The buzz-lute rose into the air and stillness became sound and the music of prophecy drifted through the draping sleep-ivy drowsing upon the trellis above, holding flowers like cradled babies.
CHAPTER 7
The immense vessel bloomed in the vu-screen like some new-born planet.
Zhaan watched, overwhelmed with wonder and dread. What had once been discernibly an alien ship was now something much more. The tendrils that held Moya fast had sprouted tendrils of their own, and those tendrils had grown tendrils yet again. It was like an unworldly garden. In her wide knowledge of the universe, Zhaan had heard of ships larger than moons, ships that grew out of anyone’s control, but the reality dwarfed everything.
The stars had simply disappeared, as if the thing erupting into space took hold of all the universe and shook it. As she watched, a snake-like root detached itself from the greater mass and came grasping toward Moya, disappearing from sight of the vu-screen. It was as if the alien ship were some dormant plant that had been awoken by contact with another living thing.
Zhaan looked away and called out, “Pilot!”
Silence.
“Pilot?”
A tremor of alarm went through her. Had something happened to Pilot? Was Moya all right? A new fear came to her. Not of dying: she had stared down death many times—and many times had almost gladly embraced its sweet relief.
No, this was worse. She was afraid that the others were gone, that she was alone to face this monstrous entity on her own.
“Pilot!” she shouted, standing up.
“Sorry, Zhaan. My deepest apologies.” The familiar voice and image swept onto the bridge, the forlorn face of Pilot. “I am somewhat taken aback.”
“I should think so! I am as well. And Moya?”
“Moya is still in a state of health, even bliss. The electro-chemicals flowing through her now are most relaxing.”
“Well, thank goodness for small favors. At least our ship is happy.” She pointed towards the growing vessel and the new tendrils snaking towards Moya. “What’s going on?”
“Sensors are down.”
“No speculation?”
“I do not speculate. Insufficient data. Would you care to speculate for us?”
“I’ve never seen a ship like it. A vast plant with a slow but powerful metabolism.”
“And still growing?”
Zhaan nodded her head. “And still growing.”
“Whatever it is, it has its grips on us,” said Pilot. “Suggestions?”
“I’d guess we have something it wants. It could destroy us, absorb us—there seems to be absolutely nothing we can do.” She sat back down wearily, averting her eyes from the sight. Even when under prison guard of the Peacekeepers, she had felt the possibility of escape and redemption. Now, though, so utterly dwarfed, she felt like an insect regarding the sole of a descending boot.
A thought came to her. “Unless…”
“Yes, Zhaan?” Pilot prompted.
“Continue to attempt to re-engage communication with Crichton, D’Argo and Aeryn,” she replied.
There was perhaps something that she could do, Zhaan thought. And there was also something that His Miniature Majesty could do as well.
“Please request Rygel to get back up here. And tell him to bring Moya’s DRDs with him, if you please! No dawdling permitted. Immediately!”
* * *
“Xarchshlkjikjjh … globble … Eat me!” said the plate of food, as if tuning in to Aeryn’s language slowly and not entirely accurately.
“What?” Aeryn asked. She pulled a chair out of the way and moved close to the edge of the table, scrutinizing the plate.
“Eat me!” repeated the food.
Steam curled up from the food, and the smell was quite savory. Nonetheless, neither Aeryn nor D’Argo were in the habit of eating things that talked. As the sounds emerged from the pile of food, it quivered.
D’Argo was looking down at the plate in front of him as well. His food was also coaxing him, and presumably it was trying Luxan: “Grfujarkh! Eat me!”
Aeryn hit the back of her head with the heel of her hand to get her colony of translator microbes back into gear.
“What the frell? Are you talking to me?” she said to her food.
“Eat me,” pleaded the food, seeming less and less appetizing all the time, despite the pleasant smells that wafted up from it. The voice seemed to be emanating from the carrots, or maybe the gravy.
Aeryn took a step back and clenched her jaw. “OK. This is frelling weird. This is one I can’t explain. Crichton never mentioned talking Earth food as part of the legend.”
