Rev’s eyes narrowed. Sparks might have shot out of them. “Technically, you’re not. This is a pressing matter. We need that rubyglass. It makes more sense for the Ocean to retrieve it, any way you look at it.”
The Captain Cooleys of the world liked to talk hard facts and had to be put on the defensive before the person on the other end of the conversation got mowed right over and agreed to something she didn’t intend to. “Were you on the surface of Sextant when it was retrieved before?” Kal asked, with some bite to it.
Cooley sat back a fraction. “No.”
“Is it viable for one human alone to do all that needs to be done to retrieve it and get safely back? What are the risks? What exactly is the value of this rubyglass, and why is it needed so urgently? Our power needs on Demeter should be well-provided for the foreseeable future, if all has gone to plan.” It was as well for Cooley to know from the get-go Kal wouldn’t be her lackey.
“I’m not saying the venture is without risk. I’m telling you it’s worth it.”
“Ultimately that will be my decision.”
“I see.” Cooley appeared to be rethinking her approach with Kal. “What does Captain Sarno have to say about it?”
“She agreed it was my decision, as acting captain.”
“The descent through the rings to atmosphere is key. Your foreign-object sensor, your laser defense system, as long as those are in working order and you aren’t a flake, you’re fine. Landing on planet was a little jouncy for us. I’m sure you’ll make a decent job of it. You flew through the portal.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s cold.” Cooley made a face. “Exosuit will serve you. Set out your sniffers and search out the nearest stash of rubyglass. What we found was on-surface, not underground. We found it on cliff faces. With a rightcutter it’s no trouble to get it down, so they told me.”
“It’s carved away from the face of the rock?”
“Some of it they picked up from the bottom of the cliff. Easy to see, the only bright reflective red thing in view.”
“How much would you want, if it were a go?”
“As much as you can lay your hands on. Of course you’ll have some chitons to help you.”
“They didn’t have any trouble at that temperature?”
“A bit. We only lost two.”
“I’ll need to speak to the crew who were on-planet before I can make a decision. Why is the rubyglass important?”
“It appears to be a supercompressed, super-attenuated source of energy we haven’t seen the likes of. Stacer says it could make a huge difference to how we manage our resources here and the length of time we have to get our renewables underway. It takes the pressure off to a huge degree.”
Kal thought, Takes the pressure off whom?
“If something goes wrong and the Ocean is damaged or lost, that would put on the pressure.”
Rev smirked. “Of course, Captain Black Bear, but that’s not going to happen, is it?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Kal said.
“Then we’re on the same page.”
“Not quite. How many asteroid defense maneuvers did you have to execute?”
“A fair number. The laser defense system annihilated twelve on our relaunch. Going down to atmosphere the number was fewer.”
“Did Mech handle the landing and relaunch?”
“Most of it. We have a stunt pilot in our midst who got us through the portal after a bit of trouble. She handled some of the avoidance maneuvers when the defense system would have been inadequate. Seems to have a feel for it.” Cooley said this begrudgingly, but with a glimmer of pride. This must be Tess, the volunteer pilot Roan had mentioned.
“Why did you go down in the first place?”
“We failed our first attempt at gravity assist, missing the window on the second loop. We orbited several times to reposition ourselves, each orbit taking twenty-two hours, as you know. The resource engineer sent down some devices. On the fourth pass she received some readings that indicated high mineral content. She wanted to check it out. Since we were looping anyway and a relaunch would enable us to recalculate our assist trajectory with more precision, we went for it.”
“Fortune favors the bold?” Kal said.
“You know it.”
“I need to speak to the crew. Which members exited the spacecraft?”
“Roan, Stacer, and Tess.”
“Get ‘em on holo.”
Cooley gave Kal another appraising look, with a little steel in it, but Kal had trembled before greater bluffers and blowhards than this and gave her patented response to such attempts to intimidate. Her eyes, her face, became a black hole and a mirror. When the aggressors got sucked in they saw themselves for the fools they were.
