Chronos had been right.
He wanted to leave, to stop watching, but he couldn’t. He kept his eyes on the capital ship. Waiting for it to move. Thinking about what he thought he’d seen but couldn’t believe. Wouldn’t. Wasn’t sure. Could have been a trick of lighting. He’d been so far away, after all. But the face was burned into his memory, a face he’d seen every night for his entire life.
Chronos had been right.
His father had been on the bridge of that capital ship, along with that bent, old man.
Petrick had seen him, and he knew he had to do something about it.
43
“IS THAT ALCOHOL?”
Suzy was looking at Balta sweating on the other side of the medical bay, reaching into a dusty cabinet to put back a glass container with a screw top. She’d just poured some of its contents into the metal container she kept on her person and then taken a swig.
Suzy’s question made her jump.
“Stars, kid,” she said, “don’t do that.”
Suzy had compacted herself onto a small chair, butt and feet both on the seat, her legs folded and back hunched in. Barry lay next to her on one of the elaborate medical beds under a soft blue light. There was a slow beeping that Haber had indicated to Suzy meant he was okay.
“You’re nervous,” Suzy said to the pirate captain. Balta looked at her flask and then back at Suzy. “Kitchen Master Gunther used to drink alcohol when he was nervous about an important meal. Or tired.”
Balta nodded in that way Suzy had seen adults nod when they were surprised how observant kids were sometimes. “I don’t like being on this side of the Wall,” she said. She took another short slurp from her flask, screwed it tight, and put it back in her pocket. “Don’t you go thinking about trying none of that,” she said.
“Alcohol is disgusting.”
Balta snorted. “Lots of things are disgusting until you get old enough.” She looked around. “Where’s the android?”
“Haber went to our quarters to recharge.”
“Okay.” Balta waved her arm toward the door. “You should go recharge too.”
“I’m not leaving him.” Suzy was talking about Barry.
Balta looked at the unconscious boy and nodded. “How is he?”
Suzy squeezed her legs up tighter to her chest. “Haber says he should be okay.”
Balta walked over toward the bed. Closer, she could see tiny tubes poked into Barry’s pudgy arms. His hair was still plastered to his face, but the sweat was gone. “He’s so pale,” she said.
“Haber says he lost a lot of blood, but that your blood consitor seems to still be working.”
“Constitutor,” Balta said, correcting her absentmindedly. “It’s saved my ass more times than none. Damn well better be working.”
“I don’t know what that means. But as long as it works. I can have Petrick explain it to me.”
“You three are pretty tight, huh?” Suzy nodded. “You guys learn that in your orphanage or whatever?”
“We take care of each other.”
“I have to be honest, kid, I thought he was a goner out there.” Balta was still looking at Barry. “But you didn’t give up. You saved his life.”
“‘Never Defeated,’ right?” Balta blinked and looked at Suzy. She was looking up at her now. “That’s what your Star Farers say, right? ‘Never Defeated.’”
Balta nodded slowly. “You remember that.”
“I like it. As long as we stick together, we will never be defeated.” She looked back down at Barry. “And I will never leave them.”
“Are you a good man?”
The sun was setting on the Indacar of eternal summer twilight. Petrick had never lost his sense of awe at the details of the dream, even now that he knew they’d been designed and artificially produced. The artifice did nothing to diminish the spectacle of it all. He looked up at the sunlit face of his father’s specter and saw confusion in it.
“What do you mean?” Fenton asked.
“Are you a good man?”
Fenton smiled. “Trying out crypticism, I see.”
“I’m not trying to be cryptic. I just . . . want an honest answer, and I don’t want why I’m asking to influence you.”
“Haven’t I always been honest with you?”
Petrick nodded.
“But you doubt yourself? Or me?”
Petrick nodded again to both questions.
“I suppose, then, I would turn it around on you: have I been a good man to you?”
“You have.”
“Then I am good, since all I am is what I am to you.”
There was a pause, and Petrick looked up to the sky, which was speckled with diamonds as the pinks and purples were slowly receding into darkness.
Fenton sat down next to his son. “Are other people saying things about me—him up there?”
Petrick nodded. “Do you know what he was like?”
“I know that I am your father, that you are my son, and that I exist to be with you here in this field. And I know if I was made by me, the me out there, and you tell me that I’m good, in here . . . he must be good, too.”
The rushing sound of the coming hornets reached Petrick’s ears. Their time was almost up.
“Then why did you leave me?” Petrick started shaking his head.
“Petrick . . . why don’t you tell me what this is about?” Fenton’s dreamlike face was lined with concern, but Petrick just kept shaking his head. “You can tell me.”
“If you’re a good man, why did you leave me?”
“You know why.”
“No, you told me why you left. That’s not the same. You could have taken me with you.”
The hornets were seconds away.
“I left you behind because it’s dangerous up there.”
Petrick’s gaze locked with his father at that. “You needed to keep me safe.”
“That’s right. I’m your father, and I love you. I had to protect you.”
“Even if it hurts me?”
