Forgotten Suns

by Judith Tarr

  Aisha could learn from that. “Let me by,” she said.

  “So you can sell us out to Spaceforce? I don’t think so.”

  “Oh,” said Aisha. “Is that what you’d do? My aunt’s on that shuttle. I want to see her.”

  “No,” said MariAntonia.

  Aisha walked through her. She gave way, which surprised Aisha, but Kirkov didn’t. It was like running into a wall.

  She leaned back till she could see his face. “You think you’re taking over the ship now?”

  “I think you need help, and you don’t know where to find it.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “I’m not psi,” he said, “but I connect data for a living. Your friend or employer or whatever he is may be able to control this ship, but if he wants to get anywhere with it, he has to have help. That means crew. You think Spaceforce will or can give you that?”

  “I’m not asking Spaceforce,” Aisha said.

  “Someone in the Force, then,” MariAntonia said. “When will it sink in that you can’t trust any of them? Even relatives. Especially relatives. They want you back home with Mummy and Daddy, and they’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

  They were getting some of it wrong, but enough was right that Aisha had a serious thought about pitching the same kind of fit she’d pitched when she was three years old.

  She couldn’t do that. She had to make herself calm, and then force herself to think. She wasn’t getting to the Helen from this direction. What she was getting was an offer she maybe couldn’t afford to refuse.

  “All right,” she said. “Tell me why I should believe you.”

  Because you don’t have a choice.

  She could read that one in MariAntonia’s face, but Kirkov wasn’t quite so blunt. “I’ll let you read me,” he said.

  “But I don’t—” Aisha bit her tongue. She was in so deep she couldn’t imagine how to get out. Now they all thought she was psi.

  She was. She could face that. But she didn’t have the first idea how to be it.

  It felt as if the crewpeople around Kirkov were closing in. Their eyes were hungry.

  All she could think of to say was, “I’ll do it. But not here.”

  “Yes, here,” MariAntonia said. “You don’t get to stall us.”

  There was no Rama to help her. Aisha was all alone.

  “Kneel down,” she said to Kirkov.

  She thought MariAntonia might squawk, but she didn’t. Kirkov dropped down to where Aisha didn’t have to strain to see his face.

  His eyes were calm. They looked kind. She thought about them the way she did about a web portal, a set of access codes that opened a new stream of data.

  At first she wasn’t sure it was working. She might be on the web, more or less by accident, but if she was, it was a weird, staticky, now blurry and now painfully sharp connection.

  The static eased up a bit. The sharpness smoothed out. The stream had an undertone of words—a lot of words—but what she focused on was the way it felt.

  He was nervous, but clamping it down. Trying to make sure he was focused and coherent. Hoping she wouldn’t find—what?

  A mob of children in a dirty street on a world with a greenish sun. The air had a smell to it, a bit like burning and a bit like sulfur. His pants were down and his backside was cold and he was so embarrassed he wanted to die.

  She backed up fast. Up, and sideways, just like navigating webstreams. She followed the feelings. Not just the ones on top, that he was trying to make her see. The others, running underneath. The fears and worries. Anger—he had plenty of that.

  It wasn’t at her, or anything that would hurt her. Psycorps, Spaceforce, that was different. The things they’d done to him…

  She pulled back again. She had what she needed. She could get out, she was sure. Just keep pretending his mind was a webstream, find the portal and shut it.

  Except it kept sliding away. The stream wanted her to go down into the parts he was trying to keep from her, the deep swirls and eddies where the mind stopped making sense and started making its own rules.

  “Up here.”

  Brisk. Sharp. It might seem angry, but that was fear honed to a keen edge.

  It wasn’t Lieutenant Zhao. Aisha didn’t know who it was at first, because it was so unexpected.

  It was Aunt Khalida. Her voice guided Aisha up through levels like sucking mud, toward something she decided to see as light. Once she made the decision, it was light: the soft, faintly underwater glow that lit the inside of the ship.

  Aisha was still on her feet, but once she realized that, her knees gave way.

