Linked

by Imogen Howson

  Lin shrugged. “Whatever it is, we did it.” She turned to look at Cadan and Markus, triumph in every line of her body. “How about that, Mr. Captain?”

  Cadan’s face lit in a smile. “Amazing. Thank you, Lin.” A hairsbreadth of a pause. “And, Elissa, for whatever you did.”

  She couldn’t look at him. She’d hardly done anything. She was just a burden on his ship, with no specialist skills and no superpowers. Abruptly his words from a few days ago came back to her. We wouldn’t want you slipping up and, you know, excelling . . .

  Suddenly she knew that if she opened her mouth to say anything, she’d start to cry. And that, after everything, would be more humiliation than she’d be able to bear.

  “Markus,” Cadan said, “would you take Lin to get something to eat from the nearest nutri-machine?” A little amusement lightened his voice. “About the only thing I know about any type of electrokinesis is that it expends a good deal of energy.”

  “Sure thing,” Markus said. “Lin, do you want to come grab something?”

  Lin hesitated. “Lissa? Don’t you want . . . ?”

  Elissa managed to shake her head and give her sister a little smile, keeping her teeth shut tightly against the threatening tears.

  “We’ll bring her back a chocograin bar,” Markus said to Lin.

  “Chocograin?”

  “You haven’t had a chocograin bar? That’s it, the first thing on your menu . . .” Their voices disappeared up into the cargo bay.

  Not that it helped. It was Cadan she didn’t want to freaking cry in front of. Elissa bit the inside of her cheek. If she could just keep the tears back a bit longer, the urge to cry would pass. God knew, she’d done it enough times at school.

  “Lissa.”

  She looked up, keeping her face as stony as she could possibly manage.

  “I’m not blaming you,” said Cadan. He wasn’t smiling anymore, and the look of strain in his eyes gave his face a grim expression. “You were saving your sister. You—” He hesitated, broke off. “That’s all, really. You had to do it. I understand.”

  She swallowed, forcing the tears down. “Giving you that fake money—it wasn’t meant as—I wasn’t thinking of you as for sale.”

  “It’s okay. I know. You already said.” He hesitated, then reached out and brushed her upper arm. All unexpectedly her stomach flipped. “Look,” he said, “I’m extremely irritable right now. Don’t take it personally, okay?”

  Something—the release of tension, that out-of-nowhere stomach flip—made a laugh burst out of her. “Please. As if I hadn’t learned by now to ignore the mean things you say to me.”

  “ ‘Mean things’?” He was laughing too, but with a question in his eyes.

  “Extremely mean things.” In the interests of fairness she added, “Well, sometimes they’re more just superpatronizing.”

  “They are?”

  She raised her eyebrows, taking a little bit of revenge. “Completely.”

  Cadan was frowning, looking as if he were searching his memory for the last mean—or patronizing—thing he’d said to her. She saw the moment the results came up, because a sudden flush swept over his face. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, all right. I’ll give you patronizing.” He hesitated again. “I guess . . . This stuff with Lin, it’s been going on over the last three years, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, there are quite a lot of things I might have the wrong idea about?”

  “There really could be.” Although it hadn’t been funny at the time and still kind of wasn’t, she found her lips quirking into a smile.

  His eyes met hers. He didn’t return her smile, but something in his face changed.

  “I meant it, you know,” he said as they turned to walk back up the ramp. “What I said before, about how you’ve handled all this. I’m impressed, honestly.”

  And when Elissa flickered a look at his face, he was smiling at her.

  CADAN TOOK another hour and a half to run maintenance on the Phoenix, aided by the three remaining members of his crew. Halfway through, Elissa and Lin raided the nutri-machine in their cabin and took the crew a collection of the most dinnerlike items they could find. Curly grain featured heavily, and something called “savory protein wafers” that did not at all taste of the ham they were supposed to. The crew ate hungrily, though, standing around the cargo bay, watching the sun rise swiftly over the horizon. Elissa knew very well that Syris II didn’t match Sekoian time, and she kept checking her watch, which agreed with her body clock that it was late nighttime, not morning at all. But all the same she found the sunrise utterly disorienting, as if she were trapped in a day that was never going to end.

