Ascending (The Vardeshi Saga Book 1)

by Meg Pechenick

  I swallowed hard and said the only thing I could say, the thing I knew I’d been manipulated into saying from the moment I came through the door: “What do you want?”

  His reply came swiftly. “Allow your Earth technology to be confiscated. All of it. Today.”

  “Done,” I said before I could stop to consider the bargain I was making.

  “And give me your sworn word that you won’t spend time alone with Novi Takheri—or any other member of my crew—either in their quarters or in yours.”

  “You have my word,” I said. “Sir.”

  “Then I think we understand each other. You may return to your duties.”

  I turned to go. His voice stopped me. “One more thing, Novi.”

  I looked back.

  “Raise your voice to me again and I’ll see that you never wear a Fleet uniform again, on this ship or any other. You can be thankful that you’re not Vardeshi. If you were, I’d have you beaten. Next time, that’s exactly what I’ll do, human or not. No more allowances, no more exceptions. Is that absolutely clear?”

  “Yes, Khavi.” I hurried out before he could change his mind.

  I didn’t have a chance to speak to Zey again until lunch, and even then we were constrained by the presence of Vethna and Khiva at our table. We lingered over our meals and at length had the mess hall to ourselves. When everyone else had filtered out, Zey stabbed an unoffending slice of root with his kevet and muttered, “Vethna.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He saw me going into your quarters last night.”

  “He’s been looking for a scapegoat ever since Daskar kicked him off rana.”

  “Well, he found one.”

  “You didn’t have to make it so easy for him, though.”

  I looked up in surprise. “What would you have done?”

  “Well, not launched myself totally out of orbit in front of the khavi, for one thing. But then, I’m not as brave as you are.”

  “Out of orbit?”

  Zey made a gesture with his hand like a spacecraft taking flight. “You know, when you take off in a weird direction and then you just . . . keep going.”

  I winced. “Yeah. I may have gotten a little carried away.”

  “‘Humans and Vardeshi getting to know each other,’” he mimicked ruthlessly. “That’s one way to put it. I’d say Sirran and Zoe know each other pretty damn well at this point.”

  I laughed in spite of myself.

  “You were right, though,” he conceded. “It just didn’t do you any good to say it.”

  “It did someone some good. Vethna looked like he couldn’t believe his luck.”

  Zey’s mouth quirked. “He couldn’t. Finally someone’s in more trouble than him.”

  “When you put it like that, it seems even more ludicrous. The ship’s engineer is addicted to a substance that could compromise his ability to do his job. But clearly the real problem is the hired help who’s speaking a forbidden language. Which has exactly zero impact on my ability to run a cleansing cycle.”

  “I know,” Zey said sympathetically. “You’d find a way to screw that up in English too.”

  I aimed a kick at him under the table, which missed, then checked my flexscreen. “It’s late. I’d better go. Khiva’s waiting for me to turn in my tech.”

  “Couldn’t you just accidentally lose it in the corridor on the way to Requisitions? Say, right outside my quarters?”

  “I could, but I think I’ve gotten you in enough trouble for one day.”

  He sighed. “Now I’ll never know what happens in season three.”

  “A lot can happen in a year,” I said. But the words rang hollowly in my ears.

  We carried our dishes into the galley. As I turned on the water and began to run it into the stainless steel basin I used for washing, something I’d missed in our conversation abruptly resurfaced. I turned the water off again. “Hey. I’m not braver than you.”

  “Sure you are.” Zey waved eloquently at the ship around us. “You’re traveling toward another planet with a bunch of strangers. I’ve never done anything like that.”

  “That wasn’t what you meant before.”

  “I never would have spoken to the khavi the way you did. Even though I felt the same way.”

  “I . . .” It took me a long time to find the necessary words. Finally I said, “I have to stand up for humanity.”

  “That’s what I mean,” he said quietly. “I can’t even stand up for myself.”

  I went to my quarters and stuffed all my Earth tech into a backpack. When I thought I’d collected everything, I made another pass through the room, looking for chargers, thumb drives, anything I might have missed. My e-reader in its leather cover was nestled among the other personal effects on my bedside shelf. I picked it up and stood looking down at it for a long, difficult moment before I slipped it into the bag. There was a duplicate laptop in a crate in one of the cargo holds, and I retrieved that too. When I arrived at the Requisitions room, I was glad I’d been so conscientious. Khiva took all the items out of the backpack and checked them off on a list I hadn’t known existed. Of course the Vardeshi had inventoried my belongings when I came aboard. In a way it made sense, but seeing the list still made me vaguely uncomfortable. I felt still more unsettled when Khiva stacked my tech neatly in a shallow metal bin, settled the lid on it, and slid my empty backpack to me across the table.

  “You can go now,” she said. “I’ll inform the khavi that everything is accounted for.”

