by Patty Jansen
The driver brought the engine to life with a powerful roar. Seated on the bench in front of it, I could feel the air suck into the jet and pull at my hair and clothes, as if I were standing in a hurricane. The guards at the front pointed that way. The driver yelled an exclamation that got lost in the roar of the engine when he gunned it. The air was sucked out of my lungs. The boat flew forward, barely skimming the water, bouncing over reed clumps. I’d been in these jet boats before, but they were nothing like this. This boat was a monster, and probably belonged to those new commercial fishing operations that went far out onto the marshlands to fishing grounds that may or may not be across the border, and may or may not be subject to frisking by Mirani border patrols. Guess that was why they needed the engine. Hell, it was fast, it was powerful, and it made us soaking wet. The low windshield at the front of the seating area did nothing to stop the sprays of mist that exploded over us every time the bow slammed into the water.
We’d gone a while when I realised that we weren’t going to the airport or even to the main island. It was too noisy and windy to ask Thayu. She sat huddled in her insulation suit with the collar pulled up over her ears. Like most Coldi, Thayu didn’t like water.
Strangely enough, Ezhya and Veyada continued their conversation as if they were sitting on the couch in my living room.
Where are we going? I asked Thayu, risking the possibility that Ezhya’s guards or the soldiers would get a fix on the feeder’s output, which would allow them to get into our network.
Thayu spread her hands. She clearly didn’t want to use the feeder. She gestured with her eyes in the direction where our listening equipment would be in our living room, had we been in the living room. I gestured all right.
The message was: be careful, wherever they were taking us.
So I said nothing and watched the reeds, lily fields and occasional islands with megon trees and their drooping branches whiz past.
After what seemed like an eternity of bumping and sheltering from sprays of water, the reeds became sparser and some areas of blinding white glared at the horizon—the sand bar that separated the marshes from the ocean. A bunch of darker shapes lay a bit further offshore, bobbing on the waves.
All right, I got it now. This was why Ezhya had feigned interest in “surf” and “ocean”. I should have known.
When we reached the beach, it turned out that the dark shapes were aircraft, and they floated quite a distance offshore. A handful of small dinghies lay on the beach, and a few more were underway to the ships with supplies on board. These were not the same ships I had seen at the airport a few days ago. Just how many of those military ships were there in orbit?
I looked up. Billowing clouds hung on the eastern horizon, but directly overhead I could see the sky. Of course there would be no sign of Ezhya’s armada. They’d be well out of range of the scanning equipment, probably hanging around at a LaGrange point while pretending to be pieces of debris. When the engines idled, the electromagnetic emissions from the ships were very weak. They could easily have been there for a long time.
Or they could secretly have come this way under minimal power, waiting for their opportunity.
A boat approached the beach where we were standing. It raced through the surf and slid onto the beach, with the driver displaying more water and boat related skills than I had ever seen in a Coldi person.
He came out and greeted Ezhya, demure and proper. Ezhya’s guards helped turn the boat around and climbed in. One of them dropped to his knees and inspected the space under the benches. Satisfied, he made a small gesture for Ezhya to come in. These people left nothing to chance.
This boat wasn’t big enough to take all of us, and we waited on the sand while it went out to the ships.
The sand was soft and white, and the crash of the surf on the beach reminded me of the summers I used to spend with my parents on the bay, where our holiday house was right at the beach. Sometimes Thayu and I had come here with my surfboard. Apart from the occasional fishing crew, no one else ever came here. I would enter the water and Thayu would lounge on the beach. Sometimes we would make love under the bright sun.
The dinghy had churned up the white sand, leaving deep gouges in the surface. When it came back, it hovered straight up the beach, and we had to climb in while avoiding the powerful intake from the engine.
We headed for the closest ship, where I could see Ezhya inside, putting on some sort of green suit. A soldier came to the doorway when the dinghy approached. She grabbed the rope the boat’s driver threw to her, and pulled the boat close to the floaters of the ship. Thayu jumped out and helped me into a storage hold full of crates and boxes. There was a door in the metal wall to the right. I followed Thayu into a cramped cockpit, where the pilot sat studying Coldi text that scrolled over the screen in front of her. She turned around briefly, greeted Thayu—subserviently—and continued her work without showing any sign that she had noticed me. Thayu pulled me into the bench behind the pilot.
I sat down, looking over the pilot’s broad shoulder. A chill crept over my back. Had I ever realised how little Asto cared about anyone with status in gamra? It wasn’t their system, and Coldi were extremely practical. If it didn’t affect them, they had trouble mustering interest in the subject. Even the Chief Delegate would fall entirely outside their associations and wouldn’t have any feedback into their system.
Ezhya and Veyada came in behind us.
“. . . have no time for that,” Ezhya was saying.
“We can’t stop them tracking.” Veyada wormed himself between the back of our seat and the narrow seats behind us. He sat down.
Ezhya also sat down and did up the seat belts. One of his guards joined us.
