by Judith Tarr
That was all he said aloud. Aisha could feel the flow of communication that ran underneath, too deep and complex for words. He asked, and the ship answered.
The answer was a song, deeper than deep. The cradle had almost completely closed around Aisha now, but when she pushed at the lid, it let her keep it open.
The rest of the crew that she could see were in cradles, too, or cysts or whatever they were. All but Rama. The ship had given him a chair to sit in, but he was out in the open, eyes on the screens.
The swarm of fighters was almost on them. One of the screens streamed a warning: Weapons aimed and locked. Ready to fire.
“Now,” Rama said.
39
The Ara Celi was gone. The maps showed it ahead of Khalida, but on the rover’s screen was nothing but empty sky.
It reminded her with surprising vividness of the broken cliff on Nevermore. A finger of granite stood up still. The rest was rubble.
She had been staying off the web, partly to avoid the inevitable screaming and the orders to return to her post, and partly to preserve what sanity she had left. She held her breath as she opened the connection.
Even tightly filtered, it was a deluge. MI was losing its collective mind. Psycorps had received the ultimatum from their slave classes, with uprisings in all the cities. And a rogue army was in the process of hijacking a most peculiar ship.
Ships were still leaving Araceli—loading and running. No one pursued them, or did more than record their essential data. This must be something special, to rate its own priority-level feed.
Science vessel. Experimental ship. Psycorps had it under deep cover—no wonder; they had hijacked it from an expedition out of Beijing Nine. The political implications of that were interesting to say the least.
None of which could possibly matter to Khalida, except that her search string placed Aisha inside the ship. That had to be a scanner error: she must be near or above it.
Khalida was trained to speculate at endless length based on negligible data. She shut that off as best she could. She had one mission: to get Aisha out of there and ship her offworld.
That was not going to be easy. MI had a new set of marching orders from Psycorps: Converge on the ship and secure it. Eliminate any opposition.
The rover qualified as MI, as did Khalida while her resignation continued to be ignored. She set a course toward the shadow spaceport.
While the rover did its own piloting, she hunted down information. If Rama wanted a starship, there were several hundred less heavily protected vessels in this hemisphere alone, and a good few thousand in orbit or close in in the system. Many of which would be delighted to take on a wealthy passenger with a lucrative obsession.
But he had sought out this one, or so she inferred from Aisha’s presence near it.
Maybe it was the name that lured him. Ra-Harakhte: a fine old Egyptian divinity. There was no manufacturer listed, officially or unofficially.
Nor would there be. The ship had been discovered by a deep-space mission, a coalition of astrophysicists and xenoarchaeologists, searching for remnants of a theoretical but as yet unproved species of interstellar explorers. It had been drifting in a stellar nursery, where it had apparently been feeding on infant stars, until for reasons unknown to the discoverers, it had, essentially, beached itself.
The mission found it by crashing into it, and so damaging their ship that they had no choice but to improvise. They had cannibalized their own ship, slaved the foundling to it, and made their way back to civilized space.
Nowhere in the datastream did anyone remark on the fact that, as far as anyone could determine, the ship was a living thing. The expedition’s report declared that it had a rudimentary nervous system, a large but remarkably efficient digestive system that processed and recycled interstellar gas and gorged on the leavings of newborn stars—and functioned, in ways not yet understood, as a powerful and almost inconceivably fast subspace drive—and no discernible brain or functioning intelligence.
Hence, Psycorps. The deeply classified report, signed and cosigned by a gaggle of Sevens and a pair of Nines—including one all too familiar name—maintained at length and in highly technical detail that the living creature commissioned as a ship and named the Ra-Harakhte was devoid of sentience.
On which grounds, a new order had come down from the heights of both MI and Psycorps. A joint expedition was to be mounted, to hunt and capture creatures of this new and wonderfully useful species. The hunt would begin in the cradles of stars, but would proceed in subspace as well, under the direction of a psi-ten.
