Joseph, just ahead of me, already had an answer. “Handholds for free fall.” Despite my earlier fear, a curious thrill filled me. Joseph and I had dreamed of this moment all of our growing years, and now I would see inside our biggest mystery.
The door slid shut behind us. We walked twenty or so steps and then Jenna stopped and pointed up. “Follow me.” Colorfully painted pipes, and more hand bumps, lined the vertical corridor. She used the bumps as footsteps and handholds, moving up. Her progress was fast, strong, but lurching, her missing arm clearly a problem, giving her a gait similar to her pongaberry tree climb. I watched her, waiting my turn. If she went home, she could almost certainly fix her arm. A world that could make four-armed people and perfect metal could replace a missing arm.
Joseph and then Alicia went next, and I followed, then Kayleen, Liam trailing. I reassessed my opinion of Jenna’s progress. We were slower; finding the right rhythm to reach and pull and reach again took time.
“Jenna,” Liam called up. “Is this the only way around the ship?”
Her laughter echoed down the shaft. “No. But until I’ve checked them out, it’s safer than the elevators.”
We went up, and up, and up before we passed a horizontal corridor. Kayleen and I, next to each other, stared into the dark tunnel.
Something moved.
I sucked in my breath. Kayleen screamed.
“What?” Jenna called down.
“Something’s alive in here.”
She laughed. “A maintenance bot.”
Kayleen blushed. I felt sheepish for being scared. Of course starships had automated systems to take care of things. I’d read about robots. We had machines on Fremont to help unload raw materials, handle ores, mill flour, and make pipes. But they did not move without specific direction from a human.
Two more levels up, my arms and calves burned from the climb. Jenna finally took a horizontal corridor lined with square doors outlined in different colors: black, deep blue, and maroon. The air still smelled fresh, and now the plant smell I’d sensed at the very bottom of the ship was stronger, mixed with winter forest scents of decay and rot and wet plants. Jenna opened a door about halfway down, and stood in the frame for a moment, frowning. The smell of flowers and herbs and dead plants was so strong I held my nose. Light spilled into the corridor, bright, like sunlight, streaming around Jenna’s spare form. Then she stepped through and motioned us in.
The room was a chaos of green and brown. Dry, dead plants thrust naked stems and curled brown leaves between healthy green shoots. Two bots scuttled away from us, and two more lay on the floor, unmoving. Jenna walked up to one of the inert bots and kicked it. It slid along the floor without changing the position of its limbs, and she stood and frowned down at it, shaking her head. She prowled around, poking at planters. Half were empty, neatly empty, no dirt and nothing but dead leaves fallen from the remaining planters. They had been put away the way we put away the fields each year. Of the rest, straggly green, healthy green, brown, and black competed about evenly.
There was barely more room than necessary to walk between the stacked planters. I didn’t see any dirt, didn’t smell dirt. I walked up and stuck my fingertips into a planter. Starship soil was clear and wet and squishy. I wiped my hand on my pants.
I would never have guessed anything lived inside the ship. It had always been a dead thing, a statue, like the little statue of the first Town Council in the park. And yet it was alive. Camouflage. Like the dragonbirds; something happening under our noses that we didn’t know how to see.
Kayleen followed Jenna, her eyes wide. “Did the light stay on the whole time we were growing up? Do robots make the plants grow? Do you need to eat in cold sleep? Is any of this good to eat?”
Jenna kept walking, ignoring Kayleen, who fell silent and stared after her. Jenna appeared to be looking for something. She stopped at a long narrow box. Feathery green tops I recognized from our greenhouses stuck out of it, only bigger. I smiled when she proved me right and plucked six carrots. Then she held the carrots under one of the first things I recognized easily. A water spigot. When Jenna touched a button with her elbow, clear water flowed.
We had a water treatment plant in town. It was finicky, affected by quakes and cold and heat and too little or too much rain. Yet clear water flowed out of a system no human had touched for twelve years. Jenna waved her handful of wet carrots, a gesture that took in the whole room. “The air systems will adjust for humidity because I picked carrots and rinsed them for you.” She handed each of us a carrot. Mine was heavy and fat and off-color; yellower than carrots from home, nearly white at the tip. When I bit into it, it crunched perfectly in my mouth, but it barely had any flavor at all.
