Tyger Bright

by T. C. McCarthy

  “That’s the point, Zhelnikov. The Jerusalem and Bangkok are undetectable. The ships only have electronic computational and communications systems as backup. Engine control is handled via mechanical systems, intercom is all fiber, and the outer hull is shielded to prevent any stray emissions that might result from minor electrical systems—our keypads, whatever.”

  “What about navigation?” Zhelnikov asked.

  “For now, that’s classified too. We’re moving out in twenty-four hours to Jupiter’s ecliptic, where we’ll rendezvous with the Bangkok and take on our navigator. You’ll find out then. When the Higgins is ready to receive you, I’ll send you on your way.”

  Win broke his silence. “Captain. The admiral told us where we’re headed, into Sommen space, but where exactly is that?”

  The man’s expression became grim. He was so much shorter than Win and Zhelnikov that it almost looked funny, and the captain ran a hand over his bald head.

  “Far away. The Sommen home world is in the Perseus arm, centered around the I-quad border.”

  “Nobody has ever travelled half that distance,” Zhelnikov hissed. “Once we transit the first two wormholes, that’s it; we cross into uncharted territories and now we have to find wormholes without the benefit of advanced scouting systems. And at any moment the Sommen could stumble on us.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” The captain moved back out the hatch and waited for Zhelnikov and Win to follow. “Come. I just received word; the Higgins is ready for you now and there’s no time to spare.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The war, San thought, is my entire reason for existing.

  The abbess lit a pipe, filling the classroom with the odor of raisins and San closed her eyes with a smile, inhaling through her nose. Smoke curled around the nun’s head. It climbed upward into the dark wooden rafters and one of the illum-bots shifted to avoid the plume, a tiny red light blinking on its side. San waited for the fire alarm to go off but the nun waved her hand and whispered something, after which the red light blinked out.

  “You have all mastered the basics,” she announced. When San raised her hand, the woman coughed and pointed. “San.”

  “We’ve trained with just bladed weapons. And most of us have only used our vision once—twice at most.”

  “Do you have a question, girl?”

  “What do you mean, ‘mastered’?”

  “Follow me.”

  The abbess moved out the door, her long robe and phase shifter swishing as she passed, the fabric flowing in the gentle breeze that blew from a nearby vent. San followed, inhaling thick smoke as she went.

  Sister Frances accessed a small hatch at the end of a narrow stone corridor and the group followed, winding up a spiral staircase. The illum-bot did its best to light the way. San blinked at the shadows, realizing that to keep from tripping she had to stare at the nun’s back or the shadows would trick her eyes, creating a slip-dance of black and gray. The climb took forever. By the time the abbess reached a hatch at the top, San’s wool clothes had soaked with sweat and she panted at the effort of lifting her short legs to mount the final steps, even in low gravity. The nun opened the hatch and ushered them through. Once beyond it, San emerged into a small dome somewhere on the face of Ganymede, tucked between massive boulders of ice that rose on three sides. The overhead view had caught San’s attention and she strained to lean her head back to get a better angle.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered.

  Jupiter’s surface was so close that San imagined she could touch its edges, which curved away in swirling stripes of red, orange, and tan. She struggled with a mixture of feelings. Being in space, with a Fleet mission, had always been her dream and the view underscored a sense that she was almost there—that her adventure would soon begin. But as it had when she first landed on Ganymede, the sight emphasized her solitude, the remnant of an Asian family at a vast distance from Mars and everything she’d ever known. San fought a thought, one which emerged out of nothing and grew into a thunderclap: She’d never see her mother again.

  “Do you see?” the abbess asked.

  San shook her head with the others. “No.”

  “Then watch and learn.”

  The abbess gestured to a gap between the boulders in front of them where a section of flat ice stretched to the horizon, and she muttered into her wrist band, “Launch the vessel.” San felt a tremor. A crack had formed in the ice plain and now widened by the second until it stopped, creating a rectangular cavity the size of a small sea, perfectly straight on each side. San and the others moved closer to the glass walls. Something crept upward and the group waited as a huge spacecraft lifted itself with jets of gas, blowing ice off the surface and into a cloud that drifted toward them. It sprinkled the dome with glittering crystals and San squinted at the ship, pressing both hands against the glass to lean forward.

  “I’ve never seen such a thing.”

  Sister Frances nodded, blowing smoke into the air. “The order has a shipyard here.”

  “I still don’t get it,” said Wilson. “What does the Sommen religion have to do with building ships?”

  The nun glared and San felt tension; she watched the woman’s face, recognizing signs the abbess was hiding something important, a weight almost visible in her humped back.

  “Not all is for you to know, Mister Wilson. Not yet. When the Sommen first attacked our ships couldn’t detect them, let alone lock weapons. We got their data stores and Zhelnikov thought the answers would be in technical documents. They weren’t.” The abbess pointed at the ship, which had begun a slow turn to climb higher over the ice. “The Sommen ships had a minimal amount of electronics and an advanced thermal-dispersion system. Almost nothing to give them away. We have been tasked by Fleet with the production of ships based on what we learned from their religious texts; space travel, Mister Wilson, is part of their religion—not their technology.”

