Nimbus

by Jacey Bedford

  “All in good time, Ms. Ashbeck. I can’t answer all your questions yet.”

  “If you get word to my family, they’ll send the yacht for me.”

  “I’ll see what we can do.”

  Ben screwed his eyes up tight and opened them wide again as Catherine Ashbeck exited the room, back straight, not looking over her shoulder. “What the hell is going on here? Bridgwater thought it had been three weeks, Ashbeck thinks it’s closer to three days. It has to be something to do with the Folds. Time doesn’t pass in there in the same way as it does out here, but it still doesn’t make sense.”

  “You said it yourself once when you were talking about the void dragons,” Cara said.

  “What?”

  “Their time isn’t always linear. Things that are sequential to us maybe aren’t, not in the Folds, anyway.”

  There was a knock at the door. Without waiting for a response, Tengue opened it a crack and stuck his head inside. “Is your next interviewee lined up?”

  “Not yet,” Ben said.

  “Well, I think you’re going to want to see this one right away.”

  “We are?”

  Tengue grimaced and pushed the door all the way open.

  Standing in the opening, looking as if she hadn’t died a year ago, was Kitty Keely.

  The sight of her bumped Ben’s mind back to the moment of her loss. He remembered it so clearly.

  • • •

  They are searching in the Folds for Garrick and Keely, adrift in their tiny two-man shuttle. Ben settles Solar Wind in the black depths of foldspace, cuts the drive, and listens. He closes his eyes. Foldspace isn’t black; neither is it empty. It glistens like moonlight on oily water. He can sense the lines that have the potential to lead to anywhere, but those aren’t what he’s looking for.

  Tracks disturb the ripples, faint whispers in the fabric of spacetime, maybe where some ship has once passed, maybe a void dragon or the otter-kind.

  There’s something out there, like a crosscurrent. What has been smooth becomes choppy.

  “There’s something on instruments,” Cara says.

  Ben closes his eyes for a few seconds longer, trying to feel the shape of it in the iridescent black. He blinks them open again.

  “What is it?” Gwala asks, his hands twitching toward the weapons control panel.

  “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Wenna answers from the systems station.

  The void dragon swirls into the flight deck and asks, *?* Ben gets the impression of *OTHER* without any actual words. The void dragon is worried.

  “What is that?” Cara asks.

  “A ship.” Ben recognizes it. “Garrick and Kitty.”

  As Ben fires up the maneuvering thrusters, the otter-kind tumble into the flight deck, become agitated, and shoot out again. The void dragon swirls around twice and then disappears.

  “Whatever’s out there, the big fellow doesn’t like it,” Ben says.

  “I’ll try the audio,” Cara says.

  “Solar Wind to shuttle. Come in, please. Solar Wind to—”

  “Cara? Ben?” Kitty answers. “Oh, gods, come and get us. This thing—”

  “We can see something on the scanners. What is it?”

  “Stay back, Ben,” Garrick says. “If it touches you, you’ll be stuck here like us.”

  “I don’t intend to let it touch us,” Ben says, “but we’ve got to get you out.”

  “Oh, yes, please,” Kitty says. “It’s swallowing the shuttle.”

  “Explain.”

  Garrick says. “At first it was the tail of the craft that was mired, but it’s drawing us in. Half the shuttle is—I don’t know—dissolved into this darkness.”

  “Can you still move around freely?”

  “Yes, within this half of the cabin. Neither of us has tried to touch the shadow-thing. It gives off a fearful sense of—I don’t know—otherness.”

  “Okay, we’re coming to get you.”

  Ben nudges Solar Wind ever closer to the shadow. Dread builds inside him until his bones rattle with it.

  “I’m not liking this,” Gwala says.

  “I thought it was just me.” Wenna tries to keep her voice light, but it cracks.

  “Cara?” Ben asks.

  “All of that and more.”

  As Solar Wind nudges closer, the shadow billows like a cloud.

  “That’s as close as we can get,” Wenna says. “The shuttle’s embedded too deeply.”