Ten?
Khalida’s hunger for data devoured that snippet. Before it could dive for more, the stream broke in a shower of pixels. They stung like shrapnel in the blast of a warning klaxon.
ALL PERSONNEL! ALL PERSONNEL IN THIS AREA! PIRACY IN PROGRESS! ARM AND LAUNCH! ARM AND LAUNCH!
The command code on it made Khalida hiss with a crazy mix of anger and laughter. Colonel Aviram, at least, had wasted no time. He was in command, and these orders superseded any and all that she might have given.
“We’ll see about that,” she said.
But first, she patched in to the commander’s feed. The fighting that she had observed on the ground was more or less bog-standard civil war. This was something else.
The ship had risen out of its well. Fighters completely surrounded it. They looked, in this feed, like a sphere of glistening insects enclosing a large and subtly shimmering shape.
The sphere was not, she realized, intentional on the fighters’ part. The ship was generating it.
Colonel Aviram’s own ship hovered above it all. It was smaller than the Leda, designed for planetary atmosphere and solar-system runs but not, rather to her surprise, deep space.
Someone had not been thinking. Or had been caught flat-footed between a conventional haves-and-have-nots civil war and an act of pirate bravura.
Khalida in her little rover without even near-space capability could relate to that. She did not need to scan the feed to know who the pirate was. Of course Rama could not hire a ship like a sensible citizen. He had to go for the one that would cause the maximum disturbance. In the middle of a war.
She doubted he cared about that, and she would hardly have cared about him except to wish him luck. But Aisha was on that ship.
She started to patch through to the Ra-Harakhte, but paused. Panic gave way to cold clear logic.
She and Aisha both were safer if she stayed out of it. Rama would protect the child. He might not promise anything else, but that she was absolutely sure of.
On the screen in front of her, the sphere of fighters collapsed abruptly. The Ra-Harakhte was gone.
Khalida was well beyond surprise. She threw up a new link, and that one she let go through. “Leda. I need that shuttle now.”
She did not wait for an answer. The rover had its return route to the port mapped and locked in. “Execute,” she said.
“Don’t.”
Mem Aurelia sat in the copilot’s cradle. Her edges shimmered faintly. “Not the port,” she said. “They’ll impound this rover before it lands. Send it here.”
The map she raised on the screen marked a site so familiar Khalida spat a curse. “I have no time for your games and petty revenge. Get out of my cockpit.”
“Maybe it is a game,” Mem Aurelia’s holo said, “but we play it in earnest. No one will be looking for a shuttle to land in the ruins of Ostia. Do you want to get offworld in one piece or find yourself in a Psycorps detention chamber?”
“I want—” Khalida bit her tongue. “Get out.”
Mem Aurelia melted away into the reconstituted air. Her map persisted on the screen. With no joy at all, Khalida reset the rover’s course.
~~~
She had divided perfectly down the middle, as the rover carried her through day into night. Half of her was grimly calm, prepared for whatever would come. Planning; strategizing. Focusing on the mission.
The other half, a
ll the way down deep, was living that day again and again. Fire coming down. Ash falling like filthy snow. People running. Screaming.
Max and Sonja. Kinuko and John Begay.
When she first knew what she had done, she had had a ritual. She ran the names of all the dead, every one, from beginning to end. She had stopped after she came to Nevermore. She called up the files again now, and ran them in order, as she flew into the fire. It burned her all away, body and mind, grief and guilt and sheer white rage, and cast the ashes on the wind.
~~~
The rover’s night vision gave her the wasteland she expected: a city blasted to slag, rivers vaporized, a barren crater full of rubble and ash. But its edges were blunted. The planet had already begun to reclaim it. Trees and ferns and grasses grew in a twisted jungle over the ruins.
Radiation scans returned readings that penetrated even her fire-dulled intelligence. They were barely above planetary normal.
