged over to another pickup to check its alignment for the tenth time.

  “What’s that?”

  Jaron was raising a set of stacked hoops jutting sideways from a thin telescoping pole. When it was about ten meters tall with ten hoops evenly spaced, he stopped and plugged it into a small box at the base.

  “Standard column.” Jaron scraped around under a bush until he uncovered a small junction box. He pulled out a power lead and ran it over to the apparatus.

  “And what’s that?” He’d agreed to join Jaron when he’d met him in the corridor after descending from the axis after his trip to R5. He’d found himself fascinated by Ri Jeffers as by no other woman in his past. And her connection to his mother made him feel something. More important? More alive?

  And then she’d demanded that he cast all that aside in favor of the knowledge his parent had wielded across the face of the planet.

  Bryce needed to just lie under the trees and forget everything for a while.

  Jaron pulled out a commpad and tapped a few keys. He glanced at the tower and consulted his display once more.

  “A standard column is for layered respiration analysis. Each loop is one square meter in area. Each is precisely one meter apart. Being separate
d vertically, I can spectrographically exam the variations in the molecular gas mix in the local atmosphere. I’m studying CO2 variations to see if our corrective actions have stabilized yet. I’m hoping to better understand the cycle along the jungle verge represented by this clearing.”

  Bryce shook his head and stared up at the hazy blue sky outlined by a ring of tall trees all around the clearing. It was like looking up a tunnel waiting for some cosmic pool ball to drop down upon you. Splat. There one second and gone the next.

  “I wish I had found your passion for something. Anything.”

  “Why haven’t you?” Jaron turned the ungainly array to the right and checked his pad again.

  “Good question.” Damn good question. He tried to count how many different jobs he’d held in the eight years since running away from his parent as a teenager. He lost count around twenty-five.

  “I guess I spent more time avoiding the past than doing anything with the present.”

  Jaron crossed the clearing and sat down on the low grass apparently satisfied with his adjustments. He propped the pad where he could glance at it easily. “I used to think that all there was of importance resided in my jungle. Robbie taught me otherwise. I traveled down into the Amazon Basin with Harold for seven seasons.”

  Bryce was amused at the smile on Jaron’s face. It looked out of place there, at least prior to the few days he’d been sleeping with Robbie.

  “The fourth year I came back and found Robbie. She was a student who someone had assigned to an abandoned Ecologic Station. We gave each other a pretty good scare. She was working with some of my old data.” He was grinning as he leaned back on his elbows apparently forgetting his readings.

  “I was so naive then about ant life cycle variations in river valleys that I was too embarrassed to even speak with her the first few days. Once I corrected the string for Atta, the leafcutter ants, her graphic showed other gaps in my data gathering. We worked together each summer after that until we came here together.”

  Bryce decided against reminding Jaron of how he and Harold had screamed together about being kidnapped to the stars by Bryce and his shuttle crew.