by Judith Tarr
“Don’t,” said Tomiko. “Don’t try that. Don’t even think it.”
Khalida stared at her. Somehow, while Khalida’s thoughts ran on, Tomiko had caught hold of her wrists. They stung. There was blood under her nails, so fresh it glistened.
Tomiko’s eyes glistened, too. Tears? Khalida would have wiped them away if she had had a hand free.
“Maybe you need that stasis pod,” Tomiko said. Her voice was hard.
“Maybe I do,” said Khalida. “I won’t have to suffer through all the briefings. I can go in cold. Will that be better or worse, do you think?”
Tomiko dropped Khalida’s wrists with a sound of disgust, turned and left her there. Where the captain had been, Khalida looked into the faces of a pair of marines, as flat and hard as if made of metal. One held up a pair of manacles.
That was clear enough. Khalida spread her hands. “I’ll behave,” she said. “Am I confined to quarters?”
“For the moment,” said the one with the manacles.
She had brought it on herself. She could hardly complain. And all the while she had faced Tomiko and then the marines, the download continued, filling her head with the minutiae of a world.
There was a way to let it break her. A way to die.
Either she was impossibly brave or she was a perfect coward. She shied away from it, from the thought and the memory.
She could die of this. She wanted to. But not by her own hand.
Cowardice, she thought. Courage would fling itself headlong into the dark.
There was only one thing left to ask. “Why me?”
No one was there to answer. Khalida had to do it for herself. “Because I’m the one they could use. I’m the one they broke. If I refuse, either the planet dies or Ostia does. I’ll be a mass murderer all over again.”
Once was enough. She compacted her orders into a tight, small blip of data and marked them Received. Acknowledged. And after a pause that she could not help: Accepted.
III.
Araceli
26
Jump from Centrum to Araceli was indecently short: half an Earthday to the outer edges of the system, and the rest of the Earthday cruising at sublight toward the inner planets. Khalida badly wanted to spend the time locked in her cabin, but she was damned if she could keep on hiding. She saw the end of jump in a cradle on the bridge, facing the screen that showed the shift from nothingness to crowding stars.
The hum of the bridge went on around her. Everything was ordinary, quiet, unexceptional. No ambush. No armada waiting to blast the Leda out of space. All their clearances were in order. The system was open, waiting for them.
And yet...
Something felt off.
Of course it did. Everything about Araceli was off. The tightness between her shoulder blades was as much memory as warning.
She pushed herself out of the cradle and stowed it. Tomiko was leaning over the comm, exchanging rapid spits of code with planetary command. Khalida had an almost irresistible urge to run a hand down her back.
That would not have been wise. At all. Even if they had been on speaking terms.
A shadow caught her eye. She held back from spinning to face it. She let the corner of her vision take it in instead.
How long he had been there, she could not have said. He should not have been there at all. Passengers were barred from the bridge during and immediately after jump.
Rama was the last person in the universe to care about Spaceforce regulations. He was also the last person she would have expected to be invisible in the middle of a brightly lighted bridge.
She saw him because he was letting her see. His eyes were on the viewscreen. His expression was distinctly familiar: he was linked in to the ship’s web. Khalida refrained from asking how he managed that.
His voice spoke inside her skull. “This is a trap.”
She answered him in the same way. “I know.”
“Yet you say nothing?”
“What’s to say? It will spring when it springs. All we can do is go in and hope we’re ready for it.”
“And if you’re not?”
She shrugged. “We die.”
She felt his eyes burning on her. “I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care.”
“Now that I believe.”
He got out of her head then. It was an odd feeling, half relief and half emptiness, and odder for that he was still all too physically there.
Intentionally or otherwise, he had mutated from shadow into substance. Tomiko turned from the comm to find him standing behind her.
Her eyes widened slightly. Her voice lashed out. “What are you doing on my bridge?”
Khalida braced for royal wrath, but Rama smiled and said amiably, “Good day, Captain. That world yonder wants to eat your ship whole. Are you doing to let it?”
Tomiko looked him up and down. He was wearing both halves of a gi, as if he had been doing katas in jump. And, Khalida thought, during emergence: as if the distortion of spacetime meant nothing to him at all.
Tomiko jabbed her chin toward her office. “In there. Now.”
Clearly he was in a mood to be cooperative. Khalida was not, but no one was asking. She followed them without a word, and got none from either of them.
~~~
In the much smaller, dimmer room, Tomiko and Rama between them seemed almost too much for one space to hold. The privacy shields when they locked down made it even worse. Khalida managed to find air to breathe, but it was an effort.
“All right,” said Tomiko, and her glare fixed not on Rama but on Khalida. “No more games. If you know something about what’s happening on Araceli, I need you to tell me now. Clearances be damned. I’m not losing my ship because of something you could have told me.”
“I don’t know any more than you do,” Khalida said.
Tomiko’s glare did not lighten even slightly. Khalida opened her mouth, but Rama spoke first. “She’s telling the truth. The world and its rulers are playing a game of masks and shadows. They like to think they’re playing the universe for fools. Mostly,” he said, “they are.”
