by Kate Elliott
The gold deck had only two other sections besides the bridge: a three-room suite comprised of tac and computer centers and a two-room suite that evidently had belonged to the captain.
“Look at that bed!” Jenny exclaimed as they keyed open the lock into the inner room. “Four people could sleep on that bed, and it’s freestanding! Do you suppose all the quarters are like this?”
Lily stared. The two rooms seemed huge to her, at least five meters square each. She shrugged, tonguing her mike switch. “It was an exploratory vessel, wasn’t it? They might spend years on this ship without ever making landfall.”
Below gold they found the silver deck they had entered onto. Here were far more corridors, but this maze was quickly explained: this deck held the crew’s quarters, the medical, the mess and rec sections, and a few areas Lily thought might be labs.
After silver, the color of the walls changed again, this time to a copper sheen. Labs, a small detention suit of cells, and a second and larger rec suite, filled about half of the deck. The other half they did not explore: a single door labeled Green Room led into it.
A large freight elevator took them to the lowest deck.
“Well,” said Jenny, examining the iron-grey walls of this deck with a practiced eye. “Now I feel more at home.”
Lily suspected that there was some pattern to the decks, as there had been on La Belle’s ship, a pattern that Kyosti would have laughed to see, although she could not possibly guess why. They hurried past cargo holds, the weapons and engineering access, a maintenance lab, a second computer center, before they found the triple airlocks giving onto the great hangar.
The shuttle had arrived before them. After almost half an hour of misunderstanding Bach’s answers to her questions, Lily finally discovered that it was possible to connect a pressurized tube to the shuttle hatchway and funnel the passengers off to an atmosphered overlook without having to put them all in suits.
Blue, of course, emerged first, followed by Bach and Lia and Gregori, in a clump, and then Yehoshua’s crewman wheeling the stasis couch in which Kyosti lay, still unconscious, and last the Mule carrying the injured woman. After a pause Pinto emerged, looking disgusted.
Lily had taken off her head gear. “Where are the others?”
“Where do you think?” Pinto said. The geometric lines on his face emphasized his derision. “Paisley was telling stories about the third cursed merchanter when I left. You know, hailed by the ghost ship and didn’t cut and run fast enough. I think this one ends up trapped in the gasp between windows.”
“Oh.” Lily looked at Kyosti’s still form thoughtfully, wondering what he would think of such a fate. “I’ll deal with them.”
Blue had gone to the overlook plastine and stood, face pressed against the plastine, staring out across the vast hangar. “Look!” he exclaimed. “Two other landers. But just small ones. You’d think a ship like this would have had some larger shore-boats, or recce yachts, at least.”
Lily lifted her gaze from Kyosti to consider the group assembled before her. A motley collection, without a doubt. Most of them gaped out the overlook glass at the hangar, at the fine, impressive interior of a ship older than their great-grandparents and yet still as advanced—still more advanced—than any that Reft space, Central or Jehane, possessed now.
“First.” She waited until they all looked at her. “Comrade Blumoris.” He turned, reluctantly. “Bach will have to give us a quick guide to the ship, before you head to your posts. Keep in wrist-com, in case you get lost. Blumoris, I want you to engine-access. You’re what we’ve got right now for engine tech.”
Blue’s mouth dropped open, leaving him looking young and foolish. He was clearly too stunned to speak. “I get to—” Almost too stunned. “I get to run these engines?”
“Not yet,” said Lily with patience. “Familiarize yourself for now. I’ll send Paisley along after you—”
“That grimy tattoo—”
“Blumoris.” The sharpness of her tone cut him off. “Who gave you leave to speak?”
Under the censorious gaze of all the rest, Blue looked for the first time a little shamefaced, or at least sullenly acquiescent.
Lily transferred her gaze to the crewman holding onto Kyosti’s stasis couch. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name, comrade.”
He gave her a brief salute, a gesture that surprised her. “Jorge Zia Nguyen, sir.”
She coughed behind her hand to hide her embarrassment at being called sir. “Well, comrade.” Hesitated, having forgotten for an instant what she meant to ask him. “Yes. Do you have a specialty that might help us here?”
