Hirin said, “I agree with Luta. If nothing else comes up, I don’t see any other viable options besides going through the second wormhole.”
I drew a deep sigh and flashed a grateful smile at my husband. Going through that unknown wormhole would likely be highly dangerous—possibly even suicidal, but I couldn’t see any better options. I was glad to have his support for the plan.
“Provided,” Viss added, “that scans show the wormhole to be compatible with our Krasnikov generators. It could be a different type of wormhole. If it won’t work with Krasnikov matter, it might collapse in on us.”
Everyone was silent, thinking.
“Comments?” I asked finally.
“I don’t see any other options, either,” Maja said staunchly. “Like I said, we’re well set for provisions, but they won’t last forever.”
“Never expected I’d get to fly into Chron territory, I’ll admit,” Rei said, smiling grimly. “But I don’t see anywhere else to go. I don’t relish the idea of flying around this system indefinitely, running low on food and getting slowly fried by radiation.” She shrugged elegantly, her long chestnut hair rippling over her shoulders. “Honestly, I’d rather go busting into Chron space, even if it meant getting blown to bits.”
Gerazan stared at her. His earlier shellshocked expression had transformed into something like admiration. Maybe, I thought, I’d get Rei to talk to him about the Domtaw. If he wouldn’t open up to me, he might to her.
No one else seemed inclined to say anything, but I didn’t sense any rebellion, either.
“Okej. We stay here for three days, learn everything we can, and if nothing changes, take a leap into that wormhole if it’s compatible with our drives.” I stood and stretched. “Divide up the scanning and analysis tasks. I want someone—two someones—on the bridge the entire time. Gerazan,” I said, and he tore his eyes away from Rei to face me. “From what you observed since you’ve been here, is it generally safe for us to stay parked on the moon while we wait?”
He nodded. “The moon’s been extremely stable the entire time we’ve been observing it, Captain. It didn’t appear to do anything at all until today.”
“Good. Then that’s what we’ll do. We’re a little less noticeable down here than we would be hanging up there in orbit.”
I turned to my daughter. “Maja, work up a duty and watch schedule, would you? Gerazan has volunteered to help Viss out in engineering as needed, but I believe he and Cerevare should continue to study the inside of the moon as much as possible. The Protectorate will need any data we can get them, even more now.”
She nodded.
“What about our friend Jahelia Sord?” Baden asked.
I sighed. “Right. Send her a message, see how long she has provisions for—and whether she has access to her ship’s waste disposal systems. If we can leave her where she is, good. But I suppose I can’t do that if it’s too uncomfortable for her.”
Rei grinned. “Why, Captain, you do have a conscience,” she joked.
“Sadly, I do, and it gets me into no end of trouble.” I smiled. “I’ll be in my quarters if anyone wants me.”
Chapter 16 – Jahelia
Echoes and Old Nightmares
THE NEXT TIME I heard from the Tane Ikai, they didn’t even bother coming around and opening up a voice channel. Just sent a damned WaVE from over on the artificial moon.
Plan to wait three days to see if wormhole normalizes. Do you have provisions/facilities adequate for that time period?
I scowled at the screen and swore.
“What?” Pita asked, although she could have accessed the message herself. She really does work hard to seem like a fellow crew member.
I read her the message aloud.
“So, what’s the problem? Three days is great! That gives us more time to try and bypass the field. Or it might go away before then, and we can get out of here under our own power.”
“I know. They’re just so damned arrogant. I mean, they can’t even open a voice channel?”
“It’s a good thing,” Pita said in a soothing voice. “Sure, they’re jerks. But it gives us lots of time to take what we need and get it all packed up nice and inconspicuous.”
“I guess,” I growled. “I’ll bet Baden Methyr sent this message. All prim and proper now that he’s with his precious captain.”
“Let it go, Jahelia. You want me to send an answer?”