“And you,” said Tomiko. “What exactly are you? Intel? Corps? Both? Neither?”
“Most certainly neither,” he said.
She moved in close. As small as she was, she almost made him seem tall, but no one in that room made the mistake of thinking it mattered. She tilted her head back and searched his face, taking in every line of it, noting it, cataloguing it with a taxonomist’s precision.
“You’re not human,” she said.
His smile was wide, white, and dizzily joyous. It erupted into full-bodied laughter.
She let him finish. Eventually he did, still grinning, as if he had never heard a more hilarious or more delightful thing.
“Genetically you’re close,” she said. “So close, there’s no distinguishing you from one of us. What differences there are, anyone would think that’s modification. But it’s not. Is it? You’re just as accidental an organism as the most determinedly backwoods Earther.”
“Just so,” he said.
“You don’t even try to hide it,” she said. “That’s genius.”
“Only if it works,” he said. “How did you guess?”
“I don’t guess,” said Tomiko, “and I don’t pay attention to the hand tricks or the curtains. When I look, I see. Where are you really from? Nevermore?”
He bent his head.
She nodded. She never took her eyes from his face. “This is my ship,” she said. “Those people you’re seducing with your katas: they’re my crew. You don’t get to keep them. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly,” he said.
“Then you also understand that whatever you’re up to, whatever you’re passing through in order to do, if you’re any kind of threat to my ship or my command, or to the force I serve, I’ll do whatever it takes to stop you.”
“I’m no threat to you unless you threaten me,” he said.
His
voice was soft. There was nothing dangerous in it. It was a fact, that was all. But Khalida shivered.
Tomiko was perfectly still and perfectly focused. It seemed she was satisfied with what he had said. “Now tell me what you know about Araceli,” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. “But there is a smell to it that makes my hackles rise.”
“What kind of smell?”
“Carrion,” he said.
She snorted. “Serves me right for asking that, doesn’t it? Yes, it stinks, but I need something solid. Something I can get Spaceforce’s teeth into. Otherwise we’ve got orders to submit ourselves to planetary authorities, offer such aid and comfort as we can, and resolve the situation to the best of our ability.”
“You should still do that,” he said. “Running would help you, but not the ship sent in after you. This isn’t going to end until someone takes the bait.”
“Granted,” said Tomiko, “but if I’m looking at a ripe worm, I want to know who’s dangling the hook. You’re psi. How high?”
The shift seemed not to rattle him at all. It did rattle Khalida, who should have expected it, considering what else Tomiko had seen. She blurted out the answer before he could. “High. Which, if he isn’t picking up whatever’s behind this, means—”
“It’s shielded.” He dropped back and down into the hoverchair that happened to be nearest. “I know it’s there. What it is, what it’s meant for, who’s behind it—those things I can’t touch. They’re too well concealed.”
“You can’t break it down?” Tomiko demanded.
His head shook, sharp and short. “Not until I know what it is. I don’t even know what part of it concerns us, and what part is simply the Corps being the Corps.”
“Weapon?”
He frowned. Khalida could feel him seeking: a dull ache at the back of her skull. She felt the wall, too; crashed into it with force enough to split her head in two.
He held his together with his hands. His lips were the color of ash. How he managed to shape words, let alone have them make sense, she barely knew. “Not weapon. Not exactly. Not... harmless, either.”
“Neither are we,” Tomiko said.
“Bravura.” His grin was back, wide and crazy. “If you go in now, and whatever it is attacks, your backup won’t get here in time.”
“Maybe not,” said Tomiko, “but if this really is a trap and we really are the quarry, we’ll be all the proof Spaceforce needs. Araceli may have Psycorps behind it, but United Planets is bigger.”
“Yes, but is it nastier?”
“Much.”
“Well then,” said Rama. “Would you like to dangle bait of your own?”
Tomiko sat opposite him, leaning forward. “You?”
He smiled.
“Why? What’s in it for you?”
“I owe a debt,” he said.
Khalida blinked. Her head was suddenly, brutally clear.
“Bronze-Age honor.” She had not meant to say that aloud.
It would hardly have mattered if she had not. He would have heard.
“What,” he said, “have you grown out of it? I hope I never will.”
“My family hasn’t. Nor,” she said with a glance at Tomiko, “has hers. But do you really want the Corps to see what they’ve been missing?”
“It might be good for them,” he said.
She quelled an urge to spit. “God, you’re arrogant.”
“Is it arrogance if it’s true? Those are weanling children who dream they hold the power of kings. They keep a hundred worlds in terror with their little tricks and sleights of mind. What they did to you and all who are like you I will never forgive. I’ll bring them down, and gladly.”
“All by yourself?”
Her mockery was so bitter she gagged on it. He actually flinched. But he came back as hard as his ancient steel. “I’ve done it before.”
Tomiko spoke outside the circle of their combat, wry and bracingly practical. “Don’t tell me Nevermore is empty because of you.”