  Felicia was standing near her, by the cargo bay exit, and when Elissa looked at her watch for what must have been about the tenth time, Felicia glanced at her, smiling. “You get used to it.”

  Elissa looked up. “If you’re on a planet for, like, a few days, does your body clock reset itself?”

  “Some people’s, yes.” Felicia laughed. “I’ve found out that mine, though, is pretty intransigent. I’ve been on Sekoia more than twenty years, and part of me’s still set on Freyan time.”

  For a moment Elissa thought she must have misheard. “I’m sorry—which planet is that? I didn’t catch—”

  “No, you heard me right. My home planet is—well, was—Freya.” She sent a half smile Elissa’s way. “Did you know, there was an Old Earth goddess named Freya? Goddess of fertility, apparently. Which, I have to say, seems particularly ironic.”

  Well, yeah. The planet Freya was the universe’s worst example of what they called post-completion terraforming failure. It had been settled a thousand years ago, reclaimed from the receding edge of an ice age and turned into something very like Old Earth itself, with busy oceans and temperate landmasses. It had evolved its own cultures, even different strains of language. And then Freya—a planet with an established, entirely stable global ecosystem—had moved into a stage of orbit the scientists had calculated incorrectly, and despite all efforts to reverse the process, the planet had entered its next ice age.

  It had taken most of the next fifty years for them to bring themselves to do it, but eventually every Freyan citizen had been forced to abandon their dying world. Probably forever.

  “I’m sorry,” Elissa said, knowing the words were beyond inadequate but needing to say them all the same.

  Felicia smiled at her again. “I was a good bit older than you and your sister before I had to leave, though. So maybe I didn’t know how lucky I was, hm?”

  Except now, because of us, you might not ever get back to your adopted home planet. God, was there never an end to all the people whose lives she was managing to wreck?

  “Stop that,” said Felicia.

  Elissa blinked.

  “That. Hunching your shoulders. Looking as if you want to start chewing on your nails. I’m forty-two. I made my own decision to stay with the ship. Just like we all did.”

  “I know. I just . . .”

  “You feel guilty. Well, yes, I imagine you do. But you shouldn’t.” She paused, catching Elissa’s gaze, the angular lines of Felicia’s face settling into an oddly gentle expression. “Did you not wonder why I—as well as Markus—stayed to help?”

  “Yes. But I— Maybe it’s not my business . . .”

  “You know all Freyan citizens were given interplanetary citizenship?”

  “Yes.”

  Everyone knew that. It had been one of the Interplanetary League’s landmark rulings. Freyan citizens had been declared to be refugees first, but then, after protracted arguments and petitions and appeals, had been given the newly created status of interplanetary citizens, with the legal right to settle on any planet they wished and be treated no differently from full native citizens.

  “We—my family—came to Sekoia. There were other planets, of course, but after what we saw on Freya, there was something about settling on a planet that was sure of its own safety, sure that its terrafor
ming had worked, that what had happened to us was one of those one-in-a-million aberrations that could never happen to them . . . Well, my mother said the complacency made her skin itch. Sekoia was only just dragging itself out of its own environmental crisis—if there was one thing it wasn’t going to be, it was complacent. So we settled there. Interplanetary citizens, right? Welcome anywhere?”

  Elissa nodded.

  “Except not,” Felicia said.

  “You got . . . discriminated against? But that’s illegal. Sekoia has stringent human-rights laws.”

  Felicia’s mouth twitched, and Elissa, suddenly aware that all she was doing was quoting a phrase she’d heard a million times and hadn’t ever thought to challenge, stopped.

  Felicia lifted a dismissive shoulder. “It’s a nice little legal fiction, that’s all. I’m trained to use every currently licensed type of firearm—and a good few that aren’t licensed at all. I’m a black belt in three different types of martial arts, and my IQ is two points off genius level. But by the time I left college, I knew my only employment opportunities were cleaning jobs.”