D’Argo’s brows were knitted in concentration. He pulled a chair up and sat down. “No, it’s nothing to do with Crichton. It’s not an Earth legend. It’s a Luxan legend.”
“It is?” Now Aeryn’s brows were sky-high.
To her amazement, D’Argo scooted his chair up to the table and surveyed the food calmly. “The Dinner of the Enlightening,” he explained. “It is one of the foundational Luxan myths. Three warriors, seeking the Gem of Constancy, came across a magical table laid with the most delicious of foods. It was a table in an island in the middle of the ocean, as I remember.”
Aeryn gave a dubious scowl. “Was one of these magical foods ‘meatloaf?’”
D’Argo shook his head. “No. But clearly Crichton’s memories of the lost Earth sailing ship have determined this set-up to some extent. In the Dinner of the Enlightening, the key factor is that the food asks to be eaten. In fact, as I remember, only the noblest of warriors have the ability to hear the food speak.”
Aeryn gave a short laugh. “I’m comforted that the food thinks I’m noble. But then do the noblest of warriors get food poisoning?”
To her great alarm, D’Argo took a linen napkin from beside a plate, unfurled it and tucked it into his belt. “The food does not hurt them. It’s called the Dinner of the Enlightening because when the warriors eat it, they’re able to understand what’s happening to them, where dangers lie and how to overcome them.”
“Eat me,” coaxed D’Argo’s carrots.
“Nice story,” grunted Aeryn. “Fantasy always has a happy ending, doesn’t it? That’s what makes it fantasy.” She watched D’Argo as he reached to pick up a fork. “Oh, no. You’re not going to! D’Argo, you can’t seriously eat that.”
D’Argo picked up his knife. “I can, and I suggest that you may want to achieve enlightenment too.”
Aeryn moved away from the table and walked around the room with an impatient stride. “First you’re trying to shoot up the place, and then you’re about to eat the food! D’Argo, this is the ship that swallowed Crichton! We should not be tucking into dinner! Have you lost your tarbles?”
D’Argo cut into a slice of loaf and loaded some potatoes on top of it. “It is a powerful myth in my culture. To gain further knowledge, I must eat the food. I will do as my ancestral warriors did.”
Aeryn paced back and forth. “Fine. Fine,” she said in a clipped tone that suggested it was not fine at all. “Imitate an old myth. Leave me to rescue Crichton and save Moya on my own. Behave in a completely irrational way just because some food told you to.”
D’Argo was chewing. “Mmmm,” he said. “Loafmeat, he called it? I haven’t had it before, but it’s not bad. Come and have some.”
“No, thank you.”
His expression changed again. He looked down at the food. Aeryn could see that it was quivering again, and she could hear a faint coaxing coming from it.
“Yes,” said D’Argo. “Yes, of course.” D’Argo turned to Aeryn. “It wants to know why you won’t try yours. It wishes to speak to both of us together. It understands our reluctance, but in order to communicate, you must partake.”
Well, the big guy wasn’t exactly choking and turning green. Aeryn paused, hesitant.
“It’s saying something about Crichton. But it wants you to be listening before it tells the whole story.”
“It can’t
explain unless I eat some food?”
D’Argo paused and listened. “The beings here are not of a substance that can interact with our substance. We must ingest something of their world to understand them.”
Aeryn snorted. “They couldn’t just leave a sign? They had to construct a whole chamber and eat Crichton? I don’t trust them!”
D’Argo was listening to the small alien voice and nodding.
“Eat me!” clamored the gravy on the other plates.
Aeryn scowled. Then, putting down her gun, she went to the table. With an efficient no-nonsense grab and swallow, she ate one of the carrots.
There was a tingling in her throat, and a commingling, it seemed at the back of her neck. Microbes getting together for a party?
The rest of the food quivered again. “Excellent. You have taken the first step. Thank you—Aeryn.”
Her first question was: “What’s happened to Crichton?”
“Thank you,” said the food.
“John Crichton!” she cried. “Why did you eat him?”
