by Chris Reher
Cyann’s eyes narrowed when she looked to Jovan.
“He told us nothing,” Moghen said. “Tava did when we... questioned him about his decision to leave the enclave.”
“Told them what?” Anders said.
“It does not matter,” Regin said. “The point is that Kiran seems to be able to find you at such times and perhaps that is what allowed him to send the visitor here.”
Cyann returned to her seat. Jovan shifted a little to make room for her but she noted that he did not sit as close to her as before, nor did he place his arm around her shoulder again. She wished he would. She wished he’d put both of his arms around her and let her bury her face into his broad chest as he had when she was five and in need of comforting. But she wasn’t five any more, she reminded herself with a glance up at his shuttered face. And maybe simple comfort wasn’t enough anymore, either.
She returned her attention to the other Shantirs. “What do you want from us?” she said and then nodded toward Nigel. “Why are they here?”
“We want you to take the Scout and find Kiran.”
“Um,” Nigel raised a hand. “You’re talking about your brain-sucking god monster?”
Anders scowled at him.
“Just asking. Seems to me that I just got volunteered for something pretty unpleasant.”
“You did,” Moghen said. “Would you prefer us to wipe your memory of this conversation so you can get out of this?”
Cyann actually felt a small grin trying to tug on her lips when she caught the light in Shantir Regin’s eyes.
“What? No!”
Anders did smile. “Well, like it or not, we’re under contract with Delphi, not the Union. They own our easily-breakable necks while we want jobs here. But besides that, don’t tell me that you’re not dying to get a look at the boy.”
“No one is forcing you,” Moghen amended. “But you have the skills we need and you’ve worked with Anders and Cyann for a few years. We don’t want to bring anyone else into this.” He tilted his head toward Jovan. “Shan Jovan will navigate. We know you’re an accomplished pilot but some of the jumps you’ll need to undertake are beyond your skills.”
“How will we find him?” Jovan asked.
“We believe he sent the pod to warn us. No one else out there would know about that Shantir code. But we don’t know if he’s even there anymore. Let Shan Nova and her team look for the cloud and try to deal with the danger it represents to all of us. That may not be for years yet. Generations perhaps. But you must find the Tughan before we lose his trail. Go with the Union fleet and begin your search there. We hope that you, Cyann, can find him with that mental connection you seem to have and convince him to return to Delphi.”
“Why?” she said. “Why do you want to find him? Is it not enough that he’s chosen to exile himself? Maybe he doesn’t want to be found.”
“You want him back in Trans-Targon knowing what he’s capable of?” Jovan added.
Regin nodded. “We have no right to ask him to return to us. But what does that voice you hear tell you, Cyann? It calls for you. It is in pain. It is asking for help. If that is Kiran, we must answer. We owe him this. But we also want to know about him. The Tughan Wai took generations to create. Our curiosity is boundless.” Moghen paused for a moment before continuing. “And maybe we can ask for Kiran’s forgiveness for what we did to him.”
Cyann stared into the coals. “Alone. A six-year old boy. Changed forever by your misguided experiments. How terrible that must have been.”
“There is another theory,” Regin said carefully. “It is a remote possibility but no more far-fetched than the one we’re actually considering. I can tell by Jovan’s mood that it’s one that bothers him, too.”
Cyann turned her head to look at Jovan who seemed surprised that Regin had guessed his thoughts.
“What is that,” she said to Regin.
“It’s possible that Kiran did not send the pod at all. That someone else is trying to warn us. And the scrap of code they brought is simply evidence that Kiran is involved.”
“What do you mean?”
“The message, although written in our own language, is difficult to decipher. It hints that the Tughan no longer thinks as we do. Nor would I expect him to. None of us can comprehend to what measure his intellect has grown. But it’s also likely that he suffers from the same emotions we all share. And among them is hatred, need for revenge perhaps. For having had no choice but to leave his clan and exile himself, as Cyann said. Some of us think that he may be directing the asteroids here. That this isn’t the Genesis Cloud that excites Targon’s physicists but that he is simply sending the contaminant to destroy Delphi.”