  “But how would they navigate?” one of the other students asked.

  “And communicate?” San added.

  “Sit, children.” When the students had arranged themselves, the nun continued. “They navigate and communicate similarly to the way we are about to—with priests. You are navigators and communicators. Truth is mathematics and mathematics keeps us on the path. Trust your intuitions; because of your time in the tank as infants, your hunches and guesses will always be steeped in fact, even if you don’t recall the memory from which they originate. Fleet has approved the plan and each of you will ship out in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we shall train nonstop.”

  A cold fear crept into San’s spine and she pulled her robe tighter, fighting the urge to shiver. She wanted her first mission. But now that it was on the verge of arriving, San wondered if she’d been hasty; the thought of leaving the group to be stationed on a huge vessel made her hands tremble. She would still be alone, but this time sailing through nothing, surrounded only by the cold vacuum of space-time.

  “Do not be afraid. All of you succeeded in demonstrating sight. With the help of serum injections, you can reach across space and communicate with each other and, with time, you will perfect this skill and adapt—capable of sensing fluctuations in quantum states and spin, the particles in you entangled with those surrounding me here, on Ganymede. These fluctuations will form the basis of messages. That is how the Sommen communicate: on a quantum level. You will do it too.”

  “Quantum fluctuations?” San asked.

  “A mental nudge at first. As your tank memories continue to surface and you hone your skills with experience, the messages will become a noticeable tapping in your mind. Then it will be a conversation in real time. Children, this is the most important lesson we can teach you: On your first day here, we broke the seal on your memories. As soon as you began to train, this uncapped information began seeping into your consciousness, some within your control, some outside of it. Let it happen; get out of your own way and stop thinking. The deeper memories will come later, with contemplation
.

  “And as far as navigation, our new ships have complex micromechanical computation systems to assist. Practice your mantras and remain submerged in mathematics. It is through this practice that you will reach out and see the course to provide basic input for the ship and its normal human occupants. All of this you can do now, children; you just don’t realize it. We will spend the next week practicing basic navigation so that once you deploy it won’t be a shock.”

  Sister Frances looked at her pipe, which had extinguished, and San noticed that the woman had started crying. “I am sorry that it has come so soon. But we received a message a few hours ago and two of you must be ready to leave in a matter of days. Fleet is sending a mission into Sommen space.”

  “Who?” Wilson asked. “Which two of us?”

  “You, son. And San.” The abbess gestured to the others. “Leave us, children. Report to Sister Joan for navigation training. What I say next is for San and Wilson. Alone.”

  San watched the other students rise and bounce toward the hatch where they disappeared into the staircase. The last closed the hatch with a soft thud and its seals hissed.

  Mathematics is truth, San recited. The truth is a path through the stars, traversing the curvature of space and time.

  San flinched at the words, which had come out of nowhere along with the memory of a Proelian monk whose phase-shifter hood had been pulled over his face, masking the features. She sat among the stars. San corrected herself: not just among the stars, but atop one of the new ships and inside a small glass dome. Two other ships burned engines to pull alongside. One was identical to the ship that she’d just watched burn from Ganymede, the other a standard Fleet vessel that, she recalled, would carry a full battalion of Marines.

  “San!” Sister Frances shouted. “Where do you go in these moments—ones that require your full attention?”

  “I am to be stationed on a ship that is part of a three-ship mission.”

  The abbess smiled, wiping a tear from her cheek. “Yes. You will be on the Bangkok. Wilson on the Jerusalem. This is the most important assignment anyone has faced in the history of Fleet, children. I’m sorry to place it on your shoulders, when your bones are still so young.”

  “Why are you scared?” Wilson asked.

  “Why do you think I’m scared, child?”

  “You are crying. But it’s more than that. I can see it in your muscles and hear it in the frequencies of your voice, your tone.”

  The abbess smiled again. “Already you grow faster than we could ever teach. I am proud of you both.” Sister Frances looked at San. “You have heard me speak of Zhelnikov. What do you gather in that case, from my tone and words?”

  “That’s easy, Mother Abbess: You hate him. You think Zhelnikov is evil at worst, misguided at best. He has made mistakes that jeopardize us and humanity.”

  War is coming, San thought again, and all I can do is pick a long path, for all of them lead to death.

  “I am sending you into a trap,” the abbess said. Her face went hard and the woman no longer cried. “And you must be brave. Find the way through this trap and you will come out stronger, a tool of warfare capable of making Zhelnikov meet a fool’s end. Although he is both brilliant and focused, he is also blind.”

  “What is the mission?” asked Wilson.

  “You are both to board your respective ships. From there, your group will travel outside the human zone, where you and San will navigate through uncharted space. The destination is a region near the Sommen home world. The Sommen have migrated away from their home and nearby conquered systems, running from something in contradiction of their faith. This is an enigma; they do not retreat, ever. So you are to travel there, find the reason for their retreat, and bring that information back. It could be critical for the war.”

  “My God,” San whispered. “You aren’t just sending us outside human-permitted space, but to the Sommen home worlds. If it’s a trap, why not avoid it?”