Cooley gave up trying to stare down Kal and called up the crew. She moved away from the holo spot. Kal tried to look around the background, now in full view, the better to see some of Demeter, but all she saw was white. Probably the wall of a biohab structure. While Roan’s holo had looked like it came from a small tent, with only himself inside it, this space gave an impression of size and airiness, though she couldn’t really see anything. Tess appeared first. She wore a necklace with a T on it.
With a grin and a wave, Tess proved to have a far more open attitude than Cooley. She had a wide smile, a narrow gap in her front teeth, light brown hair in a high bun on the top of her head, and a glowy energy Kal could feel through the holo.
“Hi, Tess,” Kal said.
“Hey there! We can’t wait to meet you! We’ve waited a while for this, I can tell you.”
“I can’t wait to meet you, either. It looks like it might be a while longer. I may be heading back to Sextant to gather more rubyglass.”
“Right, of course. Okay, I’m sure you’re freaking out but really, you’ll be fine. It’s cold as the Antarctic and strange as hell down there, but it’s not too bad. Nothing you can’t handle. And the rubyglass is piled at the bottom of these high cliffs, probably centuries or millennia of accumulation. There’s a lot more on the cliff faces, but it might be enough to gather all the slag around the bottom of the cliffs. Look out for falling rocks and ice. That rubyglass has to fall sometime, though we didn’t see it happen. If you use the rightcutter just be very careful of the ice that comes down with it. Huge chunks can shear off. It’s best left to the chitons. That’s how we lost two of them. Smashed under icefall.” Tess gesticulated as she spoke, illustrating with her hands the actions that went along with her words.
“On the descent, have all defense systems fully activated. Ours worked perfectly on the way down. On the way back up, I had to do some quick maneuvers to avoid some of the bigger stuff in our way.”
“You got through the portal,” Kal said.
Tess laughed a little and managed to look guilty at the same time. “Uh, yeah. Don’t say it too loud around here. But yeah.”
“It’s…” Kal tried to think of a word, to share it with Tess, who would recognize what she meant, but she couldn’t find one.
“Yes,” Tess said, nodding emphatically. “Yes.”
She and Kal looked at each other across the holo and Kal felt a click, almost a sound, of connection. They both knew it took something—something else—to get through the portal. She knew neither had figured out how to articulate it. It wouldn’t surprise her if it couldn’t be articulated. It was beyond speech. Beyond comparison. Beyond time.
She interviewed the others, including Roan, whom she no longer felt so close to. He looked a little crestfallen at her cooled demeanor. Unfair or not, she blamed him for getting her into this. For trying to convince her to do it.
The Ocean was traveling at twenty-seven thousand kilometers per hour. Firing the attitude thrusters to shift course until she could fire the main thruster to reverse course was a huge pain in the ass, to use technical language. She could also get all the way to Demeter, grab the gravity assist and slingshot back to Sextant. Which was an even more maddeni
ng idea, swooping by where she was meant to be.
Their reasons didn’t seem that great. What about the Mythian power from Demeter’s sun, Mythos?
No easy decisions for a person alone on a trillion-dollar starship. She would be risking the ship, no matter how breezy they were on Demeter about it. If Kal buried the Ocean, she’d never forgive herself. If she wasn’t dead. And the Aldortok Consortium would not hold her in high esteem, either in life or death.
It would bring dishonor. That wasn’t a reason not to do it, it was too abstract for Kal, but she thought it went deeper, to her gut feeling, which Sasha had told her to trust. That gut feeling said no.
Calling up Sasha, Kal told her. Sasha said, “I back you all the way. It’s a rational choice. If it’s that necessary to get more of this rubyglass we can design another mission to get some.”
That was a good confirmation of what she’d decided. Now she had to call Cooley.
Cooley appeared, clearly expecting Kal’s agreement.
Kal said, “It’s too risky a departure from the plan. We’re already facing a very different arrival to Demeter, travelers spread across the ship and two pods, with some serious irregularities derailing our initial plans. The rubyglass you acquired was a bonus, not an expectation or requirement. Perhaps a future retrieval mission can be undertaken. It’s not the Ocean’s mission. Safe arrival to Demeter is.”
