by Patty Jansen
I did. The seat covering felt rubbery and soft, and my suit stuck to it. The two crew who accompanied us had taken up positions at the door. I felt utterly naked and vulnerable without Thayu or Veyada or Sheydu.
“I will talk to you because you are not one of them.” He used very formal pronouns.
“I’m interested in your story. How you have returned here, what you have discovered on your travels and what you have to offer.”
His green eyes looked me over in a kind of uncomfortable I bet you are silence. Maybe he had expected to be grilled over the people they were still holding.
We’d get to that subject later. “My name is Cory Wilson. I represent the entities of gamra, which is—”
“I know what it is.”
Another uncomfortable silence. Was he going to give me the opportunity to establish a friendly discussion, or was he going to be rude?
“How do you know who I am?” His speech rattled with unpleasant tones and set my teeth on edge. I could imagine so well how Coldi bluff would have gone down with him. How well his replies would have gone down with Asha.
“We know about you through the historical archives that have been excavated over the years. There are wall carvings, but people have also found working equipment and documents that can still be read.”
“At Asto, after the disaster?” He raised his eyebrows.
“In the aquifers. Geologists say that the heat of the impact liquefied a good deal of the surface. A layer of molten rock sprayed over the surface, enclosing the waterways. The heat turned the water into steam, and with nowhere to go, the water turned into ice under pressure. This kept the tunnels open. When the surface cooled, the water returned to its normal state. Because much of the old civilisation was buried, quite a lot has been preserved.” Some of it was just really hard to reach, because it was encased in rock.
“In any of those documents, have you come across the name Waller Herza?”
“I haven’t.” It seemed an odd thing to ask. “There is a lot of Aghyrian history and I admit I’m not a specialist in the field.” Federza might know who this person was. It was absurd that I was speaking to someone who might have known the legends of those archives personally. Absurd and invaluable. “Is this person of value to you?”
“You can say that again. I should very much like to see what his projects have come to.”
“I hope you realise that you can’t travel to Asto.” I wasn’t going to enlighten him about my recent trip. “Asto is closed to all except Coldi, because it is too hot for other people.”
He tilted his head. “Except it’s not really, anymore, is it?”
Damn, he’d probably heard that from the Aghyrians. I had to admit the truth. “It’s changing.”
Then I had an odd thought. Of course Aghyrians could have told them about the changing climate as soon as they had established contact with the ship, but I guessed that travelling back here from outside the galaxy required some preparation, and they couldn’t turn up the moment that the first changes were reported to them. What if Captain Luczon and his crew had already known? If there was some sort of beacon at Asto that warned these people that the climate was changing? Those Exchange hiccups had been happening for years.
Ezhya’s voice sounded in my thoughts. They’re not here to negotiate. They’re here to take.
“Indeed. The climate is changing rapidly.” He looked smug.
“Do you wish to return to Asto?” My heart was hammering in my throat. This was not going well. This man didn’t want to talk. He wanted to dictate his terms and I had no doubt that he was fully aware of the value of the hostage he had. And he was not going to chat about where he’d been and what they had seen there.
“It is why we’ve returned. These people, these war ships out there are wasting their time.” He gestured at the bank of viewscreens that lined the walls and where Ezhya’s army fleet was visible as small specks. Watching this ship. Keeping it here, they said.
“They’re defending their world.”
He snorted. “It’s our world. Those fake people don’t belong there. They try to stop us, but won’t be successful. Nothing can stop this ship.”
“There are five billion people on Asto. It’s their home. They have worked for generations to make the world what it is.”
He laughed. “What it is? It’s pile of slag and rubble, that’s what. If you want to know what it should have been, had these people been smart enough to actually do a decent job, I’ll show you.”
He lifted his hand. The room darkened and the bank of viewscreens against the back wall turned uniform black. A large round shape materialised on the screen. A planet, seen from space. I recognised the shape of the continents, if not the green expanses of the land, the forests, the fields and the snow on the mountains. The ocean was azure blue and not yellow. The glow of the atmosphere blue and not white. The scores and cracks that so clearly marked the surface today were barely visible.
Captain Luczon said, “That is what we had. This is what Asto should look like.”
As I watched the former beauty of Asto roll past, noting towns and villages, I could only think that Ezhya should see this. Thayu should see it. In fact every adult and child on Asto should watch this.
“It will never be like this again,” I said, my voice hoarse. All those towns and settlements. All those people. How many had died on that day? I’d known of course, but it was one thing knowing about it, but another altogether seeing it before your eyes.
The view flicked to another image, this one a bit further away. And then a streak in the sky, as I realised with horror what I was looking at. They had recorded the whole disaster, but had not offered help? They had not evacuated as many people as the ship could carry?
The streak grew bigger and brighter until I could make out the flaming ball that formed its front end, until I could see how it glowed when it hit the atmosphere, and seconds later slammed into the planet. The shockwave made the image waver. A huge fireball erupted, engulfing the planet, followed by roiling clouds of dust with streaks of fire within.
