I couldn’t quite make myself hum a tune. But at least Marvin wasn’t climbing the walls wanting to hit something.
The big Mutt had done everything I’d asked since our shared meal. But I still wasn’t letting him near the armoury.
“Active ping,” Zyla announced.
“They can’t see us,” I assured her. “Camo’s good.”
I could see sweat starting to trickle down her long, slender neck. For a moment, I was mesmerised by it.
“I recognise the pattern they’re using,” Zy said, breaking my fascination. “I can navigate a path through this that should work.”
“By all means,” I said.
Watching Zyla work had always been a lesson in fluidity. Her body moved like a flowing river, her hands a blur as they danced across her vid-screen. Now more than ever, I noticed that dance.
And it worryingly called to me.
I looked away and checked my own vid-screens. We’d made significant progress already. Things were looking up.
“Jump Point Alpha-1 is within range,” I announced, although I was pretty sure Zyla could see exactly where the jump point was in relation to us.
A few more tense minutes ticked by and then she gave the command to hack the jump point beacon.
My heart raced, and my fingers tingled as I entered the command Zyla had given me. She knew her way around the local jump points, which wasn’t altogether surprising. What was surprising was she had a key to the backdoor.
Only the military would have access to that kind of thing, and it was yet another question without an adequate answer.
Her answer had been, “I picked it up somewhere.”
I did not like being lied to. And especially by a member of my family.
There was more to Zyla than I knew. But then, I’d always known there was something more to Zy. No ordinary Zenith had an embedded intragalactic emergency beacon.
Zyla was far from ordinary.
The jump point accepted the algorithm without sounding any alarms, and we crept ever closer through a minefield of Zenthian space tech.
I wondered how many other planets had fallen the way Ceres Alpha and Gamma Cephei had. And then I wondered what those two Zenthian occupied planets being hit really meant.
Why them?
I didn’t have any answers. I was getting sick of not having any answers. Which made me look back at Zyla.
She was concentrating on her vid-screen, hands deftly flying over the ship’s controls. She had no idea I was watching her; doubting her. I internalised my sigh and looked away again.
The ship swept through the field of battleships without so much as a hiccup, and then we were at the jump point and about to exit the system.
“Time to poke the hornet’s nest,” I muttered.
“What’s a hornet’s nest?” Marvin asked from behind me. I’d forgotten, for a moment, that he was even there.
“Zenthia Actual,” I told him, “is the hornet’s nest in this case.”
“Entering jump point,” Zyla advised.
We approached the jump point, and no one stopped us, and then there was a flash of white and we were through into exo-space.
Nobody said a thing.
“That went surprisingly well,” I finally offered. “Odo? How’re we looking?”
“Bit of a drain as we entered, but jump tunnels don’t take much to navigate. We should still be OK.”
“Just should?”
“Best I can give you, Cap’n.”
“ETA to jump exit?” I asked Zyla.
“Five hours and fifteen minutes.”
It was farther away than the Chi system, but not by much. I hoped that difference didn’t kill us. Malcolm seemed like the kind of being who planned things out to the minutest detail. Like how fluxed we were and that it was just fluxed enough to return to Chi but not go any farther.
But Malcolm had not factored Odo into the equation. And maybe he had not factored his son, either. Because Marvin had locked down the data stack issue and then while I’d been watching, he’d found a couple more problems I’d missed. Which didn’t sit well with me, but I could hardly complain; he’d dealt with them.
I’d never fully trust the ship. And God alone knew if I’d ever fully trust Marvin. But we were as clean as we could be for now and that was that.
Once we reached our destination, we’d have time to run a full externally operated systems check. Maybe even a factory reset or something.
In any case, by not going to Chi, we’d increased our risk quotient. We now not only had Zenthia to worry about but Malcolm the Mutt of Chi Virginis.
And I was harbouring both a Mutt and a Zenith on board. Sometimes I could be so fluxing stupid it boggled my own mind.
But I wasn’t about to abandon Zyla and strangely enough, I couldn’t make myself abandon Marvin, either.
Damn Ceres A and the decisions I’d made there; it was affecting everything.
“Take a break, Zy,” I said, moving command of the ship across to me.
“What about you, Captain? You look exhausted.”
Always good to have your subpar state pointed out to you by a lady.
“I’ll take a stim.”
“How many of those have you had, Kael?”
It was like Cassi all over again. ‘Captain’ when it pertained to the running of the ship. ‘Kael’ when it pertained to my life choices.
“Not enough to do damage,” I told her. “Take a break. You’re still recovering.”
Bad move. I must have been tired. You don’t point out a weakness to a Zenith.
“I am perfectly alright,” Zyla snapped. “But if you wish to play the hero, I will not stop you.”
“Are you saying I have a hero complex, Nav?”
“I’m saying you can be an idiot.”
“Been called worse.”
“Argh!” she cried, throwing her long-fingered hands up into the air. “You are impossible!”
“Still been called worse,” I muttered.