That was not possible. The best scrubbers in existence took Earthyears to clear out the detritus of a dirty bomb. Khalida knew exactly what she had hit this city with, and as far as the scanner could tell, though badly scorched and blasted, it was almost completely clean.
“Nobody noticed?” Khalida asked the screen.
It answered with an overlay: no vegetation, naked earth and melted rock, and radiation readings exactly as they should have been.
“Why?”
The rover slowed and angled downward. Half instinctively she hit the cradle’s settings, amping them up to crash strength.
Stupid. She could almost hear the nulls laughing at her. They brought the rover in as softly as a fleck of ash falling, and laid it to rest on an undamaged pad in an intact and obviously functioning transport hub.
~~~
“You have all this,” Khalida said. “Why bother with an ultimatum? Just go undercover and disappear. You can hack the galaxy. Go anywhere you like. Rescue your children—”
Mem Aurelia was physically present on the rover. She had not asked permission to board, and two silent and cold-eyed people kept Khalida from leaving. They were perfectly polite, but the message was clear. Khalida was their involuntary guest.
She had had about enough of that, but training held. She would pretend to cooperate, and acquire what data she could.
Antagonizing her host was not exactly the best strategy. She bit her tongue and swallowed the rest of what she had been going to say.
“We have talents,” Mem Aurelia said, “and skills that are remarkable in the scheme of things. What we don’t have is power. Political, economic—”
Khalida swept her hand around the rover and by extension the whole of the hub. “This isn’t power?”
“This is stolen, smuggled, clandestine, and so far, unique. It ate most of our resources. We’ve barely been able to use it, and we haven’t managed to acquire ships of our own. That one you want to try to chase was our best hope, but we lost it to a bolder pirate than any of us.”
“You want me to catch it for you,” Khalida said. “In return for what?”
“The trigger,” Mem Aurelia answered.
Khalida’s teeth clicked together. “The ship is that valuable?”
“It will hold as many of our children as we’ve been able to find and hope to set free. We believe it’s like them: a kind of null, with capabilities that the Corps can’t begin to comprehend. If they can be got to safety, and hidden from the Corps, even the end of this world will have been worth the price.”
“Suppose that happens. Suppose you get the thing back, and load up your children. Do you plan to stop breeding altogether? There will be more children, and the Corps will keep taking them away. What good will it really do?”
“Whatever the Corps wants with our nulls, we’ll take those away. They’ll need years to build the program again—and we’ll be spending every moment of that time finding ways to stop them.”
“That presumes you’re alive and capable of higher cognitive functions. What’s to prevent them from shredding your minds and locking your bodies in breeding sheds?”
“They’ll never catch us all,” said Mem Aurelia. “And our children will be free.”
“You know I can’t help you,” Khalida said. “The man who took that ship has no interest whatsoever in this planet’s troubles. He certainly will not agree to turn it into an interstellar orphanage.”
“Do this and you get the trigger,” said Mem Aurelia. “Araceli survives. You won’t add another hundred million souls to your account.”
That was a blow to the gut. Khalida had to stop and remember how to breathe. “Even if I would or could agree, how do you expect me to get it all done in less than a planetday?”
“I’m sure you’ll manage,” Mem Aurelia said.
“May the nonexistent gods save us from people with a cause.”
Khalida spat the words to empty air. Mem Aurelia and the guards were gone. She was free to leave the rover and meet the shuttle as it came down.
The shuttle was Spaceforce. Letting it know of this place made no sense, or else the Ostians had plans within the plans within their plans. Khalida could hardly tell any longer.
She slung her kit over her shoulder, shoved in a handful of waterbulbs and the rest of the ration bars, and left the rover for, she hoped, the last time.
~~~
The Helen was a little more than a shuttle. It was a fighting ship in its own right, sleek and fast. The detachment of marines that crewed it included a familiar face or two, but no manacles for Khalida, this time.
