We had spent the rest of that first evening brainstorming terms and keywords to prime the virus to look for, including ‘blue men’, ‘slavers’—which had been Fiori’s idea—’visitors’, ‘strangers’, ‘non-crescent ship’ and other offshoots and weird associations. We tried to channel the minds of the average, unaware human and guess what terms they might use to describe what they had seen if they encountered the aliens.
Then Lyth locked himself in the map room with Lyssa and coded the virus, then set it loose upon the galaxy. The rest of the three days, he spent examining the reports that came back. There were a lot of false positives, and each needed to be manually checked.
“If I’d had more time, I might have narrowed down the parameters,” Lyth said. “It’s out there now, though. I can’t change it even if I wanted to, but I don’t think we should, even if we could.” He rubbed at his face, pushing away sleep.
Jai, who had been keeping him company, was sprawled in the armchair Lyssa had built for him, in the far corner, snoring softly.
“Wouldn’t tighter parameters cut down on all this work?” I asked, handing Lyth the coffee I’d made him.
He grinned as he took the cup, for it was the cup he used to hold while waiting for me to come aboard, when he had still been the shipmind. Then his grin faded, and he shook his head as he raised the cup to drink. “If anything pops up at all, it will be because of some freak association none of us thought of.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I do know,” he said firmly. “If there had been a common, ordinary association, if the item spoke directly about aliens, we would have heard about it by now. Certainly, a basic search, even an advanced one that you might have put together, would have pulled it up.”
Anderson Marlow stepped into the room, the bright light from the passage on the other side of the door making us wince. “There he is,” he said, sounding vexed as he glanced at Jai. “How’s it going?”
“Lyth is explaining to me that we haven’t heard about the aliens before because we’re not thinking strangely enough.”
Lyth rolled his eyes.
Marlow rubbed his chin. “Sure,” he said, his tone one of agreement. “If anyone has come across them before, they might not have recognized what they were dealing with.”
“But even so, these blue guys are so…so noticeably different, why didn’t those people come dashing back to the comms network and babble about their amazing run-in with them?”
“Because they didn’t survive,” Lyth said simply.
My jaw dropped open.
Marlow sighed. “You’re looking for missing ship reports, then?”
“I’m looking at every single missing ship report,” Lyth said grimly. “Even then, I might miss the vital one.”
I shoved my fingers through my hair. “Why?” I demanded. “A missing ship is a missing ship.”
“Because no one reported the ship as missing,” Marlow said softly, studying Lyth.
Lyth nodded.
“But that’s…of course, they would report it!”
“To who?” Lyth said.
I felt my jaw drop. I couldn’t think of a single logical answer.
Marlow gave a laugh that held no amusement. “Lack of a central authority, or even a sectional authority, is working against us, for once.”
Horror leapt, making my gut twist. “That’s not a reason to create one,” I said swiftly. “We just got away from that shit.” Well, it was thirty years ago, but it still felt like yesterday to me.
“Danny’s right,” Jai said from the depth of the armchair. He stirred, got to his feet and stretched. “The closest to a central author is the Shipping Guild, but even they don’t track the movement of ships. They only keep a register of ships who care to join the Guild. Which is as it should be,” he added, resting his hand on Marlow’s shoulder. “Come on, both of you. Leave Lyth to his work. I’ll buy you a drink.”
My mind gnawed over the possibilities that Lyth kept suggesting. Lack of reporting, lack of central authority. Whole ships going missing and no one seemed to notice. We had thought it was a good thing the Empire had collapsed. And I still felt that way, I told myself firmly.
Once Lyth had scraped all comms for the last year, he went back to the year after that. “We don’t know how long ago they found our section of the galaxy and came across humans,” he pointed out. “They could have been watching us for years.”
Dalton had laughed bitterly at that idea. “You wait. Lyth will figure out they have been watching since humans nearly clawed each other to death because of the Shutdown—and they decided the only way to deal with such a miserable, aggressive species was to come in with all guns blazing.”
It turned out that Lyth was right. They had been watching us for years.
—19—
“At least, I presume they have been watching us,” Lyth explained.
“While also abducting who they wanted and pirating their guts out,” Dalton added, his voice drier than the toast on my plate.
I pushed my plate aside. “They’ve really been watching us for three years?”
“As far as I can tell, yes.” Lyth added quickly, “The objective of this was not to figure out how long they’ve known about us. That’s another of the questions for the long list, and for someone with the time to go through the reports the virus is bringing back.”
“Put Lyssa onto it,” Jai said. “She’s smart, and she’s got good instincts.”
“Awww…” Lyssa said and batted her lashes at him. She held her hands around a steaming mug of coffee.
“The object was to determine where they come from,” I said. My tone came out grumpy, because damn it, I was hungry, but it didn’t feel appropriate to chow down on sourdough toast and tart blackberry jam right now. “As you’ve stepped out of the map room, I presume you’ve figured that out?”
It was only Jai, Lyssa and me at the table, and Lyth hovering next to it. Everyone else was still asleep. Sleep had been an absent companion for me the last few nights. Mostly because the other side of the bed was empty and the person who used to use that side was just on the other side of the wall. But once awake, my mind would not stop turning over the few facts we knew about the blue-black guys, and what might happen next. In the dark hours of a sleepless night, my imagination wandered along depressing routes.
