In the Company of Others

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Sazaad had been right. This wasn’t something Malley wanted anyone else to know—not before Aaron, at least. Unfortunately, thanks to Gail, he didn’t know where they were. He assumed they hadn’t stayed inside the air lock, but that didn’t worry him. Outside was Aaron’s turf.

  Sazaad’s machine’s failure—might as well call it a personal failure, because that was how the man had taken it—had driven him to work nonstop on the problem Gail had posed to him. He wouldn’t say if she’d given him the blueprint or simply shown him a possible direction, but it didn’t matter.

  Their walk had taken them to Sazaad’s own quarters—a choice Malley approved when he discovered they did have something in common: a loathing of being watched. While Sazaad swept the room for what he called “Grant’s toys,” Malley had amused himself by going through the man’s vid collection. No surprises, there. Gail’s estimation of the scientist’s personal preoccupation was accurate.

  Her estimation of his genius was equally so. Sazaad had literally rebuilt his apparatus to do something totally new, testing it by running through data obtained from the week of testing on Aaron. It no longer measured cognitive function through the electrical activity of various parts of the brain.

  Now it measured something much less tangible. Emotion.

  Back in his own quarters, Malley looked at his hand, examining the network of blood vessels where it slipped close to the skin to bypass barriers of ligament and bone. According to Sazaad, Aaron’s skin wore a network of detectors, similar to those now in his machine, that picked up and amplified the emotions of anyone who touched him. The amplification went in all directions, a clue to why Aaron reacted at the same instant as the person touching him.

  The Quill Effect. Muted, limited by being woven into human flesh.

  Still deadly.

  Sazaad’s new machine couldn’t detect which emotion was being transferred. He planned to test it on Petra, the woman whose meditation technique had somehow controlled the emotional feedback from her contact with Aaron, if not helping Aaron at all. The Earther was full of ideas, from using his new gadget to monitor the Quill to predictably bizarre commercial applications.

  Around that point, Malley had stopped listening and left, Sazaad looking astonished—pesumably that anyone wouldn’t be interested in all he had to say.

  The stationer tensed his hand into a fist, watching how bone bleached the skin over each scabbed and scarred knuckle, how the veins between stayed blue.

  So. Aaron knew things about others—things people weren’t supposed to know about one another.

  He spied on feelings the way the Earthers spied on one another.

  An unkind comparison. Worse, a dangerous one. But Malley couldn’t avoid it. He had a lot of questions piling up for his absent friend . . . starting with why Aaron hadn’t told him.

  And definitely including what Aaron had felt on the planet’s surface.

  Chapter 78

  FEELINGS. Trust. Nebulous figments of imagination. Until Gail had come to Thromberg Station, she’d relied on her skill and wits, confident no one else could—or would—help her succeed without coercion, self-interest, or a common goal.

  She stood on the faintly scarred curve of a starship, held from drifting into her own fatal orbit around the planet below by the grip of two boots and a slip of string, depending on feelings and trust alone.

  Not hard at all. She stood there, listening to the soothing background sounds of her suit as it fought the sun’s radiation to keep her cool, gazing at the tiny craters pebbling the hull of the command sphere. No sign of a ’bot yet—if Grant wanted to deploy his remote spies, someone would have to walk to one of the hangared drop pods, pull out a ’bot, then change its housing to space capable. It could be done fairly quickly if ordered; she trusted—that word again—Grant to not act in haste.

  There were vids on the hull, but clustered to view critical areas. Most near the waist should be fixed on the retracted collar, so the crew could ensure it was whole and ready to reattach. That process would require both time and several experienced crew working outside. If Grant wanted access to the science sphere, he’d have crew already in the air locks. If he preferred to keep the Seeker’s command sphere ready to fly independently—

  Well, that was something else she had to trust him not to do. Where would he go anyway? The command sphere was atmosphere-capable. That didn’t mean they could land on Pardell’s World. Only the suits—so far—had proved any protection from the Quill Effect.