“Apparently not,” he said. He sounded as tired as Khalida had ever known him to be. “I don’t know why it’s empty. This world may hold a clue. Or not. I don’t know. I can’t find it if the world is shattered, or if it’s so torn with war that nothing can get near it. If I have to spring this trap in order to get where I need to go, I’ll reckon it a fair exchange.”
Tomiko took her time in responding. She rocked gently in her hoverchair, frowning. Her brows were knit, her eyes dark, focused inward.
Neither Rama nor Khalida broke the silence. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes. Khalida sat on her heels on the floor, since both the chairs were taken.
She felt strangely light. When Tomiko asked the question she had known was coming, she was ready for it.
“Do you trust him?”
“No,” Khalida answered.
“But you think he can do this.”
“I think he’s too proud not to.”
“And if he gives us all up to the Corps?”
Khalida’s eyes were on Rama, who had not moved at all. “He won’t do that. He may try to take them over, but he won’t sell our souls for that. We’re not worth enough.”
“Not to them,” he said without opening his eyes.
He sounded more than half asleep. He was in a trance, she realized: wandering away from his body, trying to penetrate the walls that the Corps had raised around Araceli.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Hack the web instead. Easier. Faster. Lots less dangerous.”
His eyes opened. For an instant so brief she almost missed it, there was nothing of flesh or blood in them at all. It was like looking into the sun.
He blinked, and they were human again, or close enough: dark eyes in a dark face. “I’m not as good at that as Jamal,” he said.
“Not much of anybody hereabouts is,” she said. “Except me. Who do you think taught him?” Her glance flicked to Tomiko. “Permission to access ship’s web?”
“Granted,” Tomiko said. Her face was completely blank.
Khalida remembered to breathe. She would have hacked the system regardless, but it was much less complicated with the captain’s permission. “You rest,” she said to Rama. “Be ready. I may need you.”
His assent shivered through her synapses. He was in the web, woven into it as securely as if he were a part of it.
Not as good as Jamal? Khalida had a feeling he might be better.
27
Khalida crawled out of the web with a pounding headache and a head full of data, some of it useful, none of it close to what she had been looking for. Tomiko was back on the bridge, but with Khalida, too, like a hand holding hers through the ship’s web.
Rama sat cross-legged in the corner of Tomiko’s office, watching her with calm intentness. He was on guard. When she scowled at him, he took a breath and visibly relaxed. “An army of mages would have been easier,” he said.
“Not for me.” She winced at the sound of her own voice.
He handed her a cup. It was full of scalding-hot coffee. There was no way to brew it here, and he had been in front of her, fixed on her, for the better part of an hour.
Some things were best not looked at too closely. The coffee was real, it was hot, and it tasted fresh. She drank it in grateful sips, savoring the rich and bitter taste.
With that in her stomach, she could stand up and walk back out to the bridge. Rama followed, soft-footed, padding like a big cat.
They were an hour out from Araceli. The traffic of the system hummed around them, an intricate stream of data flowing through the web. It was all perfectly normal, considering that there was a war below.
Whatever the trap was, all they could do now was walk into it. “If there’s anything you want to take with you,” Khalida said to Rama, “get it while you can. The minute we get clearance, we’re going down.”
He dipped his head and vanished, moving almost too quickly to see. She shivered, caught Tomiko’s eyes on her, forced her
self to slow down, breathe, be calm. There was nothing she could do now but wait. She was as ready for this as she was ever going to be.
~~~
Planetary Control took hold of the Leda as it locked into its assigned orbit. Araceli’s own shuttle waited to take passengers planetside. It was not exactly standard procedure, but it was common enough. Planetary governments and Spaceforce shared, at best, an uneasy alliance.
Rama had brought his baggage to the shuttle bay: a slight figure wrapped in black.
Khalida should have known. “No,” she said. “Aisha, back to the cabin.”
Aisha neither moved nor spoke. Her eyes within the veils were openly rebellious.
“She’s safer with us,” Rama said, drawing Khalida’s fire.
“You,” she said, “are insane. I’m not much better, but neither am I crazy enough to take that child into the middle of a war.”
“The war is all around us,” Rama said. “It’s not being fought with the kind of weapons a starship can stand against. I promise you, while I live I shall protect her.”
“And when you get killed?”
“I don’t intend to die here,” he said.
Khalida was not sure if she could say the same. “She’s staying here,” she said.
“No,” said Rama.
Khalida’s teeth set. “You are neither her parent nor her guardian. You have no right or authority—”
“Captain,” said a voice in her ear. She spun on its owner.
Lieutenant Zhao flinched, but only slightly. “Captain,” he said, “Control has instructed that all passengers be removed from the ship. If Meser Rama’s assurance isn’t enough, will you take mine? I’ll take responsibility for your niece’s safety.”
Khalida had the satisfaction of seeing the horror in Aisha’s eyes—but it was a small spurt of pleasure, and vanishingly brief. If Rama was bad, Psycorps was worse.
As always with Araceli, there were no good choices. Only a cascade of bad ones. Khalida hissed at the lot of them.
Tomiko stood between Khalida and the shuttle. Khalida had not seen her come into the bay; there had been too much else to fixate on.