Jenna made one more trip around the garden. Kayleen trailed her. The garden, the ship, fascinated me. But time passed in the real world. Town Council was surely planning their next moves, and Akashi and Paloma were probably worried about us. As Jenna and Kayleen neared us, I said, “I thought we were looking for meteor data.”
Jenna looked distracted. “We are. The garden was on the way, and I needed to check it. There are other food stores, but the garden will be our fresh food. It was a good place to stop to see how well the maintenance bots have kept the ship. I thought you’d like to see it.”
I picked at a dry dead leaf. “It doesn’t look very healthy.”
Jenna waved her hand at the greenery. “This is not the highest priority for the bots. There are other ways to get nutrients. But if the garden is this healthy, the rest of the ship is probably ready, although I’ll run complete diagnostics before we leave.”
Liam stepped toward me, looking at Jenna, his eyes narrow. “Before who leaves?”
“Joseph can fly her,” Jenna said softly. Joseph and Alicia nodded, standing close together. So she had already sold them.
I stood stock-still, crumpling the dead leaf in my hand, watching Liam’s face.
“How?” Liam demanded.
I suddenly sensed the huge jump between data nets and starships. The danger.
Jenna spoke patiently. “I have to show him. Give him the right gear. That’s where we’re going next. The ship mostly flies on automated systems. He’ll need to understand basic interfaces and monitor streams of data. The same thing he already does.” She sounded slightly exasperated, as if she were talking to young children. “There is a pilot computer to help him; he will be able to speak to it after he has some training.” Jenna turned toward the door and started walking.
Liam grabbed my shoulder, his voice rough. “Chelo—you can’t agree with this.” The others turned to look at us, bunching up by the door. Jenna turned, too, holding still, her gaze on me.
I glanced at Jenna, at Joseph. “We can’t go without Bryan. But…what if we do need it? Someday?” I was babbling, betraying my uncertainty. What did I know? “Liam—we can’t leave now. We can’t do anything until I meet with Nava, until we get Bryan. I don’t know how Town Council is going to treat us, not since Therese and Steven died. And Akashi and Nava drew weapons on each other. I’m carrying a microwave gun.”
Joseph and Alicia looked startled. They’d been asleep when Jenna unpacked the weapons.
I kept going, not letting their look stop me. “They threw Bryan in jail and let him get beaten up. They withheld information from Tom. It makes sense to see if the ship can fly.” I looked at Jenna. “You’re not planning to leave soon, right? Not before we have Bryan and not if we can stay here?”
Jenna said, “Not before we have Bryan.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere.” Liam’s face was set, his eyes hard and accusing. “You talk about other parents; maybe you have other parents, but mine are here. You heard Jenna. My altered parents are dead for sure. I want to stay with Akashi and Mayah, and my band.”
Kayleen stepped up next to him, her eyes darting between me and Jenna and Joseph. “Me, too. I want to stay here.”
“Look, all of you.” I swept my eyes across the whole bunch of the
m, including Jenna. The decision had to be ours, not Jenna’s. Not entirely Jenna’s. And she’d given me the perfect opening, outside, before we came in. “This is our starship. Didn’t you hear Jenna outside? Ours.” I paused, letting my words sink in.
Joseph gave me a bright smile, Alicia looked positively triumphant, and Kayleen and Liam thoughtful. I drew a deep breath. “Maybe we will fly it away, someday. First, we have to get out of the mess here, and not by flying into some great unknown that could be worse. Not by running, unless they make us run.” I paused again, and again they stayed quiet, watching me. “Look, I’ve wanted to be inside this ship as long as I can remember, wanted to fly it to space or even just to Islandia. We need to see this. We have to learn.”
Liam’s scowl relaxed. Kayleen offered me a tiny smile, still not happy, but clearly she and Liam now believed we would not leave this minute and abandon Artistos for the stars. Jenna, standing behind Joseph and Alicia, nodded at me, seeming to agree. But the agreement didn’t reach her eyes. She wanted to go. And she wanted to make the call, not me. But outside, before we came in, Jenna told us this was our ship. I would use those words again if I needed to.
