Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Praise for THE HIDDEN WORLDS
“Excellently crafted and lyrically penned, Kristin Landon’s The Hidden Worlds explores loyalty, politics, intrigue, and desire as two protagonists from divergent worlds find themselves pawns in a game much larger—and much more deadly—than either realizes. Landon’s sharp characterization and deft twists and turns of plot keep you hooked. A riveting read. I highly recommend it.”—Linnea Sinclair, author of Hope’s Folly
“[A] promising debut novel.”—Sci Fi Weekly
“With an interesting concept and deftly drawn characters, this is a fantastic science fiction yarn. Landon’s created a world with plenty of intrigue and action and high-tech devices while still leaving it accessible for readers new to the genre. There are layers of complexity here, both moral and political, that are sure to give readers plenty to think about.”
—Romantic Times
“Kristin Landon has written a spectacular sci-fi thriller.”
—The Best Reviews
“Kristin Landon’s novel The Hidden Worlds is a space sci-fi with a splash of romance and a dash of politics mixed together to make a very interesting read . . . The story is a great emotional ride.”—Yet Another Book Review Site
Ace Books by Kristin Landon
THE HIDDEN WORLDS
THE COLD MINDS
THE DARK REACHES
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
THE DARK REACHES
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Ace mass-market edition / July 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Kristin Landon.
All rights reserved.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-06133-6
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For my family
Once again I thank Anne Sowards, for her patience and guidance; my writing group (Patty Hyatt, Karen Keady, Candy Davis, and Skye Blaine), for their continuing support and honest assessment; my agent, Donald Maass; and finally my family and friends, who were so patient with my absence and absences.
ONE
SANTANDRU: MORAINE
Linnea Kiaho stepped forward under the eyes of the village, her hands tight on the wreath of sea grass and pale yellow crocus flowers. The stark new memorial cairn loomed above her, a shadow against heavy blue-gray clouds, dominating the little square in front of the village church. The cairn’s meticulously laid stones and new-white mortar gleamed, wet from the recent rain. Ready for its first Feast of Saint Andrew.
Linnea heard the shuffling and whispering of the villagers filling the square around the pillar. She felt their hard stares on her back. Her heart raced, her breath caught, as the wild impulse flared: to bolt for the skyport at Middlehaven, back to her jumpship, back to the rich, welcoming beauty of otherspace—
Back to her purpose, the work she could do best.
She took a deep breath. No. Not yet.
Carefully, with what grace she could muster, Linnea laid her wreath at the foot of the pillar, beneath the old metal plaque that had been moved there from the porch of the church. Beside the old plaque, a new one gleamed, etched with the names of the men who had died more than five standard years ago in the explosion of the village’s fishing boat, the Hope of Moraine. That disaster had driven Linnea from her village. Driven her to a servant’s contract on the decadently luxurious world called Nexus. Twisted her life into a strange new shape.
Linnea made herself look at the old, fogged plaque, searching the ranked columns of names for the one she had always sought as a child. DONIAL PIOTR KIAHO. Da, drowned sixteen years ago. His face had mostly faded from her memory. She bent her head in the ritual gesture of grief, then stepped back to her place in the crowd.
Marra, beside her, was next. Linnea watched as her sister laid her own wreath at the base of the new plaque, flanked by her children Orry and Rosie, whose father had died when the Hope was lost. A cold, rising wind ruffled the flowers piled around the cairn, hissing around the hard stone corners of the church, flapping the heavy skirts and shawls of the village women. The dark morning was getting darker. Linnea glanced up the village street toward the ridgetop, to judge the weather coming in from the sea. Strange how black that one cloud was. . . .
Then she saw the flames at the base of the cloud. Smoke. Fire, licking up from behind the long row of houses. Fire at the top of the street. She took a breath to shout. Then saw the others there, watching her. Looking from the fire to her. Keeping silent.
So they knew of it, and still went on with their ceremony. No one had cried the alarm. Which meant—
“Marra,” Linnea said, her voice strained and strange, “they’re burning Ma’s house.”
