by Judith Tarr
Khalida knew with absolute certainty that he should not be allowed off Nevermore. It was her duty and obligation to preserve the safety of the United Planets. If she let this man loose on the spaceroads, God and Allah and Great Cthulhu knew what would come of it.
She kept her mouth shut and her eyes forward. Crew were loading cargo in the corner of her eye: boxes of samples from the excavation for the museum at home, and trade goods from the tribes.
As the last of them slid into the hold, the passenger access finally opened. “All clear to board,” the pilot’s voice sang out over the comm.
Marina caught Khalida in a fierce embrace. Her husband was directly behind her. Between the two of them they squeezed the breath out of her. “You be careful,” Marina said. She sounded angry, which meant she was trying not to cry. “Don’t get into any more trouble than you can help. Come back soon.”
“As soon as I can,” Khalida said.
They let her go. Rashid kissed her forehead and her cheeks and murmured a blessing in Arabic. Unregenerate atheist though she was, she was glad to have it.
“Five minutes,” the comm said. “Five minutes to liftoff.”
Khalida had to go now or she never would. That alternative tempted her sorely, but Lieutenant Zhao was waiting at the top of the ramp, flanked by burly marines. She could go under her own power or under arrest. That was all the choice she had.
She opted for dignity, such as it was. Rama had already disappeared into the shuttle.
~~~
She had to give him credit for courage. When the doors shut and sealed and the shuttle powered up, he sat perfectly still across from her. The only sign of tension was the greying of his knuckles on the arms of his seat.
As they lifted above the plain and set course for outer orbit, he relaxed visibly, and probably with intent. Lieutenant Zhao and his marines had taken over the rear seats, and they were watching.
Khalida wondered what they thought of Rama. His clearances were beautifully forged. She would not have suspected that they were false if she had not known who he really was.
According to the records on file with the shuttle and the transport, he was one Madhusudana Rama, citizen of Dreamtime, certified traveler-on-walkabout, moving on from Nevermore, destination indeterminate—as it should be: that was the meaning of walkabout. The list of previous stopping places went back a handful of years, fading into a somewhat dull and thoroughly blameless existence on his supposedly native world.
It was rather impressive, as covers went. MI would have done better, but not by much. The fact that an eleven-Earthyear-old boy had done it with a house computer, even with a psi master to help, would terrify Khalida when she had the energy to spare. Psycorps would never get their claws on Jamal, but MI would be all too interested in him when he was older.
Once the shuttle was in the air, Rama let out the breath he must have been holding since the flight began, and leaned toward the viewport. There was no telling what was in his mind as he watched his world drop away beneath him.
The blue of the sky gave way to the blackness of space, with the planet’s curve diminishing below. Rama sat back. There was still a deep tension in him, but on the surface he was a traveler of worlds, marveling at their various wonders. He took off his hat and unfastened his coat.
He was not so ordinary to look at now. He wore the torque that Khalida distinctly remembered not seeing while he waited for the shuttle. Now there it was under the high collar of his suit—right in front of Lieutenant Zhao. Was he trying to flip the bird in the agent’s face?
Khalida closed her eyes and sighed.
~~~
She caught what scraps of sleep she could. There had been too little of that last night. Her head ached dully, as if her skull were too small for her brain.
The slight jolt of docking startled her awake. The crewmember who had been looking after the passengers, a slender young woman nearly as dark as Rama, glided through the cabin. The shuttle had gone to half-gravity to match the setting in the landing bay: easier for unloading.
Khalida should have thought to warn Rama. He was holding himself together, probably by sheer will.
Lieutenant Zhao and the marines were waiting for Khalida. There was nothing she could do for Rama but hope he lost control after Psycorps was out of there.
She could make that happen, at least. She stood up, taking a moment to remember how to balance. It came back fast. Her first step had a fraction too much bounce: she caught herself before she hit the ceiling, recalibrated, and settled into the low, gliding motion that the crewmember had demonstrated before her.
She felt Rama’s eyes on her, recording and studying. She felt when his attention turned away, too. It was rather too much like living with her skin off.
The shuttle bay opened in front of Khalida. Half a dozen other shuttles were docked along it. Leda was a heavy cruiser, big enough for troop transport; this was a patrol run through Ceti Quadrant, which happened to be convenient for both Psycorps and MI.
She forced herself to put Rama out of her mind. He was the universe’s problem now. She had problems of her own, beginning with the detachment of marines that fell in around her as she reached the end of the bay.
“Am I under arrest?” she asked the one at her right shoulder.
He did not even flick a glance at her. Bad sign, that. Her headache went from distinctly annoying to blinding.
~~~
Khalida would hardly have been surprised to find herself in the brig. The captain’s office was only marginally more reassuring, even with the person at the desk slipping smoothly out of at least four uplinks and a comm ping, rising and stepping around the desk and pulling Khalida into a long, fierce hug.
The marines and Lieutenant Zhao had discreetly evaporated. They would not have gone far, but for now it was enough.
Captain Hashimoto held Khalida at arm’s length and shook her so hard her teeth rattled. “Damn you, woman! Don’t you ever answer your messages?”
