The Return of the Angel (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 2)

by mikel evins

  Esgar Rayleigh was a tall, spare Jovian man with an ivory complexion, large watery blue eyes, a bald head, and a thick black mustache that drooped at the edges, giving him a perpetually morose look. He wore his usual uniform of dark blue trousers with a narrow red stripe, a loose white tunic, and black belt and vest. The Rayleigh Company glyph in fine gold tracery floated discreetly over his left breast, and in his right hand was the inevitable cup of coffee.

  “Hi, Lev,” said Mai. “The Captain’s teaching me to play Go.”

  “I can see that,” I said.

  Mai Greenhill was a Canine, a Spearhound native to the Green Ridge region of the Asgard Preserves on Callisto. She was of medium size for a Canine, about the height of my knee. Her coat was short and stiff and grey blending to tan around her flanks and belly, and to black at the tips of her tail, nose, and ears. Her ears were pointed and stood up straight, advertising her mood and attention to all and sundry. She wore a royal blue tunic that covered her whole torso and left her four legs free.

  I nodded and smiled at Jaemon Rayleigh, who nodded and grinned back. We were old friends.

  Jaemon Rayleigh was a large man, taller and heavier than his older brother, but otherwise his twin. He had the same long, lined face and the same watery blue eyes. He had the same ivory complexion and he kept his head, if not bald, at least cropped so short that the color of his hair was something of a mystery. He lacked his brother’s mustache, though. I wondered if that was what made him look bright and cheerful when Esgar always looked so dour.

  Jaemon wore the same loose white tunic as Esgar, and the same dark blue trousers, but in place of the black vest he had on a sleeveless waistcoat the same color as his trousers. Like his brother, he flew the family glyph on his left breast. He watched Mai as she concentrated on the game.

  “Go ahead, Mai,” said Jaemon. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Mai picked up one of her white stones. Lacking hands, she was forced to use Kestrel’s manipulator fields. Being forced to use them, she had gotten very good with them. She lifted the stone cleanly and snapped it down firmly with a click.

  “Very good,” said the Captain. “You’ve captured my stones. Remove them from the board.”

  “All of them?” said Mai, looking at the Captain with her ears locked onto him.

  “All of the ones you surrounded. See?”

  He traced the boundary that Mai’s stone made around six of his black stones. The six stones rose in formation.

  “Where do I put them?” Mai said.

  The Captain pointed to the table in front of her seat.

  “Anywhere’s good,” he said. “Next to your own stones is fine.”

  The six stones sailed as a squadron to Mai’s side of the table and landed, still in formation.

  “Is there anything you’re not good at?” Jaemon said.

  Mai turned and cocked her head at him. The Captain smiled.

  “See?” he said. “I told you it was a good idea to recruit her.”

  “Yeah,” said Jaemon, widening his eyes and nodding exaggeratedly. “That’s exactly how it was.”

  “Ahem,” said the Captain.

  “Just don’t place any bets against her on the handball court,” said Jaemon.

  “Really?” said the Captain, offering Mai an appraising look.

  “I like handball,” said Mai.

  “You don’t have any hands,” said the Captain.

  “No,” she said. “I have to use my nose. If you ask me, it’s not fair, because you anthropes have two hands you can use and I can only use my one nose.”

  “Only reason it’s not fair,” said Jaemon, “is nobody can compete with you.”

  “That’s not my fault,” said Mai.

  “You ready for the big meeting?” said the Captain, turning to me.

  “I am,” I said. “I’m looking forward to finally meeting our employers.”

  Esgar and Jaemon both winced.

  “Yeah,” said Jaemon, “About that…”

  I looked at them curiously.

  “Have they canceled our conference?” I said.

  “It’s not that,” Jaemon said.

  The Captain said, “It’s just that you may be a little disappointed. If you’re expecting to see them face-to-face, I mean.”

  “I know they’ll be using the Fabric,” I said. “It’s not an in-the-flesh meeting. I’m just curious to see what they look like.”

  “Yeah,” said Jaemon, “That’s what I mean.”

  “You met with them before,” I said.

  “We certainly did,” said the Captain.

  “I know you’ve been reluctant to talk about what they looked like…”

  “Not reluctant, exactly,” said Jaemon.

  “More like unable,” said the Captain.

  “Did they place some sort of block on discussions of their appearance?” I said.

  They both shook their heads.

  “I don’t get it,” said Mai.

  I pointed at her with one finger.

  “That’s just what I was going to say,” I said. “Why can’t you describe them for us? You met them.”

  “Let’s say we encountered them,” said Esgar.

  “Or, anyway, we encountered something,” said Jaemon. “I’m pretty sure we encountered something.”

  “Yeah, definitely,” said Esgar. “I’m sure we encountered something.”

  They looked at each other and nodded.

  “I’m pretty sure,” said Esgar.

  Mai and I looked at each other. I shook my head.

  “What is it you’re trying to say?” I said.