She would not let them see her hurry. She walked, steadily, beside Marra up the steep, muddy street, at the head of a silent crowd of villagers. Near the top of the slope, she stopped. Ahead, clear to see now, was the small house
where she and Marra had been born, where they had lived all their lives until the Hope was lost.
The house was nearly gone. A column of flame, greasy with the black smoke of burning plastic, blazed against the darkening sky. A few men stood silhouetted against the flames. Watching. Making sure it didn’t spread.
Marra caught up to Linnea and stopped beside her, looking aghast at the fire. “Linny,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “Why would they do this? No one was even living there.”
Linnea did not answer her sister. You know damn well why. She started forward again, splashing through the wind-ruffled puddles that filled the ruts in the street. Icy water soaked the thin, city-made shoes she had put on for the memorial ceremony. The men watching the flames did not turn as she approached. Well before she reached the stone fence around the old house, she felt the heat of the flames against her skin. They must have started it with lamp oil—it would never have burned so fiercely on its own.
Linnea turned and faced the crowd of watching villagers. At their head, close behind her—as she had expected—a tall, heavyset man in the long black robe of a priest stood looking past her at the flames, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. She took a step toward him. “Father Haveloe. Why?”
The priest looked down at her, his broad ruddy face set grimly. “You know why. An infested man entered that house. For all we know, some Cold Minds nanobots are still lurking in there.”
Linnea’s fists clenched. “The house was cleaned completely,” she said. “Marra told me what they did. There was no chance that anything was left.” She took a breath. “That house was my sister’s property. It was important to her family. She could have sold it for school fees for the children.” From the corner of her eye she saw Marra’s chin tremble, saw her clutch Orry closer.
“The house was, of course, the property of Marra’s new husband,” Father Haveloe said. “Not hers. But in any case, there are higher matters than property rights. The safety of this village is paramount.”
“Then why did you wait until now to burn it? Until Marra was here to watch? That was cruel!”
He shook his head slightly, pityingly. “They weren’t thinking of Marra.”
She said nothing, but his meaning was clear: They had done this because she was here. To put an end to any thought that this village was still my home.
Linnea took her place at Marra’s side again, slid an arm around her sister, and stood silent for a while, watching. Beside her, Marra wept quietly as the home of their childhood collapsed into lopsided ruin. The metal frame of the house creaked and sagged, part melted by the intensity of the flames from the ancient plastic floors and walls and windows. No one had dared to live there in the two years since its contamination.
Linnea looked around at the faces of the men watching the fire. Some she had known all her life. Eddo the medtech—she’d thought him a friend, a sensible man. Beyond him stood an old neighbor, one of the few Moraine fishermen who hadn’t been out on the Hope when it blew, all those years ago. He gave Linnea a cold glance and turned his back on her.
As she watched the fire, the wind rose, and the black pillar of smoke tilted, diffused, spread. The sky beyond was almost as dark, and spatters of rain began to fall. Marra shook her head and left silently with the children for the shelter of their room down at the guesthouse.
Linnea knew she should go, too. There was nothing more to see. Nothing but the message the burning had been meant to send her.
And there was nowhere to go. So she turned her back on the guesthouse, the church refectory, and breakfast, and walked instead past the fenced yard of her ruined house, up the steep path to the ridgetop overlooking the sea.
At the crest, the wind met her like a wall, and her eyes streamed tears from the force of it. The sea stretched out below her, cold, bleak, and empty, the surf near the shore clotted with yellowish foam. Farther out, a glimmer of pure white through the mist told of heavy breakers offshore. She could hear the rumble of surf, taste the salt on her lips.
She wished Iain were here. He would remind her that he had warned her—yet he would also understand, too well, what losing her old home meant to her. Knowing that it was here, even if not for her, had given her another reason to fight.
But Iain was not here. No, the notorious ex-Line pilot Iain sen Paolo had stayed in Santandru’s one city of Middlehaven, declining to exhibit himself to her village.
And maybe that had been wise. She’d heard the inevitable whispers about her Pilot Master lover. One of those, one of the aristocratic brotherhood of jump pilots who had controlled travel and communication throughout the Hidden Worlds for six centuries. She shivered in the cold, remembering.
