Nimbus

by Jacey Bedford

“What about those who aren’t Navigators or who don’t have implants?”

  “Some of us can see it, especially when we know what to look for,” Cara said.

  “In my case I had to see it through Ben’s eyes before I could see it for myself,” Ronan said.

  “My nephew can see it,” Ben said. “He doesn’t have an implant yet, though he’s showing potential.”

  “So you’re sure it’s real?”

  “Sure. Remember I’m in a ship with four limpet bombs attached, alone, in foldspace with a void dragon. Right?”

  She nodded.

  “We’re taught that void dragons aren’t real, but what if nothing is real inside foldspace—including you, the ship, the very air you breathe. What if it’s only real as long as you keep believing it’s real? The ship lost gravity, I kicked off and headed for the ceiling, but for a moment I guess I forgot reality. I shot through the skin of the ship into foldspace itself. I won’t bore you with the panic, but I suddenly realized I was still breathing. I grabbed the void dragon and hung on. It took me around the exterior of the ship, and I yanked off the limpets and hurled them away. Eventually, I found my way back into the ship, but I forgot to believe in air at some point. That was nearly a fatal mistake. I was in pretty bad condition by the time I made it home.”

  “You can put down most of that to hallucinations.”

  Ben nodded. “Agreed, but when I arrived back, there were no limpets on Solar Wind, and my implant was gone. I guess I’d forgotten to believe in it. I know. I know.” Ben raised his hand. “It can’t happen, but it did. You can ask the surgeon who replaced it.”

  “But why should it look like a dragon if it’s an alien entity—and I believe that’s what you’re trying to tell me—right? Why should it look like a creature from our own mythology?”

  “It’s telepathic to a degree,” Ben said. “But we don’t have common ground on which to base vocabulary or concepts. I believe it encountered a human at some time and took the most awesome image in his or her mind.”

  “I’m not sure the latest scientific papers are going to be any good to you,” Doctor Beckham said. “You’ve gone further than any other researchers I know of, though . . . there was something at a conference recently about the effects of belief in foldspace. Tell me, Commander Benjamin, are you the only person who has ever breached the skin of a ship and lived to tell the tale?”

  “He’s not,” Cara said. “We both did when we rescued Garrick from the Nimbus.”

  “Nimbus? What’s that?”

  “We don’t know for sure, but it’s terrifying,” Ben said. “A dark mass, sentient, smothering. Different from the void dragons—but we escaped and thought that was an end to it. However, colonies have been attacked in the last few months, and the attackers are all people who have been lost in the Folds, some a century ago, some last year. One, in particular, we can vouch for personally. Cara, Garrick, and I saw the Nimbus swallow her, yet she turned up in a ship which tried to attack a colony. None of the returnees think any time has passed.”

  “And when we brought two of them back to Crossways,” Ronan said, “while we were in the Folds, the Nimbus, or something very like it, began to develop on the Solar Wind, in the sick bay, where they were.”

  “So what does it all mean?” Cara asked. “What’s the true nature of foldspace?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Doctor Beckham said. “What you’ve told me pulls the rug out from under my research, but I’ll do you a deal. Take me into foldspace with my equipment, and I’ll try and answer some of your questions.”

  Cara wondered if Ben would go for that. It might mean extending the time he spent in foldspace, which was surely the last thing he wanted. She glanced at him, but his face was set in a resolute expression.

  “Done,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  PUZZLES

  “LET’S TALK TO DAVID CHO FIRST,” RONAN said. “I’ve been watching them both, monitoring their interactions. Kitty’s still adamant she knows nothing, but Cho has moments of remorse. I think we might be able to get through to him, appeal to his humanity.”

  “Do you want me there?” Ben asked.

  “I’d like you both to observe. Cara might pick up something that I miss.”

  So Ben and Cara ended up behind a one-way panel of glass-steel, opaque from the other side but so clear that, from their side, it might not have been there.