“I have some experience in weapons systems, sir.”
“Good. You and Pinto go straight to the bridge. I don’t suppose your comrade …”
“Wei, sir.”
“Thank you—has any experience in navigation?”
Nguyen shook his head. “Soldiering, mostly, with a little training in comp and tac.”
Lily sighed, feeling lost again. Without nav, they could fill every other seat and still remain stranded in Landfall system.
“If I may?” The Mule’s fluid question was surprisingly deferential. Lily nodded, looking at him curiously. “I have some experience in nav.”
“But in Jehane’s fleet—on Franklin’s Cairn—you weren’t ever training in nav, were you? Why wouldn’t Callioux have assigned you there?”
“You forget, comrade,” hissed the Mule with a sardonic edge, “that in Jehane’s fleet there are sta running nav. Sta have not taken sides in this so-human conflict, but they are always willing to accept pay for services. Sta will not work with me.”
Blue stared in repulsed amazement at the Mule, his nose puckered up as if the air had suddenly brought him a bad smell. The others, all but Pinto, looked down, or away. Pinto, however, looked at the Mule with acute interest.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” asked Lily.
“You didn’t ask,” replied the Mule.
“Hoy. And you’re good at bissterlas, too, aren’t you?”
“Damn good at it,” said Pinto so sharply that the Mule shifted its gaze to meet the pilot’s eyes. They seemed to measure each other, two whose work had to mesh perfectly in order to guide a ship safely through the precise limits and angles of the vector drive. After a moment, as if satisfied, they both looked at Lily.
Lily shook her head. “I think we’ve got the absolutes covered,” she said, not quite believing it herself. “If this boat still runs, and we can figure it out. Jenny, you take these two to Medical. Do what you can to make them comfortable until Finch can come down and check them. Then you—and Gregori, I think—just roam the ship until you feel familiar with it. That should cover everyone except the Ridanis.”
“What about me?” Lia’s soft voice barely stirred the air. She had managed to lose herself in one corner of the overlook, hidden in swathes of loose fabric and the dark cloud of her hair.
“Relieve Finch while he’s in Medical.”
“I could,” said Aliasing tentatively, “but there is one thing you’ve forgotten.”
“There is?” Lily asked, surprised not by this revelation but by its source.
“Food.” Aliasing pursed her lips, giving her fragile features a remarkably practical cast. “Maybe I should go find the mess.”
Lily glanced, startled, at Jenny, but the mercenary merely lowered her eyes in a uncharacteristically demure gesture that Lily abruptly suspected hid amusement.
“By all means,” agreed Lily. “You’ve just been appointed Steward.”
For some reason, this made Lia laugh, but she went after the others without further comment.
16 Aliasing Takes Charge of the Kitchen
LILY’S FIRST ACT ON reaching the shuttle cabin was to order Rainbow, in her most military voice, to stand guard in Medical over Finch’s examination of the wounded. Rainbow’s reflexes got the better of her superstitions, and she snapped a salute, called up her ten—consisting of Curs
ive and Diamond—and marched them out of the shuttle before they could think twice about setting foot on the decks of ya ghost ship itself.
Paisley did not budge. Her expression stiffened into one of mutinous resolve.
“It bain’t right,” she said stoutly. “It be poor of you, min Rans—min Heredes, to play sore and fast with ya cursed ground.”
“Paisley.” Lily let the girl wait while she peeled off her suit and stowed it in its locker. When she sat down beside the Ridani girl, she unclipped her screen from her belt and keyed it on.
Paisley regarded her with a stubbornness that would have put the Mule to shame.
“I’m going to tell you some things that most of the people on this ship—and most people in the Reft—don’t know.”
Paisley’s lips twitched. “Be it ya secret?”
“Not quite. It’s something people here have forgotten, and I found out just by accident.”
“I remember,” said Paisley slowly, “’bout ya time we be trapped in ya spook’s ship, and min Bach showed us ya star map.”