Zyla looked at Marvin.
Marvin looked at me and then Zy and then back at me again like he was at some sort of tennis match.
“Both of you,” I said. “Go take a break. And that’s an order.”
Zyla stood from her seat, lips pressed into a thin line, and nodded. Then she swept from the bridge in a righteous flow of anger.
“You certainly have a way with the females,” Marvin commented mildly.
“You have no idea,” I told the Mutt and smiled as if I hadn’t a care in the world.
“I’ll be in the mess if you need me,” Marvin said.
“Make sure you get some shut-eye,” I pressed.
“Yes, Captain.”
That was the first time he’d called me that.
I sighed and locked the bridge door behind them.
There wasn’t much I could do while the ship was in a jump tunnel. I checked the systems. Made sure we weren’t burning too much power. And then leaned back in my seat and caught some zzzz.
I’m not a hero. Zyla was wrong about that. I needed sleep, and I was damn well going to get some. But I also was not going to leave the bridge unmanned. Or even manned by Zyla or Odo.
Not when I didn’t trust Marvin to hurt them to gain control again.
This was the worst crew dynamic I had ever had to work with, and there was a big part of it missing.
Two parts, really. I often discounted Doc because he’d been happy to stay in the background and study things. Get him talking about one of his studies, and you’d be stuck there for an hour, nodding dumbly. But he’d been a constant presence, a reassuring one. You sought Doc out when you needed a quiet chat, some non-judgmental company.
I was going to miss that. I already did.
But it was Cassi that left an open wound inside of me.
I slept a little. Not enough, but it would have to do. And then I compiled a data stack that I’d probably never send and that didn’t say much actually. Nothing a spy-bot could decipher an
yway. And certainly nothing Malcolm the Mutt could make out if Marvin had fluxed with me. But enough for my great-grandfather to know that Cassi was gone and there was one less third-gen in the universe.
I’d thought I’d never be able to return to New Earth before. Now I couldn’t imagine going anywhere near it because Corvus would kill me.
On that thought, the bridge door chimed.
I checked the vid-screen, surprised to see Zyla standing there. She’d had maybe three hours sleep. It was probably enough for a tech superior Zenith.
I unlocked the door, and she walked in and stared at me.
“We should talk,” she said, and then crossed to her nav chair. She didn’t turn it around to face the vid-screens. She kept it facing me.
I spun my chair slightly, so we were face to face. It was bizarrely intimate, and I couldn’t figure out why that was.
I said nothing and the silence stretched.
“Are you OK?” I asked; the first to break.
She nodded. And then shook her head in negation.
I waited. Time ticked by. We zoomed closer to the jump point exit as our battery stores slowly dwindled on the readout at my side.
We’d make it. We had to make it.
“Zy?” I finally pressed.
“You remember my cousins on Ceres Alpha?” she asked.
“How could I forget them? I owe them a racing pinnace.”
She waved her hand at that as if to wave the statement away.
“Don’t worry about the pinnace.”
“OK,” I said slowly, wondering where she was going with this.
“They’re not my cousins,” she said.
“OK,” I said, this time a little faster.
“You don’t sound surprised?”
“Well,” I said. “You don’t look alike.”
“Captain! This is serious.”
I scrubbed at my face and sat forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
“Two things, Zy,” I said. “One, they treated you with too much respect. Cousins don’t do that. Not mine anyway. And two, you have an emergency beacon embedded in your neck. Only important people have those, and your cousins are not important people. But they sure as hell knew you were.”
She stared at me and said nothing.
“They were there to help you,” I said. “Not so much for protection, but to offer any aid should you require it. They were your safe harbour. The place you went to find out what was happening in the world you left behind without exposing yourself.”
She blinked those owlish eyes at me. For a moment, I thought them pretty. Which was ridiculous. Zeniths don’t have irises, so their eyes are one big inky pool of black with a hint of deep purple in the right light.
Right now, Zyla’s eyes were almost completely purple as she stared at me. It wasn’t something I’d ever seen before in a Zenith, and I’d seen a lot of Zeniths and some of them I’d seen intimately.
“Am I right?” I asked just to say something.
“Yes. You never fail to surprise me, Kael.”
So, that was a personal observation. OK, then.
“Are you ready to tell me who you are?” I asked quietly.
“No.” Then, “Yes.” Then, “Maybe.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“I’m not.”
“But we’re in deep shit, and you need something,” I guessed.
“I hid something in Cassi,” she blurted.
I sat very, very still.
“Something that might explain why the Zenthian National Army is accusing our government of bombing their own planets.”
The ZNA was the splinter faction that had broken off from Zenthia Actual, disagreeing with their government’s policies. Those disagreements ran the gamut from xenophobia-type policies to armament statuses to biotech advancements. No one really knew what. Not even they did, I thought.
“Are you ZNA?” I asked.
She bit her lip and then nodded.
Son of a bitch.
“The government is not behind the bombings,” she said with fervour, surprising me.
“Is the ZNA?”