Fenton took his son into his arms, and Petrick gripped him back, tight. “It hurts me too. Sometimes we have to do things that hurt us to protect the ones we love.”
Petrick nodded into his father’s chest as those words reverberated in his head. “I love you, Dad,” he said, “and I love my friends.”
The hornets came, fast and ferocious. Petrick braced himself, sure that they’d attack his face as they did his father’s night after night, dream after dream. Their roar filled his ears, and he felt them smacking against his tightly shut eyes. He knew he’d snap awake, panicked and sweaty, any second now.
Except . . .
Except, he gradually realized they were gone. The roaring was gone. His father’s chest was gone. He opened his eyes, and he gasped.
Everything was gone.
He was floating, in the middle of space. And not empty space. Not at all. Ahead of him was a breathtaking cosmic maelstrom. It was an enormous swirling mass of gas and rocks wholly unlike the relatively static Wall. No, these gases and rocks were colliding into each other violently, whipping around at incredible speeds, some of them the size of a full planet. The gases crackled with energy between them, casting a vibrant yellow-orange hue over the scene, like a thundercloud the size of a solar system. He could see full spheres pockmarked with craters, and others cracked and shattered at the seams.
Below him, he saw a fragmented planet, outside of the swirling maelstrom. He looked even closer, and he started to make out tiny, tiny formations on it, hills, canyons, mountains. He tried to conceive of why they should all be so small before he realized that they weren’t, in fact, miniature at all; nor was the planet tiny. He was huge. Gigantic, in fact. Larger than a planet.
As his immense size dawned on him, the entire scene started to grow larger and larger. Petrick realized he was becoming smaller and smaller. Faster and faster his big-picture view grew around him. It hurt his head to keep his eyes open, but he tried. Tried as best he could.
The universe was inflating to its proper size faster than his brain could keep up, but in the chaos of it all, he still managed to keep his eyes open long enough to see a figure hanging there in space, outside the maelstrom, the size of an ordinary man . . . waiting for him.
He’d been waiting for a while. The man turned toward him, and Petrick knew it would be his father before he even saw his face. Another projection of his father to be sure . . . but this one felt very different from the one in the field. The man opened his eyes, and they were burning with the same color as the glowing chaos behind him.
He gestured for Petrick to come join him . . .
44
PETRICK GASPED AWAKE. He was used to that now. He brought a shaking hand to his head. It pounded, just as it had in the dream, and he struggled to reach an equilibrium. Clarke walked up to him from the foot of their blanket, shaking and gentle, and the two shivered together in their makeshift bed.
They were on the floor of the med bay. The blue light over Barry was casting soft shadows. Petrick couldn’t stop his brain from spinning. If he thought the dreams before had been rough, this was five hundred times worse. It felt like the entire world was tilting downward and he was going to fall into it.
What just happened?
Haber had insisted there was more to the message; well, he’d just seen it. It didn’t make sense, and Petrick had a distinct feeling that there was still more, much more . . . and he’d finally seen it. But how?
Slowly, ever so slowly, the sensation in his head ebbed away, and Petrick was able to keep his eyes open to survey the rest of the room. Barry’s vitals were beeping soft, low, and continuous. A snort from the chair beside the bed told him that Suzy had finally fallen asleep. If she’d been mad at him for waiting so long to join her in the vigil for Barry, she hadn’t let it show. She’d just hugged him and confirmed what Balta had said in the cockpit—Barry was recovering. He was going to be okay. Petrick should get some sleep.
He’d insisted that he would stay up so she could rest instead, but she wasn’t having any of it. She was far more stubborn than he, so he’d relented.
He swung his legs out from the blanket and stood, staggering for a moment and steadying himself on the side wall. Clarke stood as well and looked up at him expectantly, wondering what they were doing. Petrick had to smile gratefully at the small ball of fluff. He’d been such a good companion on this adventure. The perfect companion, in fact. Never complaining, just moving along from stop to stop, keeping his eyes peeled for danger and snacks, never questioning where they were headed or why they were going there . . .
Looking at Suzy and Barry, he knew the same was true for them. It always had been. He knew they’d follow him wherever he led them, no matter the risk or the danger. He knew that now more than he’d ever known it before.
He scooped up Clarke into his arms and held him close to his chest. The two stood there in the blue-lit darkness, listening to Petrick’s pounding heartbeat and head gradually slow down.
Petrick was gathering strength.
Once he felt as though his senses had normalized, Petrick creaked the door open and slipped out into the hallway. Clarke squirmed to be let loose, but he couldn’t risk the dog’s tiny toenails clicking on the deck grating. The cold metal was particularly still and silent; he knew that they were traveling with their star drive, speeding faster than light toward Syrruk Prime, their course locked in courtesy of Chronos’s data stick. Balta had announced their departure as safe shortly before bed.
Petrick picked up his pace as he strode toward the command ring, then slowed once he reached a stretch of the corridor leading to the cockpit, his destination. He stopped to listen, wondering if Balta would be sleeping like the rest of the humans, or if she was on some other schedule in the internally lighted space.
There was no sound. Petrick peered as far as he dared, catching a sliver of the cockpit. What he could see was empty.