Joseph looked as torn as he’d looked for the past few days. Alicia radiated anger, standing stiff, chin up. She spoke into the silence I’d left without looking at me. “We should get Bryan now. So we can leave. Take the skimmer and fly in and get him.”
Liam said, “We should get Bryan right away, for Bryan’s sake. But it’s not that easy.”
I nodded. “Liam’s right, but not tonight. Let’s see what Jenna wants to show us, see if it can help Joseph and Gianna figure out about the meteors. That is the only thing, except tomorrow’s meeting, with a time limit.”
Jenna took advantage of my comment to pass through the door and head up the corridor. We all followed her. As far as I could tell, none of us wanted exactly the same thing. Joseph wanted to fly; Alicia to flee. Liam wanted to stay and lead in his father’s footsteps, Kayleen to follow, to help. And I wanted…I wanted to do it all. Jenna, Jenna just wanted to go home. That sounded so simple.
Damn leading. It was harder than it looked.
Ten more minutes of following Jenna through corridors, and we were in a big square room filled with a single table and eighteen chairs, all of them bolted to the floor. One wall held a sink and a small set of cabinets. Two of the walls had screens, the third was a surface for drawing on: there were colored marks, green circles and blue arrows and black symbols I didn’t understand. Perhaps they’d been here twenty years. Perhaps my parents had made those marks.
Jenna stood in the doorway, gesturing for us to sit. Then she said, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.” She disappeared through the door. For a moment, we all sat and blinked, looking around. The air smelled good; no tang of the sickly garden. The colors and textures were all new, all wrong, and they drove me to restless fidgeting.
Kayleen broke the awkward silence first. “So what do we do if meteors are heading at us? How worried did Gianna sound? What can we do about it, anyway?”
Liam cleared his throat. “There are crater lakes everywhere. And just plain craters. Most of them are pretty small…Little Lace Lake is the biggest I’ve seen.”
The lake took five days to ride around, maybe three without stopping except to sleep. We’d stopped a lot. I pictured it in my head, something big enough to make that crater, carve those tall, steep walls. Something big enough to make a hole that took days to ride around. I shivered.
Liam leaned forward, sweeping our attention to him with the intensity in his dark eyes. “Lorrie and her husband, Jacob, are our best biologists. They think the ecosystem here is as sparse as it is”—he held up a hand to forestall the question that immediately jumped to Kayleen’s face—“compared to Deerfly and Earth, because there are so many geologic events. Meteors, volcanoes, earthquakes. We roamers see signs of old impacts all over the place.” He tugged at his braid, running it through his fingers. His eyes shone with energy and his hand nervously stroked the fine smooth surface of the table. “I could count a hundred places that they’ve hit if I tried.” He paused. “But there are a lot more places that they haven’t.”
Alicia said, “I’ve seen a lot of craters, too, and Liam’s right. We’d have to just stay out of the way. Lots of meteorites aren’t big enough to make craters of any size—they just…land. Cause small problems. We found a burned-out section of forest a few years ago. Klauss said a meteor started the fire. He spent two days looking for it, although he never found it. So if there was a crater, it was so small we didn’t see it. It would be just terrible luck to be right where something like that hit.”
No point in getting too worried about something we couldn’t control. I sighed. “So we don’t really know anything until we know if, and where, one might hit.” I glanced at Joseph. “Gianna did sound worried, but not…not too scared.”
Jenna came in, carrying two bundles awkwardly. She handed the first to Joseph; a rich blue coat shot through with the same type of embroidery as the headband he still wore. White piping lined the collar and the ends of the sleeves and ran up by the buttons at the opening. The coat shimmered, softly enough to draw the eye rather than repel it. I would watch anyone wearing something so beautiful.
Joseph’s eyes shone as he ran his hands along the fabric, holding it up and looking at the finely crafted pockets and turned-up collar. He stood and slid his arms into it, shrugging it on. The coat was about two sizes too big; his fingers barely poked through the arms and the bottom of the coat fell almost to his knees. He grinned, fingering the fine worked edges, and sat back down, closing his eyes. His hand reached for the headband and he pushed it toward me across the table. “Keep this for me?”