  “Because, child. Sometimes one must gamble—a calculated risk—to overcome and gain more than you would by taking the path of safety. Zhelnikov will be on a third ship, the Higgins, but he won’t be alone. He tried to create a cadre with sight, as we did with you two, but refused to limit his work to human biochemistry. Instead he fused Sommen and human biologies. He had to; Zhelnikov didn’t have the religious texts and didn’t know the horrors associated with the path he chose: the creation of a human-Sommen hybrid. Zhelnikov thought that by taking this route, the Sommen teachings would emerge organically. He was right—to an extent.”

  “You or other Proelians didn’t warn him about the danger?” Wilson asked.

  “We did, child. And we warned Fleet. But Zhelnikov is a powerful man with powerful allies in the military and the government. And so he was permitted to create his monsters. Thank Our Lord that now only one monster remains instead of hundreds; we convinced Fleet to stop his program but not before Zhelnikov and his creation murdered one of our sisters at a secured site in Portugal. Zhelnikov’s monster is a killer and a liar.”

  The abbess reached out and took San’s hand. “Child. I need you to be strong, because this mission will fall on your shoulders more than on Wilson’s. You know the monster Zhelnikov created. He was a boy from the capital, orphaned when his father abandoned him at a young age, whom Zhelnikov used as a test subject for Sommen chemical treatments that transformed his brain matter into a mass of Sommen neurons.”

  “I don’t know him,” San insisted.

  “You’ve never met him, but you know him. And you will recall the memory among the thousands that will surface. Zhelnikov’s pet used to be your brother. Your half brother, Win, son of Maung Kyarr—your father.”

  San couldn’t breathe. Blood pounded in her head, making the room blurry and half real, a mirror of the confusion that took over her mind. She tried to remember. Vague recollections of something about a half brother surfaced but nothing she could grasp, so she studied Sister Frances’s face instead, which had transformed into a road map of concern and fear—the same face her mother had when San had first left Mars for Fleet.

  They are sending us into Sommen space, to our deaths.

  “I don’t remember him. I know you’re telling the truth but I don’t recall ever having a brother.”

  “That’s good, child. Because he is no longer your brother; he stopped being human months ago, so do not make the mistake of thinking about him in those terms. I need you to do something for the Order, San.”

  “What?”

  “Kill them both. Destroy Zhelnikov and his creation at the first opportunity, and do it in a way that will not trace back to the Order. Zhelnikov must be stopped. The war has already begun, children, and in order to be ready for the Sommen we first eradicate enemies within. God cannot help those whose core has rotted through.”

  “What have we done?” San asked.

  Wilson stopped in the corridor and the illum-bot hovered overhead, spraying them both with a cold jet of nitrogen. “We haven’t done anything,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I always thought that being with Fleet would be adventurous. Burning through the galaxy, moving from wormhole to wormhole and exploring things unknown. I didn’t count on war with the Sommen, or being told that my first job is to infiltrate their territory in an effort to assassinate one of the most valued members of Fleet: my brother.”

  A half brother. The realization hit San again, washing her in a sense of bewilderment that she should care about this person she’d never met because he was family, but that in reality there were no feelings. Nothing. The name Win was a blank slate to her and why should it be otherwise? For whatever reason her parents had kept his existence a secret and how could she be expected to care about him when this person had only just sprung into existence?

  She slammed her palm against the stone wall. “I haven’t killed anything, Wilson. Nothing. And now the abbess wants me to not just kill, but to do it professionally so it won’t get trace
d to us. We will die on this mission.”

  “Come with me,” Wilson said.

  “Where?”

  “Sister Frances didn’t say when we had to report to Sister Joan. So I say let’s take a detour and find the shipyard. I want to see more. And besides, you need a break.”

  “What if we get caught?”

  “Then we explain that because we are about to be deployed we felt that we should get to know these ships as much as possible. Up close.”

  Wilson grabbed her hand. At first San followed, too stunned to make sense of anything, but then she felt the excitement of holding hands with a boy and realized that this was the first time she ever had. San felt her face run hot with embarrassment and she pulled her hand away, following Wilson as he bounced and moved through the narrow corridors, making turns that San didn’t recognize and leading them deeper into Ganymede. She sensed the weight of rock and ice overhead. The impression intensified with each narrow staircase they navigated downward. San guessed they headed in the general direction of where the ice field had cracked open, but the corridors soon became a maze and before long she lost track of the turns.

  “We’re lost,” she whispered.

  “No, I have a photographic memory. I know the direction we’re heading and how to get back.”

  “Why haven’t we run into anyone? If this place has a shipyard there have to be more than just nuns. Engineers. Technicians. Security.”

  “So?” Wilson asked.

  “Where are they?”

  Wilson shrugged; he moved into the left corridor after getting his bearings. “I don’t know. But this has to be the way.”

  The corridor ended in a bare stone wall, solid and gray with white streaks of quartz veins that ran vertically. Wilson put a hand against it. He motioned for San to do the same, and at first she felt nothing, but soon her fingertips tingled with the vibration of machinery and San placed an ear to the wall, hearing a high-pitched hum that reminded her of a dental bot’s drill.