“Ah ha!” said the pile of food. “You enjoyed our little joke, then. We didn’t exactly eat him. We just borrowed him. His own dreams supplied us with quite an interesting way to do it.” The voice had an undertone like a bee’s buzz.
“Then where is he?” cried D’Argo.
“He is safe in another part of the ship.”
“We demand that he be returned!” said Aeryn, pushing her chair back abruptly and rising to her feet. “This is an insult and an outrage!”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” said the food mildly. “But now that you’ve finally partaken of our offering and can understand everything we need to say, we can move to the next level of understanding—and perhaps rejoin Crichton, once he has fully conferred with our elders.”
“Elders?” said D’Argo. “Who are they? Who are all of you?”
“We are—the Nokmadi. Yes, I believe that is the name we were called long ago,” said the buzzing voice.
“The Nokmadi!” said D’Argo. “Zhaan was correct. The legends were true. We have stumbled upon a fabled lost race.” A look of wonder crossed his hairy face.
“A race that has trapped our ship and imprisoned our friend!” Aeryn turned away from the table and directed her demand to the ceiling. “We demand that you release us. Allow us to get back to our ship and depart.”
“We cannot stay here!” echoed D’Argo. “We are warriors fleeing a terrible enemy.”
“The Peacekeepers,” said the food. “Yes. A curious race … but no matter. You have plenty of time. Time, after all, is merely a form of space, and there’s plenty of that in the universe.”
“Look, it’s very difficult speaking to either a plate of food or thin air,” said Aeryn. “Why don’t you come out of hiding? You will not be harmed if you promise the same.”
An odd tinkling; fairies prancing on dew-dropped leaves.
“Harm? No, that’s not an issue.”
A man appeared, sitting in the chair at the end of the table.
“Not an issue at all,” said the beautiful alien, brushing back his romantic jet-black hair and turning a scintillating, sly smile at Aeryn.
CHAPTER 8
In her cabin aboard the Peacekeeper cutter DarkWind, Captain Sha Sutt dreamed of a past that even now set her heart pounding.
She stood on the balcony of the HoverTel as it settled down near the Inverse Falls. The water flowed upward, defying gravity, cartwheeling back into spray. The mist was warm on her cheek. She could smell the Algean sea, strong and vigorous and fresh, light-years from the skycamps in which she had been raised.
She was a junior adjutant at a summit about the struggle to contain bands of malcontents in outlying Peacekeeper territory. Something had happened to Crais’s personal adjutant, and at the last moment she herself had been assigned to him.
He strode between rooms at the summit headquarters so fast she could barely keep up. He entered chambers without knocking, and she could see from their faces and their deference that the officials within were frightened of him. He stood up in the middle of meetings and issued commands like “Destroy them!” and “Have him killed,” pounding his fist on the table. He always got his way. He embodied power.
She wanted that power for herself, and she wanted him for himself.
She did his work faithfully.
And then on the final day he summoned her into his private chambers.
He was dressed entirely in black, his sleek dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, his beard neatly trimmed. He played with a ring on his finger as he spoke; his voice was low, calm, as if he were amused at something.
On a table were two long-stemmed glasses and a bottle with a long slender neck. “This is Ardenturan port,” he said, thumbing the top so that the pressure released with a long hiss. “It’s a strong drink, too strong for some.” He poured a thimbleful of the amber liquid into one of the glasses, and a sharp fragrance filled the chamber.
“It reacts to the chemicals in your bloodstream,” he said, raising the glass to his nose and inhaling the scent of the liquid. “It combines very badly with the chemicals of fear. You might even say it diagnoses fear. And if you’re afraid when you drink it, it kills you.”
He smiled and took a sip.
“That would be a good joke if it were true,” she observed.
“Wouldn’t it?” he replied. He took another sip and set the glass down on the gleaming wooden table.
“Sha Sutt, I have observed you now for some time.” He drew a chair up to the table, sat down, and moved closer to face her. She could feel the heat rising off him. He looked at her with intensity.
“You have an important future ahead of you. It may be that I will play a small part in that future. I will ask only one thing of you.”