I took it, placing it carefully in my coat pocket.
Jenna turned to Kayleen. “Here. This is an assortment of possibilities for you to try.” She handed Kayleen a pristine folded emerald-green vest with black piping, a battered cap, and a pair of loose-legged pants that tied at the ankle; filmy and totally unsuitable to wear in the cold outdoors. “These are like Joseph’s headband—they will work with the data buttons. They are not tuned to the ship, but you need to start somewhere.”
Kayleen’s eyes widened as she picked up the hat.
Jenna turned back to Joseph, still sitting straight up, eyes closed, his body relaxed. “Joseph!” she said. He opened his eyes, coming back from wherever he’d drifted when he donned the coat. “You’re wearing a pilot’s uniform, or at least, half of one. It should be plenty, as strong as you are. With that, you can access the ship’s systems, and control the screens in here. Or at least, with some practice. It won’t help you access data from Traveler, but we’re better off with our own data. A cross-reference. We dropped two satellites in orbit when we came, we’ll pull data on the meteor shower from those. It may take a while for you to learn, but I’ll stay and help you.” She looked around the room, sweeping her gaze across us all, her face thoughtful. “I think…that the rest of you should go back. There are more useful tasks for you outside, and you should get some sleep.” She looked at me. “Chelo, I’d leave you here to help Joseph, but Kayleen will have to fill that role since I want to work with her, too.” Her face softened, looking genuinely concerned. “You should sleep, or try to sleep. It’s always easiest to negotiate on a belly full of sleep.”
Alicia said, “Can I stay? I want to learn more about the ship.”
Jenna frowned at her. “We need to concentrate.”
Alicia gave Joseph a beseeching look. He didn’t even notice, his eyes riveted on the bright silver buttons on the front of the coat, exactly the size of data buttons. I squinted at them. Maybe they were data buttons. Practical.
Alicia shook her head, watching Joseph ignore her, her mouth a tight angry line in the center of her face.
The crumpled brown hat now sat on Kayleen’s head and she was already slipping on the vest. Jenna laughed. “One at a time. You’ll confuse yourself. Joseph—will you
hand her the data button with the information on the ship?”
He blinked, and fished in his pocket. Kayleen took the hat off, then reached for the button Joseph held out for her.
Jenna fixed them both with a stare. “You two, stay here,” she commanded. They both nodded, Kayleen looking puzzled and Joseph with a silly grin on his face and his eyes closed again. A stab of jealousy ran through me. Why couldn’t I see what he saw?
Then she turned to us. “Liam—you lead us out.”
Liam gave her a startled glance, but she held her arm out in a go-on gesture. He grimaced and went through the door, the rest of us following. We took three wrong turns, every one grating on my sense of urgency. Typical Jenna, making us learn the hard way. As we wound down, the scent of charred grass from outside began to mix with the more sterile scents of the ship’s corridors.
At the bottom of the ramp, Jenna said, “I’ll meet you in two hours, at the hangar. It will be getting light then.”
“But what if we need you before that?” I asked.
“You’ll manage.” She gave me a small quirky half smile, and disappeared back up the silver walkway toward the ship. We stayed, watching, until the ramp folded back up and it was impossible to tell where it had been.
I realized I had no idea how to open the door from outside.
23
Alicia’s Betrayal
Liam and Alicia and I jogged back toward the hangar, keeping close to each other. No one talked, as if being inside the belly of New Making had stunned us all. Alicia looked like she might bite anyone who spoke, and Liam seemed to have fallen inside himself.
What if Jenna took off with Joseph and Kayleen? What if something went wrong in the ship—if Joseph or Kayleen got hurt? What if Nava didn’t come to talk, or if she brought an invasion force? Where would we go? The sea and the river and the cliffs made effective barriers—we’d have to go back up the First Road. Surely people in Artistos knew where the First Road intersected the High Road? What if we had to flee and Liam wouldn’t come, or we didn’t have Bryan?
The Silver Ship and the Sea Page 33