“I was hiding,” Khalida said.
“On a planet with a total human population of five.” Captain Hashimoto dropped Khalida a good few centimeters, which was a feat: she was barely taller than Khalida’s chin. “Don’t do that again.”
She tipped Khalida backward into a hoverchair and dropped into one that drifted around to face it. Khalida sat for a moment and concentrated on breathing.
Hashimoto Tomiko had that effect on people. Khalida found herself smiling—and that was not what she had intended at all. “I suppose several dozen of those messages were to crow at me about how you got yourself a ship.”
“And that I was coming to get you, whether you wanted it or not,” said Tomiko. She tucked up her feet, frowning. She looked like a child, but anyone who made the mistake of treating her like one lived to regret it. “You did pick an interesting place to disappear to. Whoever slapped the Perpetual Preserve designation on it was either damned lucky or had damned good connections in high places. If U.P. Admin had any way to touch that much pristine Earth-class real estate, they’d have it colonized before you could blink.”
“The planet is not empty.” Khalida surprised herself with a rush of anger. “It has inhabitants.”
“A few thousand primitive tribesmen,” Tomiko said. “U.P. would fence off an island somewhere and turn them loose.” She waved the subject aside before Khalida could erupt. “Never mind. They’re there and you’re here, and the universe is back the way it should be.”
“You think so?” Khalida said.
Tomiko kicked her chair over toward the wall, which opened at her approach. She pulled out a bottle and a pair of glasses, filled them deftly as she floated back toward Khalida, and handed her the fuller of the two.
Khalida drank a long swallow of smoky fire. It burned its way to her stomach. She held the second swallow in her throat until her head spun with the fumes, then let it slip down to join the first.
“Tell me there aren’t any orders,” she said. “You pulled rank
and abused your privileges shamelessly to get me off Nevermore.”
“I did that,” said Tomiko, “but there are orders. MI’s calling you back.”
“Voluntarily? Not because you exploited a few connections?”
“I didn’t have to: they’d already cut the orders. I’m taking you to Centrum.”
“The long way or the short?”
“Mostly the short,” Tomiko said with regret.
“That’s still a solid tenday,” Khalida said.
“Most of it in jump,” said Tomiko, “and cut off from the subspace feed.” She saluted Khalida with her glass. “To mystery and suspense.”
Khalida returned the salute. “To hiding your head in the sand.”
They grinned at each other. Soldiers’ humor: coal black and sharp enough to draw blood.
It was good to be back. That feeling was strictly temporary and had a great deal to do with Tomiko’s bottle of brandy, but Khalida enjoyed it while she had it.
18
Aisha’s plan had succeeded beautifully so far. She and Jamal had worked it out when he was in his pirate phase, in case they ever needed to stow away on a spaceship.
Not that she’d said a word to him or to anyone but the grandmother and Malia. What her brother didn’t know, he couldn’t tell.
All it took was a shipping container, a portable life-support system with backup chargers, and a supply of food and water. They’d commandeered the equipment last year and stowed it in one of the outbuildings. The supplies weren’t too hard to siphon off from stores.
With everybody busy excavating or cataloguing or researching or hacking systems for Rama, nobody had noticed Aisha coming and going around the shuttle. Adding one more container to the manifest was a little harder, but Jamal wasn’t the only hacker in the family. He always got the blame, but as often as not it was Aisha who’d done the hacking.
She’d figured three earthdays to get off Nevermore and onto the ship, then wait for the first jump. Once they were in jumpspace, turning back was much harder. And Leda had orders that didn’t allow much room for unloading a stowaway.
They might space her. She had considered that. The ship had lifepods and she knew where they were; she’d have to hope she could get to one before the marines got to her.
But that was in the future and might not happen at all. Her chrono said she was two days in. She’d run through most of the databeads she’d brought with her reader. She still had enough space rations for another shipday. She wasn’t quite ready to run screaming through the spaceways. Yet.
She was horrendously bored and missing Mother and Pater and Jinni and even Jamal so badly her insides hurt. The rumble of sheer terror underneath, not just for Nevermore but for herself now she’d done this enormous and irreversible thing, made it almost impossible to think.
She could hang on for one more day. One more endless round of hours until jump.
An alarm went off, so loud and close she jumped like a rabbitzoid.
Jump alarm. One hour to jump.
But it was only—it wasn’t supposed to—
She peeled herself off the ceiling, literally in the half-gravity of the cargo bay. She had no intention of riding through jump in a shipping container. Strapped into a cradle at full ship’s gravity, with the ship ready to feed in meds against the nausea and the disorientation and the potential brain damage, was bad enough. Inside a metal container at half-gravity, even with what she’d done to make the container fit to live in, was really not on. She needed a better place to hide, and she needed it fast, while ship and crew were busy prepping for jump.
She pulled on the clothes she’d brought. She was careful about it, though the alarms made her gut tie up in knots. When she was dressed and had everything with her that she was likely to need, she slipped out the back door of the container and crept away through the maze of boxes in the cargo bay.