  Kirkov held her up. She could still feel him, partly inside and partly through his big warm hand. “You’re trustworthy,” she said. “That doesn’t mean anyone else is. Say you’ll take responsibility for them.”

  His answer was steady, though inside he wasn’t quite so sure. “I’ll speak for all of them. We’re in this together. We’ll help you get out of this system, and crew the ship at least as far as the nearest free station.”

  “Which is how far?”

  “That depends,” MariAntonia said.

  Kirkov shot her a look. “Simplest route would take us to Tien Shan.”

  “Which is glaringly obvious and promises us a welcoming committee,” MariAntonia said. “I’d head for Novy Novotny, myself.”

  “I see,” Aisha said. She hoped she sounded neutral. She wasn’t about to tell them the ship might have its own ideas, and Rama definitely did. Would. When he woke up.

  She’d stopped the beginnings of an argument, at least. “I’m going to see my aunt,” she said. She tilted her chin at Kirkov and then, after a pause, MariAntonia. “You can come. Just be quiet.”

  Kirkov wasn’t offended. MariAntonia obviously was. Aisha didn’t care. She walked between them, and let out a breath when neither tried to block her.

  42

  Commander Ochoa’s ping woke Khalida out of a dream in which she had been walking in a man’s mind beside Aisha, guiding her up and out and into the light. It was an odd dream, not because it was strange, but because it felt so ordinary. As if she did such things every day, with as much ease as if she were running the web or piloting a shuttle.

  The dream scattered. “Captain,” Ochoa said. “You need to see this.”

  Khalida swung out of the bunk and onto the bridge. The main screen was running a data feed that notably lacked the usual MI hallmarks.

  “Hacked?” she asked Ochoa.

  The Commander nodded. “It’s running everywhere in this system.”

  It must have been set to release as soon as the children were safe. Khalida had seen most of it, or heard it from Mem Aurelia.

  It was slanted, of course, for maximum shock and outrage. MI itself could hardly have done better.

  “I would say,” Ochoa said, “that things just got ugly.”

  “Ugly,” Khalida said, “and extremely, and intentionally, distracting. You’d better get off this ship, Commander. Unless you want to go wherever it’s going.”

  “‘You’?”

  Khalida had not made a decision, exactly. One of the secondary screens showed three figures striding across the shuttle bay: two strangers, and a small but upright figure in alien black.

  “I’m done,” she said. “I did what MI said it wanted. I defused the trigger; I kept Araceli from being killed, though what happens to it now, I don’t know or care.”

  “This just got a whole lot bigger than Araceli,” Ochoa said.

  “So it did.” Khalida shouldered her kit. “Good luck to you, Commander. Give my best to Captain Hashimoto.”

  Anyone else might have tried to talk Khalida out of it. Commander Ochoa did not even try. And that, Khalida thought, was one more reason why Tomiko had sent her.

  Messages within messages. She snapped a salute—for the last time, maybe. Commander Ochoa returned it; and so, to her surprise, did the rest of the crew on the bridge.

  Her throat wa
s unexpectedly tight. She walked out without interference, through the shuttle and down the ramp and into the bay just in time to meet Aisha and her escort.

  ~~~

  “Aunt,” Aisha said.

  Her face was stiff and looked cold, which meant she was close to tears. Khalida was not a person for hugging or comforting, but then neither was Aisha.

  “You have quarters?” Khalida asked.

  “I don’t—”

  “She does,” said the big man with her. “Follow me.”

  Aisha stiffened as if she might rebel, but Khalida swept her around and aimed her toward the man’s retreating back.

  ~~~

  The cabin in which he left them would have been quite ordinary if one had not known that it was formed of living substance. Khalida suspected that it had been intended for scientific staff: its many connectors, now disabled, would have allowed for the running of multiple experiments, and its half-dozen bunks, all convertible into jump cradles, showed signs of having been used as specimen storage.

  Two meals were laid out on the table by the far wall, each contained in a micro-stasis field. Khalida had no appetite, but Aisha fell on her share, even while she burst out in a flare of pent-up temper. “I wanted to talk to Commander Ochoa!”

