The Dark Between the Stars

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Aelin often remained with Lee Iswander in the admin module, trying to learn the operations. “If this cluster still has so much ekti, why was it necessary to set up a second harvesting field?”

  Iswander was patient with him, explaining the business, as if Aelin were still that bright-eyed young acolyte with a broken leg. “A secondary source of ekti-X at a different part of the Spiral Arm eases our distribution bottleneck. And,” he added with just a small smile, “when our delivery ships originate from two different points, it’s more difficult to backtrack our source. That should let us keep our secrets longer.”

  Iswander stretched his arms. “I have to take advantage of this boom and bank my fortune while I can. It’s such a simple operation, sometimes I think this is too good to be true. As soon as bloaters are discovered elsewhere—and somebody will stumble upon a cluster—then anyone can harvest ekti-X. So much for our edge on the market. If there’s such a glut, our operations might not be worthwhile anymore.” He paused. “I want to keep this secret long enough to rebuild my family name, and make a future for Arden.”

  As a green priest, Aelin had never bothered to consider those nuances before. He realized that Iswander had made the last comment for his son to hear, since Arden had appeared at the hatch of the admin module. The young man cast a frown toward the green priest. “Then today’s lesson should be about the ekti business, not history and legends and culture—that’s all Aelin wants to talk about.”

  Because he had few actual duties in the bloater refinery yard, Aelin also tutored Iswander’s son. He was not trained as a teacher, nor had he planned a curriculum, but whenever he needed information for a lesson, he used his treeling to tap into the verdani mind.

  Iswander chuckled. “That sounds exactly like my own complaints when I was your age! Trust me, son, it’s important. You need a background and a perspective on where things come from.”

  “But those stories are so old they don’t mean anything,” Arden said.

  Iswander shook his head and explained; Aelin couldn’t have made the argument better. “It’s the foundation of what we do—you need to understand that the whole basis of the ekti market is predicated on the Ildiran stardrive. Humans didn’t invent it. Without the gift of the stardrive, we would still be crawling across the Spiral Arm in slow generation ships. And while the Hansa was expanding their colonies, the Roamer clans earned great power by taking over cloud-harvesting operations from the Ildirans, running their old skymines, and then building new ones of their own.” He frowned at Arden. “It caused quite a bit of friction, and that’s one reason that the Roamers were looked on with skepticism—or jealousy—by the rest of the Hansa. It’s why we were made into scapegoats during the Elemental War.”

  The young man was not satisfied. “That still doesn’t help.”

  Aelin added, “When you’re a businessman, Arden, you’ll be dealing with other people who have the same old scars, possibly the same prejudices. You have to understand those resentments if you’re going to be a successful negotiator.”

  Iswander said, “You are a part of history right now, son. Our ekti-X will change civilization in the Spiral Arm. At some future date, there will be another young man complaining about why he has to take history lessons and learn about how Arden Iswander was part of the first bloater operations.”

  That seemed to convince the young man at last. Arden tugged the green priest’s elbow. “Let’s get on with it then. One hour, right?”

  “Two hours,” Aelin said.

  The boy started to argue. Suddenly the green priest felt a violent shiver, as if static electricity had flickered through him. He turned to see a pattern of sparkles cascade through the bloaters. One nodule lit up, then another, and another. The flashes were not connected, but they did seem to be in sequence somehow, like a signal. Each impulse lasted only a fraction of a second.

  The harvesting operations quickly went into shutdown and response mode. After only a few seconds, the flashes died away again, and the bloaters were dim and silent again, grayish green islands that floated nowhere.

  Pannebaker sent a signal to the admin module. “A few disruptions, Chief, but no overloads. The extra shielding helped. We’ll run diagnostics to determine any damage, but I think we’re set.”

  Iswander let out a sigh. “Excellent.” He turned to the green priest. “We have to be careful. The bloaters are volatile, potentially explosive, as my deputy discovered during her first encounter. We’ve instituted rather extreme safety measures, and there’s a full evacuation protocol I can engage, in case of an emergency. But those flashes . . .”