Captain Rev Cooley could burn through the holo with her rubyglass eyes if she wanted to, but Kal was confident in her decision.
Cooley had a strange smile. “Your decision, Captain Black Bear. We’ll see you soon.” She cut the feed.
Kal was sick of holos, sick of people talking through them. It was a relief to head to the mess and slurp some soup, tear into the bread substitute, and drink more custom protein drink. Screw them. It was time for bed, and she didn’t have to turn this huge ass ship around and descend through some asteroid-strewn hell to an icy-cliffed planet waiting to crush the chitons and herself, if they were in the wrong spot at the wrong time. And if she were crushed? She supposed Rai would launch without her and deliver Sif safe and sound to Demeter.
Or was that unjust? Maybe Rai would send a chiton out to retrieve her body, give her ceremony, as Kal had given Rai ceremony.
Kal sank into one of the hanging chairs. The walls of the mess were curved, the color of pewter, with dark windows on one side. No one looked out the windows in the mess. The mess was about what went on inside. The people inside. Their attention was on each other, when it wasn’t on their food. Kal ate her yogurt. She remembered the day she’d swung in a hanging chair eating yogurt when Gunn came along and tried to start something, trying to find out if anything had happened the night before. Something had. Kal hadn’t wanted Gunn to know about it, or anyone for that matter. Only she and Sasha knew what happened between them.
There was no Gunn to come by and give her a hard time. There was no Noor to bring her a hot cocoa for no reason. There was no Sasha to watch for out of the corner of her eye. There was no Davena, holding court in the large round booth where her group sat eating and listening to what Davena had to say about Agatha Christie, Maori culture, weasels, or the paths of rivers. Davena liked to talk. She did it in a way that people liked to listen, whether they were personally interested in the topic or not.
Kal unstuck herself from the deep swallow’s nest of a chair and got herself a hot cocoa. She sat down at the large booth. She pretended Noor had brought her the cocoa and Davena was lecturing on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Sasha swept by, looking in on everyone, grabbing a drink and sweeping back out again.
Sipping her cocoa, Kal smiled into the distance.
It was time for bed. When she got to the corridor of her cabin (Gunn’s nameplate on the empty cabin next to Kal’s), Kal pressed her hand to her door. It opened. Her room looked cozy and warm, the blue blanket rucked up on the bed, the pillow soft, showing the impression of her head from the morning. She felt her shoulders drop an inch. She didn’t have to go to Sextant. Now was the first time her body accepted it. She was going ahead to Demeter. The Ocean would land; Kal could step off it and see what the planet Demeter, her home for the next three years, held for her.
When Sasha arrived, they would both be there. Sasha said she’d be there for one year. The others, Kal’s friends from the Ocean, the crew, would be on Demeter with her, to face whatever they had to face from the biohab crew. New friends to meet, like Tess and Roan. A new life to build. When she wanted to talk to Rai, she could visit the Ocean. All her friends would be around her.
Kal slowly unbraided her hair. She took off her suit. Drank a drink cube and scrubbed her face with the dissolving membrane that had held the water. Took a dot and put it on her tongue, swishing it around her mouth to clean her teeth the fast way. Spat it out into the recycler next to the bed. She lay back and put the lights on a dimming pattern. By the time the lights were out, she was asleep.
5
Reversal
There were fifteen days left. Kal chatted with Tess daily now. She and Roan had also gotten back on track. His shoulders filled the holo with kinetic energy; his sense of humor kept her from feeling too bleak on days when she felt alone.
Kal had to wonder if his eagerness to connect with her had something to do with a dearth of good buddies on Demeter, which gave her pause. She didn’t mind. He was a hands-on, fix-it kind of guy, who would be very handy to be friends with in an environment like Demeter.