  “Commander Ochoa will be on her way back to the Leda as soon as the ship lets her go,” Khalida said. “What were you going to say to her that you can’t say to me?”

  “Everything!”

  Khalida paused to let the ringing in her ears subside. “I quit, you know. Resigned. Left. I’m out of MI.”

  Aisha stopped with chopsticks halfway to her mouth. “You what?”

  “If you’re looking for help from Spaceforce, I don’t think you’ll get it. A planetload of ordure just hit the fan out there, and every ship in the system will be called to fend it off.”

  Aishal set her chopsticks down. Her eyes flickered: accessing ship’s web, and maybe something more. “Oh,” she said. “Oh my. They really want us to get away without anyone chasing us, don’t they?”

  “They really do,” Khalida said.

  “That’s the problem,” Aisha said. She breathed deep, then let it go. “The only one who can control this ship is Rama. And he’s out—just gone. Though he’ll come back. I think. I got the ship to keep feeding for a little while, but I won’t be able to hold it for long. Then I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  Khalida took her time digesting that. “Do you know where he wants to go?”

  “I know he has star maps,” Aisha answered. “I saved them. But which ones matter, or where they eventually go, I can’t tell you. I’m not even sure he can.”

  “I believe this is what’s called a fine mess.” Khalida was almost happy, saying it. It was not MI’s mess, or hers, unless she made it so. She raised her voice slightly and pitched it to carry outward. “I know you’re listening. Come in and join us. If we’re all in it together, we may as well be honest about it.”

  ~~~

  It was a while before anyone responded to Khalida’s invitation. She took the opportunity to eat, having found her appetite after all. She needed fuel, if this adventure was going to continue.

  Ship’s web, she discovered, was open for her access. She idled through it, searching out its nooks and corners. Aisha’s star maps waited for her at the end of a search string, linked to downloads from Araceli’s worldweb of the carvings on the Ara Celi.

  They suggested no pattern to her. A sequence of separate systems and clusters of systems, curving up and over a stone arch, but leading nowhere she could discern. The distances from Araceli seemed random, the routes as suggested by the web equally disconnected. There was no telling in which direction they were meant to run, or even where the progression began.

  Either they really were random, or they were a code for which she had no key. The key was sitting on the bridge, apparently in a trance, and no one dared to wake him.

  People were coming: the ship sent a shiver along her arm, like feet walking down one of its corridors. Khalida saved the maps to a file of her own.

  As she slid out of the web, the ship shuddered.

  Khalida was on her feet and running. Aisha ran ahead of her, trailing black robes and tightly controlled panic.

  They passed a handful of people: the big man from the shuttle bay and the woman who had been with him, and one or two in science-team uniform. One of the latter fell as the ship lurched again. Khalida kept her balance, hurdled the fallen body, and sprinted onto the bridge.

  Rama sat upright and motionless in the captain’s cradle. People swirled around him: crew, scientists, Marta from Araceli in a trail of virtual stars. Lieutenant Zhao from the Corps, as blankly shocked as the rest of them.

  The screens showed no changes outside the ship: the moon below, Araceli floating in the distance, and a faint, disconcerting shimmer that might be a cloaking field. Then what—

  The forward screen flicked off. While Khalida stared at the darkness where it had been, a new image formed: the bridge of a Psycorps cutter, a blur on the edges that must be crew, and Rinaldi in the center, for once in Corps black with nine pips on his collar, smiling. “There you are,” he said.

  Khalida spun and clipped Zhao alongside the ear. He dropped. Rinaldi’s image, unfortunately, did not.

  “You don’t think I’d be that obvious, do you?” he said. “We’ll be boarding now. Don’t trouble with an escort. We’ll find our own way in.”

  “They’ve got a tractor beam on us,” Kirkov said from one of the side stations.

  “Yes,” said Aisha, “and ship doesn’t like it.” Her face was tight, as if her head hurt.

  Khalida sent a quick query on ship’s web. Helen was still in the shuttle bay; the ship had not yet released her. It allowed Khalida to open a link.

  It was a poor connection, full of extraneous noise. Pain, she thought. The ship was in pain.

  Commander Ochoa met her stare through the link. Khalida shot her a burst of data. Not orders, exactly. Unless she chose to interpret them as such.

  She caught the burst, scanned it. “Got it,” she said.

  Khalida jerked a nod that was half a salute. “Godspeed,” she said.