Iain had never been one of the Line, not truly—a great scandal. Even though he was a pilot, with the rare gift that allowed him to guide jumpships through otherspace, he was one of her own humble people by ancestry. A grandson of this backwater world of Santandru. The revelation of that long-held secret had helped put an end to the powerful mo nopoly of the Pilot Masters, the lords of Nexus.
And, some said, it had broken the will of the best defense still left to humans in the Hidden Worlds. She pushed the thought away and walked north along the ridgetop, picking her way carefully in the steady wind.
Even knowing that Iain was really one of them had made no difference to her people. To them he was what he’d been bred up to be—as corrupt as the world that had reared him.
Linnea’s coat, rain gear borrowed from Marra, flapped behind her like a flag snapping in the wind. No, she could understand why Iain had stayed in Middlehaven. He’d be working to prepare their two jumpships for the next leg of their planned loop through the scattered worlds of the Rimini Fading, to inspect the newly trained jumpship patrols assigned to watch out for any hint of Cold Minds ships.
The need to make this trip had grown in Linnea in the months after she and Iain returned from Nexus, from the brief, sad victory the remnants of the Line had won there. That fight had cost what remained of the power of the Line; and the new patrols in the fringe worlds were reporting contacts with what had to be Cold Minds scout ships. She rubbed her hands along her arms, reaching for warmth that was not there. It was only a matter of time until the Cold Minds moved again—until another world fell to them, or was destroyed in order to save it.
But still Iain had agreed that he and Linnea should come here: He knew how desperately she needed to see her home. Because, of course, they traveled first to Santandru, to take Marra and three of her children home from their temporary refuge on Terranova—back to Marra’s husband, Asper, a government official in Middlehaven. Linnea had flown Marra and the children out to Moraine together for this memorial ceremony—to lay their wreaths, to see their home village again.
And now she only wanted to be away from here, to travel away with Iain again, travel anywhere. He would be ready to leave. She knew he’d tried to hide his worry about the danger signs from the Cold Minds, his urgent wish for them both to return to their duties; but if this was what she needed first, to give her peace, then with all the great generosity of which he was capable, he wanted her to have it.
Yet Iain hadn’t been able to hide his dislike for the bleakness of her world, the unfriendliness of her people toward a former Pilot Master, the bitterness of Santandru’s leafless spring. She did not turn to look back at Moraine, but she knew the patches of dirt behind the houses and down toward the bay, knew that potato and cabbage plants were just beginning to straggle, pale green, up from the sodden earth. She knew the houses glistening dark in the rain, low against the slopes beyond, barren gravel rising toward the glacier and the mountains beyond.
Once this place had seemed warm, welcoming. Now she understood how small it was, how worn, how cold and comfortless. Perhaps two years living in the Terranovan capital of Port Marie, vividly sunny and lush with life, had changed her eyes.
Or perhaps it was the people here, once her people—turning away, pushing her away, resentful of the gif
t she had given them. She had been a fool to expect anything else.
Now she did turn, looking down toward the harbor, where the new fishing boat lay snugged against the quay. Marra had told her how glad they were to get the money Linnea had earned on Nexus to replace their fishing boat, how eagerly they’d used it to bring Moraine back to life. But in the end, in the result, proud people hated nothing so much as an obligation. Especially an obligation to an outsider.
She looked down at the rock of the ridgetop, splotched with pale green and orange lichen, but worn bare where generations of women had walked back and forth, watching for the Hope, for their husbands and sons returning safe from sea.
No. This place was not her home. And never would be again.
Icy rain stung her face, blurring the view of the village below. She was not weeping for this place, these people. She would not give them even that; she would give them nothing more—no power over her mind or over her heart. Shake it off, shake it off.
She bent her head. But if this was not her home, where was it? And if these were not her people, who was? Those she happened to love? Those she happened to fight for?
No one?
A hand touched her shoulder, and she jerked with surprise. A looming figure in black—Father Haveloe. “It’s foolishness, to be up here when you’re not dressed for the weather,” he said.
“I don’t own any clothes for this weather,” she said flatly. “But you’re right. I’ve got to go and pack. It’s time to leave, Marra needs to get the children back to school in Middlehaven—”
The Dark Reaches Page 1