Lily nodded. “Think about it. Say it’s true, that long ago colonists from the old planets—what they call League space now—traveled out here and lost the way to get back. That later the highroad fleet, just a few ships, stumbled onto colonized Reft space, and that the government impounded most of them, but this one wanted to go back, and got lost—”
“Sure,” interposed Paisley. “It be ya punishment for trying to get back over ya way when it weren’t meant yet.”
“Paisley.” Lily sighed. “Maybe it just happened. They lost their nav functions, or got vectored wrong by a miscalculation or—I don’t know—there are gas clouds and solar flares and I don’t know what else that can throw a system off. And somehow ended up lost and drifting, and abandoned ship.”
“Or all died, and ya corpses be still haunting on board,” muttered Paisley darkly. “Sure, and they be wanting ya companions on ya bleak way, waiting out ya belly down day till Jehane come tae lead them back.”
“But Jehane has come,” said Lily, abruptly giving up cold logic for the warmer climes of legend. “We’re part of his forces. We’re the ones who stumbled on this ship after so much time. Don’t you think it’s time we took it back, to help Jehane take ya people back over the way to Tirra-li?”
“Sure,” breathed Paisley, rapt in the sudden illumination of her great prophecy, “and glory. I never thought of that.” She stood up. “We mun go, then.”
“Hoy,” murmured Lily to herself, an exhalation of breath. “I want you to go help Blumoris. You’ve got to see what you can do with these engines.”
Paisley made an expressive face. “He smells,” she said succinctly.
Lily laughed. “I think he’d be surprised to hear you say that.”
“Sure. But it more likely he says that ’bout us tattoos.”
Lily rested a hand, briefly, on Paisley’s shoulder. “Yes, I expect it is. Just remember that he comes from a very—ah—limited background.”
“Be it so,” murmured Paisley with a skeptical frown, “though at least he knows no better. It be ya cruel o’ Finch to say ya low words about tattoos when he knows how sore sad it makes Pinto feel. A’course,” she finished, looking thoughtful, “that be certain sure why he says it.”
“You can’t judge everyone by Finch,” said Lily hastily, feeling both protective and angry over Finch at the same time.
“Nay.” Paisley lifted a finger and traced, unconsciously perhaps, one of the curling figures that decorated her face. Like Pinto, all her gestures held an inherent grace that accentuated her beauty. It was, Lily thought idly, some trick of fate that had thrown two Ridanis of such particular and unusually striking looks together. “I reckon,” continued Paisley in a considering tone, “that your min Hawk be from over ya way, bain’t he?”
“What makes you say that?”
“He be different. And ya blue hair. And anyway,” and now Paisley’s voice took on the accents of a proven argument, “he be ya only one o’ all o’ you, even you, begging pardon, min Heredes—and excepting min Bach, being as he be ya ’bot—as treats us Ridanis absolute no different than ya others. Bain’t no one I ever met done so, ’cept him.”
“Well, and say it’s so, for the sake of argument. Then that means there is a way back, doesn’t it?”
“Sure,” agreed Paisley cheerfully, “but he be ya strange, be min Hawk. So sometime I reckon we be better off here anyhow.”
Lily chuckled. “We’ll leave it as a theory. Promise me not to mention it to anyone.”
“You don’t reckon they guessed it for theyselves?”
“Well, then, just wait until they ask you.”
“Ah,” said Paisley wisely, and confined herself to that comment.
Lily left her in the huge, and confusing, engineering hall with an ecstatic Blumoris, and made her way to Medical.
Comrade Wei was awake, looking haggard but optimistic. Finch had managed to find her a mobile chair, so Lily sent her, with the Ridani soldier Diamond, off to gold deck to see what sense she could make of the computer and tac centers.
Rainbow stood at the foot of a stasis couch, looking solemn. Finch examined Kyosti with prim reluctance and pronounced his condition unchanged, and unchangeable.
“Look at those stats,” he said, pointing to the readout above the couch. “I got him transferred to this couch, figuring it was better than that makeshift business we had him in before. I even got most of the functions to work. This ship is remarkably well designed. All the systems follow along logically from your entry points, and—”
“What about the stats?” Lily asked sharply.