  Esgar shook his head, too. He said, “Maybe you should just wait and see. We’re supposed to start in a few minutes. That reminds me. I need to check the departments and make sure everybody’s following protocol.”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “I meant to ask about that. No one is to have hands on any critical equipment at the time the conference is scheduled. Everyone is to be sitting down or prone. What are those precautions for? They sound ominous.”

  “You’ll see,” said the Captain. Jaemon just widened his eyes at me.

  A few moments later I experienced a sensation like the top of my head lifting. It was as if someone had unlatched a latch I didn’t know about at the back of my head, and the top of my head rose slowly. Then the room around me began to shrink and grow sharper and more detailed, or perhaps my point of view was expanding.

  Esgar and Jaemon and Mai seemed to be expanding, too. They looked a little dazed. The invisible boundaries of our expanding points of view met and merged, and suddenly I was hearing their thoughts in my head along with my own. All of us were feeling something best articulated as, “Oh, wow.”

  Our consciousness continued to expand. It blossomed outward, encompassing the whole mess, the companionway outside, the whole deck. It took in and merged with Chief Engineer Burrell in the galley, and Able Spacer Yarrow on the lift, headed for the mess. Yarrow sat down rather suddenly.

  Soon we had expanded and merged with everyone aboard Kestrel, and with Kestrel herself, who was experiencing a giddy delight that made several of us giggle.

  We weren’t just expanding. As our perception widened to include more and more of the space and things and people around us, it simultaneously sharpened to grant us enhanced perception of tinier and tinier details, to peer deep as well as wide.

  I could see Captain Rayleigh’s fingerprints and count the hairs on Mai’s muzzle. I could see the hairline joins of my carapace and the nearly microscopic rivets in Kestrel’s paneling. I could hear the pulses of the people in the room with me, and the breaths of those on the next deck. I felt my internal servos activating as I lifted my arms and laid them carefully on the table in front of me. I experienced my perception routines classifying input as vision, hearing, touch, taste. What’s more, I could reassign them and taste colors or hear textures.

  And I knew that everyone aboard the ship—even the ship herself—was exp
eriencing the same things. I knew because I could hear and see and feel them doing it.

  I felt the presence of the Cold Ones. I knew them. I recognized them. They didn’t introduce themselves. I simply knew. They were there, sharing this moment with us. We heard their thoughts and felt their feelings. All of us together, and all of them, shared a colossal collective memory that extended for thousands of years behind us—thousands of years of experiencing the world in the incredibly present, intense, vivid way that we were experiencing it now.

  We were suddenly very smart.

  All of my previous conceptions of intelligence were humbled and swept aside by the grand sweep of intellectual scope that possessed me. I understood everything. I knew the answer to every difficult question I had ever wondered about—in an instant I knew it all. I allowed my eyes—my dozens of eyes—to drift across the table in front of me, the deck in front of me, the lift, the companionway, the interplanetary space in front of me, and I could see causes and effects and interconnections and patterns expanding and flowing and rippling like the surfaces of a vast construction of dominoes tipped and falling in waves across an infinity of levels.

  Like a rushing river, understanding swept over me and whirled me around. It exploded into blossoms like fireworks, rockets of logic bursting in the air of my rapidly expanding mind and transforming into flocks of birds, falling leaves on the wind, snowflakes, droplets of water in a fountain, gossamer seeds lifted on the breeze and cast into infinity.

  I laughed at my own earlier questions. “What did the Cold Ones look like?” I might as well have asked how high was up, or what color was memory. What were they? They were this inarticulable transcendence, this gift of insight and intellection that laid bare the foundations of the world and reduced the profoundest of human thought to an ant’s scrabbling in sand.

  Then it was over.

  “So,” said Jaemon. “How would you describe what the Cold Ones look like?”

  I stared at him.

  “I wouldn’t,” said Mai. She was wide-eyed. Her ears were flat against her head. She was looking from one of our faces to another, a little worried.

  “Yeah,” said the Captain. “That’s pretty much the conclusion we came to.”

  “What the hell was that?” I said.

  The looked at me. Even Mai just looked at me patiently.

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. I know exactly what it was.”

  And I did. The Cold Ones had set aside a portion of the local Fabric to serve as extra brainpower for all of us. They had hooked us up through the Fabric nodes built into our bodies, and had multiplied our intelligence by about a thousand. Then they had blasted everything they knew about Angel of Cygnus into our heads, along with their detailed plans for our mission, and a set of protocols we could use to establish links with them in case we should need their help.

  I nodded slowly.

  “The other meeting was like that,” said Jaemon. “Like they hook up a firehose to your head and blast knowledge into it so fast that you don’t even realize what you’re learning.”

  The Captain said, “Yaug says it helps to talk about it. About the new information, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” said Jaemon. “He says it helps that sort of dizzy feeling go away. And it helps you remember the new knowledge the next day.”

  “I don’t feel dizzy,” I said. “But I do sort of feel like my brain itches.”

  Jaemon shrugged.