Jai never seemed to sleep, either. I suspected his thoughts were as bleak as mine. He was never an openly jovial man, but the silent humor which normally lit his eyes was absent.
Lyth didn’t object to my snappish tone, although if he had I wouldn’t have blamed him. He simply sank onto the bench opposite me and Jai. “I found three ships which seem to have disappeared into thin air. They left their departure point and as far as I can figure out, they never arrived at a destination, anywhere.”
I absorbed that. “They were reported missing?”
Lyth shook his head. “They weren’t reported as arriving anywhere. Their failure to arrive was overlooked because no one was informed about their arrival so they could watch out for them. Their point of departure didn’t check in with their arrival point. They didn’t know what their arrival point would be, because no one is required to lodge itineraries anymore. I only found them missing because the virus caught a mention of someone failing to come home, so I traced it back. I found others the same way.”
“You used to track people following the data trail they left,” I pointed out.
“This is almost the complete opposite. I’m tracking missing ships by the lack of data trail.” Lyth scraped his thumb over the tabletop. “There have been three that I’ve found, so far, going back three years. Put together with the Ige Ibas, that gives me a distinct direction.”
“All out on the fringes of the Carinad arm?” Jai guessed.
“A specific area along the edge of the arm,” Lyth replied. “All the ships, including the Ige Ibas, did pass through or might have passed through that section.”
“
Might?” Jai rubbed his jaw doubtfully.
“No itineraries, remember?” I said.
“I had to extrapolate where they might have been heading,” Lyth said. “Based upon common routes in the past. There’s a lot of guesswork involved.”
“We can’t take this to anyone,” I said to Jai. “Not based on guesswork. Not even Lyth’s guesswork, which is almost bankable. No offence, Lyth.”
“None taken,” Lyth replied. “In this case, I’m guessing more than usual. The lack of documentation, of histories, is…” He twisted his mouth. “Hampering. Plus, we’re dealing with only a handful of ships, so randomness is a major factor.”
“Incoming call for you, Colonel,” Lyssa said from overhead.
“Me?” Jai said, surprised.
“Danny,” Lyssa corrected.
“On the table here, please,” I replied.
A flat screen formed over the emitter. Sauli Mullins smiled at me. There was a twinkle in his eyes. “Wanna scooch over a smidge, Danny? We’re landing.”
I sat up. So did Lyth. “You’re what?”
Sauli’s smile evolved into a huge grin. “The Omia Zaos just passed through the inner lock and we have a platform assigned. I don’t know if it’s right next to you, but traffic control muttered something about ‘you people’, so I’m going to guess it probably is. Have you been stirring up trouble again, Danny?”
I scrambled to get my thoughts straight. “It’s Lyth stirring the trouble this time,” I replied. “How the hell is it you are here?”
“That’s easy. Jai called and suggested I should get my ass to wherever you ended up. Apparently, you might be in need of a couple of excellent engineers.”
Lyth and I both shifted to look at Jai.
He just smiled.
—20—
The Omia Zaos was a luxury class private yacht, one of Sauli and Kristiana’s top-end crescent ships and tended to draw gazes wherever it landed.
Crescent ships, with their swinging arms, looked clumsy and clunky even if they weren’t retrofitted. Sauli and Kristiana had worked for thirty years to smooth out the design of crescent ships and theirs managed to avoid the appearance of a grasshopper ready to leap.
Purpose-built crescent ships were generally narrow at the nose of the ship so the crescent arms had less distance to cover to draw a forming wormhole over the front end of the ship. Darius Industry ships had, instead, an elegant curve to the nose, instead of using the common arrowhead shape. The ships did not expand behind the nose, either. They were sleek torpedoes.
We stood on the edge of the platform where the Lythion was parked and watched the Omia Zaos lower itself down onto the neighboring platform. Sound baffles—which were a new development built upon molecular barriers—stopped the wind and beating roar of the ship’s navigation engines from reaching us, even though we stood barely fifty meters away from the landing ship.
It was unusual to watch a ship land from such close quarters. In a standard landing bay, massive shield doors protected the public from the noise, toxic exhaust fumes, heat and cyclonic winds, while the ground crew stayed behind physical shields and watched on screens.
“This is one of Sauli’s designs?” Anderson Marlow asked, beside me.
I nodded.
“She’s beautiful,” Dalton said.
She was. The Omia Zaos had crescent arms well forward of the center, where many ships had them mounted. Her arms were folded back into a crease in the fuselage, so they merged with the lines of the ship instead of jutting above it.
Lyth tugged on my sleeve. “Come on.” He ran over to the small manhole on the platform that the ground crew used. We followed him down metal stairs to a gantry network running beneath the platforms, that gave the city’s ground crews access to all of them.
Crew people in their distinctive coveralls were moving along the gantries just as we were and gave us startled looks as we dashed between the Lythion and the Omia Zaos.
Up more stairs onto the Omia Zaos’ platform. Now we could feel the heat and sniff the lingering navigation engine exhaust fumes. But already, the city ground crew was coupling the ship to the supply lines and moving around the landing struts.