“That’s absurd!” Cyann gasped.
“He is no longer Delphian,” Jovan reminded her. “He’s become too many people and few of those were ours. He has no allegiance to any of us.”
She looked around the circle of faces lit only by the twitching licks of light from the coals. “You are victims of your own fairy tales,” she said finally. “’The Tughan shall destroy Delphi’. Since when do the Shantirs listen to children’s stories? Especially one of their own making.”
“Cyann...” Anders said.
She shook her head. “Believe what you want. I’ve heard that voice. There is nothing hateful about it.”
“It is still possible that the voice is not Kiran’s at all.”
Her lips formed a thin line. “Then let us find out.”
“You agree to go? Not knowing what you might find?”
“Yes.” She looked over to Anders, who had fallen silent and thoughtful. “Are you up for this, uncle,” she said softly.
He turned his head toward her and smiled slowly. “Just try to stop me.”
“Is the Council aware of this?” Cyann asked Moghen.
“Yes, they will supply the Scout and release as much coolant as you can store. You’ll have to traverse quite a number of keyholes.”
Jovan sighed. “No doubt.” Although their ships’ processors took care of the immense computations needed to span two points in sub-space, it took a sentient mind to direct it toward the desired exit. Such minds were found among Delphians and, in rare instances, among other species aided by pharmaceuticals. Guiding any sort of vessel through an uncharted keyhole took a toll on the navigator’s body and mind, requiring hours of recovery time between jumps. The list of ships navigated by lesser trained pilots that had failed to re-emerge from sub-space was long and still growing.
“Have you informed Air Command of this?” Anders asked.
All eyes shifted to Moghen with that question.
“You’re asking me if we’ve told Nova and Tychon,” Moghen replied. “No, we have not. Let us learn what we can before we alarm them. I’m sure you can understand why.”
“If you’re wrong about who sent the asteroid we will have raised his hope of finding his son for nothing,” Jovan said.
“And if Regin is correct with that other possibility, we don’t even want him to know,” Cyann said. “Because, one way or another, he must be stopped.”
Nigel barked a short laugh. “How do you stop a god from destroying the world?”
Moghen took a deep breath. “He is as mortal as any of us.”
“Shan Moghen,” Anders said, “if you’re asking us what I think you’re asking...”
“I am. He could have been stopped once. He wasn’t. And that decision has weighed on all of us since that day as we consider the possibilities.” He shook his head. “Don’t think about this now. Our best hope is that Kiran has sent the alien to warn us of the impending return of the cloud. There is no point trying to guess what’s on his mind or why he doesn’t simply deflect the object. Join the Union expedition and do what you can to contact him from there. We have much to learn.”
“That is as far as I will keep this from Tychon,” Anders said. “I see the necessity for all of this, but Tychon is my brother-friend and I can’t keep something as important as his so
n from him. If Kiran is out there, Tychon must know.”
Moghen nodded. “Agreed.”
Chapter Six
“We’re coming in range of the Repha Zi and are now officially in the Badlands. The vast unexplored. The perilous periphery of Trans-Targon. Where there are dragons and monsters and shadows in the dark. Are ya’ll excited?” Nigel strolled into the Scout’s main lab where Anders and Cyann were exchanging slides and lazily updating their database. Neither looked up at his announcement but Cyann waved a vague thumbs-up in his direction. He studied the scatter of tools, breakfast trays, data pads, imagers and specimen containers on the console. “Someday you’re going to accidentally put a mould sample into your tea instead of sweets,” he predicted.
Cyann looked around. “Maybe we should tidy up some,” she said as she took the magnifier from her eye and her feet from the counter. Still in her sleep wear, she was comfortable in loose trousers and shirt and a pair of very cozy socks. “Or we can turn off the cabin cameras when we say hello.”