  ~~~

  Khalida’s instant on the web had seen little change on the bridge. Aisha had moved, that was all. Edging toward one of the crew, the woman whom Khalida had seen with Aisha in the shuttle bay. She seemed unaware that she was being stalked, intent on the screen in front of her.

  Khalida’s mind was moving almost too quickly to keep up with itself. That was it. The weak link. The connection to Rinaldi. MariAntonia—that was her name.

  The ship’s pain had mounted. While Aisha descended on MariAntonia, Khalida aimed for the screen.

  Aisha sprang, bringing the spy down bodily while Khalida confronted what the spy had done: opening the link to Rinaldi; restoring the Corps’ modifications to the ship.

  Not all of them; there had barely been time. The shields first. The jump drive and the basic controls were still incomplete.

  There was no safe way to rip them out. The ship kept a memory of what Rama had done—the bright one, it called him; the living sun. It was well beyond any capabilities Khalida might have had.

  She tried speaking directly to the ship. “Wake him up. You need him.”

  The pain was too strong. It could maintain essential functions, life support, even opening the port that released Helen into space, but nothing more complex.

  She scanned the bridge. No one was doing anything useful, except Aisha, and the big crewman, who had moved past Aisha to lock MariAntonia in a set of shackles. Khalida would have been interested to know where those came from on a research vessel, but a Corps slave ship—now that made perfect sense.

  What came to mind made no sense at all. It was simply there, out of nowhere, except possibly the ship.

  “Marta,” she said to the woman sat quiet in the midst of the commotion, listening and taking it in without offering to add to it.r />
  Marta lifted her chin. It was answer enough. “Come here,” Khalida said, moving as she spoke, toward the other center of stillness.

  He was as immobile as that statue of him on Nevermore. The carved stone had been more alive than his living face.

  “Sing,” Khalida said to Marta.

  Marta’s eyes widened slightly, but she offered no argument. She drew breath, paused, then released it in a torrent of sound.

  That voice was trained to fill the cavernous spaces of an ancient opera house. Ra-Harakhte’s bridge was larger than the command centers of most Spaceforce destroyers, but not nearly as large as that. Every cell in Khalida’s body sprang to attention. Her ears rang, and kept on ringing, as Marta transformed that first note into a cascade of melismas and intricate flourishes.

  Khalida felt him wake. Consciousness soared from unimaginable depths to a blaze of living light. Eyes opened, with nothing human in them; nothing mortal at all, seething and swirling like the surface of a sun.

  They blinked; darkened. Became a man’s eyes, white and iris and pupil, but the sun still lived in them.

  Khalida had all but forgotten the fore screen and the image that still flickered on it, Rinaldi shaking his head and trying to laugh through evident pain. His lips moved; she did not trouble to read them. Something witty, no doubt. Marta’s aria drowned them out.

  Marta’s aria, and the ship’s pain. Cutting off MariAntonia had been too little and too late. Boarding parties stung like blisters along the hull. Two, six—ten. Rinaldi was taking no chances.

  “That will be enough,” Rama said, soft, as if to himself. He should not have been audible. He was perfectly clear.

  His eyes met Khalida’s. “Shield yourself,” he said.

  She should not have known what that meant, but it too was perfectly clear. Aisha, and even Zhao, had fixed on him. Like a firewall on the web, Khalida thought. Layers on layers of encryption. Closing in her mind; sealing this thing she had become.

  He nodded. Warmth brushed past her like the flicker of a smile. Then the world was hard and sharp and globed in glass.

  Rinaldi screamed.

  It was incomprehensible at first. Blood streamed from eyes, nose, ears. His body convulsed.