by Mel Keegan
The words were mocking, and Marin would not have known how to respond. In fact, it was Dario Sherratt who said from the door which opened into the dining room,
“There’s not one physicist’s bone in your body, is there, Leon?” He sauntered into the kitchen for wine and crackers, and inhaled the scents of baking fish. “Zunshu weapons are gravity based. They ride a gravity drive, yes?”
“Sure,” Leon agreed readily. “But what the hell does that mean?”
Dario looked lean and hard, Marin thought. The months in the field, in places like El Khouri and Kjorin, had pared him down to muscle and bone. The look suited him, like the white linen slacks and the loose silver-gray sweater that was slipping off one bare shoulder with a nice, downtown Sark chic, which matched the shorn hair and gelemerald stud earrings.
“It means,” Dario said with mock patience, “a device riding a gravity drive would have to drop out of e-space at least as far out as the edge of a Weimann exclusion zone, because the interplay of other heavy gravity wells – the inner planets, the star itself – would be more than enough to scramble its dropout coordinates, if it got too close. If the plan was for the device to detonate immediately when the drive shut off, the AI would have to know exactly, and I mean exactly, where it was before it did its business, or it could waste itself with a one-shot detonation in deep space. This kind of precision can’t be achieved with a dropout in any orbit close enough to destroy the planet in one hit.”
“Not by us,” Leon said dolefully. “You have no idea what the Zunshu can do.”
Three pairs of human eyes returned to Dario, looking for the answer to that one. Dario shrugged eloquently and fed several crackers into his mouth. “Mark and I have spent years, reverse engineering Zunshu technology, every scrap of it we could find. It was the two of us who predicted the ten minute window between a device showing up insystem and the detonation which would leave a great, yawning hole where Borushek used to be.”
“Ten minute?” Travers sounded surprised. “Everyone’s talking about a three minute warning.”
“Two reasons,” Marin said quietly. “Margin for error. Ten minutes could be too long – the Zunshu are smart. Err on the side of caution. And then, if you give people ten minutes, a lot of the silly buggers will take twenty, and stop to use the bathroom before they run.”
“Exactly.” Dario wore a wry smile. “Tell them three, and they might be out in five. Also, three to five minutes is the average time for safe ignition sequencing on something like the Capricorn, the Tropheo, any of the civilian ships taking people out of here. In other words, any less than three minutes, and we can’t get out at all.”
The observation was laden with meaning. Marin set down his glass and pulled a stool up beside the workbench. “How sure are you of all this, Dario?”
“Sure enough,” Dario said cautiously. “The way we’re also sure enough of having a few weeks. Beyond this?” He shook his head, and the earrings caught a glitter from the lights. “We’re out.”
“And the human population of Borushek?” Travers asked with an odd hush.
It was Dario’s turn to sigh heavily. “How do you evacuate a world? You can’t, Neil. All you’d do is panic people, cause them to spend their last few minutes in an agony of fear, running and screaming. There are more than a hundred human colonies in the Deep Sky. The human population could lose fifty of them and still own this territory.”
“That’s a shitty way of seeing it,” Arlott growled.
“It is,” Dario agreed. “It stinks. But in the end, this is what it could come down to, kiddo, and the smart guys are the ones who admit it without needing to learn the hard way.”
“Resalq,” Roy accused.
“Resalq,” Leon admitted, and opened his arms. “Come here. You need a hug, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” Arlott went to him, was engulfed in large arms. His chin rested on Leon’s shoulder and he closed his eyes.
“Message from Tor,” Dario informed him. “If you don’t dish up soon, he’s going to grab a plate, hit the nearest ’chef and start without you. He’s starving … so am I.”
“Yeah, all right.” Arlott disentangled himself from Leon’s embraces and surveyed the vegetables. “I just have to flash these, and I’m done. Make yourself useful, Dario – tell Tor to make himself useful! Table. Silverware. Crockery.”
The long table would seat twelve, and Marin counted ten places when Dario was done. Tor Sereccio was working the ’chef, plating for himself, Mark and Leon while Roy flashed the vegetables and sauce, and Travers found himself dragooned into carrying glasses.
