Nimbus

by Jacey Bedford

  *We’ve lost three. The entire population of Butterstone killed by poison in the water supply. The other two were more . . . messy.*

  *I’m sorry to hear that. We’ve had three now, including New Canada.*

  *I set up New Canada. Survivors?*

  *Eighteen children, plus a few from outside the main settlement. I figured it wasn’t your handiwork. I wasn’t so sure about Crossways.*

  *Not ours. Not any of it.*

  *The inner systems press is blaming Crossways.*

  *Yeah. Why am I not surprised? We wouldn’t destroy our own colonies, Jess, you know that. Besides, I had friends on New Canada.*

  *Have you any idea where the attacks are coming from?*

  *None. We’ve got one of the perps, or at least her body. Butterstone took in a shipload of refugees shortly before it happened, and I’ll lay odds she was on it. The refugees have gone, of course. Took off before we arrived, but we have her. We’ve checked her DNA through every database we can access, legally and not, but we can’t find her. Can you check her through yours?*

  *I can, but I’m guessing you’re looking in the wrong place,* Jessop said. *How far back have you checked? You know we recovered some refugee bodies from the first colony that was lost.*

  *Cara said it looked like some kind of news blackout.*

  *There was a reason for that. The refugees, well, they might have been refugees, but they weren’t from where they claimed. We DNA-checked them and found matches.*

  *Go on, Jess, you’re killing me. Don’t stretch it out.*

  *They were from ships lost in the Folds almost a hundred years ago.*

  *Oh, shit!*

  *I couldn’t have put it better myself.*

  Cara silently agreed.

  “What does it mean?” Cara’s face had gone white.

  Ben felt light-headed.

  “I don’t know. Refugees lost in the Folds, coming back. The dead returning.”

  The image of his parents as he had last seen them swam into his head, or maybe it was a memory of the portrait that had hung on the wall at home: a tall, light-brown man with a reassuring smile, and a petite, dark-brown woman who, even though it was a still photograph, looked graceful. If he thought hard, he could almost recall their voices.

  Almost.

  He’d been so young when they’d been lost in the Folds.

  He couldn’t even remember the moment when he’d learned that they weren’t coming home. He remembered the emptiness of a sleepless night and crawling into Rion’s bed in the early hours of the morning to find his big brother’s pillow was wet with tears.

  Ben’s mind leaped around in jerky circles.

  Were all those people lost in foldspace not lost at all? Were they waiting for rescue, locked in some kind of endless time loop? Hell, did time even pass for them?

  “We rescued the ark.” He reached for Cara’s hand. “If we’d been brave enough, bold enough, could we have rescued other ships lost in foldspace?”

  “If you’re asking whether you could have rescued your parents, the answer is no. How old were you when they went missing? Six? Seven? How many years elapsed before you earned your pilot’s ticket? Even if you’d absconded with the first jumpship they let you fly, how would you ever have found them? You could have spent your whole life looking.”

  “I guess, but maybe other ships, ones lost recently . . . I could ask the void dragons.”

  “There’s a small matter of not being able to communicate with them.”

  “I bet I know who could communicate with them. She told you so herself.”

  “You don’t mean . . .”

  “Olivia May Marling.”

  “You wouldn’t—”

  Wouldn’t he? It depended what was at stake. Maybe he could persuade Gen and Max to come on a trip into the Folds. What if it were the only option? Gods, he hoped it wasn’t, but the void dragon’s persistence came back to him. It wanted Olivia. He had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He thought he knew the reason why.

  “Ben, you’re going to want to take this comm direct,” Cara said over breakfast in their apartment. “It’s Saedi Sugrue, calling from Jamundi.”

  “It’s not Nan, is it, or Rion?”

  “No, it’s not about your family. Here . . .”

  She pulled him gently into the conversation.