“No, I’ll do it.” I typed a brief line and sent it off to the other ship with a contemptuous flick. No issues. Thanks for your concern.
Maybe they wouldn’t get the sarcasm, but at least I knew it was there. “Okej. Let’s get back to work.”
I’d completely disassembled my datapad, spreading the components on the deck since I didn’t have access to the little worktable in my sleeping quarters. It seemed ironic that being a techdog was a more useful survival skill than martial arts or weapons training, but so far that’s how it was turning out. Pita’s intricate and detailed knowledge of every circuit, chip, wire, and screw on the ship came in handy as I Frankensteined the pad. We made a good team. The pad already had some “modifications” from PrimeCorp, ones that were slightly outside the strictly legal. Sedmamin had asked me, quite seriously, if I had concerns about carrying illegal tech. I’d almost laughed in his face, considering that my body was full of tech that, while not technically illegal, I’d certainly gone to great lengths to keep secret. I simply smiled and told him that if it wasn’t obvious from the outside and was reasonably code-camouflaged on the inside, I was fine with it.
“Work on the pad, or on the field?” Pita said. “If we have three days, we should have time for both.”
I considered. If we could get rid of the gods-damned field, I’d show Paixon my azeno and take my chances in the rest of this system. Or try my luck with the other wormhole on my own. I’d rather die going it alone than on Paixon’s charity.
But everything we’d tried so far to identify or affect the field had resulted in a big fat nothing.
“Let’s keep working on the datapad,” I said finally. “We’ll get it completely ready, but we won’t download you into it yet. If the field goes away by itself, we can move quickly. And if we end up leaving the ship, we’ll transfer you and we can go.”
“What’s your plan if the field dissipates?” Pita asked as I set to work re-routing some hair-fine fibre circuits in the datapad. “Would you risk the wormhole to Delta Pavonis?”
She’d managed to get one long-range scanner working intermittently, so we’d had a “look” at the wormhole—or at least its radiation signature.
I shook my head, then remembered that Pita couldn’t see me. That was the hardest adjustment to having an AI companion. “Whatever happened to it, that thing feels . . . evil. Pretty sure we’d fry in seconds, if the skip drive would even activate it.”
“What about the other one? Where the alien ships came through?”
I was attempting to nudge a thin strand of wiring to the side with the tiny pair of tweezers on my multi-tool. Pita’s use of the word alien gave me an unwanted shiver, and I almost messed up. I swallowed and refocused. I’d been trying to avoid thinking about those alien ships, although I hadn’t said as much to Pita.
The appearance of a Chron ship had been bad enough. The Chron War was before my time, but they were still the bogeymen of Nearspace. With good reason. Killing machines, bent on wiping all of us—and the Lobors and the Vilisians—out entirely. There isn’t much that scares me, but when I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about Chron coming into our house at night and killing us all. I didn’t even know what they looked like. In my nightmares, they were tall, dark entities, featureless behind shadowy faceplates. They didn’t speak, moved with absolute silence. You wouldn’t know they were there until you opened your eyes and one was leaning over you, putting the barrel of some kind of weapon to your forehead. An ice-cold ring against your flesh. You’d be completely paralyzed, unable to move or scream or even think straigh
t. Completely and utterly helpless. And you’d glimpse horrible, alien eyes behind the visor in the instant before they fired.
That’s when I’d wake up screaming, every time. Memories like that don’t go away easy.
And it hadn’t been only Chron coming through that wormhole. The ship that had followed—the one even Pita couldn’t identify—had been something out of another nightmare. I pulled the tweezers away from the datapad and shivered again.
“Jahelia? Would you go through the other wormhole?”
“No,” I said, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. “I think we’d head deeper into this system, see what we could find. Check in here later to see if the Delta Pav wormhole had opened up again.”