  “We can see you,” Garrick says. “You’re still too far away.”

  “Do you trust me?” Ben asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Then all you have to do is step through the front screen of the shuttle and cross foldspace like you were taking a stroll in the park. You can step straight through Solar Wind’s skin.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s likely!”

  “Everyone doubts.”

  “Shall we suit up?” Cara asks.

  “No. They’ll never trust us if we don’t trust ourselves. As soon as we break the integrity of their shuttle, they’ll choke on vacuum because that’s what they believe will happen.”

  “So we simply step out of the airlock?”

  “More or less, yes, but we don’t need the airlock. We can go out through Solar Wind’s skin, pass through it like the void dragons do.”

  “And what happens if you don’t come back?” Wenna says.

  “Believe that we will.”

  Cara grabs Ben’s hand. “Let’s do it.”

  They push off together, then rise to the ceiling and through it into the wonder of foldspace. Momentum carries them forward. The skin of the shuttle gives way beneath them and they land gently in the small space.

  Garrick grins, incredulous, but hopeful. Kitty collapses into the pilot’s couch. “You can’t . . . You didn’t.”

  “Can and did,” Ben says. “It’s the only way out. Or are you going to sit here and wait for that to catch up with you?”

  The aft section of the shuttle, including the hatch, is wreathed in what looks like dense black smoke, but it remains coherent, as if it’s contained. It exudes a terrible nothingness.

  “I’m with you,” Garrick says.

  “I . . . can’t,” Kitty says. “Couldn’t you have brought pressure suits?”

  “There wasn’t time.” Ben eyes the tangible darkness. It’s almost touching the back of the couch Kitty has sunk into. “It’s up to you, Kitty. It’s save-yourself time.”

  “Save myself for what? You’re going to have to get rid of me, aren’t you? What will it be? An airlock accident?” She looks at Garrick. “A hundred-year sleep to wake, when and where? My mother abandoned. Alphacorp—”

  “You have to help yourself,” Ben says. “Come on. There’s still time.”

  “Why would you care after what I’ve done?”

  “Why not?” She’s a spy, not a mass murderer.

  The darkness roils toward them.

  Ben links hands with Cara again. Cara grabs Garrick, and Ben holds out his free hand for Kitty.

  She hesitates.

  “Come on, Kitty.”

  He reaches out for her, but the darkness beats him to it. A tendril swirls around her waist, draws her into its embrace.

  Her eyes widen. “Go!” she mouths. Without a sound, she steps into it and disappears.

  “Quickly,” Ben says as the darkness boils toward them. They push off, through the shuttle skin and dive for Solar Wind, landing in a heap on the flight deck floor.

  “What the hell was that thing?” Garrick asks.

  “Nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Ben says. “The void dragon calls it other. Let’s hope we never see anything like it again.”

  Without waiting to be told, Wenna fires the thrusters and Solar Wind slides away as t
he shadow swallows the nose of the shuttle and balloons outward toward them.

  “Kitty . . .” Cara says.

  Ben takes a deep breath. “She made her choice. Sometimes all you can do is hold out a hand. It’s up to them whether they take it. Let’s go home.”

  • • •

  Ben blinked at the woman in the doorway.

  Yes, it was definitely Kitty. Definitely not dead.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  ATTACK

  CARA STARED AT KITTY KEELY.

  Not dead, then, she thought. She was swallowed by the Nimbus, but here she is.

  The Nimbus was the stuff of nightmares. An alien thing, unable or unwilling to communicate, ineffable.

  “Kitty,” Ben said. His voice nearly broke.

  Even though Ben had said all the right things about holding out hands and Kitty not taking them, he always blamed himself when someone got hurt. It was his big flaw. Ronan called it White Knight Syndrome. If anyone needed rescuing, Ben would volunteer. But he couldn’t be responsible for the safety of everyone in the galaxy, nor for everyone on Crossways, not even for everyone in the Free Company.

  That didn’t stop him trying.

