by Sarah Zettel
Avir tried to collect herself, but didn’t feel very successful at the attempt. Her mind was full of light and threads. “Explain what you have done.”
Apparently ready to accept his prisoner status, the Unifier described the hunt for Stone in the Wall’s genetic relatives and how Broken Trail was led to the “control bank” to lay her hand on one of the spheres that still remained in the bank’s sockets. He went on to tell about how the lights had switched on in both the chamber and the cavern, and how the artifact had lain in a stupor since then and he wasn’t sure she was ever going to come out of it.
Avir didn’t realize how chilled her cheeks were until she felt the heat of anger rising in them.
“Do you realize what you have done!” she demanded. “You animal without Lineage!” Her fists clenched. “You played with the work of the Ancestors without even a preliminary test? Without a survey or any kind of analysis! You thought you could just…”
“We were in a hurry,” he said blandly. “We’d had word your lot was coming down like vengeance on this place for no particular reason, except maybe the people.”
Little by little, Avir clamped down on her emotions. This was not just unseemly, it was unacceptable and grossly unproductive. The Unifier had to be questioned thoroughly by experts. The Reclamation Assembly had to be notified of these developments at once. Measures had to be taken to secure the human artifacts, all of them, immediately, from the Imperialist clutches. Teams had to be brought down here as quickly as possible.
All time was gone. It was already too late. The race had started without them and now they could only run to catch up.
I am child of the Lineage. I will not see the work of the Ancestors end at the hands of the Imperialists. I will not.
Now the real work begins.
14—Aboard the U-Kenai, Hour 14:23:45, Ship’s Time
“This is the truth. This is what we learned too late. We should not have made them Human. Even a little bit of Humanity was too much.”
—Fragment from “The Beginning of the Flight", from the Rhudolant Vitae private history Archives
As it turned out, they didn’t even feel the collision. There should have been a long, slow, grinding crash, but there wasn’t. There should have been the sound of straining metals and ceramics, but there wasn’t. One minute the screens were full of filthy ice, the next minute they were black.
Adu felt the smooth surface of the control boards under his hands and for a moment wished Dorias hadn’t decided to house him in the android. It was convenient, but it was isolating. If he had been loaded into the ship itself, then he would have been able to know where the hull stresses were as soon as the ice touched the ship. He could have compensated for them instantly and monitored them where compensation wasn’t needed yet. He would have known everything, without needing to call up the data, or turn his head, or wait while his mind processed what his eyes saw.
Next to him, Eric Born and Aria Stone blinked at the blank screens.
Eric looked down at Aria in the communications chair. “Now what?” he asked her.
“Now, we push it toward the Realm. What’s supposed to happen is the heat exhaust melts the ice as we push and we slide father into the shell. When we get to the Realm, we head to ground looking like a great, hulking lump of ice.” She frowned. “Did I say that right?” Her hand fell onto her pouch of stones and she jerked it away.
“I, for one, hope you did,” said Adu. “Although what they’ll think when they see a lump of ice going this fast, I don’t know.”
“We’ll just have to hope the satellites don’t think.” Eric stretched his arms over his head until his joints popped.
“They’re Vitae satellites,” Adu reminded him. “How can we be sure what they do?”
Eric swung his arms down. “Adu, that’s not really helpful.”
“My apologies, Sar Born.”
Eric nodded and, almost absently, stroked the curve of Aria’s shoulder. “Let us know when we have to strap down,” he said, and he left the bridge. Aria stood. Her concentration focused on Adu, but she said nothing. She just followed Eric Born out of the chamber.
Adu shifted himself to make room for the work being done inside his skull. Most of the processing right now was actually being done by the Cam programs. It was able to calculate the angles and bursts of thrust needed to push them around the binary, keeping their “tail” angled away from the suns. They would fly into the system between the satellites, and get just a little too close to the planet. Its gravity would grab hold of them and drag them down. Nothing surprising. Nothing unnatural. Nothing to rise from the ashes and craters.
Adu tried to be content. He tried to draw comfort from the fact that he would be able to fulfill his parent’s first instructions. Down in the Realm of the Nameless Powers he’d be able to find out the origin of the Vitae’s plans.
But there was nothing down there. He tried to tell himself that he’d eventually be able to find an open line, or a satellite transmission, or something that would allow him to get a message through to his parent. As it was, though, the only networks existed in the android body and in the shell of the ship, and the ship would soon be gone, even if its passengers survived.
Survive, yes, but for what? To pace the ground carrying the useless Cam routines around with him, until something was found for him to do? What would it be? There was nothing down there but stone and water and vegetation. He’d checked as soon as they’d entered the system. The only life was the uninterpretable Vitae transmissions, flitting between their ships.
“You will stand by them.” Dorias had sunk deep into him. “Eric Born will find a way to get you back out once we know what is happening.” A pause. “Do you think I want you lost? You’ll be carrying everything I need to know.”
The memory was warm and firm and a part of him, but it was still not enough to silence the fear of diving straight into nothingness.
What made it worse was that there was a way out. He’d spotted it. Between the plotting strategies Dorias had poured into him and the equipment list he had read in Cam, he knew how to get out of this android and this shell of a ship.
