Sunsinger

by Michelle Levigne

  Why hadn't Lin awakened? Bain guessed stellar dust wasn't that important. Maybe Lin woke up before he did, knew what was happening, and went back to sleep.

  He set up the recorder to analyze the dust—just in case—sent out a probe to collect a sample, and went back to bed. When he got up three hours later, Lin was already at her station, checking the night's log.

  “Stellar dust, huh?” She ran her fingers over the control panel, checking the buttons he had pushed. “Everything according to procedure. You're learning.”

  “I wasn't wasting time, was I, sending out a probe? I mean,” Bain hurried on, “we're in a place nobody else has seen. Something might be different here.”

  “You did exactly right. The next step,” she said with a grin, “is to distinguish when something is a danger, or just unusual. But you're learning. That's the important part.”

  Her praise carried him through the morning chores. He had to go down into the hold for his regular school lessons, and stayed to check all the fastenings of the furniture. If the Mashrami waited for them on the other side, Sunsinger would have to make multiple Knaught jumps to avoid being followed straight to Refuge. The stresses of jumping could throw Sunsinger in five different directions at once. Gravity could go up and down twenty times in a minute. Anything loose would get thrown around, broken, or cause serious damage to people or vital ship equipment if they collided during all that bumping and swerving. They were lucky the only damage last time had been to Toly's arm.

  Bain worked hard, double-checking every bolt and strap. Shari kept the littles out of his way when he worked on the bunk straps. All the passengers would be in their stasis chairs again, but a single loose net could hit something hard enough to break it.

  After dinner he made one more sensor scan of the hold. Bain wanted to crawl into bed and stay there for three days. Even the thought of going through transition again, seeing the colors, hearing and feeling the music, didn't give him energy. His fingers hurt from pulling on straps and squeezing tool handles. His arms felt limp and rubbery from pushing and lifting all day. His eyes ached from trying to see in shadows and studying scanner screens.

  Bain couldn't go to bed yet. There was one thing he wanted to check, or he knew he wouldn't sleep, no matter how dead tired he felt. He still hadn't studied the dust.

  He came up from the hold, sat down at the control panel, and brought the report up on a computer screen.

  “Want to tell me what that is?” Lin said. She sat in the galley booth, feet up on the table, and gestured with her cup at the screen on the far wall. Her voice startled him. Bain felt his face start burning in a blush.

  “Uh...” He turned back to the screens. “It's a study of the stellar dust that hit us this morning.”

  “What's so important about that dust?” Lin asked. Her face didn't show what she felt. She only looked tired.

  “I don't know. Yet,” he added on an impulse. That earned a grin from her. “I mean, we heard a little about stellar dust in lessons. Not much, because no orphans really have a chance to get into space.”

  “Oh, really?” She laughed and spread her arms, to take in the whole ship. “What do you call this, young Master Kern?” Her laugh turned into a yawn. “Bain, you should listen to the experts, and pay attention to facts and figures. You'll need them to do your job right. But those are generalizations. There are always exceptions. You're one.”

  “An exceptional young man,” Ganfer said. If a ship-brain could sound tired, Bain thought, Ganfer did.

  “Are you completely done now, Bucket of Bolts?” Lin asked. She pushed her cup into the recycling slot and launched herself toward the control panel.

  “All calculations in place, prepared for ten danger scenarios.”

  “We've been brushed with stellar dust. Are your memory banks awake enough to work up a pattern?” she asked.

  Ganfer paused. Bain knew by now the ship-brain waited for effect, for drama, not because he was low on energy or the data had to be found and analyzed.

  “Regular patterns, varying density. Analysis required?” Ganfer said.

  “Bain already did one. Collect all you can without straining yourself.” Lin winked at Bain.

  “Why?” the boy wanted to know.

  “Why avoid straining Ganfer?”

  “Why collect the dust?”

  “Finish your study, first.” Lin reached over and punched a few buttons. “They didn't teach you much about space travel or navigation or exploration, did they?”

