by Patty Jansen
The screen in front of him showed a waving line in green.
He waited, his hands over the controls, ready to react. Afraid of another burst of destructive sound? Awaiting total obliteration?
The wriggling line suddenly disappeared. “They’re receiving us.” He blew out a breath.
We waited, occasionally looking at each other. I reached out and touched Thayu’s hand. She looked at me, love obvious in her face. Not so long ago we’d been talking about a family. Today we faced death.
Nothing happened for a very long time. Various features of the outside of the ship scrolled over the viewscreen. Wow, some of those panels were terribly scratched. Not really a condition I’d like to fly in.
Then without warning, the controls went dark. A zooming sound filled the cabin. I was pressed in my seat.
“They’re pulling us in,” the pilot said. “I’ve lost all control over the ship.”
I looked at Thayu. This was it.
Chapter 24
* * *
WE MOVED AT quite a high speed but remained at roughly the same distance from the ship as we had been.
The pilot fiddled with the controls but from where I sat it didn’t look like he had much success in bringing them back to life. One of the copilots was trying to contact the main fleet on a separate system that still appeared to have power.
But after a while he announced, “All the outside links are jammed.”
Thayu had linked the outside visual feed to her reader and was watching the structures scroll past, while occasionally tapping the screen. She wore her thought sensor and I presumed she was taking notes.
Then we started moving towards the ship. We entered the shadow side, out of the harsh light of the giant star. It was pitch dark here. Thayu used her sonar to get an image, but the quality and resolution dropped considerably.
“There,” the pilot said.
The dark surface with various protrusions was broken by a huge open bay. The opening was square, several ships across, and dark inside apart from some blinking lights in the depths.
This appeared to be where we were headed. When we hovered over the opening, a laser-like shaft of light pierced the darkness, coming from within the ship. It became visible only where it hit some kind of barrier of vapour. It swept the mouth of the docking bay and found our ship. An indistinct pattern of light blue spots flashed over the pilot’s screen.
“Diagnostics,” Thayu said.
“They send a huge bunch of frequencies all packaged in a highly targeted beam,” the pilot said. He had his head turned to a screen to the side of the main viewscreen.
No one spoke in the cabin while the blue light tracked over the outside of the craft. I clutched the armrests of my seat. Thayu was studying images of the docking opening on her reader, making notes and comparing things. The screen showed the recorded graphics enlarged to the point of blurriness. She looked busy so I didn’t ask her what she was doing and she didn’t volunteer information. This was Thayu in her element.
The copilot at the back was also looking at something on the screen. Some kind of text. I thought he’d said that the system had been fried.
Thayu briefly met my eyes. She put a finger to her lips and gestured with her eyes at the big ship.
It looked very much like this was another data-gathering operation. But I didn’t understand how they communicated back to the army ship. A chilling thought: was I but a pawn in their game? It looked like they had a plan, and Coldi plans usually involved guns and explosives. I, Thayu and three junior officers were going to take on a ship of thousands? What were they thinking?
The ship descended into the maw of the opening. It was dark in here. A lot like the Coldi ships, actually.
“How huge is this place?” I couldn’t see a floor, only platforms that floated in the air without anything to hold them up. I couldn’t see the walls and I couldn’t see other ships.
Thayu had pulled up the diagram that we’d gotten from Federza. She was tracking something with her finger. The image zoomed in, showing a three-dimensional framework of lines that described the shape of the ship. I found it really hard to make much sense of these images.
As we slowly moved into the hold the vastness of the place overwhelmed me. I could only see brightly lit platforms hovering in nothingness. The sides of the cavity were well out of view.
We slowed down a lot.
There was a clang against the outside of the ship. The ship settled on the surface of one of the hovering platforms and we settled in our chairs. There was gravity here.
“We’re in,” the copilot said to whoever was still listening.
A moment later, the pilot said, “Outside air is declared safe.”
“What do we do now?”
“Wait, I guess.”
We waited. Sweat rolled down my stomach. Thayu was still annotating her images. I wanted to ask her what she was doing, but she made an Indrahui hand gesture that she had learned from Evi and Telaris. Quiet.
Then the screen lit up with large blue letters.
Your envoy can exit the vessel. Leave weapons behind. The language was quite stiff, as if they’d learned Coldi from listening to gamra meetings.
Thayu nodded to me.
This was it, then.
I rose from my seat. I felt heavy. Probably the ship was running on Asto gravity and it was a bit more than Ceren or Earth.
Thayu gestured, Be careful. She tapped her arm to indicate the gun she wore there, but I couldn’t see how she would even know if I was in trouble. All the electronics in my suit had gone dead. I couldn’t update on anything that happened to me.
This was such a stupid expedition.
Damn, Thayu.
With the pilots in the cabin I didn’t know if I should kiss her, but I wanted to. She looked so . . . I was going to say vulnerable, but that was an Earth reaction. Thayu’s expression wasn’t one of Coldi vulnerability. It was one of determination. As always, they had a plan. They had asked me to come because the ship people would allow us in here, but I was not a negotiator. I was a decoy. She was going to try and free her father by force.
