Cepi had been discovered by the Arkhorans when they'd been taking their first, bumbling baby steps into space four hundred years ago. They'd Rediscovered Kalastoni on that mission, and had admitted the Kalastoni into the Verdant String—the last Rediscovery, with Kalastoni being the eighth planet found that was populated by a people who had obviously all originated from the same, mysterious place and settled across the five solar systems that comprised the string of eight green and blue planets.
Even though Cepi was Kalastoni's moon, the Arkhorans had hung on to it, charmed and fascinated by the evidence on it of a culture far older and different than their own. The Halatians had muscled in a bit, being further ahead, technologically speaking, than the Arkhorans, but their interest had been purely academic, and the Arkhorans had tolerated their presence.
It had taken the Kalastoni at least a hundred years after that to be in a position to resent the ownership, but they'd also found it very hard to get the Arkhorans to leave—they were the newest, least technically advanced members of the Verdant String, after all.
No doubt the reason for some of the council taking up Garett's suggestion was politically motivated, or merely score-settling. Maybe that's why Garett was so hostile. He'd suggested they come, but that suggestion had damaged his career with the professor, perhaps?
She shrugged. What did it matter now? They were about to leave.
The girls were packed, she'd overseen that herself, and their things were waiting in the docking bay.
Tilla approached her, screen still raised and scanning. “I think we're all done.”
There was a happiness, a calm in Tilla's gaze that made Nyha glad she'd been persuaded to do this, even though, like the professor, she'd thought it was a terrible idea.
“What would you like to do before we leave?”
“Sit in the observatory. The others are happy to come as well.”
Nyha brushed Tilla's cheek with her fingertips. “Let's go, then.”
Tilla's mother had loved the obs deck. She'd written about it in her journal, and Tilla had gone there every day since they'd arrived on Cepi. It would make a fitting last stop before they left.
“Goodbye, Professor.” Nyha waved to him from across the room, but he barely looked up, flapping a hand at her in a distracted way.
She hesitated, caught between good manners and irritation, and then decided to leave it.
As the archeological team kept telling her, they were running out of time. The Kalastoni had promised to blow Cepi up at the end of the week, no exceptions. The fact that The Calling had delayed the removal of the ruin's artifacts by two months with their spurious court application made no difference.
There were four days left before the ruins were gone for good.
“You want to say goodbye to anyone?” she asked the girls, and they shook their heads.
“Already done it,” Fran told her. “While we were exploring the room.”
That made things much easier. She led the way out, and took them to the spiral, let them laugh and do silly tricks as they were spun upward.
Ju hung on with both hands, jumped and lifted her legs, so the centrifugal force pulled her body horizontal to the central column. The other three were still laughing at her antics by the time they got to the very top.
Ju dropped lightly to her feet and grinned at Nyha over her shoulder. “You should try it next time.”
“Maybe I will,” Nyha told her. And maybe she would. After the excessively safe and subdued public transport on Arkhor, their adoptive planet, this was a little wild. A little more Halatian.
Then again, Arkhor had had to take her and the girls in because Halatia had been a little too wild.
There were things to be said for safe. But the spiral was just crazy enough to be fun. She and the girls seemed to be the only ones on Cepi who liked it, though.
The tech that made it work was similar to tech that had been used on the planets of the Verdant String for hundreds of years, so it wasn't scientifically interesting, except in its similarity to Verdant String tech.
There was even a theory that their original ancestors, the settlers of the Verdant String planets, had stopped at Cepi when they'd dropped off some of their people at Kalastoni, had seen the spiral, and tried to replicate it, thereby sowing the seeds of theories and experimentation that would eventually help them succeed in doing just that.
Nyha found the idea fascinating, but the truth of the matter was, the rest of Cepi was a mystery, the spiral was not.
Nyha glanced back at it with affection as she followed the girls. She'd miss it—it was hardly ever used in Arkhor anymore.
“That looks like our ship,” Vik said as they all stepped out onto the platform, protected from the nothingness of space by most likely the biggest Cepi mystery of all, the artificial gravity and atmosphere that surrounded the entire moon.
Nyha lifted her head and saw the sleek gray pick-up approaching, marveling, as she had every time she'd been out here, at how it seemed as if she could reach out and touch Kalastoni to her left, or Darga, the small ice planet in Kalastoni's solar system, to her right.
It was as if they were standing outside at home on Arkhor, looking up at the night sky, instead of on a tiny moon with no atmosphere.
No one knew what was powering the protective layer on Cepi.
The planets of the Verdant String had their own grav and atmosphere generators, but Cepi's ran silent and without any visible power source. And the protective layer was completely invisible. The Verdant String technology was only possible with a honeycomb layer around it, and it produced a hazy shimmer. You always knew the layer was above you, while the Cepi tech was silent and clear.
A genuine wonder.
Even more interesting, it was widely speculated that the reason Cepi's orbit had been strangely altered in the last year had something to do with its grav generator. Whether it was failing, or there was something else going on, Cepi was now on a collision course with Kalastoni.