From the passageway beyond the dining room Mark’s voice carried clearly, but Marin could understand one word in five. He was speaking Resalq, conferencing with several people by comm, and most of what Marin could pick up was the names of ships, cities, people, times and dates. He mentioned his own ships several times, and he was almost certainly arranging flights, cargo, bulk storage.
When he appeared from the labs and offices deeper in the house, he wore a frustrated look and Marin did not have to ask. People could be idiots, and humans did not own the sole rights to stupidity. He gave Mark his hand as he stepped into the dining room, and gestured over his shoulder at the two Sherratt siblings and their partners.
“This is almost the first time I’ve seen you all under the same roof at the same time. I like it.”
“So do I,” Mark said with rueful humor which mocked only himself, “but at what cost? If this were a family gathering, I would be celebrating. I’ve never been able to lure them all into the same place at the same time, much less having you here too.”
“Family,” Marin whispered.
“Heleque.” Mark smiled almost sadly. “The roots of the word are ‘love’ and ‘people.’ Aehal and equesam. Put them together … family. And it’s the same in any language.”
An odd prickling caused Marin to rub his eyes as he watched Travers juggling plates between kitchen and dining room. “Mark, do you know what Harrison Shapiro is planning?”
“Oh, yes.” Sherratt leaned both shoulders on the wall just outside the arched doorway. “He’s asked me several times if I’ll join the mission. Fly with Lai’a to the other side of the sky. He invited you and Neil aboard too? No surprise. He wants the best with him.”
“And are you going?” Marin asked very softly.
“I … don’t know,” Mark admitted. “Part of me, and a large part, yearns to go. It’s the culmination of a very long life’s work. It will provide the answers to every riddle I’ve spent a great many years trying to unravel. But at the same time, my people are about to vanish again. New worlds, new dangers in the regions charted by the Aenestra, and which you humans have never broached. Nor,” he added pointedly, “have the Zunshu. The Aenestra mission scouted almost three thousand systems, and there is not one hint of Zunshu activity before they reached Orion 359.”
“Which is a nasty, noisy, dirty black hole system a lot like Hellgate,” Marin finished. “And there, the bloody Zunshu pop up again like toadstools.”
“Exactly.” Mark set his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. “We know what to stay away from. What to avoid, in order to avoid them. We can start again on any of twenty worlds which are enough like Saraine and even Borushek to make my people comfortable with little or no terraforming.”
And he was torn in two, Marin knew. Half of him wanted to be aboard Lai’a, finding those answers. The other half wanted to be with the Resalq diaspora, building new worlds, safe harbors where his people and humans alike would be safe from Zunshu and Confederacy.
“Dario and Leon,” Mark said in a quiet, husky voice, “have already told Harrison they’re aboard. He wants Barb, and you know she won’t say no. How could she? This is everything she’s lived for.”
“Everything you’ve lived for,” Marin observed.
With both hands, Mark rubbed his face hard enough to bring a flush to the normally olive cheeks. “I know. But it’s not t
hat simple, Curtis.”
“It never is,” Marin agreed. He set a hand on Mark’s shoulder. “If you want me to sign with you on the Carellan and let Shapiro lead this mission of his, go Zunshu hunting in Elarne … say it, Mark. I’ll come with you, as I always did, and where I go, Neil will go.”
The dark gold eyes were luminous in the soft light from the dining room. “You would do that?”
“I would.” Marin lifted his chin. “You’re no less my family than Neil is, and lately I’ve come to put a high value on family.”
“But I couldn’t tell you,” Mark said, and sighed. “It’s not my decision to make.”
“Oh … shit,” Marin said with an odd mix of passion and self-mocking humor. “You’re going to leave it up to me.”
“And Neil.”
“He’s already said it’s my call.” Marin looked from Sherratt and Travers and back. “You’re not making it easy!”
