Mistworld

by Nina M. Osier

  “Maybe you're willing to be a puppet for her, Farren. But I'm not. Understand this, everyone, right now! Any authority I'm given, I'll use for Narsai's benefit. Not Terra's. And not the Commonwealth's, either. Do you understand that, Ms. Paré? Ambassador?” Maddy looked first at the assembled audience, her fellow citizens of this world. She met as many eyes as she could, and then she turned her defiant brown gaze toward Aurelia Paré.

  Was she committing suicide in the most public way she could have chosen? If so, she couldn't help it. Going along with what Paré had just proposed (no, decreed was more like it), in hopes she might be able to subvert her overseer's purposes and benefit her people that way, might or might not work; and in any case, she simply couldn't face it. As she'd told her escort of a few moments ago, the big Marine sergeant, she wanted all of this to be over. She needed it over, or it was going to kill her all by itself.

  Farren dropped her hand and flung himself at her. She was so startled that she didn't have time to put up her arms and repel him, or do anything else to stop his greater mass and weight from bearing her down after knocking her off her feet.

  After the moment of impact he was dead weight, anyway. Just as Cab Barrett had been, only Doctor Cab hadn't fallen on top of her after creating desperate momentum.

  The ballroom erupted, while she was lying under her cousin's scorched body and gasping to regain the breath he'd knocked out of her. The Narsatians, weaponless though they were, rushed forward—vaulted out of chairs that their departure sent flying, and tackled whichever Terrans they got their hands on first.

  Many of them died, of course. The Marines didn't hesitate to fire, and whenever they fired they shot to kill (as had the one who'd just tried to execute the defiant Councilor Romanova, obeying a nodded commend from Paré). But even unarmed and for the most part untrained civilians, pitted against trained and fully armed elite Commonwealth ground troops, could snatch the upper hand if they had sufficiently greater numbers plus surprise on their side; and the Narsatians had both.

  Their adversaries were so surprised, in fact, that by the time Maddy managed to push Farren's body away and sit up, two Narsatians had Aurelia Paré clasped between them. Her arms pinned, and a captured blaster pressed against the base of her skull. With its muzzle angled upward.

  * * *

  Chapter 22

  Linc. Katy. Are you all right? Kerle Marin's urgent thought reached Catherine Romanova before the sounds of other friends’ physical voices managed to penetrate her unconsciousness. The Morthan doctor who'd known them both longer than Astin Fort (whose thoughts were there also) acknowledged it with relief when Romanova responded. He moved past her immediately, and put all of his concentration into trying to reach Linc.

  What happened? She didn't sit up. She didn't do anything about her body, because the two Morthans needed all the help they could get—and she, although lacking their gifts, knew her husband's mind better than anyone else. She ignored her physical self, and gave the rest over to Marin and Fort.

  We don't know. But it affected you, and Linc, because you were in sync with Misties at the time. At least that's our theory.

  Based on what? She heard poorly veiled anxiety in Astin Fort's thoughts, along with something else. An indefinably disturbing something that she'd also detected in the thoughts of Kerle Marin ... but she wasted no time trying to identify it, because she knew well enough that some things about Morthans (especially first-wave Morthans) would always baffle her.

  Based on the silence we're hearing every time we try to contact our friends, Fort told her.

  My boys? She had to ask that question, although she knew every inquiry she made took attention away from reviving Linc. Ishi, your stepson?

  Misties who used to be Human, or Morthan, or whatever, are just as puzzled as the rest of us. And all of them are in their host-bodies now, whether or not they were a few minutes ago when this happened.

  Stirrings interrupted them then. Sluggish thoughts, where a second earlier there'd been no awareness at all. Katy forgot the Mistworlders then. Even the adoptive ones who were her children. She reached for her husband, and held him close. Eventually, when she opened her eyes at last, she found herself doing that physically as well as mentally.

  “I'm okay.” Casey spoke in a rusty but decisive voice, as he, too, opened his eyes. “Katy, what's happened to the stars?"