  Ronan ran through the usual set of questions about who Cho was, how he’d become a psi-tech, where he’d trained to fly. Cho had no problems answering until Ronan began to dig deeper into his last mission. Cho denied any knowledge of the Nimbus, but when Ronan described it and how it grew inexorably, swallowing everything in its path, he broke down and began to weep.

  “I think he’s ready to talk,” Ronan said. “We should get answers tomorrow.”

  But in the morning David Cho was dead. Not a mark on him.

  “I’ll do an autopsy, of course,” Ronan said. “But it looks as if he simply gave up and died.”

  “How’s Kitty?”

  “She’s fine, for now, but I’ll keep her under full surveillance.”

  An hour later Ronan was standing in Ben’s office, livid scratches on his face and a developing bruise on his forehead.

  “Don’t tell me . . .” Ben said.

  Ronan sighed. “Yes, partway through the exam, it was as if someone flipped a switch. Kitty went for one of my med-techs, as vicious an attack as I’ve seen. I swear if we hadn’t pulled her away, she’d have chewed the poor girl’s throat out. Afterward, she didn’t know she’d done it.”

  “Any permanent damage?”

  Ronan shook his head. “We stopped her in time. But Kitty’s going to have to be restrained or in lock-down.”

  “Whatever you think is best. We will need to talk to her, but perhaps you should try deep regression first. See if you can find the Kitty we used to know. She may have been a spy, but she wasn’t a monster.”

  Ben had arranged to take a new batch of potential pilots out for an assessment run. To be honest, he was pleased to be able to leave the problem of Kitty Keely for a while and get on with the business of flying, even if it was with a bunch of pilot-Navigators he hadn’t personally recruited.

  He thought three of the five might do very well. One was borderline but willing to learn. The other, sadly, had faked the initial test. There was no way in hell he’d ever seen a void dragon. Someone had probably primed him with the right answers in advance of the interview.

  After the training flight, Ben dropped into Garrick’s office to give him the assessments and advised him to send the dud back to where he came from. He was undoubtedly a competent pilot, but he didn’t have the instinct to fly a jumpship safely.

  “I had Syke in to see me this morning,” Garrick said. “He’s heard you’ve got Kitty Keely in your infirmary. You know he used to be sweet on her?”

  “Did he? I know he kept in touch after Orton died. I didn’t realize it had developed any further.”

  “You know Syke. It might have taken him a few more years to get around to telling her.”

  “Not exactly impulsive, is he?”

  “You’ve noticed.”

  “He still calls me Commander Benjamin.”

  “That sounds like Syke.” Garrick smiled. “Anyhow, I think he’ll come to see you about her, so be prepared.”

  “I’m not sure she’s ready for visitors. She tried to tear out a med-tech’s throat this morning.”

  Garrick winced. “Well, whatever you and Ronan think best. I thought I’d give you a heads-up.”

  “Much appreciated.”

  By the time Ben arrived at Blue Seven, Syke was waiting for him.

  “Kitty,” Syke said. “Alive.”

  “Yes,” Ben confirmed. “But the Kitty you knew might not exist anymore.”


  He wondered if allowing Syke to see Kitty would be good for either of them. Would it advance their understanding of what had happened to her in the last year, or would it simply be a kind thing to do?

  “I want to see her.” Syke’s voice trembled. His hands, balled into fists, betrayed his tension.

  “It’s not every day someone is resurrected,” Ben said. “Ronan’s still running tests.”

  “I want to see her.” Syke’s voice had gone very quiet, but his hands hadn’t relaxed.

  “As long as you know what she’s done,” Ben said. “She’s dangerous.”

  Syke shook his head as if he couldn’t envisage Kitty being dangerous.

  “She tried to rip out a med-tech’s throat this morning. We need to discover what happened to her. It’s been a year, but Kitty thinks she’s only been gone for a few days. Maybe it was, for her. Time in the Folds is strange. Or maybe she’s been brainwashed—manipulated. It only took one woman on Butterstone to poison the colony’s water supply. Imagine what someone determined and resourceful could do on a space station.”