  “But it’s— I don’t understand how people could get away with—”

  Felicia gave her that oddly gentle look again. “People can get away with most things if they’re determined to.” A smile flickered across her face. “And people can overcome most things if they’re determined to, as well. I joined SFI as a cleaner, and I worked my way up. Once you’re in SFI, under the eyes of the people who really count, all they care about is how good you are, not whether you’ve got that pesky special citizenship they’d never have voted for if it had been up to them.” The twist to Felicia’s voice indicated that this time it was she who was doing the quoting.

  “Anyway.” She shrugged. “It’s not a sob story I’m telling you. It’s an explanation. I don’t trust government bodies. I don’t trust them when what they say sounds like a good thing, and I don’t trust them when what they say sounds like a clever bit of twisted logic. ‘Nonhuman human-sourced entities,’ for God’s sake.” Her lip curled. “One guess which category that falls into.”

  Elissa swallowed, aware that at some point in the last few minutes Lin had wandered over and was silently listening, that Cadan, Markus, and Ivan had stopped talking and were watching them. “But . . . Cadan doesn’t think I can know it, but I do. It’s not just some random organization doing this. It’s the government. You—SFI gave you a job—”

  “And you think if it comes down to it, my loyalty might ultimately be to them? No. I earned my position with SFI. They gave it to me because I was that good, not because they wanted to. I don’t owe them anything.” Her face hardened. “And if it was the government who authorized what happened to both of you, I’ll find myself another damn job.”

  “We all will,” said Ivan, crumpling his coffee cup in his big hand.

  Lin looked across at him. “Why did you stay?” she asked. “Markus gets all angry about clones, and Felicia doesn’t trust the government, and Cadan always does the right thing—”

  Cadan choked on his coffee. “Hardly—”

  “That’s what Lissa says.” Lin’s voice was matter-of-fact, and she didn’t even bother glancing his way. It was as if she were making a statement that everyone already knew. Elissa felt a flush climbing all through her face. She couldn’t look at Cadan. It was one thing for her to know she trusted him; it was quite another for him to know exactly how much.

  Lin was still watching Ivan, her face full of calm interest. “Why? Why did you stay?”

  Ivan tossed the crushed coffee cup into the disposal chute, watching as it hit the rim and bounced down out of sight. “It’s not politics, I can tell you that much. I’m just a working man—I don’t have time for any of that activist stuff.”

  Lin waited, her gaze on him.

  Ivan looked up at her. “I have daughters,” he said. “They’re not on Sekoia, and they lived with their mother even before they left home. But you and your sister—you remind me of them when they were teenagers.”

  Lin waited.

  “That’s all,” said Ivan. “I told you, it’s not politics, and it’s not complicated. That’s it.” He glanced at Cadan. “I’m going to start those safety checks, Captain, okay?”

  He climbed up one of the staircases and disappeared into the body of the ship.

  They took off in a sudden rainstorm that came up as they were leaving, up through raindrops that spattered against the glass all around the flight deck, then through banks of cloud followed by a momentary blaze of sunlight like fire. Then the sound of the engines changed, Elissa’s stomach dropped in the fraction of a second before the gravity drive kicked in, and they were in space once again.

  The crew were already at their posts around the ship, doing, Elissa imagined, the most vital tasks of all those intended to be undertaken by a full crew. She and Lin were strapped like good passengers into two of the seats at the edge of the bridge.

  “So,” said Cadan, half his attention on the enviro-scan, “this is what we’re doing.” He glanced across at them, then gestured toward two of the seats at the controls. “Here, come and sit where we can talk.”

  He waited for them to change seats, frowning at one of the side screens.

  “Is that the hyperdrive?” asked Lin.

  “The hyperdrive status display, yes. It’s . . . it’s not showing anything wrong, but the last time I used it, it didn’t feel . . . But it’s built to be good for at least five years, and, anyway, no one on the ship even begins to be qualified to investigate it.” He gave his head a shake, filing the problem away—Elissa could tell he was doing it—to consider later.

  “We’re making for Sanctuary,” he said. “I can’t plot a course from here, though—I don’t dare do anything that makes us easier to track. And even using the hyperdrive, I can’t take us straight there, for the same reason. We’re going to do it in a series of short random hops to keep anyone from getting a full lock on our signal. Doing it that way, we should reach Sanctuary in the next twelve hours. And once we’re at IPL HQ, you—Lin at least, and probably Lissa as well—can claim refugee status under the Humane Treatment Act.”