  She was kneeling, with him in her arms. His head cradled by the curve between breast and shoulder, his face toward the nighttime sky above. As soon as she lifted her own face, and looked where he was already looking, she saw exactly what he meant. And it made her gasp.

  “They're different!” she said.

  That couldn't be true, of course. Yet it was what her eyes told her, and therefore she had to believe it.

  “Mum?” Ishi Sanibello's voice reached her from beyond the people already gathered around the spot where she and Linc had collapsed. He sounded scared out of his wits.

  “I'm here, Ewan! And I'm all right. So's Linc.” She couldn't spring up to greet him, as her firstborn pushed through to reach her side. But she didn't have to do that, because he reached down, instead. And got Linc to stand up, so that she was free to do the same. “Do you have any idea what's happened? And where are the twins?"

  “With Chad and Dram. We don't know where the others, the Mistworlders, are."

  “Then you can't tell us anything that might help?” Nadja Nah Trang asked that question with absolutely no inflection in her voice. The Mistworld Colony's administrator had made her own way through the still-increasing crowd on the headland, and was standing now between her Morthan husband and her fully human adult son.

  The planet's single moon had risen now, and its light was pouring down. Romanova stood looking into her son's face (the one she'd grown accustomed to seeing him wear, that was!), but the thoughts she shared belonged to her husband. To her partner throughout a forty-year Star Service career, who knew as well as she did what the sight above them meant. She hadn't expected him to offer her an explanation, but she'd irrationally hoped that he might, anyway.

  “No,” Ewan/Ishi said to Nadja Nah Trang. “We don't know what's happened to the Misties, and we don't know how the stars can change, either."

  “They can't.” Romanova spoke with finality. “But they appear to, when you view them from a different hemisphere. Or when a starship travels far enough to give the people it's carrying an entirely different vantage point."

  Nah Trang nodded. “It's not possible,” she said. “I realize that. But since the stars can't move, we must have. Somehow."

  “Mistworld has moved? The whole planet?” Someone in the crowd, whose voice Romanova didn't recognize, asked the question with suitable incredulity.

  “The whole star system, actually. Since we're still receiving sunlight—reflected sunlight, on the night side where we are right now.” The former fleet admiral lifted her free hand, the one that wasn't clinging to her husband's, and indicated Mistworld's placidly shining moon.

  * * * *

  “Where is it, ma'am?” Randall Kane spoke up when no one else did, on the bridge of the SHIP that was still moving majestically toward a vacant spot in space where he'd expected to find a star system waiting.

  “All stop. Let's take a look at this.” Yes, the older of the two spirits inhabiting his new captain's body had a seasoned military officer's calm tone. Even in the face of this unbelievable occurrence. “Are we actually where we're supposed to be?"

  Kane had already checked on that. So he knew that they were right on target, however inexplicably the SHIP's pilot might have done it; and he therefore wasn't surprised to hear the navigator say flatly, “Yes, Captain. We are."

  “How the hell can a whole system just vanish?” That belligerent question came from the SHIP's XO. Kane didn't know much about the others in this crew, yet, except their names and duty assignments; but he didn't have to know Captain Alleluyeva well to see that she was bristling, beneath her veneer of tranquility, at h
er exec's tone.

  “It didn't disappear just to spite you, I think, Tom.” She gave the man (whose host's body was older than Randall Kane) a frosty look, and a sentence of ironic reproof. Then she got back to business. “Are there any other changes in the sector? Those we can chart from here, at least?"

  “No, Captain.” Kane had been running the necessary sensor sweeps ever since realizing something was wrong, and he'd already analyzed the data. “It all matches our existing star charts. Exactly."

  “I was afraid you were going to tell me that!” Alleluyeva rolled her eyes. Violet eyes, in a delicate face above a small-boned, almost dainty body. “Is there anything at all in the readings which might indicate there's something unusual here?” She nodded toward the main viewscreen's telltale blankness (except for the star field that formed its background). “Something to confirm that these coordinates weren't always empty?"

