“Let who do what?”
“Your father. You knew he wasn’t safe on that dam. Did he fall or jump?”
“They said it was an acci . . .”
Her grandfather is holding her close. “Breathe, child, it wasn’t your fault.”
“But Mom said—”
“She doesn’t blame you, Cara. In part she blames herself. He never got over the split.”
Prof Rimbaud looks up from his desk. “I expected better, Miss Carlinni. This paper is inadequate. Perhaps if you concentrated more on your studies and less on young men, you might achieve the grades you’re capable of.”
She opens the envelope, knowing that if her grades aren’t A or A+ across the board, she won’t get the assignment that her heart is set on. “Yes!” Air punch! She’s on the spearhead team.
Rydal is smiling down at her with a mug of coffee in his hand. Damn, that man makes good coffee. It’s not the only thing he’s good at.
“Don’t!” She sees the doc seal the disposal bag over Rydal’s face and tries to rise, but a crushing pain in her knee turns her word into a gasp. The doc comes over. “Rest, now, Carlinni. We’ve got this.” He peels her fingers back, pushes Rydal’s handpad into them. There’s no time or space to carry a corpse home. She hears the whomf and the sizzle as the bag’s incendiaries reduce her lover to ash.
Ari scowls at her. “Craike handles severances,” he says, and she suddenly has an image of heads parted from bodies.
Ben’s standing at the foot of the bed, his eyes smiling. “Are you getting up or do I have to come in there and get you?” She stretches out under the light airquilt. “Guess.”
“Cara! Cara!”
Who was that? She didn’t want to wake up.
Her suit helmet was gone and there was a mask over her mouth and nose. Air! Never had anything tasted so sweet. She drew a deep breath and another. Ben’s face came into focus, brown skin and concerned eyes over a clear mask. Then a space-suited Ronan, helmet still in place.
*All right?* Ben asked.
*I will be. Doc Ronan to the rescue, again.*
*Wait until you get my bill.* Ronan grinned behind the faceplate.
Cara enjoyed the fuss for a while, the instructions to take it easy while Ronan did half-hourly and then hourly checks. Ben was, as usual, a bad patient, shrugging off the attention and pacing the central office, cursing Jake Lowenbrun five ways from Wednesday until the Solar Wind popped out of the Crossways gate twelve hours later with Lowenbrun calling for the Bellatkin like a cow calling for her calf.
*Home safe, already,* Cara told him. *Where have you been?*
*We were right behind you.*
*We came through twelve hours ago.*
*Shit! I’m sorry. You’re obviously all right, though. Benjamin?*
*Both fine.*
He docked Solar Wind like the pro that he was and stayed there until Ben relented and gave him permission to come to Blue Seven.
It had been four days for the Solar Wind, but closer to five weeks’ elapsed time on Crossways, so Ben called a break. Gen and Max gained three days together. Gen’s belly had expanded visibly, and after only three days she was reluctant to lose Max again, but relinquished him back to his duty with instructions not to take so long next time.
Wenna had everything under control in Blue Seven. There had been news from Nan that another two independent colonies were willing to ally with Crossways.
Ben was anxious to get back to the search. Cara was fully recovered and willing. Hilde and Gwala volunteered again, and Lowenbrun said if it was all the same to them could they please get back into the Folds or space him right now because he was not built for total sobriety.
“You really think we can do this, don’t you?” Cara asked Ben as they boarded Solar Wind once again.
“I really do. I think there’s one small thing we need to change in what we’re doing.”
“What’s that?”
“Take Max out to meet the void dragon.”
“Max? Outside?”
“Outside where?” Max caught up with them at the top of the ramp.
“Don’t worry, we’ll help you with it.”
“With what?”
Ben jerked his head toward the locker room. “Your space suit.”
“After what just happened to you two?”
“You’re sure about this?” Max asked for the fourteenth time as Hilde checked his suit.