“Oh.” Finch shrugged. “They’re all skewed. Somehow I just haven’t got that functioning properly. It’ll take some time, working with it.”
Lily frowned. “I think we’re better off with you on com on the bridge, for now. Learn the system as well as you can in the next four hours, and then I’ll send Lia up for a quick survey of it so that she can relieve you when necessary.”
“What about—him?”
On the couch, Kyosti looked not so much asleep as closed in, as if his essence had been pulled tight in around and into himself.
Lily said nothing for a moment, gazing at him, at the sheen of paleness underlying the bronze tone of his skin. “Our first priority has to be to get out of this system, to find Jehane’s fleet and report this disaster. And anyway, what more can we do?” She looked at Finch as if daring him to say that he had deliberately not done as much as he could to bring Kyosti back, but he merely ducked his head and backed away from her.
“I’ll get back to the bridge, then,” he said, and left.
“I can stay and watch him,” said Rainbow unexpectedly. “Be I’ve got ya bit o’ medic training—not as makes ya real difference, mind you, but I can tell ya clean bandage and ya signs o’ distress, or if he be coming round.” She paused, went on in a lower, more deferential voice. “Min Hawk; he be ya fair to us Ridanis.”
“Thank you,” said Lily. She motioned to the other Ridani soldier, Cursive. “I want you to find comrade Seria and send her to the bridge. Then continue with Gregori to familiarize yourself with the layout of the ship. We’re going to need to know this boat backward and forward. Take a verbal log as you go.”
Cursive nodded. He followed Lily out, separating off from her outside Medical. Lily, on her way to gold deck, got lost once, but she forced herself to patiently retrace and reroute her path until she found one of the elevators. It brought her to gold deck, where she found Yehoshua loitering in the corridor. He looked up, hearing the quiet fall of her feet on the soft flooring.
“Comrade,” he said, formal. “I would like permission to bury my cousin. I think he would have wished this kind of—solitude.”
The words brought her up short. “Yehoshua. Comrade Officer Yehoshua.” It was not the nature of the request, but the request itself that stunned her. “You outrank me. You don’t have to ask me.”
> In the softening glow of the golden walls, she saw that he had aged in these few days. The stark white lines, the legacy of his years of hard work in deep-space asteroid mining, showed more sharply on his face than before. Streaks of gray sprayed a fine mist of silver across his black hair.
“I don’t want charge of this expedition,” he said curtly. He paused, mulling over the words, and started again. “You were being trained by Callioux for ship’s command. My rank is purely soldiering—and by that measure, on this ship, you outrank me. It’s in your hands, comrade.”
“Hoy,” Lily muttered. “I need to go sit down.”
A brief smile curved Yehoshua’s lips, perhaps sympathy, perhaps the merest distracted response. “And my request?”
She shook her head, wanting for the moment to be free of him, to consider what she had to do now. “Do you want any company?”
A slight, negative shake of his head. “I would prefer to be alone, with your permission.”
“Then granted.” He began to walk away. “Wait,” she added. “Who is monitoring life support?”
“The ’bot,” he said with another wisp of a smile. “He seems to have the system well in hand.”
Motionless, she waited until he vanished into the elevator before she took slow steps toward the bridge, as if by delaying her entrance she could somehow put off the moment when she had to face squarely that she was responsible for this tiny, fugitive crew, stranded on a ghost ship in enemy territory.
Well? she thought, lifting her hand, pausing before she set it on the panel that would trigger the door mechanism, and send her, all retreat impossible, into the bridge. What would Heredes have said?
She smiled. Heredes, at least, never let circumstances throw him off-balance. Always maintain your stance, and stay centered. Wasn’t that the first thing she had learned? And yet one never stopped learning to deepen that center.
With the briefest of touches, she opened the door and entered the bridge.
Finch glanced up at her as she paused beside the captain’s chair. “I think I can bring up the in-ship com now.”