“When the time comes,” Mark said slowly, “it will be. Things can change. Will change. Before Lai’a enters Elarne much will have happened. We’ll know a lot more about the colonial situation, and even the Zunshu.” His eyes glittered with reluctant amusement. “You know, we’re still processing the Orpheus data. I have two signals that overlaid each other so perfectly, one was practically piggybacked on the other. The beacon from Ernst Rabelais’s Odyssey must have been transmitting from the same direction in both space and time as the telemetry returning from Vidal and Queneau. It was weird. Surreal.”
“A voice from the past.” Marin shivered. “Ghosts in the ether. Were you able to make any sense of the signal from the Odyssey?”
“Just a repeating, automated message,” Mark said tiredly. “A set of coordinates that don’t mean much, because the ship would have been drifting in space as well as time, and a brief message along the lines of ‘Help, am damaged, cannot maneuver.’ As you’d expect. From what I could see from the signal degradation, the Odyssey was drifting at right angles across temporal currents, literally surfing on gravity tides, a lot like the Orpheus. It can be done, Curtis. Mick Vidal did it – he proved the interior of Hellgate can be navigated.”
“And you…” Marin smiled up at him. “You would dearly love to be there when Lai’a does it.”
Sherratt returned the smile. “Of course I would. But not when the last of the Resalq are vanishing into the dark of what they’re already calling the Mare Aenestra. The name fascinates me, deriving from the ancestral Resalq for ‘pathfinder,’ and a word in a dead human language, Latin, meaning ‘sea.’ The Pathfinder Sea, named by, and for, two peoples who are becoming one in order to survive.”
Again Marin shivered. “And you would also dearly love to be there when it happens.”
“One lives a whole lifetime for just one of these chances, and –” he paused as Dario called out. “Ah. It seems we’re eating.” He set a hand on Marin’s shoulder. “And you’re about to meet the others. Try not to stare.”
To stare? Marin wondered what he meant for a moment, and then he knew. “The Kjorin survivors? From the stasis vessel?”
“Emil and Midani Kulich.” Mark pushed away from the wall, worked his shoulders around until Marin heard the pops and crackles. “Emil is the larger, heavier sibling. Midani is the more intelligent, but they’re both big, tough and smart. These were the hallmarks of their generation. You know their background, their history.”
What Marin knew of the centuries of the Resalq flight was grim. For generations, people like the Kulichs lived on ships which were tacked and patched and held together with hard work, prayer and welding. Their children were born in space and if they were lucky enough, lived long enough to call a planet home, discover the joys of sunlight, open water, green meadows and mountains, the ocean, before once again they had to flee when a squad of Zunshu automata found them.
He had never thought to meet people to whom their last waking memory was of those days, and his skin prickled as he hung back, watching the group gather at the table. The Kulichs entered the dining room from the high, arched doors leading into the lounge, and Marin murmured softly as they appeared.
They were both of Mark’s height; Emil was taller. Both skulls were hairless, and elongated into the strange, even elegant shape of the Resalq head. The limbs were too long to be human – the pelvis just that much too wide to be male, the eyes set a fraction too far apart, the nose too small and too wide to have the human ‘look.’ Clothes had be tailored specifically for them, and these Resalq were dressed in loose slacks and smock-style shirts, silkscreened fabrics in deep reds, golds, greens. Marin knew what the Resalq liked, and the exotic hues suited Emil and Midani Kulich. But it was their hands which made Main stare until he caught himself.
The hands of the ancestral, natural, unmodified Resalq were very alien indeed, with the extra knuckle to each digit and the second opposable thumb like a mirror of the first. Those hands had much more dexterity and strength than human hands. They could do things the human hand never could.
“I’m staring, aren’t I?” he said at last, catching himself.
Mark had hung back, waiting for him. “Yes. Try not to … but they’re used to it by now. Everyone stares at first, including people who should know better. Resalq of my generation can remember our elders, who looked much more like our ancestors.”
“They don’t mind – being alien, among their own people?” Marin asked quietly.