  The flash storms came at intermittent times, widely separated. Sometimes they were faint, while other times the dazzling surges damaged the electronics until Iswander’s people had added extra shielding. This was the first such display Aelin had seen from so close. “I wonder what it means.”

  “Nothing to worry about. Just an interesting phenomenon. Now, shouldn’t you get to your duties teaching my son?”

  They went into an unoccupied boardroom, and Aelin set his potted treeling across from the boy, ready to tap into the worldforest. Using telink, he touched the verdani mind and accessed information and news, while Arden waited, fidgeting.

  Within moments, he received a devastating report from the trees: Shelud and all the members of clan Reeves aboard their alien space city had been exposed to a mysterious plague.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  SHELUD

  Aboard the ghost-filled Onthos city, more and more people fell victim to the strange plague. Clan Reeves was devastated—most were sick now. Nausea and fever consumed them; dark discolorations appeared on their skin from hemorrhaged blood vessels. Dale quarantined himself with Sendra and their two boys, and their condition grew progressively worse.

  The Retroamer families clung to one another, initially putting the sick ones into isolation chambers, but there was no escaping infection in the enclosed city. The somewhat healthy ones struggled to remain strong so they could care for the ill. They wore environment suits and specialized survival breathers. Still the disease got through.

  Connected to the verdani, Shelud worked nonstop to translate the log entries left behind by the dying Onthos. Although his discoveries in the Onthos records gave the doctors ideas of treatments to try, nothing worked. Nevertheless, he shared the information through the telink network so all green priests could know that forgotten history.

  Olaf Reeves imposed extreme measures to prevent the spread of the plague, but he knew full well that the virus saturated the city of Okiah, and the incubation period was long enough that everyone aboard had surely been exposed. The disease that had been dormant and harmless in the Klikiss race had infected the Onthos with a mortality rate of one hundred percent.

  Three-quarters of the clan’s members already showed symptoms. “And those are just the ones who’ll admit it,” Olaf said to Shelud in the main hub office. He eyed the green priest up and down. “Do you feel any ill effects?”

  “Possibly. Nausea, exhaustion . . . but that could be just from the tension.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself, too,” said the clan leader. “But it doesn’t sound convincing.”

  A delegation of six Roamer men and women barged in to see Olaf; they all looked frightened but otherwise healthy. “If we stay here, we’ll all catch it. Our medicines don’t work,” said a man named Reese Carlin. “We’re healthy. Let us take our ships and fly away from here, bring back medical teams, experimental treatments, whatever we need. We’ve stayed bottled up here for too long. We need to get out of Okiah before it’s too late.”

  “Not a good idea,” Olaf said. “If you leave here, that plague will spread to an inhabited planet.”

  “We don’t have any other choice!” said a woman, Indira Reeves, whose husband was a cousin of Dale’s. Her husband had fallen sick and gone into quarantine, but Indira remained outside.

  Olaf looked angry. “You’re right—we don’t have a choice. If thi
s is a deadly plague, and we’ve all got it, you can’t go spreading the disease everywhere. At least it’s contained here. I won’t turn you loose out in the Spiral Arm.”

  “We’ll be careful, Olaf,” Carlin insisted.

  “No. We wait for now—that’s my decision.”

  “Wait? For what?” said a third man. Shelud didn’t know his name, though he had been trying to memorize every member of the clan Reeves exodus.

  “We wait until we recover. That’ll show we’re strong enough to fight this disease. And if we all die, then that proves how deadly it is.”

  The delegation left the hub office, trembling with anger and fear.

  As soon as they departed, Olaf hammered on the desk communications system. He adjusted to a specific frequency. “Attention, compies. This is Olaf Reeves transmitting directly to you with a priority command. Go to every ship that’s docked to this city—seventeen vessels linked to hatches and in landing bays. Open the hangar bays, use autopilots, and dump those ships out into space—set them adrift. I don’t want anyone able to fly away and cause trouble. Okiah must be quarantined.”

  The six clan Reeves compies acknowledged and trudged off to follow the instructions.

  Shelud was concerned. “Won’t that cut us off, sir? If we do recover from the plague, we’ll never be able to get away.”

