The sun shone between the horizon and a bank of clouds. Below, the sunlight glowed red, yellow, and orange on distant buttes, cliffs, and spires, creating deep blue shadows. The clouds above mirrored those colors and shapes, and I could see curtains of rain falling in isolated areas. When we dropped lower, I spotted the line of a river, snaking in from the east.
Narm wore a headpiece, so I don’t know at what point he began to receive radio signals from the ground. I heard him relay Merlin’s call numbers and destination, which in this case was Port One.
What about Odd’s Corner? I wondered. That was the town Fire had said she was from, the one next to Joe’s Canyon.
The landforms up ahead must be part of that canyon. Would we fly over it? Would the alien spaceships allow us to do that? What about the storm that was pouring rain ahead of us? Would we get hit by lightning?
We executed a turn. As our perspective shifted, I saw the monoliths that defined Graveyard. The Three pierced the sky. Their tops disappeared into the storm clouds.
I felt a jolting force as we banked again, rolling in a slow S-formation. How fast were we going now? How much were we slowing?
The sensation gradually faded. Minutes later, when I dared to glance out the windows, I realized we were much closer to the ground than I had thought. I heard the noise of machinery beneath me as the landing gear extended. Landscape was passing on either side instead of below us—really fast. Had we managed to slow down enough to land safely?
I felt a jolt as Merlin’s landing gear hit the runway. The reverse thruster fired, reducing our speed. We traveled a long distance, but we had slowed enough to see details of the man-made structures on either side.
We continued to slow, and pretty soon we were crawling. “Okay, folks,” announced Captain Thomas. “We’re down. Now we’re going to drive to our parking spot.” She paused, assessing the situation. “This could take a while. Port One is big.”
A big spaceport next to a small town. Odd’s Corner sat beside the ancient, alien tech that everyone wanted. If the graveyard tolerated those neighbors, it must have had its reasons.
“I feel kind of tired,” said Ashur. “Is it the gravity?”
Mirzakhani answered. “My diagnosis is that you’re more tired from the fact that you’ve been awake so long already, and you just had an exciting ride.”
When Ashur nodded, she added, “The gravity here is a little lighter than what Olympia simulates—about .9 g’s. This world feels like Old Earth. I was born there—in Iran. I know what I’m talking about.”
Ashur looked duly impressed. I was thinking, Two people in this crew from Old Earth. What are the odds of that?
Although Cocteau hadn’t come right out and said she was from France. Perhaps I would ask her, after she had drunk more wine, though what she revealed under those circumstances would be only what she intended to.
Graveyard might be smaller than Earth, but it looked plenty huge to me. It felt that way, too—Ashur wasn’t the only one who looked tired. Now that the excitement of landing was over, I wondered if I would fall asleep, especially since it was taking us so long to get to our parking spot. Port One sounded glamorous from space; the structures we passed were anything but. The whole thing was beginning to feel anticlimactic.
“At this point,” Thomas said, “it’s pretty much like driving a ground vehicle.”
“One that uses really expensive fuel,” said Narm.
We trundled along for another five minutes or so, and then stopped. Thomas, Narm, and Cocteau began to flip switches, shutting off several of the sounds we were accustomed to hearing. Without them, my ears began to ring.
For a moment, everyone sat quietly. Then something splattered the windows.
“What’s that?” Ashur asked breathlessly.
“Raindrops,” said Thomas.
A reverent silence followed.
Until Kitten broke it. “We fell! And then, we flew! And that was amazing enough, but then we went down to the ground and landed! And now—we’ve stopped, and we’re alive and everything!”
Captain Thomas raised an eyebrow. “That was the general idea.”
“It’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Kitten.
I suppose it was, up to that point, but as I stared past the rain splatter on the windows, at those three pinnacles in the distance, I had a feeling the amazing things were just beginning.
* * *
“This vessel has been cleaned so many times,” mused Kitten as we watched Port One’s scrubbers working on Merlin. “No wonder she’s so sparkly.”
Captain Thomas laughed. “That’s the first time anyone has ever called Merlin sparkly.”
“Does everybody land that way?” said Ashur. “Like—you know—an airplane?”
“Depends on the ship,” said Thomas, “and on how much money and energy you’ve got to spend. I’ve seen ships that manipulate gravity fields to land, but that’s astronomically expensive.”