  Again, Kane could give her no help. “Sorry, ma'am. I can't find a thing that's out of the ordinary."

  “Damn gen! Let me have that station.” The XO, one Thomas Forrest who was temporarily residing in the body of a colonist called Norgay (and nothing else), didn't have far to move before he pushed Kane bodily away from the scanner console.

  Fourteen years ago, when Lieutenant Commander Forrest and Commander Alleluyeva died on different ships at Mistworld, Randall Kane was still a crèche-child. And gens, back then, didn't perform tasks that required analysis of data or any other significant decision-making. Which, to Kane's way of thinking, never had made much sense; because his kind were bred, after all, to perpetuate Humanity's best physical and mental characteristics. Why do that, and then use the resulting beings for menial, repetitive, and dangerous work that “normal” (that was, wildling) Humans didn't want?

  But he remembered now that in those days gens were far less common than they'd become in the years since, and he also remembered that everyone on the SHIP knew about the current gen rebellion. So it was no wonder, perhaps, if some of his new colleagues carried prejudice toward him for being what he was. What he couldn't pretend not to be.

  He yielded to Forrest's snarled order, and felt a curious relief in doing so. He hadn't been free to be what he was openly, after all, since before his eighteenth “birthday."

  “Mr. Forrest, are you satisfied?” Alleluyeva spoke much too mildly, and didn't stir from her own position.

  “He's right. I can't find a thing, either,” the XO admitted, after running the scans and the analysis of them through a second time—and a third, as well.

  “Too bad. Leave the bridge now, if you please, and go to your quarters. Mr. Kane, return to your station.” Alleluyeva waited while her dismissed exec went on sitting at Randall Kane's console, with his mouth hanging open in readiness to ... what?

  Defend himself, when she hadn't named his offense? Protest that she had no right to do this, when she obviously did? No one was going to listen to any of that, especially not now. Finally, after giving Kane a look of pure hatred—as if the gengineered officer must somehow have personally caused the Mistworld system to disappear from the universe, leaving its former location vacant—Forrest started off the bridge. Clumping his boots on the deck as he went, and muttering, “Damn gen! No wonder he could tell us all about the rebellion. He's probably been in on it all along!"

  “I don't believe that. Because I'm damned if I can think of a way that he could have been. So lay off, Tom, and get your ass off my bridge. Before I kick it off!” Alleluyeva froze, briefly, before she made that pronouncement. So did all the others in the SHIP's command center, including her disgruntled XO. As soon as he had finally obeyed her, she activated the shipwide comm system and spoke into it using her preternaturally calm “captain's voice."

  “All hands, this is Alleluyeva. By now you know that our destination, our home system, has disappeared from out of space. I have no explanation for how it happened, or why. I find it pretty hard to believe that the Commonwealth has some kind of secret weapon, one capable destroying a star and its planets, that doesn't even leave debris behind. I find it even harder to believe that if they've got such a weapon, they've kept it secret and trotted it out to use against Mistworld now. Not a few months ago, when they didn't yet have a gen rebellion on their hands!"

  She paused, and gathered her breath as well as (Randall Kane thought, although her face didn't show it) her wits. Then she continued, “Anyway. We may as well make ourselves useful somewhere else, now that Mortha's secure. We know, from what we heard via long-range comm before we left there, that the Sestus system has managed to give its Commie ‘occupiers’ the boot. Kesra didn't have a problem with them in the first place, and the smaller Outworlds seem to be managing pretty well. So the only place we know of that still needs us to give the kind of help we're capable of giving is Narsai, where they still have occupation forces on the ground. Occupation forces that have committed some pretty nasty atrocities, and that don't seem inclined to give up because they've lost their backup from space. So Narsai is where we'll go. I'm sorry I can't take you home, as I promised I would. But there's nothing I can do about it."

  She raised her voice, and spoke again before anyone had a chance to react to what she'd just said. “Mr. Gantry. Bring the SHIP about, and set a course for Narsai. We'll wait to attempt transition until everyone who'll have to participate has had time to rest, and get over the last one. Understood?"