“Oh, they mind,” Mark said in a musing tone. “But they’ve been offered the gene therapies and the surgery to make them over into the forms we Resalq wear today, and they’ve declined. I can’t say I blame them. Remember, a little while ago, as far as their brains count time, they were among a whole Resalq community, and if they had seen a human, or a Resalq who had been modified like myself, much less like Dario and Leon, they would have stared!”
“The Raishenne,” Marin murmured. “They were on the Raishenne. You said the ship was lost, and all their people with it.”
“Yes. Many ships didn’t make it – I was on one of the lucky ones. The Freyana was refurbished to the best of our ability when we were able, and has been parked in a sensor blind on Saraine’s third moon since we found safety on that world.” Mark stepped into the dining room. “The AI has just been woken, its systems came online with a few hiccups. It’s delicate and difficult to maintain, because the technology is, of course, Resalq. Replacement parts are a dream, and nothing manufactured by humans fits! We’re blueprinting everything, in the faith that ships like the Wastrel, the Wings of Freedom, and Lai’a itself, will be able to manufacture replacement parts as the Freyana fails, piece by piece.”
Since the fabrication shops on the Wastrel were done making the mines which would be seeded in the path of the Fleet warships on approach to the Deep Sky colonies, Marin could see no difficulty other than time. Given a year, two years, the Freyana could be brought back to full operational standards, and human engineers like Ingersol, Fujioka and Jazinsky herself would stand in line to study her, reverse engineer the millennium-old technologies.
The smell of baked fish and flashed vegetables reminded him of how hungry he was. Travers was heaping noodles onto a couple of plates as Marin slid in beside him, and he found himself opposite Emil Kulich, with Travers on his right and Mark on his left. Roy Arlott was speaking in slow, measured Resalq. His pronunciation was very different from anything Marin was used to hearing, and he realized, Roy was learning how the language was spoken by native speakers – and not merely the Resalq of this century, whose accent had been bastardized by a dozen human dialects as well as Slingo itself.
The Kulichs were looking at Marin and Travers as Arlott gestured toward them, and Marin caught just enough to know he was making formal introductions. And then the taller, broader Emil smiled faintly and extended one of the strange hands toward Marin.
He said, in thickly accented Slingo, “Good evening, Major Marin. Midani and I are … how do you say? … in your debt.”
“For what?” Marin took the
offered hand, clasped it, felt its warmth and strength, before it was offered to Travers.
“For Kjorin,” Midani said in a lighter, softer voice. “We fight … have fought together. Fought Zunshu together, and have won.”
“Yes.” Marin shook Midani’s hand briefly. “All this must be very strange to you.” He spoke slowly, giving Arlott the chance to translate, if it were necessary. “Finding yourselves in a human environment would have been the last thing you expected.”
Arlott translated ‘environment’ and ‘expected,’ and Midani tried both words on his tongue while Emil said, “Human. So alien. Strange … but not strange like Resalq here. Like – ” he nodded at Dario and Tor. “These, I think are human.”
“I think you need to catch up with the world,” Tor Sereccio scoffed. “You’re a bit out of it, guys.”
Again, Arlott translated, and Emil gave Tor a disdainful look as Midani chuckled into a glass of acid-like red wine. Mark leaned closer, one hand on Marin’s forearm. “There is a certain reluctance for the Kulichs to accept much we’ve done in these last centuries. Remember, it’s all come as a massive shock to them. They find themselves alien in the midst of their own people. Of all the Resalq here in Riga, only the very oldest are recognizable as Resalq, if you know what you’re looking for, and even they are … different.” He held up his hands, flexed and turned them. “Of necessity.”
“Necessity,” Midani Kulich repeated, trying the word for fit. He was making a far greater effort than Emil to master the accent, learn the words. Emil leaned on Roy much more for translation, and when he spoke, the accent was thick enough to slice.
“We do what we must,” Mark said gently, patiently.
“And we,” Emil said, “must not be here.”
“At dinner?” Tor was teasing deliberately, and Marin got the strong impression, he did not much like the Kulichs.
“Here,” Emil repeated. “On Borushek, with humans. We must be … other place. Go.” He lifted one heavy brow at Roy and spoke at greater length in the Resalq.