If the planet was going to survive, there was no choice but to blow Cepi into tiny pieces.
“How long have we got before we have to board?” Tilla asked, her head tipped up to watch their pick-up edging in.
Nyha remembered her comm set again, fiddled with it, but it was still dead. “Maybe an hour. It looks like the ship's right on time.”
It couldn't come fast enough.
She knew she often held a grudge too easily, a remnant of the unfairness of her childhood, but in this case, she thought she was justified in feeling resentful of the way the scientists had transferred their anger at The Calling onto her and the girls. They'd been handy stand-ins for the cult and its crazy leaders.
Not that the scientists' anger at The Calling was unjustified. The Calling had fought against common sense and pragmatism at every step. They wanted to stop Kalastoni from destroying Cepi, or at least prevent Arkhor and Kalastoni from stripping the ruin of its artifacts.
But eventually, after they'd employed months of delaying tactics, the courts had stood firm against them. The Kalastoni had the right to protect themselves from a moon smashing into their planet.
So goodbye, Cepi.
The Calling's case hadn't even made sense. No matter what, Cepi was going to be destroyed. The only variable was whether or not it took a planet of two billion people with it.
The Kalastoni had insisted on having a two-week window before final impact in case something went wrong, and would have destroyed the ruins months ago if The Calling hadn't held everything up.
Because of that, the scientists had to be happy with whatever time they were given, and they weren't being gracious about it.
At least the courts, when throwing out The Calling's application, had barred them from Cepi while the scientists stripped it bare.
The Calling had annoyed the courts as much as they'd annoyed everyone else.
And now she and the girls could leave the whole festering mess behind them.
The small, sleek
pick-up seemed to drift downward like a floss seed on the wind as it came into the final approach, and Nyha was gripped with a need to just go.
But it was customary for the crew to get at least half an hour of off-ship time, and so there was no sense hurrying the girls to the bay yet.
She forced herself to sit on one of the benches and close her eyes, half-listening to the girls as they chatted to each other and took final scans of their surroundings.
She lifted her hands up and released her hair from the high, tight, twist she'd put it in this morning, shaking it out and massaging her scalp.
It felt blissful to have it down.
She usually pulled it off her face because the color was less obvious that way, and she'd spent her life living on the razor's edge of refusing to deny her physiological roots, and her need to blend in to her new home.
Tying her long blue hair in a complex twist was probably a poor compromise, but it was the only way she could appease both deeply-held needs.
The girls had never drunk the waters of Halatia, with its minerals that changed the composition of its people's hair follicles, but their mothers had, and their hair was a paler, almost sky blue shade to her darker, brighter color. She could dye it, had been urged to shortly after she entered her teens, but that would have been denying her origins.
She refused.
A sharp, almost painful, spike of sound pierced her ear, and her eyes opened in surprise. The pick-up was out of her line of sight, having docked below the obs deck, and she stood and walked to the edge of the platform.
“Hello?” she said into the comms set, looking down at the smooth dark gray of the ship, neatly connected to the docking bay. “Captain?”
“Who is this?” The voice in her ear was deep and rough.
Nyha frowned. “You aren't Captain Farga.”
Captain Farga was a woman, and whoever she was speaking to was most definitely a man.
“No.” The man paused. “Who connected you to this channel?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but before she said a word, someone screamed below.
She stepped even closer to the edge and looked down, saw one of the Cepi security guards had fallen to the ground and a man in a dark blue Arkhor space crew uniform was standing over him.
She drew in a sharp breath.
“What is it?” the voice in her ear asked, but she ignored it, her gaze fixed on the scene below.
The security guard squirmed back a little, then tried to pull himself up.
The man in the blue uniform lifted both arms, and she realized there was a weapon in his hands. She called out a warning, but it was too late.
There was an audible buzz, and the guard fell back down and didn't move.
The man in the Arkhor crew suit turned his head, looking straight up at her, and Nyha stared back, eyes wide.
“Tell me what happened,” the man talking to her through the comm set demanded again.
“One of the pick-up crew just shot a Cepi security guard.” She spoke quietly, voice soft with shock.
“Then I have one word of advice for you,” the man said, low and urgent. “Run.”
2
What in the Unknown . . . ?
Mak tore off his comm set, held it up and checked the frequency. After a moment of staring at numbers that made no sense, he shoved it back in place, too nervous to miss anything.
“What is it?” Vasouvy asked, but he held up a hand, frowning at the sudden silence from his mysterious speaker.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
“Yes.” The voice coming through was husky and breathless. It sounded like she was running. Which was good.
He heard her murmuring, speaking to someone else in urgent tones. Giving orders, it sounded like, and his frown deepened.
“Who's with you?”
She said nothing for a moment, and when she finally did speak, she kept her voice low but insistent. “Look, I'm not saying anything more to you until I know who you are. Catano said she'd recalibrated this comm set so I could speak to the captain of our pick-up, and you're not her.”