  “I understand.”

  “I can show you the live feed to her room. She’s restrained, of course, and watched constantly.”

  “I’d like to see for myself.”

  Ben brought up the holo screen. In a room bare of obvious equipment, Kitty lay strapped to a contour couch. A female med-tech sat in a corner and the two of them were chatting casually. Kitty had a reading tablet close to hand and earbuds for music.

  “That conversation is being recorded, of course,” Ben said. “There was another survivor, David Cho, second in command of the Barbary. He died this morning for no apparent reason.”

  “She looks the same.” Syke’s voice cracked and he cleared his throat before continuing. “Her hair hasn’t even grown.”

  “Good point,” Ben said. “That never even struck me. So she’s either been in suspended animation for a year, or her elapsed time is only a few days, or whoever had her for the last year has hairdressing facilities. Thanks, Syke. Maybe you could sit with her for a while, see how she reacts. It would all have to be monitored, of course.”

  “I get that. Fine. Yes, sign me up.”

  It was time to talk to Kitty.

  Cara wasn’t looking forward to this. The whole situation was getting more complex all the time. Earlier that morning Cara had taken a communication for Ben from Jessop. The transport that the Monitors had sent to collect the cryo capsules from Mirrimar-10 had successfully loaded them, entered the Folds via Mirrimar-10’s main gate . . . and vanished. Cara wondered whether the Nimbus was reclaiming its own. Perhaps that’s what it had been trying to do when it materialized in Solar Wind’s sick bay on the journey from Jamundi. Ronan thought Kitty and David Cho had been its main focus.

  Could Kitty tell them more?

  Ronan brought her into the interview room, secured in a float chair. Ben and Cara were already waiting. They’d agreed in advance that Ben would do all the talking while Cara and Ronan listened with all their senses to see if they could get a sense of anything underlying Kitty’s answers.

  “I’m sorry about the restraints, Kitty,” Ben said as Ronan locked the chair to the floor and took a seat to one side and slightly behind her. “You understand why they’re there.”

  She scowled. “I’m a dangerous criminal. I tried to kill Etta Langham.”

  “That’s true, but it’s in the past now. We don’t think you wanted to do that. You were acting on orders from Alphacorp. You let yourself be caught before you could do any damage.”

  “Yes. Orders.” Her face cleared. “I guess Alphacorp can’t do much to me now—unless you’re going to send me back.”

  “Would you like that?”

  She stared at her knees and shook her head, then looked up. “Alphacorp has my mother. Unless I do as they say, they’ll slap her with a big medical bill, a financial hole she’ll never climb out of.”

  “Alphacorp thinks you’re dead.”

  “Oh. Do you think Mom will get the death-in-service bonus?” She brightened considerably. “I guess that works out all right, then.”

  She sounded calculating rather than emotional, as if her mother was some distant problem that had suddenly been solved.

  “We’re not here to talk about Alphacorp,” Ben said. “We need to know what happened to you after you disappeared into the Nimbus.”

  “The what?”

  “You were on a shuttle with Norton Garrick, in foldspace. We found you, but the Nimbus, a black cloud that we think might be sentient, swallowed you up before we could get you off the shuttle.”

  “That’s not—”

  “How you remember it, no. But that’s what happened.”

  “You left me, and the Barbary found me.”

  “How long do you think it’s been?”

  “I don’t know four days? Seven maybe?”

  “It’s been a year.”

  “What? How can it be a year? I would know.”

  “Would you? Maybe you were in cryo or some kind of suspended animation.”

  She shook her head and repeated more firmly, “I would know.”

  “Did you talk to your fellow passengers on the Barbary?”

  “Not much. They were all a bit odd.”

  “Some of them thought they’d only been on there a few days, but their records show they were lost in the Folds sixty years ago.”