Its commander was a message, and one that made Khalida almost want to be happy. The Leda’s XO should have been well above running pickup service for stray MI officers, but she grinned as Khalida came onto the bridge. “You ready?”
“Commander Ochoa,” Khalida said. “I’m honored.”
“De nada,” Commander Ochoa said. “I was bored, and here’s a war to fly in and out of. Now they tell me we’re hunting a pirate ship?”
“Better than that,” Khalida said. “A living ship. Which managed to jump into subspace in the middle of a full-on fighter attack, from a hundred meters above the surface.”
“Better and better,” Commander Ochoa said. “Not just an adventure, but an impossible one. Now tell me the fighters belonged to the Corps and I’ll be a happy woman.”
“Some of them did,” Khalida said.
“I’ll take it,” said Commander Ochoa. “Here, patch in to ship’s systems. Do you have a course to lay in?”
Khalida started to say she had no faintest idea, except to get offworld fast. But she did. It was still there: the tracer she had put on Aisha.
There were no miracles. There was technology that worked, and a ship that had to have come out of subspace in time for Khalida to catch the link.
It could jump again of course, but it was still in the system. Very close—orbiting one of Araceli’s triad of moons.
Impossible. No ship could jump from a planet to a moon. The interplay of gravities, the complication of solar flares, the risk of damage or collision—
Nothing about this ship was possible. Or its de facto captain, either.
She filed the coordinates. Helen’s system returned a complex and circuitous course: restricted areas, banned areas, war zones, high-traffic clusters, evacuation zones. Even without the worldwrecker, Araceli was coming apart at the seams.
If she won this gamble, the planet would stay in one piece, at least—whatever happened to the people on it.
The cradle beside the commander’s post was empty and waiting for her. So were they all. Even while the straps secured themselves around her, the Helen launched herself toward the stratosphere.
~~~
“Captain Nasir?”
Khalida had fallen into a doze. Even less than half out of it, she knew the speaker could not be on the Helen.
“Captain Nasir,” he said again, while the stream beneath the words marked his location and identity. Zhao, Lieutenant. Psi-Three. Coordina
tes— “Request permission to board.”
“I’m not the one to ask,” Khalida said.
“Actually,” he said, “you are.” He shot her a spurt: Commander Ochoa spitting at his Corps ID and tossing it off toward the MI officer.
Khalida aimed a glare at Commander Ochoa, who was happily preoccupied with flying her ship through its twister of a course. Zhao was alone, as far as she could determine, and rapidly running out of air.
Any vestige of intelligence would have let him drop away. He was Psycorps: the last thing any of them needed, least of all either Aisha or the walking atavism who had effectively abducted her.
She snarled in frustration and no little self-disgust. “All right. Come aboard. You’re not a guest, do you understand? You aren’t a prisoner, either, but you damned well will be if I catch you slipping data to your superiors.”
“I won’t do that,” he said. “You have my word.”
It might have been her imagination, but he sounded breathless. His shuttle was a maximum altitude and straining to stay there, but he was already outside it, suited and with jets engaged.
Trusting of him. Or suicidal.
Helen’s rear hatch opened to take him in. Khalida was halfway there, escalating to a long lope as she hit the half-gravity of the stowage bay.
~~~
Lieutenant Zhao out of his suit looked almost wild, and distinctly hollow-eyed.
“Why?” Khalida asked him—calmly, she thought, but he shied like a startled horse.
He answered steadily enough, even so. “I took responsibility for the child.”
“I absolve you,” Khalida said. “We’ll have to keep you until we’re done with this; then we’ll drop you off at the nearest Corps installation. You will stay out of the way and you will not communicate with the Corps. Do you understand?”
“I understand that you trust me,” he said, “and that you have no idea why. Except that you can.”
“My head hurts,” Khalida said.
He did not laugh at her, which was merciful of him. She turned her back on him and led him up to the bridge.
IV.
Ra-Harakhte