  I nodded and forced myself to turn around and walk out. I made it halfway back to my quarters before a dizzy spell made me unsteady on my feet. I sat down abruptly in the middle of the hallway. What had I just consented to? I hadn’t brought those things aboard as luxuries. My laptop’s hard drive contained thousands of photos and videos of my friends and family, a digital library of my life. It also held more than a hundred favorite albums and playlists in which I had sought refuge when the foreignness of life on the Pinion overwhelmed me. I had two laptops, an original and a backup, because Dr. Okoye and the other psychologists had believed it was vitally important for me to have access to those resources when I needed to ground myself in thoughts of Earth. I had just willingly surrendered my most potent memories of home.

  I arrived at the evening briefing a decorous five minutes early. While the meeting proceeded, I sat quietly, my eyes on my flexscreen, mentally composing a message. Only once was I distracted from my thoughts. Khavi Vekesh said my name, and I looked up, startled, only to realize that he was describing to the crew the agreement we had reached that morning. I didn’t see how the others reacted—if anyone did—because I immediately returned my gaze to my flexscreen.

  After dinner, when the crew scattered to the lounge or the other entertainments offered by the Pinion, I went to the axis chamber and recorded a video message. Briefly I summarized what I had done to incur the khavi’s anger and explained the bizarre truce we had struck that morning.

  “I need an outside opinion,” I finished. “If you think these conditions fall within the terms of my contract, I’m prepared to live with them. But for what it’s worth, things are starting to feel weird out here. I’m out of my depth, and I’m scared. Please get me an answer as soon as you can. I’ll stand by whatever you decide.” For good measure I included half a dozen covert signals, four for I’m uncomfortable and two for I don’t trust this person when I mentioned Vekesh by name. I replayed the message to make sure the recording was complete, double-checked the destination, and touched the Send control.

  I spent the next few days treading very carefully around everyone. Word of my “insolence,” as Vethna gleefully described it at least twice within my hearing, spread as quickly as the news of his disgrace had done. I found it remarkably easy to identify the various sources of the information. Hathan and Ziral, to judge from the wary glances they cast in my direction, had heard it from Khavi Vekesh himself. The markedly more sympathetic attitudes of Sohra and Daskar suggested that Zey had told them
his side of the story. And Khiva’s barely contained hilarity was certain proof that she’d heard about the incident from Vethna. I wondered if Saresh was talking about it to anyone. He continued to address me with the same gentle courtesy he had shown from the beginning. If anyone on the ship shared my intuition that the alliance, or at least our tiny corner of it, was beginning to sour, I thought it might be him.

  I’d been scheduled to serve at officers’ dinner on the day following my clash with Vekesh. I thought he might reassign me out of spite. Part of me hoped that he would; I wouldn’t put it past him to test my patience by rehashing the incident in tedious detail and with minimal effort at impartiality. I checked my flexscreen repeatedly throughout the afternoon, anticipating a notification of a duty change, but none came. As the dinner hour approached, I steeled myself and went to help Ahnir bring the serving dishes in from the galley. I felt an easing of tension when I saw that the dinner guests were Ziral and Daskar. Ziral could be counted upon to be professionally courteous, and Daskar was my staunchest defender aside from Zey.

  The conversation that evening touched upon a number of topics—none of them, mercifully, in any way connected with me—and then settled on a security report Ziral had received regarding an incident of some kind on a remote starhaven. The fact that I didn’t recognize the name of the starhaven meant there were no humans in transit to it, which alleviated my immediate concern. The nature of the event eluded me; it sounded like an attack, or an outbreak of disease, I wasn’t sure which. All I could determine was that the incident had been violent. The name of the illness, if such it was, was repeated over and over again: azdreth.

  After dinner was over, I went back to my quarters, pulled up a Vardeshi dictionary, and looked for a definition. Because the most complete Vardeshi-English dictionary to date was the one I was currently constructing, there was no simple way to translate an unfamiliar word without asking someone what it meant. I couldn’t do that without violating the confidentiality expectation attached to officers’ dinner. After half an hour of looking up each individual word associated with the definition of azdreth and then cross-referencing it with my own records and Dr. Sawyer’s twenty-five-year-old notes, I identified a word I thought might serve as a rough translation. The Flare.

  My weekly checkup with Daskar took place the following morning. Since she’d been present at the dinner, and we were alone in the medical clinic, I judged it safe to broach the subject with her. After she had run through her standard checklist and noted down my heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation, breathing rate, weight, and a few other statistics, I said tentatively, “What’s the Flare?”

  She placed her medical scanner into a drawer and closed it slowly before looking up. “The Flare?”

  “What you were talking about last night. At dinner.”

  Instead of answering, Daskar placed her hands flat on the countertop in front of her and gazed down at them. I waited. Just at the point when I was readying myself to say that it was all right if she couldn’t answer the question, she said quietly, “We don’t really know. We think of it as a sort of contagion that affects long-range missions, but we know virtually nothing about its nature or its origins. We have reports of it dating back thousands of years. Outbreaks are so infrequent that at times we’re certain we’ve seen the last of it, but inevitably, after a decade or a century, it resurfaces.”

  “What is it?”