“I don’t think that would be smart. We only have provisions for a limited amount of time,” Pita said in a matter-of-fact voice. “To say nothing of fuel. Eventually we’d run out of both, and you’d—”
“I know! You don’t have to remind me!” I snapped my hand back and threw the multi-tool against the dark field wall. It bounced off and landed with a clatter near my feet, where I sat cross-legged on the decking, barely missing the vulnerable inner casing of the datapad. For some reason, that only made me angrier. Only the knowledge that I needed it to finish rigging the pad stopped me from picking it up and throwing it again. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Then another. Pita displayed remarkable insight and stayed silent.
There’s nothing I hate more than feeling helpless.
After a minute, I picked up the tweezers and went back to work.
Pita muttered, “Sorry,” but I didn’t even answer her.
Chapter 17 – Luta
Wormhole Explorers
I SETTLED INTO my big armchair in my quarters—I shared them with Hirin now, as I had long ago, but it took some getting used to. I still thought of them as mine. I knew I needed sleep, but couldn’t relax or calm my whirling mind yet. It was just as well. Only a few moments had passed before there was a knock on the door and Hirin poked his nose in. I supposed his habit of knocking grew out of the same kind of acclimatization on his part.
“Not asleep yet?” he asked with a grin.
I felt a brief flash of traitorous annoyance. I wasn’t sure I was up to dealing with him at the moment, but guilt swept it aside immediately. For years I’d longed to have him with me again—how could I resent his presence now? And perhaps it would be better to put all the current unresolved issues to rest.
I smiled. “You might squeeze in ten minutes before I nod off.”
He crossed to the desk and dropped into the chair behind it, lifting his feet to prop them up on the desk. “Then we’ll leave more pleasant pursuits until we have more time. We need to talk.”
I pulled a face. “Are you sure? About the talking?”
“I’m sure. I’m going to stop playing captain for a while, and I need you to give me another official assignment.”
“Playing captain? What do you mean?”
He wagged a finger at me. “You know very well what I mean, and you’ve been awfully good about it. Giving me the chair on so many duty shifts, letting me help in making decisions—come on, Luta, I can see what you’re doing.”
I started to protest further, but he cut me off.
“I appreciate it. You think it’s too hard for me now, coming back to the ship and having you as the captain. I’ll admit it takes some getting used to. I’ll admit it’s nice to be in charge sometimes. But right now, the last thing we need is any ambiguity. We’re in a dangerous situation, you haven’t overstated that. And one of us has to be in control or the crew will be confused.”
“Why not you, then?”
“Because they’re your crew. They like me, and I think they respect me, but they’re still yours.”
I puffed out a sigh. “That’s pretty much what Yuskeya said when I asked her if she thought she should be in charge.”
“And she was right. You’re a good captain, Luta.”
I stood and crossed to the desk, gently pushing his legs down so I could sit on his lap. I put my arms around his neck. “Promise me one thing,” I said.
“Anything.”
“We’ll work out some other arrangement when all this is over. One that makes you as happy to be on this ship as I am having you here.”
“I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be, no matter what I’m doing.”
I glared at him. “Don’t avoid the question. Promise.”
He laughed. “Okej, okej, I promise. We’ll figure out something else later.” He pulled my head down and kissed me.
“You know,” I said when he released me, “I might be able to let sleep wait a little longer.”
I CAN SUM up the next three days fairly succinctly. Nothing happened. Well, that would be a bit of an understatement. Baden sent a series of comm signals through the Delta Pavonis wormhole, which remained as sullen and malevolent as ever. The messages appeared to go through, although we couldn’t verify that. We had no reply.
We ran as close as we dared to the wormhole and engaged the skip drive, but there was no response from the wormhole, and we weren’t feeling lucky enough to try diving to see if it worked. We returned to the moon.
Jahelia Sord’s ship stayed half-in, half-out of the dark energy shield. We sent sporadic comms to check on her. She continued to be surly, but cooperative, and said she was fine to remain on her ship for the time being. I was happy to leave her there until I was forced to do something else with her.