  Trust aside, Gail knew they had no time of their own to waste. Aaron had gone to locate the air lock into the hangar. When he’d heard who was waiting to admit them—the Seeker being a ship whose ports stayed safely locked unless authorized personnel were outside—he’d laughed and said he’d know the code to use. Gail, at that moment, hadn’t been in any shape to go along, mutely grateful to feel something solid grabbed by her boots. Aaron’s notion of how best to dismount from the ship’s tether had been a little more exciting than she’d anticipated.

  He’d probably find skydiving dull, given the certainty of a landing.

  A gloved thumb appeared in front of her helmet, the agreed signal. It was too risky to use their comms here. Her companion reattached the cable from her belt to his. Gail was somewhat amused by this sign that Aaron, who’d recently and casually risked both their lives, didn’t take avoidable chances.

  She followed the ’sider around to the side of the Seeker facing the planet, resolutely avoiding the temptation to look up and lose herself in the beautiful distraction of the coming sunrise. The hangar wasn’t far—the smaller inset door of its air lock was already open, a black pit in the side of the ship.

  Now for the unavoidable chance she’d taken, with Rosalind Fournier.

  The rebel ’sider looked pleased with herself. No doubt, Gail decided, it had something to do with putting her at a disadvantage.

  “I admit, I’d wondered how you planned to get here when Grant’s troops had the waist locked tight,” Rosalind had said in lieu of a greeting. “Neat trick, splitting the ship in half.”

  “Glad you liked it,” Gail replied, more concerned with Aaron’s reaction to where they were but doing her best not to show it. He was taking off his suit with care, stealing glances around as if he couldn’t quite believe they had the Seeker’s hangar bay to themselves.

  Themselves and three drop pods. The first, Athena, sat with her entry ramp down. Gail nodded at the two back in line. “They’re temporarily out of service,” Rosalind said rather smugly. “Nothing that can’t be repaired—on Callisto.”

  Gail wasn’t at all surprised. Who better to sabotage engines than someone who repaired them? “Athena?” she asked.

  “Prepped and ready to fly. Your people had conveniently finished her when the biohazard alert sent everyone into a frenzy. The place was sealed tight like that,” Rosalind clicked her paddles together sharply. “Good thing I was ready for it.”

  “So you knew,” Aaron stopped pretending to be preoccupied with his suit, looking from Rosalind to Gail. “It wasn’t an accident at all.”

  Before Gail could say a word, Rosalind laughed once. “Young Aaron. When will you learn there are no accidents—only momentum applied to events? Still, I’d have thought the Earther would have explained by now why you had to fly through vacuum.”

  “You’d better have sealed the door from the inside, Rosalind,” Gail informed her coolly, then pointed at the ceiling above the stubby pods. “Unless you’ve disabled the vids.”

  Rosalind smiled, unperturbed. She’d taken to wearing crew coveralls and probably blended more easily into that group than Grant’s people would have liked. It hadn’t been difficult at all to convince her to slip into the hangar in the confusion—or to have Reinsez’s own plants among the crew and staff help “prepare” the pods. Nothing was difficult—for a price. Predictably, Rosalind’s very next words were: “What I care to learn, Gail Smith, is whether you can deliver on your promises.”


  “Promises?”

  “Oh, yes, young Aaron. Your patron here has been profligate with them lately—to me, to the sadly worried Dr. Reinsez, to the station itself. What has she promised you lately?”

  Gail picked up the bundle of her suit and boots. “You and your ships will get to Callisto, Rosalind,” she said calmly. “Compared to what else I have to deliver? That’s the easy part. Aaron? Let’s go before Grant’s folks start burning through the door. And they will—the FDs won’t worry about Titan’s property.”

  Her words and tone were light. Gail feared her expression was anything but as she looked at the ’sider, hoping the troubled look in his hazel eyes meant he was thinking it through—not preparing to balk. The FD might not be watching for trouble in the hangar. Tobo might distract them from the vids. Gail wasn’t prepared to bet on either.

  Aaron nodded. Without another glance toward Rosalind, or her, he picked up his suit and walked up the ramp into the Athena.