Things cleared up a little. “Catano did something to your comm set?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
More silence. “I told you, I'm not saying anything more—”
There was no way he could tell her he was the captain of an Arkhoran Special Forces team sent to keep watch over Cepi until its destruction, or that Catano was part of that team. Not without knowing who she was. And probably not even then. “My name is Mak. I'm part of Cepi's security forces. Now who are you, and who's with you?”
She was silent again. Thinking about whether to trust him, he guessed.
“If what you described to me is correct, someone just hijacked that pick-up in order to land on Cepi, and I don't think they're there to sightsee the ruins, so make your decision pretty damn fast.”
She sucked in a breath at his sharp tone.
“My name is Doctor Nyha Bartali. I'm here with my four charges from Arkhor to visit the ruins.”
The Halatians.
He knew who she was. Of course he did, he knew who everyone was on this pitiful excuse for a moon. But he hadn't thought about her and the four girls with her very much. They were clearly no threat, and they were going today.
He'd been assured . . . assured . . . that the pick-up vessel was clear when it came through the cordon the courts had ordered around Cepi.
Most of the cordon guards were Kalastoni, but at least some were Arkhoran and perhaps a few others were from other Verdant String planets. They'd been put there by the courts for oversight, but someone had been bought off, or whoever had taken control of the ship was just that good that they could fool an entire unit of Verdant String special operatives.
“Have you found a place to hide?” he asked her, a growing dread in his gut about what was going down.
She didn't answer him. When he repeated the question, the silence was deafening.
“Shit.”
“What is it?” Vasouvy, his second-in-command, was a bit more insistent this time.
“Listen up, everyone.” He lifted his hand, made a come-here gesture with his fingers, and the five members of his team, excluding Catano, who was stuck deep inside whatever nightmare was going down at the ruins, drew closer. They were all Arkhoran. He was glad now he’d insisted on only working with his regular team. None of that Verdant String Cooperation Initiative bullshit.
If they'd had anyone else with them now, they’d all be wondering if there was a traitor in their midst. Probably a Kalastoni would have been okay. It was hardly likely they’d be endangering their own planet, but that left the other five planets of the Verdant String. He was happy no one had forced him to take anyone else on board.
They were nestled down in a camouflaged lookout on one of the three hills which overlooked the ruins. They wore full space gear, although it was of the lightweight, flexible variety, even though Cepi's mysterious gravity and atmosphere generator covered the whole tiny moon. Mak had insisted on taking all precautions.
No one was wearing their helmets, but they all had them at the top of their packs.
Mak knew, because he had the clearance, that the strange fluctuations in Cepi's gravity generator had led to it spinning off course and directly toward Kalastoni.
If they were going to sit here babysitting Cepi until almost the bitter end, they would not die because everyone trusted a problematic grav and enviro generator to keep them alive.
Mak studied the wall on which the live feed of the ruins was playing, drawn from the scanners they had pointed at the ancient structures. He crouched down and tried to make out what was happening at the docking bay.
“Zoom in,” he said, and Erenn moved to the equipment near the door and suddenly they were looking at a group of blue-clad Arkhoran flight crew, one of whom was dragging a Cepi security guard away by his feet.
There was silence as the team absorbed their change in circumsta
nces.
“They said the pick-up was cleared.” Vasouvy's voice had a bitter edge.
“They lied. Or were bribed. Or were simply fooled. That's for some internal investigation to uncover when this is all over.” Mak kept his own voice dry.
“What alerted you?”
“Looks like Catano was worried something was up. She hasn't gotten in touch with me, so either she's worried she’s being monitored, or her equipment's been tampered with.”
“If Catano hasn't been in touch, who were you talking to?” Vasouvy asked.
“Dr. Nyha Bartali.”
“The Halatian?” Fren rubbed the bristles on his chin. “How did she get in contact?”
“Catano must have calibrated her comm set to emergency override mode. Whenever the doc speaks, it comes through on my set. The doc told me Catano fiddled with it, and told her it was rebooting and would connect to the captain of her pick-up vessel. I'm guessing Catano was worried her comms were about to be shut down, but gambled that the Halatians might be overlooked. They're hardly a threat.”
“Where are the Halatians now?” Goojie had moved forward and was crouched down close to the wall, too. His eyes narrowed as they all watched one of the fake pick-up crew standing in the doorway of the small space craft that had been sent to fetch the doctor and her girls, throwing down weapons to the team below.
“I told them to hide. The last time I tried to talk to Dr. Bartali, she didn't answer me.”
“Couldn't?” Yari asked. He'd been leaning against the far wall, arms crossed over his wide chest through the whole debrief.
Mak shrugged. “Most likely.”
“You think the insurgents know we're here?” Vasouvy asked.
“No idea.” And it was ruining his mood. “Catano obviously suspected they did know, or she wouldn't have set up the Halatian with the comm set. Or she thought someone on the inside suspected her of being a spy. Either way, we'll find out soon enough.”
“Are we going to let someone know about this?” Erenn asked. “I’m assuming Catano tried, if it was possible. But just in case she couldn’t.”
Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Page 39