  Olaf Reeves clenched his hands together. “That’s a trivial problem compared to what we’re facing now. We know how to be self-sufficient, and we can find a way to round them up if necessary—when the time comes. Or you could send word through the worldforest, if it comes to that.” He shook his head. “Never much liked compies, but now I wish I had a dozen more. Our people can’t do their work, and soon we won’t have enough personnel even to keep life support functioning. Thank the Guiding Star most of it’s automated.”

  Olaf coughed and covered his mouth, then his eyes flew open in alarm. He rubbed his neck. “Just a tickle in my throat.”

  Shelud didn’t argue with him.

  “And where’s my son? Is he getting stronger?”

  “Weaker, I think. Dale’s incapacitated. I visited him yesterday in the quarantine chambers.”

  Olaf Reeves scanned down at the list of names again. “Eighty percent of my people.” He shook his head. “Probably more.”

  Shelud was sure it would be more.

  Dale’s son Scott was the first to die. Shock waves rippled through the space city, and the frightened Retroamers tried to make excuses. He was just a boy. Perhaps his immunity was lower than others, maybe he was weaker. They told themselves that one death didn’t necessarily mean the Onthos plague would be fatal in all cases—but they didn’t manage to convince themselves.

  Within three days, every member of the indignant delegation that had wanted to leave Okiah on their ships showed signs of the plague. The later the onset of the disease, the more severe the symptoms.

  Then Dale Reeves died. Soon people didn’t have time to mourn or hold formal funerals as the death toll mounted.

  Olaf followed Shelud into the quarantine section—a quarantine that meant nothing anymore—and sank to his knees beside the bunk where Dale lay dead, little Scott wrapped in a sheet beside him. Sendra and Jamie were both so sick they seemed unaware of what had happened.

  Olaf let out explosive sobs and then collapsed. When Shelud helped him back to his feet, he realized that the burly clan leader was burning with fever.

  “We can’t let this get out,” Olaf said. “The Onthos called this a plague city. They marked it, but we didn’t understand the message. We unleashed the disease on ourselves, and it’s our job to make damn sure the plague doesn’t spread farther. If this gets out into the Confederation . . .” He grasped the green priest by the arm. “Use your telink. Inform them where we are and what’s happened. Then tell them to stay away from Okiah.”

  “Even if we warn them away, do you think they’ll really leave this city isolated forever?” Shelud asked. He remembered all of the researchers and xeno-archaeologists who had demanded access.

  “Probably not.” The bearded man’s shoulders slumped. “I better find a more definite means to keep them away.” Olaf shuddered violently and had to rest against his son’s deathbed before he could move on again. When Shelud hesitated, the clan leader glared at him. “Go, green priest! Find your treeling.”

  When Shelud reached his quarters, he grasped the small tree with trembling fingers, plunged into telink, and sent his message throughout the verdani network. He poured out his thoughts with enough urgency that every green priest would notice. They already had his description of the plague, but now they would know how it spread like wildfire—and how deadly it was.

  “Stay away from this derelict city,” he said. “We will all be dead before any help can arrive . . . not that there can be any help. If you come here, you will die.”

  He broke the connection with the worldforest mind. As his hands trembled violently, his stomach clenched, and he suddenly became sick on the floor of his quarters. He caught his breath, inhaling and exhaling; he touched his forehead, feeling the sweat there. His fever was already high, and it was only a matter of time. Shelud had been aware of that. He didn’t know how much longer he could last.

  He took a long time to compose himself and focus his mind so that stray terrors would not leak into his telink thoughts. When he touched the treeling again, he was determined and strong, and he sought out the presence of his brother Aelin.

  Yes, they would have a good conversation.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  NIRA

  Though the seven suns of Ildira created an entirely different calendar, Nira kept track of her own birthday, as recorded by the central Confederation calendar on Theroc. She was now forty-nine, and she felt vibrant and rejuvenated by her frequent contact with the worldforest mind. Years ago, Nira had been abused as a breeding slave and prisoner on Dobro, but now with Jora’h at her side, she was strong.