  Bain shook his head and tried to watch three new screens fill with information—two in front of him, one on the wall. Speed, density, temperature, mineral content, organic content, weight and radiation of the dust cloud. He tried to see it all without missing a single change in the data, and earned a headache and a crick in his neck.

  “To learn anything, you have to learn to ask questions, first. You learn fastest if you ask yourself questions and figure out the answers the hard way.” Lin danced her fingers over the buttons and blanked several blocks of information. “This is what we're most interested in, right now.”

  “Metal and organic content?” Bain bit his lip before he asked ‘why.’ He stared at the numbers on the screen until the colors blurred.

  Organic. That meant the dust originally came from a planet that had plant and animal life. A planet destroyed by catastrophe or particles scattered by solar winds, meteorites or fluctuations in gravitational fields.

  “You want to know if there are any habitable planets in this solar system?” he guessed.

  “That wasn't so hard, was it?” Lin winked as she leaned back in her chair. She closed her eyes, sighed and nodded. “From those readings, there's a chance of life somewhere around here. We don't have the right equipment or the time to do it. That'll take a team from Colonial Survey and Reconnaissance. No matter what, we get a finder's fee. We'll need it to repair Sunsinger and make upgrades at some time or other in the future.” She paused to yawn. “If we record the coordinates accurately.”

  “If we get that information back to Refuge,” he whispered.

  “We'll get back. You've been saying your prayers, haven't you?”

  “Morning and evening.” Bain wondered why she asked. Lin made sure he said his prayers, but he thought it was just something she felt duty-bound to oversee, like his lessons and washing regularly and taking his vitamins.

  “Spacers know, in our blood and bone, Fi'in is real.” Lin sat up again and opened her eyes. “You can't travel through space and believe it's just an accident, a huge, molecular mistake.” She chuckled, but it was a tired sound. “I know from personal experience, Fi'in listens to prayers. He listens to children, most of all. You children keep praying, and we'll get to Refuge with no problem.”

  “Besides the Mashrami chasing us?” he asked, grinning.

  “You have a too-fast tongue, boy.” Lin reached over and tousled his hair. “Go to bed. We have a busy day tomorrow.”

  “I can sit in the dome again, can't I?”

  “How are you going to learn if you don't watch?”

  “I still don't understand why you need to know the metal content of the dust.” Bain unbuckled his safety strap and gave himself a tiny push up. He floated to the ceiling and stayed there without bouncing off.

  “How about mining operations?” She launched herself toward the sanitary cabinet to wash.

  “You can mine dust?” He knew as soon as he said it, the question was silly and Lin had been teasing him. “The dust will tell us if there's usable metal in the planet?”

  “Maybe there was usable metal once. For it to get into the dust in the quantity I want ... the planet would have to be destroyed. From the organic content, I don't think the planet was destroyed. Say prayers there's enough metal to help us. That's another lesson, later,” she said, when Bain opened his mouth to ask what she meant. Lin tugged the door open. “Think about it—and go to bed.” She gave him a teasing scowl and slipped inside the sanitary cabinet.


  Bain obeyed, pushing off the ceiling with enough force to rebound when he reached his cubicle. He grabbed the curtain rod and twisted around to swing inside. Bain tried to think of all the things Lin could do with metal dust. He fell asleep before he could figure it out.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Everybody's in stasis,” Bain reported. The last caution light on his side of the control board blinked off. He raised his eyes to study Lin. She nodded, biting her bottom lip as she looked over the board one last time.

  “Ganfer?” She started unbuckling her safety strap.

  “All three jump calculations are ready, in temporary storage and hard dump,” the ship-brain answered. A thin square of plastic protruded from the face of the control panel, under Lin's elbow. Bain thought it looked like Ganfer stuck his tongue out at them.

  “That's your responsibility now,” Lin said. She handed the square to Bain. “If Ganfer pauses for more than two seconds before answering any question, any order, you have to load that data back into the system.” She pushed off her chair and headed for the dome.