“Sounds like a fine option,” Nigel leaned over her to flip one of the overhead screens to display the cockpit video system. “They’ll be in view in a few hours.”
Anders started to stack samples into a case. “About time. I think I’ve had my fill of cataloging pollen samples for a while. Years, probably.”
“But look at the progress we’ve made these past few days,” Cyann said, pointing to a stack of similar cases on the floor. “And it beats watching Nigel’s tedious plays.”
“Hey, those are all the rage on Magra. You have no appreciation for art.”
“No, I have no appreciation for that Centauri actress you’re slavering after,” she replied. She tipped her head back to study him. “Comb your hair. You look like you just woke up.”
Anders looked up to scrutinize Cyann’s untidy mane. “So says the authority on fashion and personal grooming. Speaking of waking up, where is our navigator?”
“Still out, I think,” Nigel said, peering into the empty tea bottle on the table. Disappointed, he flopped back onto a beat-up lounger sporting a peculiar floral pattern that he had brought aboard three years ago and refused to give up. “That last jump knocked him right over. Not that he’ll admit it, but I doubt he’s moved a toe since he fell into his bunk.”
Cyann sat up. “I should get dressed properly. I can just see Tychon do that thing he does with his lip when he’s not impressed by something.”
Anders rose. “I’ll get Jovan up. I’ve got experience with waking the dead. I mean, waking Delphians.”
“Good luck with that,” Nigel said. He shook his head. “I don’t know how you people manage to pass out like that,” he said to Cyann. “I can’t get through a single sleep shift without one of you waking me with your snoring.”
“I don’t snore!”
“You just keep thinking that.”
She grimaced and left the lab to move along the narrow corridor to her cabin. They had reduced the ship’s gravity for intervals to conserve energy and she bounced lightly on her toes.
These past days had made for a tedious journey but she was used to that. They had followed Nova’s small fleet out of Targon, meeting up at some of the jump gates and then parting ways again. Nova was commanding Repha Zi, the Union’s impressive mobile astrophysics lab equipped with some of the best long-range sensors available. Along with that came the four Air Command Eagle cruisers, heavily armed and staffed by elite Vanguard officers and pilots.
The first leg of the trip had been made using the open and charted jumpsites linking the populated areas of Trans-Targon. The quick jaunts through sub-space were expensive, using up coolant more precious than fuel, but did not require a great deal of effort on Jovan’s part.
Eventually they had run out of mapped sites and had to rely on Tychon and Jovan to open keyholes, microscopic breaches in space, and expand them into traversable apertures. Using their ships’ computing power along with their highly evolved mental abilities, they penetrated sub-space to determine the desired exit. Without this connection, communicated to the ship via their neural interface taps, leaving sub-space again was unlikely or, if it happened, could land them at some problematic point anywhere within their galaxy and possibly beyond.
Unfortunately, the four jumps they had taken to reach the edge of Trans-Targon’s explored space meant that Jovan had spent much of the past few days asleep. But he had not neglected to continue lending his healing touch to Cyann’s slow recovery and she felt better now than she had for weeks.
She bounded into her room and slipped into a slightly less wrinkled set of clothes. When she felt the slow shift of the Scout’s gravitational pull as Nigel adjusted it for their daytime routines, she shook her hair free and combed it into some semblance of order.
“Cyann!” Nigel called into the corridor. “Your mother wants a word.”
“Don’t shout, Human,” she heard Jovan’s grumbled complaint before the door to the ship’s hygiene chamber closed.
Cyann hurried from her room into the central passage of the ship, past the hum of Jovan’s decon cycle and back into the main lab.
But it was her father’s image that greeted her on the large overhead screen. His attention was on something off-camera. Anders, at the main console, was also busy. As always, Tychon’s hair was neatly braided, his casual clothes impeccable. Cyann fumbled with her twisted collar in an attempt to straighten it.
“Hello, Dadda.”