As we circled around the ship, a set of stairs lowered down from underneath the ship. It was a private yacht and didn’t have a huge freight bay and ramp servicing it.
The first person out of the ship was Venni. She was black, white and grey all over, with startling blue eyes amongst all the monotone fur. She shot down the steps with a little yip, dashed over to me, and reared back and planted her forepaws on my shoulders.
I staggered under the impact and the weight, as Venni tried to lick and nuzzle my face. Rich, aromatic breath fanned my skin.
I managed to stay on my feet and even got a hand up to scratch at her tummy—which was as far as I could reach with her paws holding down my shoulders.
“Here, let me. Sorry about this. Venni!” The male voice was not Sauli’s, but I couldn’t peer around Venni to see who it was. From closer to us, he said, “Venni, down. You’ll squash her.”
Venni got in a last lick and dropped to the ground. The relief to my shoulders was vast. I rubbed them and smiled down at the parawolf, then looked at my savior.
He was Sauli’s double, except his hair was a deep brown, and his eyes were the same black as his mother’s. But he had Sauli’s rangy build, high cheekbones and thin cheeks, and the determined chin, which most people overlooked. No freckles, though.
“Yoan?” I said, staggered.
Yoan grinned and thrust his hand into Venni’s scruff. “Colonel.”
“You’ve grown up!” My response was a mindless reflex.
Jai swayed closer to me. “They tend to do that,” he pointed out. Then he smiled at Yoan. “Are you working with your father now?”
Yoan nodded. “Learning the trade. Although I’ve learned a lot just sitting at the family dinner table and listening to them talk.” He cocked a brow as Sauli and Kristiana came up to us.
Kristiana Saito was a delicate, petite brunette, with short, no-nonsense hair, sharp black eyes and a pointed chin. She grinned at me. “You were an excuse, that’s all, so don’t bother yelling at us about obligations.”
Was I that predictable? I had been juggling guilt for pulling them away from their very busy lives, even though it hadn’t been me who had done the yanking.
I hugged her, instead, then pulled Sauli away from Marlow and did the same to him. I had got used to hugging, over the last thirty years. It was a pleasant custom that more people should adopt.
While we were all busy saying hello to each other, which included Venni dancing around all of us, more people, none of them wearing the ground crew coveralls, came up and surrounded us. They didn’t give off security vibes, or even ex-Ranger vibes, which most security staff had once been.
Sauli untangled himself from the greetings and turned to a squat man with pale hair, sensuous lips, and a keen gaze. “Everything under control, Captain Truda?”
Truda glanced around. “Well…it isn’t a landing bay, is it?” He looked overhead, at the landscape painted upon the far side of the cylinder.
Sauli clapped Truda’s shoulder. “We’re heading to the Lythion, over there.” He nodded toward the other platform.
“I’ll let you know when the ship is ready to leave,” Truda said. He gave a half turn and smiled at Lyth. “Hello, old friend.”
Lyth gripped his arm. “Hello, Baha. It is good to see you.”
With a jolt, I realized that Truda was a digital sentient.
The Humanists insisted that digitals were faint copies of real humans, and left spore which marked them indelibly as not good enough. Yet I could not differentiate between digital and bio people, and I had known the very first digital person the longest of anyone in the galaxy except Dalton.
I turned to Kristiana. “You left the rest of the family on Darius?” Sauli and Kristiana had married—yes, the actual old Terran rite. I had watched it myself. Then the
y proceeded to have children one after another, while also building a shipping business. Oh, and while also building a city station in orbit over Darius III.
Darius—the planet—was one of the tragedies of the Shutdown, thirty years ago. While everyone in the galaxy had been incommunicado, thanks to the array, Darius had been hit by an ELE-sized asteroid. Like Nijeliya, Darius’ atmosphere had become hostile to life. Millions had died because no ships could take them off the surface.
Kristiana had been born on Darius III and was one of the few natives to survive, for the Darius way of life had been conducive to remaining on the planet. To mark the disaster, so that no one would forget, Kristiana—who was also a politician par excellence—had rounded up influencers and businessmen, while Sauli co-opted construction firms and experts. Between them, they had directed the building of the star city.
Darius City was now the center of crescent ship technology, and Kristiana the president of the Shipping Guild, which she had also built, in between having children.
Kristiana smiled at me. “I would have left Yoan behind, too, but I thought it prudent to pull him out of the city for a while.” She grimaced at me. “The Humanists dangled a pretty girl in front of him and he’s just young enough to not see past the pouty lips.”
I drew in a breath and let it out. “Does he know now?”
“I’m waiting for a good time to tell him. Yoan sulked all the way here.” Her smile returned. “But he brightened when he saw the Lythion. He loves tinkering with the nanobot system.”
“You adopted it for your ships, after all.” I was pleased. Wedekind’s advanced designs were coming into their own, finally.
Saito nodded. “It’s sensible. It saves space. I should show you around, but Jai mentioned some unsettling things. We would much rather hear what is going on with you.”
Sauli came over to us. “And Venni is nagging me to let her see the others.” He rolled his eyes.
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