  As consort of the Mage-Imperator, she had all that she wanted and felt no particular need for gifts or feasts on her birthday, but Jora’h had learned that it was tradition for humans to commemorate the anniversary of their birth. And so he commanded an annual celebration for Nira in the city of Mijistra.

  When the procession emerged from the Prism Palace, Nira walked alongside Jora’h as part of the large procession, wearing an outfit of the finest imported Theron feathers, beetle carapaces, and iridescent moth wings.

  Fawned over by attenders and noble functionaries, the Mage-Imperator wore fantastic robes as well, and his chrysalis chair was festooned with reflective streamers. This was one of the rare times when Jora’h allowed attenders to carry him in the chair.

  The first time they had celebrated her birthday, Jora’h suggested that a special chair be built so Nira could be carried beside him, but the uproar had been so extreme that he decided against it. The kiths were already uneasy about all the changes the Mage-Imperator had imposed in the aftermath of the Elemental War.

  Over thousands of years of history, Ildiran tradition held that a Mage-Imperator was supposed to be alone, the sole focal point of the thism. In his years as Prime Designate, Jora’h had taken countless lovers to spread his bloodline among the Ildiran kiths. People had been startled when he took the young green priest as his exotic lover, and when they fell in love, some Ildirans found it even more shocking than the reappearance of hydrogues after ten thousand years. Jora’h’s people simply did not know how to react to the human woman at his side, when no previous Mage-Imperator had ever kept even an Ildiran female as his consort.

  But Jora’h did love her, and he had put his foot down, quieting the whisperers and social unrest, insisting that his people understand and accept change. As Mage-Imperator, he was the Ildiran race.

  Nevertheless, Nira was content to walk at his side, while his chrysalis chair was carried by attenders, so everyone in Mijistra could see her acknowledging his importance. When Jora’h looked as if he might continue to press the issue, Nira
had smiled, touched his arm, and said, “It’s my birthday celebration, and by our custom I’m allowed to ask for and receive gifts. This is the gift I ask of you—don’t disturb your people further.”

  And so today, as she had done every year for nineteen years, Nira walked beside him with bright sunlight reflecting from the shimmering insect scales. Two rounded condorfly wings were mounted to her back; Nira thought the wings made her look like a fairy princess, which she remembered from the stories she had read aloud to the worldtrees when she was just a green priest acolyte. . . .

  Next in the procession, behind the chrysalis chair, walked Osira’h, Rod’h, and a fragile but brave Gale’nh who proudly wore his Solar Navy uniform, though his bleached skin and hair still made him look startlingly out of place. Muree’n accompanied them, dressed in the special armor and uniform of the Mage-Imperator’s personal guard, as she had requested. Nira had never seen her youngest halfbreed daughter look happier than when she donned the same outfit and weapons as Yazra’h, who walked on the other side of the chrysalis chair.

  Prime Designate Daro’h, the Mage-Imperator’s heir, walked near his father. Like Jora’h, Daro’h had spent years with breeding advisers who kept a catalog of his numerous offspring. As the procession passed into the city, he glanced over at Jora’h, pleased to see how many Ildirans had come out. He was overjoyed to point out many of his children scattered in the crowds. Daro’h did not hide the waxy burn scars on his face, which remained as an indelible reminder of when the faeros had nearly killed him.

  Crystalline buildings towered all around them, and crowds of Ildirans gathered. Nira saw a panoply of faces and body types, numerous kiths with different faces and builds and colorations, yet the same racial identity. Thanks to their thism connection, Ildirans had a commonality she couldn’t feel, which left her an outsider, no matter how long she lived among them, although she could comprehend a similar thing with her green priest network.

  Jora’h normally basked in the telepathic tapestry of his people, but today he seemed uneasy in his chrysalis chair. He glanced around as the spectators crowded close. Although this celebration was supposedly for Nira’s birthday, most Ildirans loved any festival in which their Mage-Imperator appeared among them. He waved to the crowds, as did Nira. She listened to the murmur of so many voices, so many people. It droned and throbbed around her.