  “How can that be?”

  “You tell me. People lost in the Folds decades ago suddenly come back to realspace and start attacking colonies.”

  “Attacking colonies?”

  “You thought Jamundi was the only one?”

  “I . . . we . . .” She shook her head. “It’s all a bit of a fog after we landed. Attack, you say? What happened?”

  *She’s genuinely confused,* Cara said to Ben.

  “I can show you. We have video. What I can’t tell you is why it happened or what the outcome was meant to be.”

  Ben flicked the image onto the wall from his handpad. Security cameras had captured the incident from several angles. Kitty watched in silence as she and her fellow passengers stormed the fence. She didn’t even flinch when Tengue’s mercs began to drop individuals with tranquilizer darts and stun bolts, and she showed no emotion at all when a mass of civilians drove forward through the mayhem to smash themselves against the security screen.

  “Well?” Ben asked when the last image faded.

  “Well what? What was that?”

  “That was you and your fellow refugees almost chewing your way through three layers of security to attack the colony.”

  “No way.” She shook her head. “You faked it.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “I don’t know, but there’s no way I could forget something like that.”

  Ben looked at Cara.

  *She absolutely believes what she’s saying,* Cara said.

  *I concur.* Ronan nodded.

  “Thank you, Kitty. We’ll leave it there for now.” Ben nodded to Ronan.

  “Wait, you can’t finish like that. You’ve accused me of something I didn’t do. Don’t I get the right of reply?”

  For the first time Cara felt a flash of emotion, though it was mostly righteous indignation.

  “Go ahead,” Ben said.

  “One minute we were all sitting around, bored out of our skulls because there’s only so much you can do in a large tent, and the next thing we knew your savages were among us with stunners. You’re trying to cover up your inhumane treatment of us.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “I don’t know. You made a mistake. Whatever. Thought we were something we weren’t.”

  Ben fiddled with the control on his handpad. The images sprang up on the screen only this time slower and in clo
se up. He focused on one face in the crowd.

  “Take a good look, Kitty.”

  “It looks like me, but it can’t be. I’d remember.”

  She was still muttering, “It can’t be,” when Ronan called a med-tech to take her to her room.

  “Opinions? Ideas?” Ben leaned back in his chair and looked at Ronan and Cara.

  “She believes what she’s saying, but she has fuzzy areas that she’s trying to work around.”

  “Medically, she’s the woman who left here a year ago,” Ronan said. “There’s no trace of cryo chemical or anything else unusual in her blood. Mentally, she’s a little confused. I thought it was deliberate at first, but now I’m convinced she doesn’t recall the Nimbus, or what happened during the missing year, or even trying to storm the fence on Jamundi or attacking Aster this morning.”

  “What about David Cho?” Ben asked.

  “There’s no reason he died. Historically, there have always been sudden unexplained deaths. Statistically, it was mostly young Asian men. The superstitious used to call it various things. In China, they called it being crushed by a ghost. Sometimes it’s undetected arrhythmia, but I checked David Cho personally when we brought him in. I would have picked up anything abnormal in his heart, however mild. Ever since this sudden unexplained death syndrome was noted, there have been five percent of cases that remain consistently baffling. This is one of those.”

  “Kitty shouldn’t be vulnerable to that, should she?” Cara asked.

  “She shouldn’t be, but neither should David Cho. Kitty’s problem is in her head.”

  Cara nodded. “Kitty believes everything she says, but that doesn’t mean the memories are real. Neural readjustment screws with your head. Has she been programmed by an expert?” Donida McLellan was never far from Cara’s thoughts. It didn’t even matter that the woman was dead.

  “Syke’s a solid part of her past here,” Ronan said, “It might help to have him babysit her for a while. It might also help to sit her down with Garrick.”

  Cara frowned. “What might that do to Garrick? He’s still a bit fragile. A lot fragile, in fact.”

  Ronan frowned. “Yes, you’re probably right.”