  Cara had her Empathy cranked up to ten to see what emotions she could get from the person standing in front of them. She looked like Kitty Keely, sounded like Kitty Keely. Was there even a small chance she was not? Was this some elaborate hoax?

  Even as she was thinking that, she dismissed it. No one could have guessed Kitty would come face-to-face with the very people she’d betrayed. No, betrayed wasn’t the right word. Keely had been a spy, an infiltrator right from the start. She’d fed information to Alphacorp, doing the job she’d been sent to do. Alphacorp had a hold over her, her ailing mother, so wherever Kitty’s sympathies lay—and Cara had reason to believe she was not unsympathetic to Crossways—she was never going to turn away from Alphacorp permanently.

  “Sit down, please.” Ben indicated the chair and Kitty sat.

  Cara felt no emotion emanating from her at all, neither fear nor surprise. She looked the same as she’d looked on the day she died, dressed in a borrowed flight suit with the Crossways logo on the breast pocket.

  “Are you well?” Ben asked.

  “I believe so, though your doctor would be able to tell you the state of my health better than I can. Doctor Hoffner, I believe.”

  “You remember her.”

  “I didn’t know her well, but we had passing acquaintance.”

  *Mel, have you processed Kitty Keely’s DNA results yet?* Cara asked.

  *She checks out, except her file says deceased, which she obviously is not.*

  *That’s okay. We’ll sort out that one.*

  “Could you tell us how you got here?” Ben asked. He didn’t add, especially since we saw you die.

  Kitty’s expression went blank for a moment. “When you left me on the shuttle, I called for help and luckily the Barbary was close enough to pick me up.”

  Cara felt Ben cringe when Kitty accused him of leaving her behind, but he didn’t deny it. “Do you remember exactly what happened?”

  “There’s not much to remember. I kept wondering if you’d come back after you took Garrick, and then I thought maybe you’d left me deliberately. You obviously didn’t want an Alphacorp spy on Crossways. There’s no jail there, so I expected you’d float me out of an airlock sooner or later. Perhaps leaving me in the Folds was simply a way of getting rid of me. What did you tell people?”

  “The truth: that you were swallowed up by an alien cloud.”

  She raised her eyebrows. Cara detected nothing but genuine surprise. “And they believed you?” she asked. “That sounds pretty lame.”

  Ben cleared his throat. “So, the Barbary picked you up—in foldspace—and then what?”

  “Then we came straight here. I’m glad I didn’t have to spend more than a couple of days with all those refugee folks. Some of them were in a pretty bad state, and I’m not a trained medic. I volunteered to help the flight crew. Their Navigator was strictly a gate-to-gate man and had lost the beacon. I helped him find it. I flew them out of the Folds.”

  “You’re Captain Bridgwater’s whiz of a Navigator?”

  “Is that what he said? He told me I could have a job any time I liked. Unless you particularly want to float me out of an airlock, I might take him up on that. See if the Rodontee Corporation will buy my contract.”

  “I never wanted to float you out of an airlock, Kitty, believe me. The worst we’d have done to you would have been to return you to Alphacorp.”

  “And here’s me thinking you wanted to dump me in the middle of foldspace.”

  “What do you remember of the Nimbus?”

  “The what?”

  “The black cloud in the shuttle.”

  “There were a few wisps of smoke from a burned-out panel, that’s all.”

  *She’s telling the truth as she believes it happened,* Cara said. *Though there’s something else underlying what she’s saying. I didn’t get that from the other interviewees. There’s more to Kitty than is immediately obvious. Perhaps I’m only picking this up because I knew Kitty before.*

  *We’re going to have to go deeper,* Ben said to Cara. *Perhaps Ronan’s regression therapy.*

  *Good idea.*

  Ben was puzzled. There had been no sign of aggression. None of the interviews had turned up anything unusual in what the refugees believed, but their stories still didn’t tie in with the truth as Ben understood it. The passengers all had different recollections of their various ships getting into trouble and the Barbary picking them up, but some of them had been lost in the Folds as recently as a couple of months ago, while others had been lost a century earlier—yet here they all were, alive and looking as they had the day they were lost.