“Sure as I can be.” Ben would have told him not to worry, but he couldn’t lie. It was dangerous, especially with someone inexperienced inside a suit for the first time. Max had barely learned how to use his buddysuit, let alone a full space suit. “We go outside, wait for the void dragon to show and ask again, but this time bring you into the mix with your line to the Kirchners.”
“And if this doesn’t work?”
“Then I’m out of ideas. We admit defeat, go home, and get on with the rest of our lives.”
“And I’m off the hook?”
“Pretty much.”
Hilde clipped on the line that bound Max to Cara.
*Foldspace coming up,* Lowenbrun broadcast from the flight deck.
“Hang on to something, Max,” Cara said, “And take care not to tangle the line.”
Max’s reply was lost in the transition.
This time the lights don’t just dip, they flicker out altogether and it takes Lowenbrun a couple of minutes to restore illumination. Hilde sets the air lock controls using her cuff-light while they wait.
“All right, children,” she says. “Take care out there.”
The air lock is big enough for two, but not three, so Ben goes through first, latches his line to the ship and waits, alone in the blackness, for Cara and Max to emerge together. He clips his line to theirs.
“Ahh,” Max says over the suit comm. “This is . . . unbefuckinglievable.”
“Breathe, Max,” Cara says. “Slow. Steady.”
“Yeah, breathe. Right.”
There’s a swirling sensation. The big void dragon winks into existence, changes into a cow, back into a dragon and then into the Bellatkin, though this Bellatkin has an eye. Is that a wink?
“The big guy’s here,” Ben says. He feels Cara link to him and pull Max into the mix.
“Is that the ark?” Max asks.
“It’s the void dragon.”
“But it looks like—”
*I know what it looks like. Concentrate. Put the ark and the Kirchners uppermost in your mind.*
“Ark. Kirchners. Right,” Max mutters.
Ben picks up a fleeting impression of a middle-aged couple, unremarkable in their looks, but determined to do the right thing by their foster boys. It seems that Max understands them, in retrospect.
Ben touches the surface of the void dragon, smooth under his glove. The spaceship turns back into a dragon and Max loses it. “Holy shit!” He hits the suit’s boosters and shoots away to the end of his tether, his momentum snatching Cara and Ben away from the void dragon.
“That thing . . .”
Max is spinning on the tether, tangling himself, drawing Cara into a knot. They collide and it sets her spinning, too. She curses and wraps her arms around Max, at least as far as her suit and his biopack will let her. Ben’s tether is longer. He’s dragged, but he avoids the spin and rights himself with a couple of short maneuvering bursts of propellant.
“Steady.” Cara puts her faceplate next to Max’s. “Steady!”
He’s overbreathing dangerously. The inside of his faceplate is fogging.
Ben judges their rotation, counters it and steadies them.
“Breathe, Max. Slowly,” he says. Cara reinforces it with a thought and gradually Max gets himself under control. It takes a while longer to straighten things out and untangle the tethers.
The v
oid dragon rolls lazily and follows them. Ben senses amusement and curiosity combined. He wonders whether to apologize, but figures that’s a concept the void dragon might not get.
“Kirchners, Max. Kirchners.”
“Kirchners, right.”
Ben feels Cara pull them all together again mentally as she tugs the line and brings them together physically.
*Find?* Ben asks the void dragon. *Please.* It never hurts to be polite. He pictures the ark, but lets Max’s image of the Kirchners superimpose on it. *This one.*
There’s a glimmer of understanding that translates into a repeat of, *This one.* Is the void dragon managing a little more language each time they meet? It’s learning. Why would it do that? Curiosity? Kindness? Some ulterior motive of its own? Or maybe just because it can.
Ben looks up. Hanging pot-bellied above him, black in the darkness, is a huge shape.
“Is that . . .” Max begins.
“I hope so.”
*This?* the void dragon asks.
“Kirchners,” Max says. “I never thought I’d be glad to be near them again, but they’re here, somewhere.”
“Alive?” Cara asks.
“I think so . . . I mean . . . would it feel any different if . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ben says, still hardly daring to believe. “We need to get on board.”