There were some thumps on the floor behind us. The pilot spoke to other crew through the microphone. The tinny voice that drifted through the loudspeaker spoke entirely in code. Something about flight directions, I gathered.
The door of the vehicle shut with a thump.
The pilot swiped the comm screen and called up the flight diagnostics. The craft was at ninety-five percent of carrying capacity, ninety-six percent readiness, fuel was at seventy-six percent and the outside current that made the ship almost invisible was off. That was a measure taken for the sake of lowering fuel consumption. It was not really necessary in Barresh anyway.
I’d had a few flying lessons, because Ezhya wanted it—and this was pretty much the extent of my knowledge. Once you were in the air, it was easy, he said. I hadn’t gotten to that part yet, and to be honest, it sounded pretty damn scary to me.
For a few moments, no one spoke. The diagnostics on the screen crept up. The pilot moved her hand when readiness hit ninety-nine percent. The low hum of the engine increased.
Hundred percent.
The engine roared into life.
I was pressed into my seat. A glimpse of the marshlands shot past the window, followed by a view of the sky and then a wider view of the marshlands. The sky again. What the hell was the pilot doing? Rolling. Twisting. Turning. My stomach didn’t like it at all.
I glanced at Thayu in the seat next to me, who knew of, if not understood, my discomfort. She put a hand on my leg, very discreetly, where the people behind us couldn’t see this little admission of weakness. Right now, I wasn’t feeling very strong. I was human, weak and fallible in the face of this display of military might.
Fortunately, the craft evened out and rose straight into the air. The sky turned dark blue and then black. The glow of the atmosphere receded.
By now, the pilot was busy again with her comm screen where the messages in code scrolled faster than I could read. She turned on the visual screen on the wall. This surprised me a bit, because the one previous time I’d come to an Asto military ship, they’d blanked out all the visual input.
The screen now showed me an enhanced view of one of Ceren’s little moons. Behind it hung a multitude of little dots that could have been stars or asteroids, but I knew them for what they were: a ve
ritable armada of ships.
Holy shit.
I glanced over my shoulder at Ezhya. He met my eyes squarely.
Never underestimate Asto. I didn’t know how many times I needed to be reminded of that fact and yet their sheer military might surprised me every single time.
“Do you really believe that the risk warrants this reaction?” I asked him.
“These people have the technology to travel outside the galaxy. They have maintained a coherent society for all this time. According to their logs, only four hundred years has passed since they left, but that’s still a remarkable time to have maintained social coherence. Most societies fall apart every hundred years or so. The captain is the same as the heartless man we know left behind many people to die on Asto. I could not believe it is the same man, but it seems this is the case. Four hundred years isn’t that long. Already Aghyrians live longer than any of us. They may have developed immortality for all we know, but we can’t ask them. They won’t talk to us directly. To them, we’re products of their science. Not real people. Beneath them.”
The contempt in his voice disturbed me.
Then a thought: the Coldi didn’t know how to react when someone considered them inferior. They might not even know how to react when threatened by someone with considerable military might. Since Asto was so much bigger than most gamra entities and nobody considered the Coldi inferior, the situation simply never arose.
As we came closer, the true size of the armada resolved from the shadow of the moon. There were at least thirty large ships. Some were the classic box shape for deep space travel, others were long and narrow and huge. There was one that looked like it had a habitat with artificial gravity. A space station, really? How long had it been here? Why was he showing me this now?
The screen before the pilot showed how a locator beam was guiding us from one of the large craft, one of the long and skinny ones.
The closer we got, the more the thing grew in size. First it took up most of the screen, and then we could see only portions of the ship, and those portions were ever zooming in, while more detail resolved. This thing was massive.
We flew into the shadow of the craft, where the pitch-darkness was broken only by the occasional pinprick of light on a piece of equipment or maintenance hatch. A square opening marked the surface ahead. Strong floodlights came on when we approached, casting harsh shadows both inside the dock and the surrounding part of the hull.
The downward camera gave us a view of the inside of the dock. Entry was through the ceiling. I could see people moving inside. Walking, yet the ship had no rotating habitat. Our ship hovered above the opening and eased through the invisible wall that separated the dock from the void of space. The windows glowed orange with the heat as we passed. As soon as we had gone through, up and down resolved from the multitude of directions that I’d felt while in space.
“Artificial gravity?” I glanced at Ezhya.
Thayu was watching with wide eyes. The military was secret not just from us, but from Asto’s citizens as well. She loved this sort of stuff.
Veyada, though, would have seen it all before, and he was talking to Ezhya as if he came here every day.
The pilot engaged the downward jets and the ship eased down on the floor of a huge hall. One of the guards inside the cabin undid his safety harness, rose and opened the door to the cargo hold.
Ezhya was also getting up from his seat.
I was itching to ask questions, but I’d learned that any Coldi who was familiar with Asto military might didn’t just keep the knowledge hidden from the public, but most military operations were never talked about, even amongst people who should know. We were to get no explanation of what this ship and the other ships were doing here. Even Thayu and Nicha disliked talking about what little they knew with me. To ask questions would be considered rude.