We also spent a day at the Stillwell, trying everything we could think of, short of blasting it with a torpedo, to disperse the cloud of dark energy that enveloped it. I would have settled for some kind of reading from inside the ship. It was all futile, though, and by the end of the day we were frustrated, angry, and although no-one said it, scared. If the dark ship could do this to a Dragon-class warship, what could it do to the Tane Ikai? My only consolation was that they’d had the option to simply blow it up—they’d fired the energy weapon on the Chron ship, proving that—and they hadn’t. Perhaps this was only some kind of stasis field that would eventually dissipate, leaving everyone inside unharmed. After all, Jahelia Sord was doing fine, hadn’t been harmed by the field around her ship—although granted, she wasn’t in it.
We ran as near as we dared to the new wormhole and spun up the skip drive while Viss took readings. He and Hirin put their heads together over the results and concluded that we should indeed be able to navigate it. It would be a risk to enter, but a calculated one. We knew that it was traversable, at least.
Hirin had decided that he’d act as “security” officer, so I’d put him in charge of weapons. We hadn’t needed a weapons officer on board the Tane Ikai for a long time, but I suspected we might need one soon. And he’d taken the initiative in onloading those torps a few weeks ago, so he was the logical choice. He also returned to his research into PrimeCorp’s past.
Cerevare had spent every waking hour studying the operant moon with Gerazan, usually accompanied by Rei. Rei said she was going along as “security,” but I wondered. Of course, there was little for her to do as a pilot, since we were effectively docked on the moon for the duration, except for those few short jaunts. But she and Gerazan seemed to have a mutual interest in each other. I smiled, watching them suit up for another EVA to the moon’s interior control room. Maybe Rei had found a better cure for her melancholy than screaming workouts in the cargo bay. And it seemed to be good for Gerazan, too.
Yuskeya pored over data and tended to the injured scientist, Chen. His condition had her puzzled. She could find no reason for his failure to recover, and in fact, she couldn’t even pin down exactly what was wrong with him.
Occasionally he would spike a high fever, sometimes becoming agitated and delirious. Other times he merely slept for long portions of the day, and in his waking hours was quiet and slow to speak. Gerazan confirmed that this was a marked change from his personality before the accident.
Maja kept track of our
provisions and made sure that waste was kept to a minimum, becoming the de facto cook. Where usually we’d each see to our own culinary needs, Maja took to preparing ingredient-economical, large-scale meals for the entire crew. She and Baden had grown even closer during the crisis, and I knew that his crew quarters were empty virtually all of the time. That was fine with me. My daughter was old enough to make her own decisions and live her life on her terms. I was pleased to see her happy and content—circumstances notwithstanding—for the first time in a long time.
And as for me, the stress of the situation must have bothered me more than I’d like to admit. Yuskeya had to give me two more injections for headaches, and one for nausea. She wanted to run some medical scans, but I put her off. After a lifetime of not requiring medical procedures, I felt a growing terror at having to turn to them now. My burned fingers healed, but slowly. I couldn’t remember an injury ever persisting longer than a day or so. I tried not to think about it, but the roughened ridges on my fingertips reminded me every time I touched something with them.
Finally the end of the third day arrived. I went to bed that night knowing that in the morning I would have to send us through the unknown wormhole. I lay curled against Hirin’s back, feeling the slow, even rise and fall of his breathing, for a long time. Not talking. Not sleeping. Trying, without success, not to worry.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, EVERYONE was on the bridge for the first duty shift in the morning. Baden and Yuskeya had split the night shift so that neither would be too tired in the morning. We were a quiet bunch. Everyone had held onto the secret hope that the Delta Pavonis wormhole would have righted itself by now. The alternative was a leap into the unknown.
However, as Captain, I couldn’t let the crew see any hesitation on my part. My headache had flared again, and I made a note to get a shot from Yuskeya as soon as I had a chance.
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