The planet became smaller and smaller, barely recognisable and shrouded in dust. That was how the ship had left it.
The screen went dark again to be replaced by a grainy image of Asto today: a planet of pinks and yellows, damaged, scarred, badly overpopulated. How had they obtained that? But I thought I knew: those old unregistered satellites that hung around both Asto and Ceren looking like bits of space junk. The ones that had upset the Exchange when responding to the ship’s commands.
Captain Luczon was studying my face with an intense expression. “Looking at these images, I don’t think these people have done so well, haven’t they?”
“They don’t need to. The Coldi quite like Asto as it is.” In fact, the changing climate unnerved a lot of people greatly. They were afraid of an influx of visitors that might overrun their world. And with their population control measures, they were managing their resources well enough.
He scoffed. “It is a poor effort. They should have done better. We will do better for them.”
“If you can so easily return a planet to health after a disaster like that, there are thousands of worlds where you can live.”
“True. But none of them are ours. Asto will be green again.”
Chapter 25
* * *
THAT STATEMENT chilled me. Through all of the time that I’d been here, he’d shown little emotion, no empathy with the people who had died, and a bucketload of contempt for the Coldi.
Even if we all agreed that a climatic engineering project was necessary, he was not a person I’d want to put in charge of it, let alone a project that involved the lives of five billion people.
He lifted a warning finger. “Asto is ours. I want to see it again. I’m an old man. Is it such a strange request that want to see my home world green and healthy again?”
“The planet is inhabited. The current inhabitants won’t see the benefit. They’re numerous and
smart.” I cringed to talk about Ezhya in this way. “They are very capable of carrying out large projects if they see the need.” Terraforming? I was sure Coldi could do it.
“Then why haven’t they done it?”
“Because they are happy with the way the world is.”
“Impossible.”
“Talk to them, and they will explain. They can vary their body temperatures to suit the climate.”
His nostrils flared. “Can they eat rocks, too? Can they breathe poisonous air?”
Damn, he really hated Coldi. One would almost think that there was more behind it than the fact that Coldi now considered Asto their world. “On that subject, you’re restricting the freedom of a couple of people who came to talk to you before. You’re probably aware of the status of one of these people, and of the fact that the structure of Coldi society depends on this person.”
“They were rude.”
No, they were bluffing. “They were acting according to their custom, as are you and I.”
“They were still rude.”
“You are holding this person so that his capture will have the maximum effect on the people and ships that outnumber you, and you hope the disruption will give you a break so that you can jump out of this siege.”
He gave me a so what if I am? look.
“That’s not going to work. Keeping this person here won’t end the siege and it won’t diminish their vigilance. Not only that, but the moment they have established a new leader, the hostages on your ship will have lost all of their value.” This was exactly why so many high-ranking Coldi committed suicide: because their lives lost value when they lost their position.
Not a flicker of unease went over his face.
“You have the negotiating chips in your hands right now. Wait much longer, and the advantage is gone, and that army out there will have no hesitation in opening fire.” I had no doubt that this would happen. The trouble was that if that happened, I would likely still be on board this ship.
“I’m ready. I may not have any personal weapons, but I have weapons that are much more interesting than that. This ship carries antimatter. If they breach the containment field, they’re gone.”
“You’ll be gone, too. You won’t ever see Asto.”
“We have other engines, and if necessary we’ll jettison the antimatter, and jump before it hits any of your ships. We are not crazy.”
“The Asto army has a second armada in our system. Really, I’m not here to talk about acts of war. The lives of millions are at stake—”
There was a thunk elsewhere in the ship that made the floor vibrate.
Captain Luczon turned his head sharply to the door. It seemed his two guards had collapsed. At that moment someone dropped from the ceiling. Hell, that was Veyada, whom I’d last seen several transfers ago.
Captain Luczon took something from his pocket—
“Watch out, Veyada!”
Another thump, and there was Sheydu, who grabbed the captain from behind and lifted him straight over the back of the couch. He made protesting noises, but she clamped a hand over his mouth. Then she unclipped her gun and before I could say anything, fired.
“No!” I rose.
She gave me a strange look.
“That man is the original Captain Kando Luczon who left Asto at the time of the meteorite strike.”
She looked from me to the captain, slumped in her arm.
“That’s a pity, because he’s an arsehole. I should have used a higher setting.” She lowered him to the bench, where he hung sideways against the armrest. His hand twitched.
I hoped she was joking, but damn, with Sheydu I never knew.
Thayu came running up to me. She squeezed my arm in a gesture of warmth. “Quick, Cory let’s go and find my father.”
“Find him? Do you know how big this ship is?”
“Come.” She turned around and made for the room’s exit. A couple of Aghyrian crew came running the other way, and Thayu stunned all of them.