  “Ideas?” he asked.

  They were all sitting around the big table in Solar Wind’s mess, the biggest communal space on the ship. A beverage machine burbled quietly to itself on the counter. Ben helped himself to a hot tea before they started, and offered drinks to the visitors.

  Cara, clutching coffee, was by his right hand, as usual—he liked that, though he’d never clip her wings by telling her how much—Ronan sat opposite, with Nan and Tengue. To Ben’s left were Vijay Gupta and Max. At the head and foot of the table, respectively, were Rena Lorient and Jack Mario. Ben had always valued Jack. He’d been an ally even when they’d appeared to be on opposing sides in the early days of the Olyanda settlement. Ah, those were the days, when they’d thought their only problem was the enmity between settler and psi-tech. Rena was an unknown quantity. She’d appeared compliant when they’d been on Olyanda, but as her husband had diminished, she’d grown to take over the colony in his place.

  “Can we repatriate them?” Rena asked.

  “They’re dangerous,” Ben said. “I don’t know how and I don’t know when, but no matter how pathetic they look, they present a danger. Don’t trust them for a moment.”

  “We haven’t told them yet what year it is,” Ronan said. “Imagine the shock of finding out you’ve been legally dead for a century. They all think they’ve had a bit of an adventure that’s lasted a week or two at the most.”

  “What’s our best guess as to what has actually happened to them?” Jack asked.

  “I know this sounds like science fiction,” Ben said, “but alien abduction would be my theory.” He held up his hand to quell the murmurs around the table. “Yes, I know that during all our time exploring the galaxy we’ve never actually come across a sentient civilization, even if we’ve found life-forms on other planets, but these aliens are not from our dimension.”

  “Do you think it’s your void dragons?” Gupta asked.

  “I’m not an authority on these things, but the void dragons are benign, so far—more curious than anything,” Ben said. “They d
on’t communicate like we do. They’re telepathic. We can occasionally pick up feelings from them, but we don’t have any commonality that enables us to work on building a shared vocabulary.”

  “If it was the void dragons,” Cara said, “surely they would have attacked us.”

  And that’s when the alarms began to sound.

  Tengue leaped to his feet, one hand on his communicator. “Question answered. They’ve massed by the fence and they’re trying to claw their way through it.”

  Ben had moved Solar Wind out of the quarry to a landing pad on the far side of town, but it would still take them almost five minutes to run to the compound from here. Ben and Tengue were first down the ramp, Cara and Ronan close behind. There was one groundcar parked close by. It was a four seater, but with Ben and Tengue in the front, Cara, Ronan, and Gupta jumped in and squashed into the back.

  Arriving at the compound Cara could see the refugees clawing at the fence in a frenzy, each one trying to climb the mesh or push it over. The fence was beginning to wobble. If they breached it, then the mercs’ charged security screen was the town’s last defense against what was nothing short of a ravening horde.

  Space zombies, Cara thought and then immediately dismissed the idea. Whatever they were, they weren’t mindless creatures. Or, at least, they hadn’t been until now.

  The mercs were standing their ground supplemented by the psi-techs, outnumbered three to one, but with vastly superior technology on their side.

  “They’re in some kind of hive-mind state,” Cara told Ben, “but not on a wavelength I can break into.”

  “Can you sense if anything’s controlling them?”

  “No. That’s not to say there isn’t, but I can’t sense it. They’re locked together in some kind of mental bubble.”

  “Set your weapons to stun,” Tengue yelled. Cara opened up a channel for Ben. *You heard him,* Ben said. *Weapons to stun. Let’s not kill anyone’s grandma if we can help it.*

  *What if Grandma’s trying to kill us?* Serafin asked.

  *Don’t die. That’s an order. And Serafin, get out of there now. Stand aside.*

  *Or what? You’ll retire me?*