She just looked at me and shook her head slightly, as if even though our feeders weren’t working, she knew what I was thinking and wanted me to stop thinking those things because others might be able to see them, too. Not that I knew how, but people always said that my thoughts were easy to deduce. It was scary.
So I hugged her and she hugged me back and I hoped that whatever she had planned wasn’t too crazy, but knowing her, it probably would be. After all, she’d had us flying on giant drones into the sunrise over Athyl during our last adventure. I wasn’t even armed this time.
The outside door opened. A waft of warm and humid air spilled into the cabin. It had a very distinct Coldi scent: that of wet stone.
Standing in the door opening at the top of the gangplank, I looked into a massive hall. The ship stood on a small platform that hung in the middle of a huge empty space. There was no light in the hall except a soft glow around the platform, and no sign of movement. I stepped off the gangplank onto a hard, metallic surface. The sound of my footsteps vanished in the vast space. I walked past the side of the ship, but found nothing of importance. Nothing that attached the platform to the invisible walls or any other structure that would allow us to get off this thing. Nothing on the other side either. Great, what now?
There was a rumble behind me. I whirled around, but it was only the pilot of the shuttle closing the door.
Well, this was kind of . . . anticlimactic. How to neutralise an enemy: plant them on a platform suspended in thin air without any means to get off. Then let them sit there and ignore them. They would never need to talk to us again. Maybe Asha and the others were on a similar platform in the darkness where I couldn’t see them. Maybe, to add insult to injury, Asha watched us landing and getting out of the ship, knowing what would happen but unable to warn us.
That was an unsettling thought.
All
our plans about readiness to escape in case things went wrong now seemed thoroughly ridiculous. Never mind I had taken Thayu and the pilots. There was no way we could get out of this ship if we wanted to. Having lost all control over the shuttle, the pilot could do nothing. So, what was I supposed to do now? Wait here? Feel like an idiot?
But then something started happening: a group of three specks of light came floating down from somewhere above. When they came closer, it became clear that they were people, but their appearance was eerily ghostlike. I was looking for signs that this was a projection, but when they came closer it was clear that they were real, live people. They eyes moved, studying me and our shuttle. They were tall and lanky like the Aghyrians in Barresh. Two of them wore identical shirts: grey with red trims. I figured they were guards or assistants. Both had long dark hair tied back in buns. The person in the middle had white hair and wore a dark blue outfit. With his pale eyes, he looked a lot like a full-blood Mirani aristocrat. Even more aloof than Federza. His face bore some wrinkles but from my experience with older Aghyrians, he could be anywhere from seventy to a hundred and twenty years old, like Delegate Akhtari. Or maybe four hundred years old. This man might well be the captain, Kando Luczon.
They floated down until they stood on the platform. They towered over me. One of the guards was a woman. The old man had penetrating green eyes with which he studied every part of me. His face remained impassive.
I bowed, hoping that bowing was something they would understand.
The old man gave a sharp command.
Before I could reply, the two guards approached me on each side. I slowly straightened and remained still, not wanting to provoke them, but also not wanting to make them think that I was afraid. One of them held a small device against my neck. I held my breath, expecting a sting of a needle, but it didn’t come. He withdrew the device and showed it to his companion, who nodded and then nodded again to the white-haired man.
He said something to the pair and they fell back again, and then he said in passable Coldi, “You interest me.” He used formal pronouns.
From close up, his face looked older than I had thought at first.
“You are Kando Luczon?”
He laughed and it was a rude sort of laugh that set my teeth on edge.
“Kando Luczon,” he repeated, the sounds much sharper than I had pronounced them.
The Coldi language lacked harsh sounds. One of the comments I always got if I returned to Earth was that I pronounced s as z and t as d or th.
“I come in peace,” I continued. I used formal pronouns, but if he’d been a person at gamra I would use professional ones to indicate that I thought he was being rude. That nuance would be lost on him. He might only know the formal words and their associated noun declensions.
He laughed again. “Peace through a thousand war ships.”
“The ships are not mine.”
“Yet you came on such a ship.”
“The ships belong to Asto. They want to resolve this situation without conflict. The ships are out there in case there is a conflict. The ships are here to stop your sling crippling our Exchange.”
He laughed again, and then there followed an uneasy silence in which he studied me, his expression intense. I found it hard to believe that this was the same man who had seen Asto destroyed. That he could still talk to us. That he and his crew had left the galaxy, that they could build an anpar generator that could span that sort of distance reliably.
The two crewmembers who had come with him both stared into the distance. Listening to instructions? Studying the shuttle?
He didn’t look like he was going to say something so I continued, “As you can see, I’m not Coldi. I have been asked to come here because I’ve studied different people and their customs. I’m a negotiator. I’m interested in hearing your story.” I was doing my best “clueless diplomat” impersonation and if Thayu had been standing next to me, she’d be rolling her eyes.