He looked up and a smile softened his features. “Good morning, Little Blue,” he said. “We’ll have to sync up when you get here. We’re all ready for bed.” He leaned over the controls on his side of the conversation. “Here are the files, Anders.”
“What have you got there?” Cyann asked.
“We’ve pretty much worked out the alien’s language as much as we can. She didn’t have time to say very much, but I think the techs did a very good job with what they had to work with. I want to know what you think, Anders.”
“Ohh, wanna hear this!” Nigel said.
They waited until the files Tychon transmitted from the Union ship arrived at the Scout and were fed into their own system. All of them eagerly connected their neural interfaces to access the new program. “You first,” Cyann nodded at Anders. “If this makes us sound like rodents I can wait.”
“You’re so thoughtful,” he said and engaged the translator. He thought a moment before mouthing the words he meant to say to slow down the thoughts that the translator would need to calculate. Haltingly, a babble of words came over the lab’s speakers, sounding eerily like the little alien.
Cyann shivered, thinking about their visitor and her last few moments on Sola. She was suddenly uneager to try the new matrix herself.
“And now for the acid test,” Nigel said. He had recorded Anders’ sentences and now returned them through the translator and back into Delphian, the language Anders had chosen for the experiment.
“Say joy dirty,” the mechanical voice said. “Plate tidy boat.”
“Huh?”
Tychon, up on the screen, sighed.
“Try another language,” Nigel said.
They experimented until it seemed that a common Centauri dialect, the foundation of Union mainvoice, was the easiest to translate into the alien’s language.
“Cyann is agreed to bring dirt and foul eating plates to clean on big ship”
“What? I never said that!” she protested. “You do your own cleaning.”
Tychon grinned. “You try it, Cyann,” he said but then turned when someone nearby caught his attention. He frowned. “Really? Are you sure?”
“What is it?” Anders said.
Tychon leaned aside, perhaps looking at another monitor. There were more voices there now, sounding excited.
Cyann turned when Jovan entered the lab, looking a little tousled but rested. He came to where they had gathered at the console. “What’s going on?”
“Something happening over there,” she said. “Maybe
they found the keyhole. All better?”
He nodded. “You shouldn’t let me sleep so long. A few hours is enough.”
“Hey, Nova,” Anders said.
Their mission commander had appeared on the monitor when she sat down beside Tychon who was now busy with something on the console out of sight of the camera. “Anders,” she smiled, but her smile seemed harried, like a formality to be dispensed with. “Hello, Sweetie,” she added with a nod to Cyann.
“Have you found something?” Jovan said.
“Yes. And it’s not good. We’ve detected the keyhole precisely where the tablet said it would be. It’s stable.”
“Somehow I thought you’d be happier about that,” Cyann said, puzzled by Nova’s tone. Now that they had found what was essentially an entrance into Trans-Targon, they could start to probe into possible exists to look for the approaching cloud. Failing that, they would begin to plan a defence system capable of destroying the object upon arrival here.
“The planet we detected earlier is inhabited,” Nova said. “Densely.”
“Gods,” Jovan whispered.
“We’re not seeing any activity in orbit and so we’ve sent some probes. Sensors show a very complex ecosystem. We’ll know more in a few hours. By the time you get here, for sure.”
“That whole solar system will be right in the cloud’s path,” Cyann said.
Tychon looked up. “And we’ll have barely room to move if we have to destroy the object.” He nodded in Jovan’s direction. “We’ll start mapping the keyhole as soon as you get here. I really don’t want to wait around until it comes at us from sub-space.”
“Anders,” Nova began and then gestured at someone off-screen. To those on the Scout it seemed like the entire command center of the Union vessel was in a state of guarded fretfulness. “We’re going to start sending you our findings about the planet. The more eyes on this the better. If you determine the life form physiology we can concentrate on atmospheric conditions. We can’t start blasting asteroids until we know how that will affect them.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to blast anything,” Anders said. “Start sending.”