Cam twitched, suddenly alert on new levels. Adu fastened his attention fully on its activities. The monitors were picking up localized increases in hull temperature, pinpricks of heat. Cam didn’t understand. Adu prodded it and opened up part of its memory to remind it they were in a hostile space. Now it had it. The pinpricks were targeting lasers. The Vitae satellites had spotted them.
Adu waited, listening to the comm lines with Cam’s ears. There was nothing but unintelligible Vitae noise. The pinpricks stayed where they were, tracking the comet they had become a part of.
Did the satellites think? Were they trying to decide what to do? Had the Vitae in their ships been notified, or was this just standard operating procedure? Track every bit of junk and rock that floated into the system and wait for it to do something stupid?
Adu knew his questions were useless. There wasn’t even any way to tell if the satellites themselves were armed. The comet’s cloud of crystals and dust made too much interference for the U-Kenai to get a detailed picture. The ship could tell where the satellites were, but that was all.
There was nothing Adu could do. The course was laid in and plotted. Changing it under the satellites’ gazes would definitely cause an alert to be sent to the Vitae’s flesh-and-blood watchers. The U-Kenai was built for running away, not for fighting, and halfway buried in ice and dirt, it wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. They were already in the trap. All of them.
Cam wanted to move, to recalibrate the monitors and make sure it was seeing what it thought it was seeing. It wanted to summon Eric Born to the bridge and alert him to the situation and get orders, even if it was just to stay on course, because the situation had changed.
Adu forced Cam to hold still. The trap’s lid wasn’t closed yet. Nothingness didn’t surround him quite yet. He could still get out.
And if he did, wh
at would Dorias do?
Send him back to Eric Born? Impossible. Reabsorb his identity? Perhaps, but then at least he’d be part of something. He wouldn’t be alone in the middle of a silent world.
Cam was shoving at him, seeking a way to get to the circuits that ruled the android body. Adu leaned all his weight against it until it stopped struggling.
“Sar Born!” Adu called. “Strap in!”
The monitor on the common room showed the pair of them moving with admirable dispatch. Aria Stone laid herself flat in the lowest alcove and let Eric draw the webbing over her. He closed the catches while explaining how they worked. Then Eric climbed into the second bunk and fastened himself in.
Adu, giving Cam just enough room so that it could stay alert for any changes in the ship’s monitors, moved the android.
The U-Kenai’s emergency beacon, once retrieved from its storage hatch beneath the bridge’s deck, proved to be an old unit that had been only peripherally kept in repair. When Adu had been required to set it up in dock at Abassyd Station, he had siphoned its specifications from Cam. The beacon was supposed to carry warnings or distress messages from a ship. It had an extraordinary amount of redundant memory and it could travel long distances, albeit slowly. It could take him back to where there would be voices he could hear and room to stretch out. In the meantime, there would be a little spare room in there, where he could keep himself busy by building his own tools. In a year or three or five, he would be found and his box would be opened and he’d go on from there.
The pinpricks still hung on the ship’s skin. The transmissions from the satellites had picked up slightly, but they hadn’t changed direction, and the satellites themselves hadn’t moved. They watched closely, but they just watched.
So far.
Cam’s main processes huddled in the corner where Adu had left them. Adu encompassed Cam and pried into its insides. He heightened its perception of the task at hand; to get the U-Kenai safely down, unseen, if possible. Cam thought more slowly than Adu, and had less capacity for memory, but it knew the ship and had years of experience stored in itself. The ship could still maneuver a little, and it could still brake a little. The comet ice packed around its skin would absorb the extra heat of the accelerated re-entry and Cam could surely steer it more accurately than Adu, because it had special subroutines for flying under reduced capacity. It would all be enough, with a little added urgency. Adu had to make sure it would be enough, because there was every chance he would contact Dorias again. Dorias would know Adu had defied him, but at least he wouldn’t be able to say his child had done it carelessly.
Besides, Adu carried copies of everything Eric had learned from the Vitae datastores. Dorias wanted them back.
That is my real purpose. Not sending myself into emptiness.
Cam did not try to duck out as Adu laid the new orders in. Accepting orders was part of what Cam was carefully designed to do. When Adu was satisfied that the first thing Cam would do when left to its own devices was launch the beacon, he let it retreat to its corner.
The beacon would trail along behind the ship in the “comet’s” tail as just another piece of junk until the final descent began. Then it would break free and fly off on its own, like at least two dozen other pieces of rock would be doing at that point.
The monitors registered a rise in temperature from three of the pinpricks. Adu froze. The temperature leveled off. Maybe it was only a fluctuation. Maybe some lensing had been caused by the ice coating the ship’s side. There was no way to tell.
Adu opened a hatch on the beacon. Then he flicked back the cover for the hardwire jack on the android’s wrist. He plugged the biggest unused cable on the bridge between the two sockets. He made the android glance at the monitor again. Eric and Aria lay in their alcoves with their gazes fastened on the view wall, trying to see what was happening, and doubtlessly wondering how long it would be before they landed.
Cam will get them down, Adu told himself as he reached down the new opening that the cable provided. It will. They don’t need me. Not down there in the emptiness.