“Yes, you are interesting.”
I wondered what that scan device to my neck had revealed about me. “I’m from a different type of people who are not related to the Coldi race.”
He let another silence lapse, while he regarded me with a kind of are you, now? expression. Then he said, “Come.”
Without warning, he stepped off the platform into the air. I just managed to keep myself from grabbing his arm to stop him falling. He turned to me, standing in midair, and gave me a what? kind of look. “Have you not seen localised gravity fields?”
I hesitated. If I said no, he might consider me dumb and might not elaborate.
“We have . . . something like this.” I was trying to wrack my brain over what example I would cite if he asked. Hell, localised gravity? Of course, the gravity well I had seen in the large army ship.
But that was Asto military and highly secret—
No, Ezhya had shown it to me for a reason. That reason was obviously that he wanted me to bluff. He might have known that the ship had something like this. It would show up in their gravity field scans.
I stepped off the platform, holding my breath as if jumping off a dive board into the water. As soon as my feet had left the surface of the platform, all semblance of gravity disappeared.
Whoa. I almost went toppling, except where there was no gravity, there wasn’t any toppling. The shuttle standing on the platform gave me a good indication of which way was up, but I wasn’t feeling any of that.
One of the guards took my arm while I was trying my best to recover my dignity. Don’t behave like a dunce, Mr Wilson. It does not go well with bluffing.
Damn, this really made me feel like I had a bad bout of vertigo. I guessed a bout of puking also wouldn’t do wonders for the relationship, and thinking about puking was a really bad thing to do while I was trying to keep my stomach calm. I could taste that revolting liquid meal in the back of my throat.
Stop it, Mr Wilson.
After the two guards had dragged me along for a while, I noticed that while there might not be any gravity, my feet seemed to “stick” to an unseen point in the air, which allowed me to stand up. Every time I made the action of putting down my feet, that “stickiness” returned.
In this manner, we “walked” through the air. A breeze wafted from somewhere above us and this seemed to be where we were headed.
We came past a number of similar platforms. Some were empty, others contained small craft of the type I had seen before, the distinctive low-slung shapes that were carved in stone panels in the aquifers of Asto and in the history archives of Barresh. Judging by the shape, they were surface-to-orbit craft, with streamlined shapes and powerful engines. Others I had never seen before: oval-shaped things that were all cabin and virtually no engine, and dark, arrow-shaped craft that may or may not be fighter craft.
As we progressed through the hall, the platforms started to become tilted until most of them hung at right angles to the direction I had thought was up.
We came to the side of the hall, most of which was made up of cranes and platforms pointing in all different directions. One platform, facing the same way as we did, contained a stack of crates, while the next hung at a 90-degree angle, but there were cranes on the platform whose chains also hung at the same angle. The platform behind that was upside down, but a small craft stood on it, adhering to the upside-down surface like a gecko. That alone was enough to give anyone vertigo.
I saw no activity on any of these platforms.
We made for a gallery-like shelf. When we stood on the metal surface, and its gravity had re-established a sense of direction, I figured that the darkness of the hall might not be a matter of choice. Added to the impression I got from the unfixed damage on the outside of the ship, I wondered how many crew this ship still had. Maybe the situation was different from what I had expected. They had been away for four hundred years, had not found anything, and they had elected to come back. They were limping, almost dead because of disease, interior feuds or something else. They h
eld Asha as hostage because they feared that vast army that was watching them, and other than the sling, they not only had no weapons, but no people to man them. This was an action of desperate people.
From the gallery we went into an opening to a corridor. Here the direction of gravity suddenly changed sideways. Whoa. I held onto the railings that seemed to be set in the middle of the floor for that purpose. We stepped onto a platform that moved down and came out into another passage. Down or sideways, I’d lost track of the directions.
This passage looked like a type of service corridor. There were little alcoves in the walls with screens and workstations. I couldn’t help but stare at the slim designs and how much they resembled the latest technology designs on Earth, and thinking that would surely have to be a coincidence. The text on the screens was very different, and so was the way that images detached themselves from the screen and floated to the next screen, flapping like a butterfly.
In this passage, we also met the first other crew of the ship: a couple of men and women in muted grey clothing who worked silently and efficiently at the workstations. They used some sort of thought or iris sensor, even though I couldn’t see any, because they didn’t type.
They looked up while their leader passed, and followed his progress down the passage with their eyes. None of them said anything, and the captain didn’t acknowledge any of them. When he had passed, they averted their eyes and kept working, not looking at us either.
Something about that behaviour made me uneasy. They’d been travelling through space for four hundred years, and for the first time someone from outside the ship came on board. One would think that it would make people curious, at the very least.
At the end of the passage we came out in a wide room with a floor that was black and smooth as glass. In the middle stood a semicircular couch. The far end was taken up by a bank of curved viewscreens which displayed the outside of the ship and, beyond that, all the white specks that were the Asto army’s ships.
Captain Luczon invited me to sit on the couch.