  *Saedi, what’s wrong?*

  *There’s a refugee ship requesting permission to land.*

  While Cara was holding the communication open for Ben, she contacted Phoebe Tilston, Mother Ramona’s latest in a string of Telepaths trying out as a replacement for Ully. Cara thought that this time she’d found the right one. Phoebe linked Mother Ramona into the call and brought her up to speed.

  *Is Garrick with you?* Cara asked Mother Ramona.

  *He’s—not well.*

  Shit, Garrick surely couldn’t be off his head on detanine. Not now, not when they all needed to pull together. Cara eased into the conversation between Ben and Saedi, keeping Mother Ramona in the loop.

  *Hell, Saedi,* Ben said. *You haven’t given permission for them to land, have you?*

  *Of course not, but they’re saying their ship’s losing integrity and they’re coming in with or without permission. I guess they’ve been turned away from other colonies, and they’re not taking no for an answer this time.*

  *Okay, tell them you’re prepping the landing ground and delay them. We’re on our way. It’s about time we got the jump on these maniacs, whoever they are.*

  There was a pause while Saedi relayed the information.

  *Is Jack there?* Ben asked.

  Cara liked Jack Mario. He was Saedi’s partner and the Jamundi colony’s chief administrator. Victor Lorient was supposed to be the colony director, but since the death of his son, Danny, and the scramble to save the Olyanda settlers from both the Trust and Alphacorp, he’d been a changed man. Diminished. Rena, his mild-mannered wife, had blossomed and now headed the colony in all but name.

  *Jack’s here and Rena. I called Gupta and Doctor Hoffner, too. They’re on their way.*

  *Good,* Ben said. *We need a plan. You’ll have to mobilize every spare hand you’ve got. Call in all the psi-techs and build a secure compound. On no account let any of the refugees out into the town. Keep them on their own ship for as long as you can, then fence them in.*

  *Got it.*

  Ben was already dressed in his buddysuit; Cara was still half-dressed. While she relayed messages for Ben, she pulled on her buddysuit trousers and top and sealed the two halves together.

  Ben called Tengue to gather his mercs together.

  *What do you need?* Mother Ramona asked.

  *We need you to alert Syke to keep everything locked down on Crossways while we’re away. We’re taking Tengue and most of his mercenaries and forty of the Free Company. If we need backup, we’ll send for it. Wenna’s in charge while we’re away.*

  *Understood.*

  Cara could sense Mother Ramona snapping out orders via Phoebe’s telepathic link.

  *Jake, are you still asleep?* Cara called.

  *I was, and I was having this dream ab—*

  *Get to the Bellatkin. We have a serious emergency. Need to get Tengue’s mercs to Jamundi.*

  *When?*

  *Yesterday.*

  *I’ll be at Port 46 in ten minutes.* Jake asked no more questions.

  Ben rattled off a list of psi-techs and then cursed because Archie Tatum was still on Olyanda with Jussaro.

  *Will I do?* Serafin butted in.

  *You’re on sick leave and almost retired,* Ben said.

  *I’m still the best you’ve got, and besides, Jamundi’s where I’m going to retire and Suzi’s already there.*

  *If you can get to Solar Wind before we take off, you’re in,* Ben said, *but we can’t wait
for you.*

  *I’m on my way.*

  By the time Ben had called the psi-techs to action, Cara had her buddysuit on straight and they ran for the dock.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  JAMUNDI

  SERAFIN MADE IT ONTO SOLAR WIND BARELY a minute before Ben locked down the doors. With Cara by his side, Ronan in charge of the med bay, and Serafin leading the Psi-Mechs, Ben felt like they’d got the band back together. Suzi, Saedi, and Gupta were waiting for them on Jamundi.

  “Room for one more on the flight deck?” Max poked his head up above the rim of the access tube.

  “I don’t recall asking you to come?” Ben said. “I thought you preferred accountancy to hard action?”

  Max shrugged. “You might need a Finder.”

  Ben bit back the comment that he hoped Max had squared it with Gen before volunteering for what could be a dangerous mission. If those two were still having problems, it wasn’t for him to interfere.