  “Probably different for mechs.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” said the Captain. “So what did we learn?”

  “The habitats aboard Angel of Cygnus are icky,” said Mai.

  “That’s for sure,” said the Captain.

  “Yeah,” said Jaemon. “They look like somebody scraped the gunk out of the produce drawer of their fridge, stuffed it into test tubes with some pond water, and then left them standing on the windowsill for a month.”

  “Vivid,” said the Captain. He looked a little queasy.

  “There’s a single human survivor aboard,” I said.

  “We knew that,” said Jaemon.

  “Now we know that he’s about fifty-nine, though he’ll look older to us, because of his ancient metabolism, and because of the unusual stresses of his living situation.”

  “We know that the ship’s mind is goofy,” said Jaemon.

  “That’s not the preferred terminology,” I said.

  “Oh?” said Jaemon. “Pray, educate me, Esteemed Colleague. What is the preferred terminology in this case?”

  “The ship’s mind is nuttier than a fruitcake,” I said.

  Jaemon nodded with detached interest, folding his hands together as he considered my words.

  “The survivor’s name is Oleh Itzal,” said Mai.

  “And he doesn’t seem to quite have it all together, either,” said Jaemon.

  I shrugged. “What do you expect? He’s been locked up alone in a dying generation ship for who knows how long.”

  “There are weapons aboard that vessel,” said the Captain.

  “Yeah,” said Jaemon soberly. “A lot of them.”

  “They’re odd, too,” I said.

  “Agreed,” said the Captain. “Thousands of very small drones. A lot of them have biological components in them. Not all of them, though. Some, but not all, are clearly carrying directed energy weapons. Some are carrying explosives, mostly pretty small charges. They have tracking systems and wireless network controllers.”

  “And we have no idea what they’re for,” I said.

  Jaemon was shaking his head.

  “There are thousands of them,” he said. “And they make absolutely no sense, especially on an interstellar explorer. They look like antipersonnel weapons. The ones I can figure out. Or maybe figure out. Half of them, I have no idea what they’re for.”

  “They’re mounted on the outside of the ship,” I said. “As if this starship was jury-rigged to act as a bomber.”

  We all looked at each other.

  The Captain said, “Well, a few minutes ago we were like a thousand times smarter, and we couldn’t figure it out then, either. So I figure we probably aren’t going to figure it out now.”

  “Yeah,” said Jaemon.

  “So what next?” Mai said.

  Jaemon said, “We figure out how we’re going to send a few of our crew into the insane crazy ship with the insane crazy arsenal on it to meet the insane crazy person aboard and then we bring him back to our vessel to stay with us.”

  He smiled winningly.

  3.

  Angel of Cygnus was inertial. She had cut her twin fusion drives and was falling free toward the inner Solar System. Everything aboard her was weightless. If her drives remained dark then she would fall through the Solar System, from a little above the plane of the ecliptic in the constellation of Cygnus, through the inner system between the orbits of Venus and Mercury, and out the other side in the general direction of the constellation of Carina.

  We needed to move back and forth between Angel of Cygnus and Kestrel. Since Angel was inertial, that meant that, in order to match her trajectory, Kestrel had to be inertial as well.

  One of the great advantages of torch ships is that they accelerate all the time, and thus enjoy a convincing simulation of gravity. They don’t have to go to all the fuss and bother of dealing with weightlessness.

  So much for that advantage.

  Kestrel rocketed out past Angel of Cygnus, cut her drives, flipped over, and rocketed hard the other way until she had matched Angel’s trajectory to a ’T’. Then she cut her drives again and used attitude jets to position herself precisely, placing her cargo bays in line with Angel’s habitats.

  Many people seem to think that being in space means you’re weightless. That’s not true at all, of course. Everyone aboard Kestrel enjoyed perfectly reliable weight nearly all of the time. Until she cut her drives. At that point, of course, everything was everywhere.

  The first problem you notice when a ship goes inertia
l—a ship that is normally under acceleration—is that most of the people with stomachs and inner ears go a little green. Stomachs and inner ears don’t much like gravity that changes. They like it even less if it disappears and reappears in between the world flipping over.

  The thing about space sickness is that there’s not all that much a doctor can do about it. You just have to get over it. Some of Kestrel’s crew begged me for prescriptions. I of course told them that it wouldn’t help much. Some of them of course asked me to supply them anyway. I dutifully dispensed them so that those people, instead of being chronically nauseated like their colleagues, could be chronically drowsy and nauseated.

  That—and the occasional flying breakfast—was the first problem that weightlessness caused, but it wasn’t the most serious.

  The big problem with weightlessness is that nothing stays where you put it. Everything of whatever size has a tendency to wander around and get into places it doesn’t belong. Pencils, nuts and bolts, crumbs, shed hair, drops of spilled drink, gaskets, pocket lint, hand tools, clothing, random containers, bearings, tubes of sealant, and a thousand other things take to the air and migrate in a leisurely fashion around the ship, looking for the worst place they can possibly end up.