Her aunt’s property always had something that needed fixing, and Kal had learned to jerry-rig things that shouldn’t be jerry-rigged. It never hurt to have the common sense of a compadre on your side, and one who could figure out how stuff worked and adapt to it on the fly was a good friend to have. Roan might have his own practical reasons for cultivating this friendship with her. She didn’t mind. You had to be pragmatic in space, and it was life-or-death to be pragmatic on an unfamiliar planet.
Tess, on the other hand, was pure pleasure. She was upbeat and willing to share information. If Kal had attempted the Sextant launch, her info might have saved Kal’s life, leaving Kal indebted to her. Tess didn’t have anything negative to say about anyone, so Kal didn’t get much of a sense of the dynamic on-planet from Tess. Roan gave her some character studies, comedic ones, which made her laugh, but she’d have to compare them to her own estimations when she could judge for herself.
In the evenings, before her last check-in with Rai on the bridge, Kal liked to sit in one of the layback chairs in the astrolab and name more constellations. She found a stack of handmade paper in the library which had probably been Wei’s or Tafari’s, the two artists in the group, and took a piece of it and a large tray. An ink pen and the judgment of her eyes were all she had. A more accurate map could have been produced by Rai or skymap, of course, but Kal wanted to use the old ways, something she could hold, that she had made. Something her aunt would like and approve of.
Kal was conscious that once she arrived on Demeter her chance to see the echo of her aunt every day would end. Conjuring her up brought mixed feelings and made Kal feel guilty now. She didn’t know why. She worried her aunt was like a toy she brought out to entertain herself. What effect did it have on Priscilla herself? Priscilla never seemed harmed by it. She seemed to enjoy the time with Kal, commiserating with her when Kal felt the sting of aloneness, helping snap her out of any self-pity she fell into, telling stories of home. She made Kal feel very close to what had been.
When Kal lay on the chair in the astrolab, studying the Huntress or the Night Charger, two of her favorite star patterns, she sometimes thought of Sif, the only person more alone than Kal. Sif had the Carys, she supposed. Was that company? Sif was locked in a copper-threaded space without contact with Rai or anyone. If Kal was lonely, she couldn’t imagine what it was like for Sif. Sif was in solitary confinement.
Knowing that Sif would try to kill her if she got free was motivation enough not to be tempted to let her out. Not passing by the infirmary to look at
her—or going in the infirmary to talk to her—was harder to resist.
Kal wondered if it were possible for the Carys to try to leap from Sif to herself. That was her biggest fear of walking into the room with them. The Carys didn’t have the freedom she wished for, and Kal would look pretty good by comparison, Kal was sure. Kal asked Rai. Rai didn’t know if it were possible, since she hadn’t successfully experienced a shared mind with a human, but she thought it unlikely. Rai thought a ship’s AI would require the full force of its powers to make the leap, and once ensconced in the consciousness of a human it would not be possible to create the right conditions to leap from one to another.
Soon it would be time to fire the main thruster in reverse, to begin the slow-down in the approach to Demeter. Kal looked forward to when she could initiate this phase, as it would be one step closer.
Every day she made herself spend an hour in the lightroom. She drank her custom drink. She made herself do two twenty-minute sessions on the physio. As a result, her flexibility and strength increased further than they ever had before, as she’d never devoted this much time to it. Life was bearable.
The days went along, one much the same as another. The reversal went smoothly. Rai was a good co-pilot. Maybe even co-captain. Before Kal knew it, though every day had dragged since the departure of the pods, it was soon time to enter Demeter’s atmosphere. It was time to land.
The Ocean was a marvel of engineering. It could enter a planet’s atmosphere, land in terrain, and present a new, enormous feature in a landscape that had only seen one like it before. Demeter was about to become real.
As the starship got closer to Demeter, Kal could see the planet much better. She’d approached another Earth-like planet before, through Freya, the first portal, and knew the sense of surreality and wonder very well. Even so, this was different. She was looking at a place that would be her home for the next three years. (A quiet voice inside said it could be her home forever, if certain things went wrong.)
Call of Worlds Page 5