  He released the docking clamps and nudged Solar Wind out into space, clearing the immediate area of the station before picking up speed.

  Cara held open a link. Ben said, *Jake? How are you doing?*

  *Loading the last of Tengue’s mercs now, and their equipment. These guys carry around a whole arsenal.*

  *Let’s hope we don’t need it.*

  *We’ll be away from here in ten. See you on Jamundi.*

  Respecting the station’s hundred-klick safety zone was for the times when it wasn’t an emergency. At fifty klicks Ben engaged the jump drive.

  • • •

  Though ever-present in his dream, Ben hasn’t let himself think too much about the Folds during waking hours, but here he is again in that liminal space between realities. He tries not to think of the void dragon in case the thought attracts it, but not thinking of something is always the way to have it uppermost in your mind. Sure enough, a void dragon comes. Its scaled head fills the flight deck, but then it shrinks in size until it’s barely the size of a well-grown crocodile though way more beautiful than a croc. It flexes its wings, which shimmer with rainbow colors despite being black as the void itself.

  EXPLOSION! The void dragon says straight into Ben’s head—though he may also have heard the word with his ears. That’s new.

  “No explosion today,” he tells it.

  BENNN. It knows his name. That’s new, too.

  “Are you talking to the thing that knows my daughter’s name?” Max asks from one of the two bucket seats reserved for non-flight crew.

  “You can’t see it?”

  “Do I want to?”

  “Did you see it when Gen gave birth?”

  “I saw something. A ripple in the air. Something not quite there and yet . . . I tried to forget it again as quickly as I could.”

  “It’s the same something.”

  MAAXX, the void dragon says, and turns toward him.

  “What? Oh! Wait a minute. Go away!”

  Ben sighs. Max can hear the void dragon and the dragon has another word.

  OLIVIA MAY MARLING, the dragon says suddenly. OLIVIA MAY MARLING. There’s a strong sense of need.

  “You are not getting anywhere near my daughter,” Max says. “Hear me. I mean it.”

  MEAN IT. The dragon repeats. MY DAUGHTER.

  And then Ben finds the line and they pop out of foldspace above Jamundi.

  • • •

  “Can that thing follow us through?” Max asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Ben said.

  “Don’t think? Aren’t you sure?”

  “I used to be sure that it was all in my imagination,” Ben said. “All I’m sure of now is that I’ve never seen or heard of a void dragon in realspace, and one has never tried to cross over with me.”

  “How come we can cross into its dimension, but it can’t cross into ours?”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  “Why is it so fixated on my daughter?”

  Ben shrugged. “I wish I knew.” He had an idea about it, but he wasn’t telling Max yet. If there ever came a time for that, he knew they’d be on opposite sides of an argument.

  The planet now filled the forward screen. Bathed in light from its yellow sun, Jamundi was blue-green. With intermittent light cloud cover and polar ice, it looked a lot like Earth but with two moons.

  “What a beauty!” Max gazed at the screen. “Prettier than Olyanda.”

  “And not as likely to be affected by solar storms, either,” Ben said. “It’s altogether better real estate. The settlers got a bargain—eventually—though they paid for it in other ways, I’ll admit.”

  “Like nearly getting wiped off the face of the planet,” Max said.

  “Something like that. Yet here they are on their own planet.”

  “With psi-techs,” Max said. “That’s not exactly what they wanted.”

  Ben shrugged.

  Victor Lorient was psi-phobic, but his wife Rena had declared the Free Company welcome and had even accepted psi-tech help to get the new colony established.

  When Crowder had gone after his family, Ben had moved them to Jamundi. Rion, his brother, and Rion’s elder son Kai were settling into their own farm. Young Ricky wasn’t cut out for farming, though, any more than Ben had been, even though he’d been raised to it. And Nan? Nan would stay near her family, no doubt, but she wasn’t the kind of woman to retire and grow old gracefully.

  Cara interrupted his thoughts. “Saedi says the refugee ship is touching down now.”

  “Let’s go in as quietly as we can.”