“No pun intended,” added Narm. “Besides, who’d want to land any other way? Was that a great roller coaster ride, or what?”
“I loved it,” said Kitten, who had been eager to get out of her harness so she could press her nose against the window. No one was allowed out of their seats until hydraulics lowered us to the ground.
The quality of silence that followed our landing was very different from anything I had experienced before. Inside Olympia, one always heard ventilation systems, quiet though they may be. It was the sound by which we knew our ship was still breathing. Merlin had seemed like a smaller version of what we were already used to, except for her gravity conditions—which is no small thing, I will admit. Now that Merlin’s systems had been shut down, we could hear sounds from outside the ship.
Once the novelty wore off, my responsibilities began to nag at me again. “Captain,” I said, “I want to speak to Medusa in your office.”
“All right,” said Thomas. If I had been wearing Medusa, I could have monitored her heart rate, the dilation of her pupils, all the physical signs, but even with my own paltry senses, I could see that she knew things had changed for Medusa and me. She knew my conversation with my old partner was going to be anything but casual.
I left the bridge and went into Captain Thomas’s office. Medusa sat bundled in her corner.
She stirred. I waited, aching to see my friend. Medusa’s tentacles unfurled, revealing the face I had seen the first time I followed the forbidden link my father had implanted in my brain—remote and coldly beautiful.
The hairs on the back on my neck stirred. Had Medusa reverted to the earlier state? Could she discard memories of me, if she thought it was necessary?
She dispelled that notion when she said,
My petty heart leaped at that. Could she share some of the blame? Maybe we were, in a twisted sort of way, coconspirators once again.
She said,
I blinked.
I tried to picture that Medusa. She had been busy in those days, moving her sisters into the research towers on Olympia, trying to save as many of them as possible. I saw a shadow of anger in her face now, and I recognized it from the recording Gennady had made of Medusa and me killing Baylor. In the heat of that killing, I had thought Medusa was backing my play.
Maybe I had been backing hers.
said Medusa. The anger leaked from her expression. What replaced it broke my heart.
Oh, bring back the angry Med
usa, I silently pleaded. I understand that gal. Don’t leave me with this sorrowful version.
Narm called from the hallway, “A limo just pulled up!”
She never looked back.
A small hand touched mine. I looked down and found Teddy. “Is she coming back, Oichi? Are you coming back?”
I couldn’t manufacture a smile for him, but I could at least fake some confidence. “We’re coming back, Teddy. We’re Olympians.”
Any notion I entertained that I was comforting a childlike creature evaporated when he nodded.
* * *
Scant minutes after Teddy and I returned to the bridge, someone sounded the buzzer at the outer door.
“Port agents,” said Narm. “Time to show our bona fides.”
Dragonette flew to him and perched on his shoulder. “Aren’t you going to squirt antibiotics up your nose?”
Narm looked at Mirzakhani, who shook her head. “They said the course we had before Maui is sufficient.”
“Is that unusual?” I said.
“A little.”
“Maybe Graveyard has really good doctors,” said Ashur.
Mirzakhani glared at him, and his eyes went wide. “I mean—I didn’t mean—”
She punched him in the arm. “It’s not about the doctors; it’s about protocol. Everyone does it differently. And we’re all just kidding ourselves anyway, because we can’t stop disease vectors, we can only slow them down, hopefully long enough to develop a treatment.”
“Oh,” said Ashur, and she punched him again. “Ow.”
“You guys stay on this end,” said Thomas. “I’ll escort them into my office. I have no idea how long this is going to take, so relax.”
She and Lee went into the air lock to meet the authorities. Their voices drifted up the hallway. They sounded cordial.
I remembered how cordial I had managed to sound, just before I lunged up the ramp at Thomas and Lee.
Come on, now, I chided myself. Not everyone who sounds friendly is planning to kill people.
We had been told to wait at our end of the hall, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t crowd there and stare at the newcomers when they came in. Within a few minutes, Thomas and Lee led them out of the air lock, two men and one woman wearing Port Authority uniforms. They were like Fire, like most of the Belters we had seen—descendants of people from Oceania. One had the tattoos on his face.
When Thomas and Lee preceded them into the office, those officers paused to stare back at us—especially Ashur and me, and all four Minis who had managed to find perches that let them get the best view (Kitten, of course, on the ceiling).