The coast was clear.
“May I ask what you are doing?”
Petrick covered his mouth to prevent himself from yelping in surprise.
The question had come from behind him. Petrick turned and saw Haber standing in the gently curving corridor. He looked puzzled. Concerned.
“You nearly scared me half to death,” Petrick said. His heart was pounding.
Haber leaned his tall frame to look at the cockpit just beyond. “Why are you sneaking to the cockpit?” he asked.
“I wasn’t,” Petrick said. It was a lie. Haber knew it was, and he frowned in response. Petrick decided to back the lie up with the truth. “The dream woke me up,” he said.
“Oh?”
“It’s changed, Haber. Something happened, I don’t know how.”
“Really?” Haber stepped forward with interest. “Can you elaborate?”
“I was looking at a mass of . . . I don’t know, debris? Maybe? But not like the Wall at all. It was swirling, angry and fast. And glowing inside.” Petrick looked at the android, hoping for a sign of recognition, but Haber shook his head. He didn’t know. “Anyway . . . my father was there, and I think there is even more to it, but I woke up before I could see it.”
“Why do you say that?” Haber asked.
“Because he was inviting me to join him.”
“Fascinating,” said Haber. His blue eyes were alight with the new development. “This is wonderful. I wonder . . . I wonder if it is proximity triggered.”
“You mean because we’ve moved into the Outer Rim?” Petrick asked. “Closer to the Source?” He hadn’t thought of that.
“Possibly.” Haber reached out for Clarke, who was still in Petrick’s arms. “We must see if we can download this new part of the message.”
Petrick pulled Clarke back and looked at his android.
“Haber, freeze.”
Haber stiffened unnaturally, obediently, vacantly . . . as he had in the Aaron’s Landing spaceport so long ago when Petrick had told him to bark like a dog. His eyes were glittering stones.
“I’m sorry, Haber,” he said, his throat tightening around the words, “but I need you to turn around and go back to your quarters, stay there, and . . . forget that you saw me here. This is what I command.”
The machine, for he was more a machine right now than he was Haber the individual, turned around without any word or gesture and marched straight back toward the cabin area. His movements were so stiff, so artificial. Everything that made Haber who he was, dour, smart, pessimistic, attentive . . . it was all suddenly absent, like a switch had been flicked. It was like he had died.
Petrick steadied himself on the wall as he watched him go. He told himself that Haber would be fine as soon as the override was released, just like before. Clarke whined and wiggled in his arms to go after him, but Petrick held fast. His stomach was doing somersaults. He lied to himself that he was just feeling lingering symptoms from the new dream, but he knew it was guilt.
He pushed it aside, and he turned back toward the cockpit.
He knew what he had to do.
“Oh, man, I’m hungry.”
Petrick awoke suddenly for the second time in one night in his makeshift bed on the floor of the medical bay . . . but this time his heart was racing for a different reason.
“Barry!” he heard Suzy exclaim from the chair next to the medical bed.
She flung herself upon him and started squeezing despite his protesting. Petrick jumped over and joined the fray, despite Barry’s protests, and Clarke a moment later was barking in between licking attacks on Barry’s forehead.
“Guys,” Barry squealed. “Guys. Not so hard!” But he was giggling, and the other two children knew he must be feeling fine.
After the dog pile had dismantled, Barry repeated his sentiment. “I. Am. Famished,” he said. “Where’s Haber?”
“In our old quarters,” Suzy answered. “I’ll go get him, and we can bring you breakfast.”
“And stay here the whole time?” Barry protested, and he started gyrating his legs
to get Suzy and Petrick off his oversized bed. “I don’t crunching think so.”
“I think you ought to stay off your leg for a while,” Petrick said, watching Barry’s injured limb move about under the blankets.
“Why?” Barry asked. “Feels fine.” To prove it, he wrestled himself out from his blankets and set his feet down onto the floor barefoot. “Yowz! . . .” he yelped as he made contact.
“See,” clucked Suzy.
“. . . The floor is cold,” Barry finished with a grin. The devil. He’d been dramatic on purpose. He stood and put his hands on his hips. “See?” he said. “Good as new.”
Petrick found he was smiling in spite of himself. Barry was okay. He really was okay. Petrick stepped in and hugged his friend again. Once he extricated himself, he realized both Barry and Suzy were looking at him strangely.
“You okay?” Suzy asked.
“Yeah,” Barry chimed in, “your eyes are all dark and stuff. Did you get any good sleep last night?”
He hadn’t. The dream hadn’t let him, and then there hadn’t been time.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said to Barry. “I’m just relieved you’re okay.”
“Guys. It was only a small cut. Just like Haber said.”
Petrick and Suzy looked at each other. “What do you remember?” Suzy asked him.
“I remember that oversized space suit.” Barry pointed at Suzy. “And I remember you being stupid and brave, as usual. I remember Haber, too, working the machine.” He gestured to the med bed. “Where is he anyway? Let’s get some food.”
Starstuff (Starstuff Trilogy Book 1) Page 29