  Before Gail could follow, Rosalind reached out and held her by the elbow, robotic fingers biting deeply into the flesh. “When it comes to the end of this, Earther,” the ’sider said evenly, each word quiet and sincere, “remember that young Aaron and I are family. You’ve given me your word this is the only way to keep him safe from the schemes of Titan and the Earth military—he’d better be safe from yours as well.”

  Gail stared down at Rosalind’s hand until the ’sider released her grip, then she looked up again. “No one’s safe, ’Sider,” she replied steadily. “This?” A wave at the pod. “A chance. If there was another option, believe me, I’d take it.”

  “Luck slide your cable, then,” Rosalind told her, something genuine in the odd wish.

  “Luck?” Gail repeated, then shook her head decisively. “I prefer to make my own.”

  Chapter 79

  PARDELL didn’t like having others make decisions for him—not Malley, and certainly not Rosalind.

  Gail?

  Different and the same. He trusted her judgment in situations where he didn’t have all the pieces. Malley doubtless believed it was because he couldn’t see reason—thinking with hormones, he’d heard Malley mutter when one of their drinking buddies acted as if dazed by a pretty face.

  Malley was wrong. Pardell might not know as much as his friend about relations between men and women, but he understood very well what it meant when someone risked death for you. That was when caring went deeper than infatuation or any of the other things casually labeled as love; that was when you became absolutely essential to one another.

  That you could die because of one another was just a cruel trick fate played on occasion.

  So Pardell walked into the now-familiar hold of the Earther’s little pod, put his suit by the seat where he’d strap in before take off, and turned to wait for Gail. This wasn’t her decision to make.

  Gail hurried up the ramp, tossing her suit ahead, intent on reaching the door controls. Pardell gently put his hand over them first. “You aren’t going,” he told her.

  She didn’t look surprised, merely reached into a pocket and pulled out a pair of the blue anti-Quill gloves. “This will hurt you more than me, Aaron,” she warned, putting them on, her blue eyes quite serious. “Move out of my way now. They could stop us at any moment.”

  Despite her diminutive size, Pardell decided, Gail could give Malley lessons on intimidation. “I’ll go back down,” he offered, keeping a close watch on her hands. “You can tell me what to do, what trials to conduct. They won’t stop you once I’m gone—

  “Trials?” Her eyes widened. Suddenly, a dimple appeared on each cheek. “Aaron my sweet, we’re eloping, not conducting research. You can’t do that by yourself.” She waved impatiently at the control panel and he moved back, too stunned to do anything else.

  Gail closed and locked the outer door, then headed for the pilot’s seat. It had been vacant during his and Dafoe’s earlier flight.

  “Eloping.” The word alone threatened to split his thoughts into a hundred directions at once; worse, it flared back into life those longings he thought he’d safely buried since those dangerous, stolen moments together. The memory of her—sight, warmth, sound—all began interfering with his breathing, as it had then. Pardell began to sweat with the strain of keeping his focus. “Eloping,” he repeated.

  She peered over her shoulder at him, taking off the gloves at the same time. “You do know the word?” she asked with a faintly worried air.

  “Of course I know the word—”

  “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Mind?” There was something wrong with the air in the cabin. That was it. Carbon dioxide poisoning. But the alarms should have gone off by now.

  Gail swiveled her seat around to look right at him. “We can keep talking and be stopped any minute—or we can get moving and talk later, Mr. Pardell. Your decision.”

  Aaron searched her face. For all her outward spirit and confidence, there was something uncertain, something almost wistful around her eyes and mouth. He coughed lightly, none too sure of his own expression or voice. “Talk later, Mrs. Pardell,” he said, as if leaping to a cable, and was rewarded by a sudden, brilliant smile.

  Chapter 80

  “Is this like Earth? Exactly?” turned, the headgear of her suit suffering from a significant lack of peripheral vision. Proving there was no substitute for checking everything herself no matter who was on the design team. Aaron was standing on the end of the ramp, his dark hair tumbled over one eye by the ever-present wind. He hadn’t bothered with a suit, but wore his own gloves as protection from the rising sun.

  As promised, they’d talked on the trip down, but more about what was waiting here than anything of the future. Protection of another sort, Gail thought.