  She waited until the SHIP's whole complement had heard her bridge crew's chorused, “Aye, ma'am!” before she cut the broadcast commlink. And then she set those few who could see her an ongoing example, by staring resolutely at the viewscreen as her pilot obeyed orders and the star field shifted to show that they were now headed away from Mistworld. Away from what, to nearly everyone on board, was home ... or at least, from where that home used to be.

  * * *

  Chapter 23

  Lucien Douglas and his little squadron (as he was choosing to think of this baker's dozen Star Service vessels, none of them except his own large enough to have had gens on board) decelerated into Narsai orbit with the memory of how close they'd come to joining the rest of the Benedon battle group still far too fresh. He knew, as did any officer who exercised command, how to self-destruct his own ship. He'd suspected that a flag officer might be able to give that order for everything under his or her command, independently of the captains involved. But seeing all those ships, all those big ships, immolating themselves, after hearing what was happening to them via one quick, desperate broadcast from the last vessel to blow, was something so terrible that he was still having trouble getting his thoughts around it. Especially since he had a wary notion that if he'd been much closer to the Aragon, his own ship and the other twelve now under his protection would have gone up, too.

  Had Admiral Benedon survived all that time, and finally ended the mutiny by the only means left to her? Or had she somehow set her flagship's systems to do that for her, after her death? Douglas knew he stood little chance of getting that question answered, but he wondered about it anyway. He also wondered if he'd just made his life's biggest, and possibly final mistake, by disregarding Fleet Admiral Tanaka's warnings (he could hardly call them orders) and bringing what he had left to command back to Narsai.

  But dammit all, heading for the nearest usual “safe harbor” at New Orient made no sense in light of the news coming out from there. It, along with all the other Inner Worlds, was in turmoil right now as its substantial gen population fought for freedom—and, now, for survival itself. Making New Orient's Star Service base no longer a safe harbor, and not a place where Douglas thought he and his little force could make a difference in the conflict's outcome, either. So he'd had to choose the least of the evils that the various Outworlds represented, in search of a haven; and of the major Outworlds, Narsai easily beat out Kesra, Mortha, and Sestus (both 3 and 4). It, at least, was an almost 100 percent Human world. Industrialized, civilized, and—Douglas hoped—still under Commonwealth control.

  “Star S
ervice vessels, this is Narsai Control.” A feminine voice greeted him seconds after he'd brought his ship into orbit. “Identify yourselves. Now. I won't bother asking you twice."

  Now, that was so ridiculous it was almost amusing! Narsai Control, with no weapons at its disposal, threatening warships? No matter how small? For the first time in many hours, the young captain smiled as he said, “Lucien Douglas, commanding Europa. I've twelve other vessels with me. Where is everyone? This is the emptiest sky I've ever seen.” On a world like Narsai, he amended silently. One that had habitats, and comm and power relay satellites, should also have freighters and liners and other commercial traffic constantly coming and going.

  “Were you part of Benedon's command?” The woman on the ground asked another question of her own, instead of replying to Douglas's. “What happened to your Admiral?"

  This would be his career's defining moment. Douglas knew that, and gave himself a moment to think before he made up his mind. Should he take out the satellites that Narsai Control was using to track his vessels? Threaten to destroy the planet's great solar collectors, or perhaps just one or two of the transmitters that beamed the power down to the planet's surface? He wouldn't stoop to threatening the habitats and their helpless residents with harm.

  Wait a minute. Half of the planet below him was dark. Narsai, settled centuries ago, looked the way an empty Class M world did from space; or as Terra must have before electric power illuminated its cities.

  “Yes, but that's not why we've come back. Do you know what's been happening on Terra and the Inner Worlds? And on Star Service ships big enough to have gens aboard, too?” Lieutenant Commander Douglas made up his mind. He didn't know the details of what was going on down there on Narsai's surface, but he was pretty sure he could guess the situation's essence.