He was so close she could have reached up and touched his face. “Anything, Captain,” she said.
“All I ask is loyalty.” He looked into her eyes with a dark and burning gaze. “Tell me,” he said with intensity, “that loyalty is not too much to ask.”
She was flattered, even heady, that he would care so much about the loyalty of a lower-level functionary such as her. The flattery made her bold.
“You have my loyalty,” she said, “even if it should kill me.”
He sat back in his chair, relaxed, with a small smile on his face once more. “I don’t think it will,” he said, “or at least not this time. Some Ardenturan port? It’s no joke about it being lethal if you’re afraid—it killed my former adjutant just last week.”
And because she had that one moment of heady boldness, she drank it down to the last drop.
Sha Sutt groaned. She writhed in her flatmat. The tissue threads of the filament-warmer knotted about her in her cabin. Although she had stayed cool throughout the entire ordeal of the battle amongst the asteroids and the harrowing dive into the Leviathan’s StarBurst, although she had not perspired across the light-years nor in her command decisions aboard the bridge on the other side of the jump through space and time, now sweat stood on her brow and dripped into her massage-pillow.
For a moment she awoke, shivering. For a moment, just a moment, she thought that Crais was with her, reassuring her. However, reality intruded and she remembered that the affair had been over before it had really begun. Crais had gone elsewhere and returned with some other young officer in his thrall, and he politely but firmly detached from Sutt. She had warned herself not to hope for too much, but still it was painful. Nonetheless, she was promoted to captain of a ship and found that her family back in the Pods had received mysterious gifts. She could not complain. She could only grieve, for when Crais looked at her now, he was distant, as if he had other things on his mind entirely. And in her heart, Sha Sutt said to herself: he shall not ignore me.
The wrench through space and time had taken its toll. Sha Sutt still felt dizzy, and the tug of sleep once more pulled her down upon the mat of the tiny cubicle she called “The Captain’s Cabin.”
Sha Sutt dreamed. She dreamed of another past. She dreamed not of a lover, but a rival—an enemy.
“So, Sha. Peacekeeper starship captain now! What a great honor for someone so young.”
The words in the officers’ bar were cutting. But then, the words of Sub-Lieutenant Aeryn Sun often were. The two women were of the same age and skills—they had known each other since they had met on a special training course on the desert planet B’Nalli. That had been a torturous time—two other Peacekeeper soldiers had died in that camp during a particularly gruelling set of practice maneuvers. And Sutt firmly believed, although she had never been able to prove it, that she herself had come to the brink of death—because of Aeryn Sun.
“Yes, Sun. I am a starship captain,” snapped Sha Sutt. “I earned my wings. I’m a qualified officer and I’m proud to serve the cause!”
There were murmurs in the shadows. Sha Sutt thought she heard a whispered slur: “Qualified! Qualified to serve under Crais, perhaps.” She whirled around. But there many people here now in the Calm-time, and she could not tell who had spoken.
Aeryn Sun sighed. She took a gulp of her drink and shook her head sadly with a wry smile. “Always on each other’s case, aren’t we, Sha? Let’s just celebrate, pure and simple. Let me buy you a drink.”
Captain Sha Sutt’s eyes flared. “And let my guard down? The last time that happened, I ended up in the hospital—hanging on to life by a thread.”
Aeryn Sun frowned. “Oh, come on, Sutt. We’ve been through this before. What happened back on B’Nalli had nothing to do with me. And you know damn well that if I’d known you’d been blasted half dead I wouldn’t have run back to that emplacement. I never saw you.”
“I saw you. I swear you looked at me, damn you!” said Sutt through gritted teeth. “You were trying to get the best time in the squadron. You knew I would slow you down. And so you left me. You didn’t even check to see if I was dead or alive.”
“It was dark and the ground fog—” Aeryn Sun shook her head. “What’s the use? We’ve been over this a dozen times. I would never leave one of my own troop behind. You choose not to believe me. But even if you don’t take my word for it, the inquest into the matter found nothing to prosecute.”
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