She had the Leda’s schematics memorized. She knew where the main corridors were, and where crew went when they needed to get around fast. She wasn’t sure exactly where Rama was, but there weren’t many guest cabins on a military ship, and they were all on the same level. He was the only passenger on this leg of the voyage, which meant the other rooms would be empty.
Once she thought about Rama, she knew where he was. She could feel him. He was part of the sun she was still using to keep Psycorps from finding her.
She did her best to keep him from feeling her. She crept through the maintenance ducts that ran through the whole ship. For someone thin and not very tall, like Aisha, they were big enough to walk upright in, and the lights there were emergency lights, just bright enough to see by.
She counted levels as she went up the ladder, then went off sideways. Nobody came at her from any direction. The crew must be all battened down for jump, or else busy making it happen.
She wouldn’t let herself think about what it would be like if she didn’t get to a cabin before jump. She moved as fast as she could, as quietly as she possibly could.
The ship relied on the crew’s implants to keep track of them. Anybody who didn’t belong there would trigger alarms. But she hadn’t triggered any.
Maybe not having real implants yet, just the house-computer model, meant she was basically invisible to the ship. Or maybe the ship knew, and wasn’t doing anything about it.
She didn’t dare link to its web to find out. All she could do was keep on going, and hope she didn’t run into a troop of marines.
She made it to the hatch. The passage on the other side was wide and high enough for the larger end of human norm. It felt huge after the one she’d been in.
Now she had to hope the cabins weren’t locked. That was the down side of not being linked in to the ship. If the Leda couldn’t see her, neither could the doors.
Maybe she hadn’t been as smart as she thought she was.
She had to keep going. The hallway was empty, but it might not stay that way. She went on past the door where she felt Rama, down two to be safe, and pressed her hand to the touchpad on the third one.
“Ident code, please,” the door said.
Then the ship said, “Jump warning. Ten minutes.”
Aisha lost fifteen seconds to a panic attack. Her eyes darted up and down the corridor. It was all closed doors with numbers on them.
The door to cabin 7 slid halfway open. A shadow leaned out. “Get in,” Rama said.
Aisha didn’t try to pretend she wasn’t there. She dived into the kind of cabin she’d traveled in since she was small: six jump cradles built into the walls, two of which were open and waiting, and everything else tightly stowed until the ship made it into subspace.
Aisha’s panic wasn’t screaming as loudly now. She dived for the nearest cradle, but she took an instant to say to Rama, “Get strapped in. It’s almost time.”
He was already moving as if he knew what to do. She fastened the straps the way she’d been taught, and thought about hitting the panel that brought the wall up over the cradle, but decided not to, the way she always did.
Rama left his cradle open, too. She hoped it wasn’t a terrible idea, but just about the time she started to say something, the thirty-second alarm went off.
That was the longest and the shortest time in the world. Aisha made herself breathe deep, in and out. Breathing helped.
Then the world fell apart.
Supposedly it was different for everyone. For Aisha it was like being blown up in slow motion, with each piece of her spinning away into infinite dark. The dark was full of stars, but they were all stretched and twisted and their light had collapsed into itself. They flowed around her like water.
Chronos said jump lasted a minute at most. Inside Aisha’s head, that minute was forever. She had heard of people going into that place and never coming out. Even people who did come out could keep a part of it in them, a piece of infinity that floated up at odd moments and sometimes drove them insane.
Aisha could see Rama, because she’d turned her head right before
the jump took her. He was lying on his back like an effigy on a tomb, and his eyes were open.
They were full of stars. Galaxies wheeled under his skin. He reached up his hand, though the straps should have kept him from doing any such thing, and gathered a handful of suns.
He was smiling. It was a sweet smile, nothing evil about it at all, but it made Aisha’s skin shiver. Nobody ought to be happy about being in the middle of jump.
As quick as that, they were out. The walls were solid again. The All Clear rang through the ship.
There was not supposed to be any difference from inside between truespace and subspace, but Aisha had always been able to tell. Subspace felt deep and cold and quiet, like being under the ocean. It was supposed to be empty of life, too. It was just her imagination that filled it with vast shapes. They swam all around the ship, paying no attention to it, except to slide past when it got in their way.
She unfastened the straps and got up slowly. Rama hadn’t said a word since he pulled Aisha into the cabin. He stowed the cradles he and Aisha had been in, and ordered the cabin to rearrange itself into a proper stateroom. Then he sat cross-legged on the bunk farthest from the door.
He was in the ship’s computer. Aisha felt it like a tickle in the back of her skull.
He could walk inside a system without triggering any of its security alarms, because he wasn’t accessing it in any way they’d been programmed to recognize. He was even more invisible than Aisha was—and he could get into systems she couldn’t get near.
He was terribly dangerous. He didn’t scare Aisha, though she supposed he should have.
“Your parents are beside themselves,” he said. He was still in the computer, but he was in the room, too, looking straight at her. “They think you’re somewhere on-planet; that was clever of you, setting a rover to fly out to sea the day after you left. Were you planning to let them know where you really are?”
“Eventually,” Aisha said. “Are you going to tell them?”