Into the corridor. She turned sharply to the left.
“How do you even know where we’re going? We might get lost.”
“You’re kidding. They gave us a map.”
Of course that was what she had been doing when we came in: cross-referencing the spots on the map with the plan.
I did my best to keep up with her, but she was running fast. “Thay’, not so quick.”
She stopped briefly to let me catch up.
“How did you even get here? What about Veyada and Sheydu? They weren’t even on board the shuttle.”
“Just because you couldn’t see them doesn’t mean they weren’t there.”
“True.”
“We have to hurry. This diversion is only going to last for so long. The old man will probably wake up soon.”
“He’s the original captain.”
“The one who refused to take people on board?”
“The very one.”
Her eyes widened. “Did you get anything out of him?”
“Not really. He was being stubborn. He showed me images of Asto as it used to be. He wants to return Asto to how it was.”
“So that they can make a claim.” Her eyes flashed anger. I had judged the Coldi reaction well enough.
At the end of the corridor we came to another gravity switch. Thayu had obviously been here before and ran straight up the wall. I stumbled after her. This was seriously weird. I wondered why they kept changing gravity like this.
We ran out the corridor . . . into a void with no gravity.
Whoa.
I stopped too late, lost my footing and floated into the empty space. “Thay’!”
She had managed to hold onto the end of the corridor. She was receding quickly as I floated away from her. Moving my arms or legs made no difference.
“Hang on.”
She jumped—completely in the wrong direction.
“No, Thayu.”
How were we going to meet up now? The hall was huge. It would take ages until we were on the other side.
But she was coming closer and closer still. Hang on, had she just calculated in her head where to jump so that with all the forces that acted on the ship, she would catch me?
Her hand grabbed mine, the skin warm and dry. We sped up with a jerk pulled along by her momentum.
“Sorry,” I said.
“We needed to get to the other side anyway. The map doesn’t tell me about all the gravity changes.”
We floated through the semidarkness, occasionally pierced by a shaft of light.
What was this place? The entire walls were covered with something that looked like a honeycomb that emanated a soft blue light from within. Each individual cell was a—a pod, with a person inside. It looked like—no, it was—a hibernation station. Thousands upon thousands of people in pods.
“Shit, look at that,” Thayu said. The soft blue glow silvered her face.
“I think we have just found the crew.”
We had reached the other end of the hall, and I grabbed onto a railing along the outside of one of the pods.
We floated there for a while, looking around.
The pods were arranged in layers, heads facing the hall and feet attached to the ship. The arrangement stretched above and below us all along the walls, broken only at places where there was an entrance. Each pod contained one person. The closest one was a woman, next to her was an adolescent man and then an older man, all ages and genders randomly mixed throughout. Each lay on a surface that resembled white foam, covered by a half-tube of see-through material that was warm to the touch. Every person wore a mask that covered nose and mouth. A small tube led from the bottom of the mask into the bed of foam.
If I looked through the cover and moved my head, the edges of objects became strangely distorted as if the empty space in the pod was filled up with a clear fluid. Something inside the pod emanated soft blue light, but I couldn’t see where it came from.
“Do you think it was necessary f
or the passengers to be inside these pods to jump the kind of distances this ship has been doing?”
Thayu gestured no idea. “I wonder how long they’ve been in here.”
“Or why they are in here and why he hasn’t woken them up.”
“Or whether they have ever been woken up.”
That sent a chill through me.
Maybe the ship hadn’t been to another galaxy. Maybe they’d just floated around aimlessly, with the crew dormant, until they’d fetched up back here.
“But then why would the captain be awake?”
“Because someone needs to crew the bridge.”
“Why hasn’t he woken them up?”
“Those are the big questions, aren’t they?”
Far too many questions than I felt comfortable with. All I could say was that I didn’t trust that captain. He could be hiding that the ship was more powerful than he made it out to be, but he could also be hiding a desperate situation.
The ship could be a decoy, a Trojan horse type of venture aimed at dealing us a blow from a powerful civilisation across galaxies.
Or they could simply be curious and homesick.
Their mission could have failed completely.
And for me, there was no way of knowing which applied.
Damn it.
And I was meant to make sense out of this, to hand gamra the conclusions on a platter, and tell them what to do.
These people were going to end up in Barresh. Who would we trust with the liaison between them and the rest of us? How could we keep them isolated so that they didn’t start to infiltrate different groups, giving them tidbits of technology, as we had seen with the Barresh Aghyrians?
Or maybe once they were on the ground, it would turn out that their mission had failed and the technology they shared was old and hadn’t been added to for four hundred ship years.
It was up to me to make that call.
“Come, we have no time for dreaming.” Thayu was not really the person in my association that I could discuss this with. She was practical, and I loved her for that, but for long discussions about society and philosophical questions, I needed Veyada, and I was counting on him to have some useful insights.