  “Does that work—the Act, I mean—even if Lin’s not legally human?”

  Cadan gave her a half smile. “Will I sound patronizing if I say that the Act has nothing to do with being human?”

  Elissa flushed a little, but his eyes were kind. “I can cope. I guess I should already know about it, yes?”

  “I guess,” Cadan said, echoing her, “that you’ve been otherwise occupied. Basically, the Act deals with cruelty, and it applies to all life-forms. It didn’t just get mammal-hunting abolished, it’s what led to the banning of foods like foie gras and ikuzukuri and dead-and-alive fish. So, and thank God for it, the fact that Lin isn’t declared human on her home planet is irrelevant.”

  Relief seeped through Elissa’s bones. She looked at Lin, wanting to share it, but Lin, with one of her out-of-place reactions, had found her attention caught by something else entirely. “I could be a fish,” she said, amusement all over her face.

  Cadan shrugged. “Pretty much. Look”—he glanced at Elissa—“it’s very late by Sekoian time, and you both look tired. Why don’t you get some sleep? If you go down to my cabin, you can use my bunk and the couch in the lounge area.”

  If we can sleep, after everything that’s happened—everything that’s still happening. “When will you sleep?”

  He gave her another little smile, and she had to suppress an impulse to reach out and touch his hand. “When we get to Sanctuary? It’s okay, Lis, we’ve practiced plenty of ultralong shifts. If you could dial me a coffee before you go, I’ll be fine.”

  He didn’t look fine. He was pale, with bags under his eyes. For a moment, as he turned to frown at a screen, rubbing his forehead with three fingers, he looked like the skinny, too-tall boy he’d been years ago. Markus and Felicia and Ivan were making sacrifices and taking risks, but at least they were completely gro
wn up. Cadan wasn’t even supposed to have graduated yet, and right now he looked horribly young, coping with problems far too big for him.

  Well, Lin and I are doing that too. But all the same her chest tightened in pity so strong, it felt like grief.

  Elissa did manage to sleep for a while, although she woke each time Cadan took the ship into hyperdrive, and she spent a good part of the rest of the time jerking awake, hearing phantom explosions or running footsteps. After a couple of hours she couldn’t cope with it anymore. She slid off Cadan’s couch, washed her face and brushed her teeth with items from the toiletries machine in his shower room, and went quietly out, leaving Lin in the bedroom.

  The whine and shriek of the hyperdrive vibrated all around her as she climbed through the doorway up to the flight deck, and the jerk as they took another hop made her grab for the rail at the bottom of the steps to the bridge.

  Cadan was standing by the nutri-machine when she tapped on the security door. He turned, coffee cup in hand, to let her in. “You couldn’t sleep longer?”

  “I’ll have to sleep when we get there too.”

  “Good plan. Coffee?”

  She nodded, and he dialed for her. “I’m having it with extra caffeine. You want that?”

  She couldn’t suppress a little shudder. “No, thanks. Regular’s plenty strong enough. I only started drinking it, like, three days ago, when Lin and I first ran away from my house. Before that, when I was getting all the symptoms of what Lin was going through, one of the doctors I saw said going caffeine-free would help.”

  “Sadistic freaking bastard.”

  Elissa blinked. That was a reaction she hadn’t expected.

  Cadan turned from the machine, the coffee he’d just dialed in his free hand, his face set in lines of anger and distaste. “For God’s sake, they knew all along what was doing it, and they recommended things like going caffeine-free? For disconnecting a telepathic link?”

  “Oh, no.” He wasn’t handing her the coffee, so she took it from him. “I don’t think they all knew. I mean, some of them definitely did, and I’m sure my parents knew all along too. But that doctor—he was kind of early on, and I think the others—the ones who did know—I think even they were maybe hoping it was nothing but nerves and hormones and stuff. Right at the beginning I was just getting the pain, before the bruises started appearing. So to start with, they sent me to ordinary doctors as well—doctors who didn’t have all the information, I mean.”