We left the cabin for the cargo hold, where the outside door had just been opened and the gangplank was zooming out. The air inside the big ship was too hot to be comfortable, and smelled of hot metal, and a kind of industrial smell that I couldn’t place.
We followed Ezhya down the gangplank. A couple of people waited there, all in desert-pink military uniform.
They greeted Ezhya with subservient expressions, and maintained those expressions for the rest of us, even though we probably didn’t deserve it. I was quite hungry, and itching to ask what the point was of all this. Ezhya gestured a few code signals to the ship people, some of whom I deduced to be of high rank.
Then he said to me, “Come.”
Chapter 20
* * *
HEART THUDDING, I followed Ezhya out of the hall. I sensed Thayu close behind me, so she must have surmised that she was allowed as well. Veyada was likely to follow close by, too.
Surely Ezhya was finally going to show me the reason why I had to come here.
From the arrival hall, we went into a corridor with a spongy floor that felt sticky under my feet. I frowned at Thayu, but she looked as bewildered about the material as I felt. I didn’t dare open the feeder. The level of surveillance was likely to be extreme.
Every soldier we met snapped into a subservient position to the point where I would pick up immediately if one person failed to do this. This was how Coldi saw if everything was in order: if a high-ranking Coldi person entered a room, the only people who didn’t look down should be equals or superiors.
Ezhya took us up a winding staircase with only enough room for one person. He opened the hatch at the top and climbed into a dark room. We followed him. It reminded me of going to the bridge of the military ship that had taken us to Asto.
But the dark room where we came out wasn’t a ship’s bridge. We stood on an elevated walkway that stretched into the darkness. Little blue lights illuminated small spots of it. The ceiling overhead curved as if we stood in a huge cylinder. I surmised that we were in the core of the ship, in the engine room, or whatever it was that gave the ship such a long, narrow shape. Beneath our feet lay a number of huge metal tubes which disappeared into the darkness on both ends.
Was this the legendary military sling? I couldn’t believe Ezhya would show that to me.
“The main problem with this Aghyrian ship is that they won’t talk to us directly,” he said over the low hum of the engine or ventilation system. I took a moment to realise that we were continuing the talk we’d started aboard the shuttle.
“How much contact have you had with this ship?”
He didn’t answer that, but I figured it was quite a lot.
“Are they coming this way?”
Thayu had stopped a little bit behind us. Well within earshot, I believed, but far enough to give us the illusion of privacy. Veyada had probably gone to do Veyada-things, and I assumed that Sheydu had remained aboard the shuttle.
Ezhya said, “They know about the Ratanga cluster.” Again not answering my question directly.
The Ratanga cluster, of course, was the part of the galaxy arm where we were, and where Kedras was, and a couple of other inhabited worlds within a single jump of each other. The world of Damarq, the main node of the Exchange network, lay in the middle of this cluster. It was the beating heart of the Exchange network, of gamra and all the civilised worlds.
A pilot had once assured me that when you jumped an anpar line, it was extremely hard to find where you had come from without specialised navigation equipment. Even when using the gravitational centre of the galaxy as a reference point. In the fifty thousand years that had passed in this galaxy since the ship had left, positions of stars would have shifted enough to completely throw the ship’s navigation off-course.
Finding Asto in the galaxy would not have been easy. But they had found it.
Ezhya continued, “If they decide to target an attack on the Exchange system, they could knock out communication to all the Ratanga worlds before a single warning system would trigger.”
I nodded. It was a weakness of the Exchange, and one no one was sure how to defend agains
t it, simply because there had never been a need to do so.
“I am not going to allow a repeat of what happened last time.”
I wanted to ask him if he thought that a fleet of military ships would prevent it, but that was surely a dumb remark. He was about to show me something about this installation. I leaned both elbows on the balustrade and looked down at the curves of the metal tubes that ran under the walkway. There were control panels at regular distances along the tubes, consisting of a little box with yellow and blue lights set on a panel with buttons, or something similar—it was hard to see in the low light.
Ezhya leaned on the balustrade next to me. Even though the temperature of the air was, as was customary for Asto, the level of a hot summer’s day, I could feel the heat radiating from his skin. Wow. I knew that the Coldi’s lowest body temperature was a little bit under forty Celsius, but wasn’t sure of the upper limit.
He said, “The fact that we’ve been working on a transportable one-way Exchange core has to have been the worst-kept secret of gamra.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Well, this is it.” He gestured at the tubes underneath us.
My heart jumped. Well, what the hell, he did show me.
“It’s not that new anymore, or, for that matter, secret. It’s not particularly elegant, it’s not refined or small, and it still requires the presence nearby of a secondary ship, but here it is.”
“We could have used that when I went to Asto.”
“Yet, you did not, because my staff were under strict instructions not to reveal it to anyone not authorised. And they did not.”
“Even if using it would have been to your benefit.”
“Yes. Even so.” He interlaced his thick fingers. “I wasn’t there to authorise them.”
Fair enough. That was Coldi loyalty for you. “Why are you showing it to me now?”