  “A sort of temporary insanity. Those afflicted with it become irrational, aggressive, often brutally violent. They attack those around them, sometimes fatally. The illness seems to be transmitted by physical contact or close proximity. For no reason we can determine, it affects some people and leaves others on the same ship untouched. Men and women are equally at risk. The symptoms last only a matter of hours, days at the most. Contracting it seems to confer immunity; no one has ever been infected twice. The madness itself does no permanent cognitive damage, and the hosts are left with clear memories of the things they did while they were infected. Often they claim to have been fully conscious but unable to control their own actions—up to and including murder.”

  “It sounds nightmarish,” I said.

  “It is. It’s the darkest fear of any deep-space traveler. Our poets call it the madness that lies between the stars. Some people say it’s the price we pay for the gift of interstellar flight. Some are so afraid of it that they never venture to travel beyond their own birth worlds.”

  “You’re not worried, though?”

  Daskar shook her head. “Why worry about something that’s both incredibly rare and entirely out of our control? Risk is an inherent part of life. I’m a physician. I know that staying in one place isn’t a safeguard against disease or death.”

  “If it’s so rare, do you think the incident in Ziral’s report really was the Flare?”

  “On Shadanrai Starhaven? Hard to say. It’s not easy to separate superstition from fact where the Flare is concerned. Once the word has been spoken, the hysteria is quick to spread. Most of the reported outbreaks turn out to have much more prosaic causes. I’m inclined to think that what happened on Shadanrai was one of those. A crime of passion, probably.”

  “You guys have those too, huh?”

  “Still,” she said.

  “The darkness within,” I murmured.

  Unlike Zey, Daskar placed the reference immediately. “Yes. We’ve conquered it, for the most part, as a people. But it would be arrogant to think we’ve eliminated it for good. Violence has a way of reappearing just when we find ourselves growing complacent about its absence.”

  “Like the Flare,” I said.

  “It’s an apt metaphor,” she agreed. “I hope never to know it as anything more than that.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  My third month on the Pinion began. A week passed by with no events worthy of note. I dared to hope that my concessions to Vekesh might have won me a reprieve, that the equilibrium we had achieved, however tenuous, might hold. I did my novi work. I drafted another newsletter to the Strangers. I exercised in the fitness center, my workouts still cathartic but less invigorating without a soundtrack. I cooked palatable meals and ate them at the lower-ranking table, alone or in company. I spent my evenings in the lounge. Zey and Sohra could generally be counted on to play a hand of cards or simply sit and talk. When they weren’t present, I sat in front of the long viewport and wrote in my journal. There were two Listenings that week. I spent both of those nights reading in my quarters.

  Throughout that week I waited, first patiently and then less so, for a reply to the distress call I had sent Earth. With every chime of my flexscreen I felt a jolt of anticipation, followed by a plunge into melancholy when I saw that it was only another incoming text message or an update to the duty roster. After seven full days of silence, I finally received a notification of an incoming video message from Earth. I hurried to my quarters to watch it. To my dismay, the video was only a few seconds long. In it, Councillor Seidel requested a status update from the Pinion. His tone was level and calm. He didn’t address any of my questions. I watched it twice, searching for hidden meanings. There were none. I was forced to conclude that the Council hadn’t received my message at all. Somewhere in the long miles of darkness, by accident or design, my transmission had gone astray.

  I knew Saresh would have an explanation, if any existed, but the nature of the message made me cautious about approaching him in public. I didn’t want to find myself explaining to a crowd why it was so urgent that this particular message reach its destination unimpeded. I waited for a chance to catch him alone. A few hours after receiving the transmission from Seidel, I crossed paths with the hadazi in the residential corridor. He was alone. He nodded to me and would have kept walking, but I stopped him and asked, “Is there a way to see if a long-distance transmission was sent successfully?”

  “I can’t confirm that it arrived at its endpoint,” Saresh said, “but I can verify that it was sent.”

  We went to an u
noccupied workstation in the axis chamber. With trembling fingers I pulled up the messaging interface and indicated the transmission I’d sent to Earth. Saresh frowned. “This is dated seven days ago. We were already within the signal shadow at that point.”

  “The signal shadow?”

  “The relay station nearest to the Pinion was damaged by a piece of debris. When a station is damaged, it casts what we call a signal shadow. We’ve been out of communications range for several days. No messages coming in, no messages going out.” My face must have betrayed my alarm, because he said gently, “I did mention this in the briefings. Twice, at least. You didn’t hear me talking about it?”

  “I never know what anyone’s talking about in the briefings,” I said.

  He smiled slightly. “Understandable. We cleared the shadow a few hours ago. I can help you resend the message, if you’d like.”

  “I don't understand,” I said. “Why don’t the pending messages just send automatically when the ship comes out of this shadow thing?”

  “It can take days or weeks to enter the signal range of another satellite. Any messages composed before entering the shadow are assumed to be out of date.”

  “I’d still like to send mine,” I said. “Please.”

  He nodded, touched a few controls, and said, “It’s done.”