She shook her head. I ran a hand over mine in frustration.
“You’re losing me, Zy. You’re ZNA, but you disagree with them?”
“Yes.”
The only option left was to ask, “Why?”
“Because my father is on the High Council and he would never agree to harm our kind like that.”
I stared at her, my mind a blank.
And then I started to laugh.
“Holy shit,” I said. “You’re the missing High Councillor’s daughter.”
She nodded her head, watching me warily.
“You look nothing like your pictures.”
“I was young when I left. I’ve grown some, and also the nanites were reprogrammed to alter my DNA slightly. I appear different than I did back then; enough to fool facial recognition programmes and my family.”
That was some radical shit right there.
“OK,” I said.
“That’s it? Just OK?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know, Kael!” she said, throwing her hands up in the air. “Maybe why did I lie to you and how about, get off your ship!”
“I’ll tell you what,” I said, leaning forward again. “Why the Harpy? Why my ship? You leave your life in the shadow of the High Council behind and join a cargo hauler on the outer rim? I don’t buy it.”
She blinked at me.
I stared back, scowling.
“Cassiopeia,” she finally said.
I stood up and paced away from her.
“We know about the third-gens.”
My knees almost gave out.
“At least, the ZNA does. Not the High Council.”
I wasn’t sure if that was better. No. Wait. It was better, but not by much. The High Council was Zenthia Actual. It was the centre of their military and technological might.
The ZNA was a splinter faction, dissatisfied with Big Brother, and not entirely organised. It was the better of two very dangerous evils.
But still…
I groaned and lowered my face into my hands.
“What are your intentions?” I asked pitifully.
“I have none. Save the truth. I want to know why the ZNA is accusing the High Council of mass murder. And I want to know who is bombing Zenthian planets.”
“So, it’s not the High Council, and it’s not the ZNA,” I said, turning back around to look at her. “Then it’s not a Zenthian internal struggle.”
“No,” she said succinctly.
“Can you be sure of the High Council?”
“I can be sure of my father.”
“And yet you ran away.”
“There are many faults in our system, Kael. But my father and, I believe, the rest of the High Council would never condone mass murder of our people.”
It didn’t make sense for them to blow up their own planets. Zenthian might was tied up in their galactic reach. They occupied more rocks in the known systems than any other species, and they were proud of it. But now two of those rocks were radiation infested nightmares. Useless and hardly worth being proud of.
“OK,” I said. “So, what about the ZNA? Can you be sure of them?”
“Yes,” she said, sounding upset about it. “They are self-righteous. In some aspects, rightly so. They can also be over-enthusiastic about their message, but they are honourable Zeniths. They didn’t do this, either.”
“And the ones that tortured you?” I’d figured out already which side of the equation they landed on.
They were too disorganised and untrained to be the High Council’s. They had the cash and the resources but not the experience. That left them firmly in the ZNA’s camp.
“A misunderstanding,” Zyla said softly.
“They thought you were a High Council mole,” I guessed.
She nodded and stared at the gel floor.
I watched her silently. Zyla had turned her back on the High Council and by extension, her father — someone she clearly respected to some degree. And now the beings she’d thrown her lot in with had turned on her, and she consequently had nobody.
I could empathise with that. For a long time, I’d had nobody, too.
I scrubbed my face and let out a breath of air.
“What did you hide in Cassi?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It was data I’d managed to collate but not yet read.”
“Then you don’t know whether it has anything to do with any of this.”
“I do.” She looked up at me. “It was intercepted by my cousins on Ceres Alpha right before the first bomb dropped. A signal to one of the drones themselves; the origin point was outside of the system.”
OK, I’d give her that. It would have helped. But how much, I wasn’t sure. It had to still be one of the Zenith factions behind all of this. I hated to be the one to point that out, but Zyla was clearly too loyal to both sides to see it.
“Zy,” I started.
“Kael,” she cut me off. “It came from outside any known system. It came from the other side of the Belt.”
I stilled. I didn’t even breathe for a second there. No one had navigated the Belt. It was an Oort type cloud of rocky debris that marked the edge of the known systems. Even the Zeniths had not been able to find a path through, and they were the galaxy’s best navigators.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered.
“I need that data stack,” Zy said steadily. “We have to go back to Ceres Alpha and search for what remains of Cassi.”
I swallowed thickly.
“Nothing remains of Cassi, Zy. I ordered a self-destruct. It’s final; complete. It’s designed to be that way. So, if the AI is compromised and about to fall into enemy hands, there is absolutely no way it can be salvaged and put back together again. It’s a failsafe. And one I was obliged to carry out.”
She stared at me, her mouth slightly open, the ramifications hitting her like a pyroclastic blast on Piscium B.
“That’s why you did it,” she whispered.
“I had no choice. Cassi was compromised.”
“Because of me.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. I would not let her take the blame for this; it was all on me. “No, Zy. No.”
She said nothing. I was all out of words.
Absolute Zero (The Sector Wars, Book 1) Page 15