  Ben activated the heat shield as they breached the outer atmosphere then deployed Solar Wind’s retractable wings for atmospheric flight. He brought her in two hundred klicks south of Jamundi’s main settlement and skimmed the ground, raising dust but staying hidden as much as possible. He dropped the ship into a quarry, temporarily silent. The forty psi-techs, all armed and protected by buddysuits, formed up and trotted toward the town where Jack Mario was waiting for them in the newly constructed town hall.

  The small enclave built around the landing site on Jamundi had grown into a proper town since their last visit. The Psi-Mechs had cleared hectares of forest for crops and building land while the settlers’ own carpenters had built houses out of wood with stone foundations. Suzi Ruka’s agriculture team had already harvested three crops of fast-growing grain and several varieties of vegetables, so the settlers weren’t reliant on imported staples.

  “Jack, good to see you again.” Ben shook hands with the administrator on the town hall’s doorstep under the portico. “You’ve managed to keep them in their ship, I take it.”

  “So far.” Jack ran his hand through thinning hair and shrugged his broad shoulders. “They’re not happy about it. Gupta’s policing it, but I’m sure he’ll be grateful for the backup.”

  Shorter than Ben by half a head, Jack was thickset and muscular. Saedi, frizzy fair hair forming a halo around her pink face, was the same height as Jack. She nodded a greeting, but Ben recognized the faraway look. She was obviously in the middle of a communication. He didn’t interrupt her.

  “Jake Lowenbrun is about ten minutes behind us with fifty of Tengue’s mercs on board.”

  Jack shuddered. “Aren’t those the guys who were trying to kill us on Olyanda?”

  “Only because they’d been hired by the wrong side. They work for us now.”

  “You trust them?”

  “I do. We pay their wages.”

  “And what if someone paid more?”

  “I’d still trust them—at least to warn me they’d had a better offer.” He grinned.

  “Good enough for me,” Jack said.

  “Have you built a secure compound?”

  “In such a short time? We’ve done our best. With your guys as guards, it should work. What if the refugees
are genuine, Ben? What if they need humanitarian aid and all we’ve given them is a wire fence and a couple of big tents?”

  “No one is going to deny them help, but that will be only under secure conditions. Ronan has a portable DNA testing lab. We’ll match them against our database and see if their story checks out.”

  Ben heard the Bellatkin screaming in to land next to Solar Wind in the shallow quarry. She wasn’t exactly subtle, but Jake did the best with what he had. Tengue’s mercs arrived at the double in full battle gear, taking no chances. Jack directed them to the compound, where they set up an outer perimeter with a charged security screen, and then formed up to create a human corridor from the refugee ship to the compound.

  “All right,” Ben said to Saedi. “You can invite them to disembark and make their way to the reception area where we have shelter and medical staff.”

  “Done,” Saedi said.

  The ship itself was a passenger transport, capable of carrying four hundred people in reasonable comfort. The refugees hadn’t been crowded together in the hold of a scow; they’d had contour couches, water, and food.

  “There’s a registration plate on the ship,” Ben said. “Can you run it through the database?”

  Cara brought up the holo display on her handpad and punched in the registration numbers. “Whoa!” she said. “It’s listed as the Barbary, an Eastin-Heigle passenger ship reported lost in the Folds last year with only thirty-four souls aboard. How many refugees is she carrying?”

  “Three hundred and eleven, including crew, according to their report.” Ben’s eyes narrowed as the main hatch cracked open and a passenger ramp extended.

  “Some need medical help,” Saedi said. “They sound pretty desperate.”

  “So are they genuine or simply good actors?” Cara asked.

  “That’s what I was wondering,” Ben said. “After so many attacks it’s surprising that they’re still using the same excuse to land. It’s not very imaginative. If I were planning to infiltrate and destroy several colonies, I would vary my story for getting my ship to the surface. Though to be honest, why land at all? An attack from the air would be much more devastating.”

  Ben had firsthand experience of that, and he never wanted to see a colony go through it again.