“Where’s Solar Wind?” Max asks.
Ben leaves the question hanging. One step at a time, he thinks.
*Jake?* Cara reaches out mentally.
*Still here.*
*Stand by.*
*As if we could do anything else.*
Ben propels himself to the ark’s side, dragging Cara and Max with him. The ark’s skin is space-pitted. She’s not a new craft, but she’s sound. The cargo bay air lock doors are open, presumably from Lowenbrun’s departure. He doesn’t mean to include the void dragon in that thought, but it takes the tether and passes clean through the skin of the ark dragging them all through with it as though the ship isn’t solid. They’re in foldspace. Of course the ship isn’t solid. Neither are they.
They’ve entered the cavernous hold with rack upon rack upon rack of body pods. Three hundred racks, thirty thousand souls.
The void dragon rises through them in a lazy spiral, then returns to Ben and asks, *?*
*Settlers,* Ben says. *People. Farmers. Makers. Mothers.* He tries the concept for size, not sure whether the void dragon will understand. He tries to put it into images, but that’s far from the void dragon’s plane of experience. Even so, it conjures an image of the Benjamin family farm, plucked out of the remnants of Ben’s first implant, no doubt. Then it comes up with an image of a city, lit by a garish white sun, peopled by stocky purple-skinned individuals, looking a lot like Jussaro. After that there’s a city with elegant white-walled buildings roofed with multicolored, glittering mosaics of tiny power collectors. Each building is surrounded by lush greenery and sculpted open space. Ben’s never been there but he recognizes it from images. New Tamanrasset, where Cara went to school.
*Others,* the void dragon says. It’s a concept rather than a word.
Now it’s Ben’s turn not to understand.
*Many others. Lost in the Folds?* he asks, wondering whether this could be the first rescue mission of many, whether he could find his own parents’ lost ship, but that was so long ago. It may still be out there, somewhere, but what good would it do to bring it home? Let it lie in the Folds, a mass grave.
*Others,* the void dragon repeats, and Ben gets the impression that others doesn’t mean more humans. He gets a fleeting impression of something alien, possibly even more alien than the void dragon itself. Then the void dragon is gone and the three of them are left alone in the ark’s vast hold. The image of something alien lingers until he shakes it out of his head and turns his mind to the task at hand.
His suit reading tells him there’s breathable air in here and the temperature is a steady five degrees centigrade. Ben releases his helmet seal and draws it off. Cara is already flashing their news back to Solar Wind, saying, *Life support is functioning. Stand by until we see if the ship’s fully operational.*
They make their way forward from the hold to the crew compartment where the captain, med-techs, comms-tech, cargo master, shuttle pilots, deckhands, and captain are all in cryo, waiting for a wake-up call that might never come. Cara checks the pods. *All working. Everyone’s alive. The captain and the med-techs are in auto-revive capsules.*
*What did you do with the bodies of the pilots, Jake?* Ben asks.
*In the ready room.*
They go forward to the flight deck. Cara finds the pilots. Apart from two bodies on the floor, the ready room looks like someone just popped out for a moment. There’s a half-finished chess game on the console. Piloting any vessel through the vast emptiness of space is ten percent frantic activity, ten percent checking systems, and eighty percent waiting for the automatics to tell you something is happening.
*You might have put them in body bags,* she says to Lowenbrun, curling up her nose.
The air scrubbers haven’t completely taken care of the sickly sweet smell of corruption, but without them it would be a lot worse.
*Sorry. Alexandrov wasn’t observing the courtesies.*
Max looks through the ready room door and turns away, shaking, more than from his first spacewalk.
While Ben checks the ship’s systems, Cara finds a pair of body bags in sick bay and gets on with shrouding the pilots herself. She doesn’t ask for Max’s help but he bends to help her anyway. His face is ashen.
Ben remembers having to deal with his first corpse, a floater out on the rim. It’s a long time ago, but still fresh in his memory. No matter how many times you deal with death you never really get desensitized. Well, he never has, anyway. They all count, whether it’s a friend, a stranger, or your own kill.