Carefully, he eased himself into the beacon.
Aria knew the ship was performing a delicate dance, skirting around the edge of the Servant’s Eyes, but it felt like nothing at all. To her, the U-Kenai was standing still while the universe churned around it Light bent into bows and knots. It was like watching fireworks recorded through a distorting tens. It was silent, and beautiful, and utterly strange. Aria wanted to touch the backs of her hands in salute to the Nameless and the Servant, but the webbing held her hands down. She just hoped her thoughts would count and that there was somebody watching closely enough to acknowledge them.
All at once the morass of color and darkness was gone. The bare back of the Realm filled the screen.
“Too low,” gasped Eric. “Adu! Too low!”
Aria forced herself to keep her eyes open. If I’m going to die, I’m at least going to see it coming.
Rock rilled the screen, silver and black, pitted, gouged, bare. Bells and chimes, mechanical shrieks filled the air and the light flashed wildly.
It’s the World’s Wall. Nameless Powers Preserve me. We’re going to hit the World’s Wall!
The ship rolled sideways and a scream cut loose from Aria’s throat. They were upright in the next breath, she had time to be embarrassed, then to realize that she was alive to be embarrassed, and then to realize she hadn’t made the only noise.
Outside the ship blurred beige, brown, and green. Total darkness hit. Dim light returned and the screen flickered back to life. Green chaos swallowed up everything else and a sharp jolt bounced her up and down until the webbing creaked in protest.
They stopped and stayed still, doing nothing but breathe.
After a while, Aria was able to notice that the room was crooked. She lay with her knees pointed toward the ceiling and her left ear pressed against the side of the alcove. A single alarm bell rang tiredly for a few more seconds before it hushed itself from exhaustion.
“We’re here,” said Eric in a hollow voice.
“We’re home.” Aria fumbled with the catches and shoved the webbing aside. She planted her feet carefully on the tilted floor, resting her hand against the wall for balance. The dim lights threw a half dozen hazy shadows of her across the room.
Eric was on his feet a split second after her, trudging up the slope toward the bridge.
“Adu!” he called. “Are you all right?”
There was no answer.
“Adu?” Eric stumbled forward before his feet found purchase on the sloping floor. Aria followed Eric onto the bridge. They entered the cabin, but Adu didn’t even look up.
“Adu?” said Eric again. The android stayed motionless, hands on the control boards, seemingly oblivious to the drunken angle of its chair.
Then Eric said “Cam?”
The android turned its head. “Yes, Sar?”
Eric swallowed hard. “What’s happened to Adu?”
“He’s left us,” Aria said. “Run away.”
“That’s insane,” snapped Eric. “Dorias would never have…”
Aria laid her hand against the threshold for balance. “That…person was not Dorias, and he was scared to death of coming here. Even more scared than you, I think.” She eyed the blank monitors. “I also think, Eric, we had better get out of here and see where we are.”
But Eric was not moving. “Cam,” he said again, “what is the disposition of the process Adudorias?”
“Adudorias transferred to U-Kenai emergency beacon. The beacon was launched fifteen-four-ten, ship’s time.”
For a moment, Aria thought Eric was going to fall over. He was counting on that creature, she realized. As long as Adu was around there was a touchstone to the outside, a tangible chance he might find a way out again. Now he’s as stuck as…A new beeping piped up from the control boards, and another joined it as the alarms began to recover from their own shock. As this ship of his.
“If I m
ay presume.” She laid her hand on his forearm. “I think we are not safe in here.”
Eric looked at her for a moment like he didn’t understand what she said. Then he lurched towards the airlock. “Cam. Come outside.”
The android got up and obediently teetered after its master. Eric palmed the reader on the airlock, and nothing happened. He cursed through clenched teeth and undid a latch beside the door. A small compartment came open and he pulled a lever down. “Cam. Manual release procedures. Go.”
The android gripped a pair of handles on the airlock’s inner door and pulled. Reluctantly, the door gave way and Cam dragged it up the slope of the floor and latched it into place. A draft of warm air caressed Aria.
Eric and Cam repeated their actions for the outer door. His hands seemed inordinately clumsy as he worked the controls. Aria felt her patience strain.
Try to remember, it’s been ten years for him, Aria told herself, and he never wanted to come back.
The outer door opened and air rushed in, warm, rich, thick air.
Acrid, black, smoke and a billow of heat came with it. Aria coughed harshly. She couldn’t see anything except a curving wall of smoking ash. She undid her head cloth and pressed a strip of material over her mouth before she started out the door.
“Wait…” started Eric.
She ignored him. She felt as though she had walked into a furnace. Coughing despite her makeshift face mask, Aria waded up the ashy slope, waving her free hand both to keep her balance and to keep her bare hand from touching the burned ground.
Finally, she scrambled onto a patch of unburned, white sand. Forgetting pride altogether, Aria dropped onto her knees. A fresh wind caught her right cheek and Aria breathed deeply. When her lungs cleared of the stinging smoke, she stood up and looked around to see what part of the world they had come to rest in. Joints and head seemed to sigh with relief. The world wrapped around her like a blanket.