  Bain nodded and swallowed hard. Now he knew what people meant when they said they choked with fear. Something hard filled his throat and wrapped around his neck. All the coordinates and control programs for the next Knaught Point jumps were on that disk, along with the keying sequences to restart basic ship functions from the hard-wired backup system. If anything damaged Ganfer, it was Bain's responsibility to reload that data back into the computer system as fast as his fingers could push buttons. Simple things like life support and sensors and impulse jets to move them out of the way of danger depended on his speed and alertness.

  He felt proud Lin trusted him so much; he felt scared to the point of being sick. He thought of the littles in the hold. He even wished he had been nicer to Toly Gaber.

  Lin's feet vanished into the dark doorway as she pulled herself up the ladder to the dome. Bain swallowed again, tucked the square into his shirt pocket and followed her. Before he reached the doorway, the lights on the bridge dimmed. Down in the hold, the lights were already off. He hoped Kisa wasn't afraid, sitting there in the dark. He wondered if anyone in stasis would know what was going on. Dr. Anyon would know, so he could watch over the others, but did that mean the others could or couldn't hear or feel or sense what happened to the ship?

  The ladder felt cold under his fingers. Bain shivered. It felt strange to sweat and yet be cold. He paused at the top of the ladder to catch his breath and look around. He decided he didn't really want to see the color shifts again. They were beautiful, yes. Exciting. He could never guess what was coming next. That didn't make him forget the Mashrami might wait on the other side of the transition, ready to fire on them or even ram them; the Mashrami did that sometimes.

  He drifted over to his couch and strapped in, trying to keep quiet. Lin was already in place, eyes closed, hands resting around the rim of the controls. She took deep, slow breaths. Some tension lines eased from her face—or were they only invisible in the shadows? Was she praying? Bain thought so. He tried to pray, too.

  Faintly, he heard the moaning, humming, singing of the music of space. He smiled despite his fears. The sound went into his bones. He felt a little silly, even a little angry with himself that he hadn't tried to listen to the music for so long. It was always there, Lin said. Even deep inside the ship, if he paused and listened and waited for the music to come, he could hear it. Bain wished he had stopped to listen more often—he might not feel so afraid.

  “It's always there,” Lin had said the night before. “You just have to know how to listen. And when you get tight inside and full of worries, remember what it was like to hear it. Sooner or later, you hear it again. Just like Fi'in is always there, Bain, even when it doesn't feel like he cares or listens. Remember that, and relax, and sooner or later, you'll understand, and you'll find the answer or help will come.”

  Now, Bain listened with his whole heart and mind and he stored those memories away. Just like Lin stored stellar dust, just in case. She had said a smart Spacer took opportunities and stored things against need to always be prepared, because emergencies never gave warning. Bain said a prayer too, in case it got too busy and dangerous for him to pray when they really needed it.

  “Ready?” Lin whispered. Her voice sounded like a shout against the humming quiet of the dome.

  Bain opened his eyes. Lin reached out a hand, and he reached for her. Their fingers clasped for a few seconds. Lin's fingers felt cold, damp like his with nervous sweat.

  “All right, Ganfer. Let's get going.” Lin brushed her fingers over a row of switches along the top of the panel. They went from white to green.

  Through the couch, under his legs, Bain felt Sunsinger's engines shift from the hum of warm-idle to the grumble of full life. He bit his lip hard to remind himself not to say anything, not to make a single sound. Lin had to have total quiet to get them safely through the Knaught point and past any waiting Mashrami.

  A streak of stellar dust lit by their engines pointed toward the Knaught Point and vanished into the frame of the dome. Bain grinned at that sign of movement. Something tightened in his gut—pure excitement chased the fear away. He clenched his hands around the edge of his control panel and watched Lin work.

  When he looked again, colors outlined the Knaught Point. Tiny sparks pinpointed the jumping spots. Bain tried to figure out which one was their chosen doorway. Lin had showed him a few times, but it was always hard to tell with just his eyes.