Ben checks the control panel. Relief washes over him and he has to swallow hard to keep his eyes from misting. It’s been a long search and there have been times he feared they’d never succeed. Now he knows it’s been worth the effort. “All set here. Settler cryo pods are viable.”
But finding the ark was only the first hurdle. Now they have to get it out of the Folds and then across the galaxy to Jamundi without being tracked. The ark is too big for the Crossways gate, but Ben doesn’t want to take her via one of the regular system gates since her ID will bring the Monitors down on them and probably the Trust and Alphacorp as well. Can Jake Lowenbrun repeat the trick that Cara’s been calling the Benjamin Maneuver since he pulled the Monitor ship out of the Folds?
“Max, can you Find Solar Wind?” he asks.
“Uh.” Max straightens up from the body bags and goes still for a few seconds. “I can feel the pull. Yes.”
“Good. Cara, can you link us all in to one gestalt?”
She’s good at this. No, that’s not giving her enough credit. The way she handles mind links is more than technically perfect, it’s instinctive. She’s absorbed whatever difference her new implant has made and her mental touch is firm but gentle. He sends a whispered kiss in her direction and she echoes it back to him.
*You were right all along,* she says privately.
He’s not one for saying I told you so, but he flashes her a smile.
She brings Max in first. Yes, Ben can see Max’s line between the ark and Solar Wind. Now all he has to do is get the two vessels close enough to swing the ark out of the Folds on Solar Wind’s coattails.
Next Cara brings in Lowenbrun. Ben feels the man’s anxiety. By now he’s come to the conclusion that Lowenbrun is not any kind of villain. He was caught up in the wrong scheme at the wrong time, a victim rather than a perpetrator. His only real crime was not standing up to Alexandrov as soon as he figured out what was going on, though whether he could have made a difference is impossible to tell. Al
exandrov was a mean bastard even when constrained by Monitor regulations. He wouldn’t have hesitated to beat Lowenbrun bloody or, more likely, threaten his cousin to get cooperation.
*We’re going to swing the ark out with Solar Wind,* Ben says.
He feels Lowenbrun’s alarm. *What? I’ve never—*
*I have,* Ben says. *We have to get close. Hold on, I’m coming to you.*
Cara brings Hilde into the mix. She’s enormously strong and confident, a credit to Tengue’s leadership. And lastly there’s Gwala, who barely registers on the Telepathy scale despite his receiving implant, but that’s an advantage now. Gwala never sees any of the denizens of foldspace and isn’t even plagued by his own ghosts. He’s going to be the linchpin that holds everything together on the Solar Wind.
*Okay, everyone, we need to get close.* Ben brings the ark around in a wide sweeping turn, following Max’s line.
Cara slips into the copilot’s seat and checks the readout while keeping the link steady. “I’ve got another vessel on screen,” she says. “It’s telling me four hundred klicks one second and forty the next, Take your pick.”
Ben checks Max’s line to Solar Wind and nudges the ark over by tiny increments.
*Whoa, you’re right on top of us!* Lowenbrun says. *And the big fella just flew right through the flight deck. Through Gwala, but he never even felt it.*
*I don’t believe in void dragons,* Gwala says. *Makes life simpler. Don’t even tell me if it comes back again.*
*I thought I saw something,* Hilde says. *I’d have liked to see it.*
*Not me. I’m not interested in your nightmares, or Lowenbrun’s, or anybody’s. I’ll stick to the ones that come when I’m asleep.*
*Okay, Jake, are you ready?* Ben asks.
*How do I—*
*We need to bring the ark out of foldspace close to Jamundi and then establish an orbit. Can you find the line?* Ben searches for it himself and finds it before Lowenbrun, probably because he’s already familiar with the planet. He feeds the information to Lowenbrun.
*Got it,* Lowenbrun says. *Now what?*
*Now we match each other move for move and when you shift into realspace, so do we.*
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