They regarded us with open curiosity tinged with a bit of awe. “So you’re the Olympians,” said the man who stood in front. He was handsome, an older version of Jay Momoa.
“We are,” I said. “We’re pleased to meet you. Your world is beautiful.”
He didn’t smile. “Most people feel disappointed when they see this part of our world. They think it’s barren.”
“I love the colors of the rocks,” I said, and that did provoke a smile.
He nodded at us, then went into the office. The other two also nodded as they followed him.
When Fire and Queenie saved our butts, they had looked like beings of pure light. Did they need to travel the same way we did? Or did the Alliance of Ancient Races have some mode of transport even more mind-blowing?
The port officers didn’t stay in the office for long. When they emerged, the man said, “Oichi, Ashur, Kitten, and Dragonette, please come with us. We’ll take you to meet your party.”
This was it. I felt ready, but I had underestimated just how unhappy this moment would make Teddy and Rocket. They followed us into the air lock.
She sounded like she hoped it would be, not that she knew it. That was going to have to be good enough.
I sounded more confident than Kitten had, but I swear, when we turned to walk away, I had never seen two Mini faces look so solemn.
* * *
We could see them as soon as we emerged from Merlin—the Three, reaching into the heart of the storm that had piled up over Joe’s Canyon. Were they generating that weather themselves? Like mountains, with their own ecosystem? They looked big enough.
Yet there was something remote about them. I couldn’t make out details on their surfaces. They felt distant. Not just in terms of how many kilometers stretched between us. They felt—aloof.
Welcome to Graveyard, I thought. Nice to see you, too.
The vehicle that had come to fetch us was no limo, by any stretch of the imagination. We climbed into a government vehicle with plenty of mileage on it, though it was full of equipment that must be quite useful to the authorities of a spaceport—at least to my untrained eyes.
I had thought that we would be going to some sort of hotel to spend the night and get used to our new circumstances, but the port officers informed us they would drive us straight to Joe’s Salvage Yard. Our destination resided in the heart of a rapidly heating day. The chronometer in our vehicle, set for Graveyard time, informed me that it was 9:37 A.M.
What temperature would it reach when the sun was at its zenith?
“How much hotter is it going to get?” asked Ashur.
“Pretty Hot,” said the older officer. “As opposed to Crazy Hot. This is the middle of our spring season. If you had shown up in the summer, we wouldn’t expect you to make it out of the canyon alive.”
As someone who had spent her life in chilly circumstances, I wondered how well I was going to cope with Pretty Hot.
The port officers smiled when Ashur paused on the way to the car and exclaimed, “That’s what wind feels like!”
They never told us their names, though. They had a job to do, and they weren’t going to forget all the protocols just because we were full of wonder.
Home, where everyone and everything stayed where they were supposed to be—or so we all liked to imagine.
promised Teddy.
That was the last I heard of him on that side of the canyon.
The officers let Ashur roll his window down an inch so he could feel the wind. (It was noisy.)
That part of the sky had turned black. As we watched, a curtain of rain descended, obscuring the Three.
“Could we get trapped in a flood?” Ashur asked aloud.
The female officer looked back at him. “Stick to the highest ground you can find—stay out of the hollows. Don’t think you’re safe just because you don’t see water yet. It can hit you just like that, a wall moving down a slot canyon right at you. That’s how hikers get killed. They don’t heed the warning signs.”
“I promise to heed the warning signs,” said Ashur.
She flashed him a smile. “You’re smart. I think you’ll do fine.”
Ashur blushed. When he was younger, he thought girls liked him because he was funny and clever. He was just beginning to realize how handsome he was.
I wondered what Ahi would think of him. Would she turn goofy in his presence?
Crow thought highly of her, so maybe not.
From what I could see of it, Odd’s Corner was miles long and an inch wide, built up on either side of the lone highway. Many of the roads leading from that main drag weren’t paved. We drove past shops that sold food, clothing, electronics, and various things that undoubtedly made life more comfortable inside a gravity well. We saw quite a few places that promised dancing, pool, and copious amounts of alcohol. Many businesses advertised services that baffled me—probably connected to the salvage from the graveyard. Quite a few others seemed to be legal offices.
The younger male officer nudged the female and pointed at one of the alcohol/dance places, then said something I couldn’t catch. She laughed, and responded with words that flowed together.
Medusa in the Graveyard (The Medusa Cycle) Page 19