  “It’s very close,” she assured him. “You’d hear birds and insects as they woke up and started moving around. There’d be more smells in the air—wildflowers, possibly livestock in the distance. The stream over there—it would likely have a band of trees alongside it. The wind would make different sounds through their leaves than it does over the grass.” Suddenly, the headgear and suit were a prison, keeping her from savoring this world, from being truly outside for the first time in—when had she last been on Earth, actually taken the time to step outside a university building or hotel?

  “But those who were born on Earth—they’d feel at home here?”

  Ah. Gail took a step closer to him, careful to stay on the ramp. She hadn’t bothered with the umbilical—they could send a remote for her body, if it came to that. She’d hardly care, then.

  They hadn’t seen Quill yet, although the Athena had repeated her flight path precisely. A shapeless mound of torn grass marked the end of the path Aaron and Dafoe had made. The statue was gone—collapsed, perhaps, as the grass dried. Or deserted by the Quill. “Yes. Right at home. That was the point of terraforming, to produce an environment suited to our form of life. No domes, no pressure suits. Sky and fresh air.”

  “I told you Raner was from Earth. Sammie. Most of the older ones—the immies. The rest of us—” Aaron paused, as if transfixed by the light beginning to slip down the shoulders of the distant mountaintops. “We listened to their stories; I don’t think we believed them.”

  “I have to be honest, Aaron,” Gail told him soberly. “If we can make these worlds safe for people again, not everyone from the stations will be able to stand being outside like this. Look at Malley. He might—I think he’d try, if only to prove he could—but it would be a battle.”

  “For Malley, that would be the point,” Aaron observed. He paused. “How do you feel?”

  Gail, about to go back into the pod for more equipment, stopped at his sudden question. “Fine. Why?”

  “She’s back.”

  Fighting back excitement, and a healthy dose of fear, Gail looked down the path. Aaron was right. The now-drying grass stalks were aswarm with Quill fragments, together pulling the loose mass into cohesive, literate form. A woman, human, wit
h a child—this time held to the torso by one arm, the other outstretched toward them.

  Gail studied it. The legs were incomplete, more stumps than limbs. The face, though. There was a surprising amount of detail to the face, but the shadow-rich lighting of early morning didn’t help. Given the Quill sensitivity to light, she hesitated to shine one of the pod’s spots on them. Moving steadily and slowly, she brought out one of the portable vids and used its lens to enhance what she could see.

  “Aaron,” she said, then realized his name had dried on her lips. “Aaron. Look at this.”

  He came immediately, concern on his face. Gail held out the vid and pointed it at the figure. “What do you see?” she asked, watching as more Quill fragments shimmered up the grass stalks surrounding the Athena.

  This was why she was here, Gail told herself sternly, forestalling any urge to run back into the pod—or simply stand and shake.

  A shame she knew so much more about the Quill Effect than she did about communicating with aliens.

  “More to the face than before ...” his voice trailed away.

  Gail rephrased her question, staring at the statue. “Whose face? Who do you see?”

  “Who?” Aaron dropped the vid from his eyes to look at her.

  “Go on. Forget what that is . . . where we are. Who do you see?”

  He raised the vid again, holding it still, looking toward the grass and Quill sculpture. “It’s not Gabrielle Pardell—my mother,” he concluded, sounding almost disappointed. “There’s no similarity.”

  Gail reached for the vid. She took it almost reverently, refocusing on that face. “I wasn’t sure if you’d see it—you’ve only seen a few images of her. But I’ve been haunted by this woman most of my adult life—I know her face very well indeed.”

  She put down the vid and made an extravagant wave toward the statue. “Aaron Pardell, meet Susan Witts, your paternal great grandmother.”

  What did it mean?

  Undoubtedly they weren’t the only ones puzzling over the Quill’s representation of the infamous terraformer. Gail had chosen, for the time being, to permit live feed from the Athena’s outward-pointing vids to play up on the Seeker. One-way. She wasn’t interested in hearing endless arguments or complaints, however deserved. The feed seemed the least she could do, given she’d effectively stolen most of the research opportunities from her staff—as well as Grant’s main hope of finding out more about the Quill.