  Blue streaks became arrows, pointing into the center of the swirls of energy and stellar dust. For a moment, Bain thought Sunsinger headed into the dead center of the whirlpool. Lin murmured an order and the ship shifted to the right—not much, just enough to notice.

  The blue changed to deep purple. Gold spots winked and turned silver before vanishing, outlining three jump points.

  Under his cramping hands, Sunsinger rumbled and grumbled and bucked. He thought of all the bolts and straps and fastenings he had tightened. Then the jolting stopped. Bain almost shouted, afraid the engines had died.

  Then he remembered and felt silly. Sunsinger had shifted from maneuvering speed to flight speed. The engines steadied, and the ship now moved too quickly to shudder. He remembered enough math lessons to look at the control panel and understand the numbers flashing there. They meant the ship moved fast enough to hit and enter the Knaught Point.

  He watched Lin. She studied the streaks of color across the dome. Royal purple changed to violet, shading into crimson, streaked with lemony-green and swirls of gold with silver centers. Bain stared too long at the spinning. They caught his attention, pulled his eyes deep into the spirals.

  “Now!” Lin shouted, triumph in her voice. The shout startled Bain. He jerked and turned so fast to look at her, his neck ached. Lin grinned, leaning forward, clutching at the control board. Sweat streaked her forehead and cheeks and plastered loose strands of hair to her skin.

  Bain felt the ship leap as it entered the Knaught Point. When he turned to look, the colors had already faded to electric whites and blues. The white-speckled black of normal space filled the dome.

  “Ganfer?” Lin asked, her voice cracking.

  “Back to original coordinates within three hundredths of a degree,” the ship-brain replied.

  “We'll just have to do better next time.” Her voice wobbled a little. She winked at Bain.

  “Next time?” Bain yelped. He slapped both hands over his mouth, terrified he had spoken too soon. Lin laughed.

  “Mashrami.” Ganfer sounded more machine than person. Bain wondered if Ganfer sounded like a machine when he was afraid.

  “Next point jump,” Lin ordered. Her voice crackled with energy again, no more shaky relief. She brushed her damp hair out of her face with both hands.

  “Ten seconds until arrival.”

  “Bain, on my mark, hit the release lever,” she said. “The black lever, bottom left corner of your panel.”

  Bain nodded and res
ted his hand on the lever. It was small under his palm. He pressed on it a little to make sure it would move.

  Sparkles of energy flashed around the ship. He almost yelped, almost asked Lin what was happening. Mashrami weapons? They threw bolts of energy through space to disrupt ship systems, to paralyze computers and engines and destroy life support systems.

  Would he have to re-start all the ship functions with the little disk safe in his pocket? What would happen to Ganfer, all his teasing and jokes and the stories he told? Could Ganfer die, never exist again except in memories, like people?

  People had souls—did ship-brains get souls if they were old enough, loved enough?

  “Ready,” Lin said, breaking him out of his speculations. Bain was grateful.

  The view outside the dome shifted. Bain clung to his couch with one hand, keeping his other hand on the lever. He felt a little dizzy, watching the colors swing by faster than he could watch. Sunsinger did a full one-hundred-eighty degree turn back into the Knaught Point.

  “Bain, now,” Lin said, her voice a sharp, low grunt.

  He hit the lever, a sharp pain in his palm for half a second. Bain felt something loosen in his gut—relief that he had reacted fast enough, gratitude that the lever had moved. He almost laughed at the image of pushing and pushing on the lever and the silly thing refusing to move.

  Sunsinger leaped forward, gaining power and speed. Bain turned, regaining the ache in his neck. He had to see what was going on, even if it was just black dots and lightning sparkles of energy behind them.

  A silvery, brown-streaked cloud emerged from the rear of Sunsinger, obscuring the clean black and white of space. When the ship's energy vents hit the cloud, it flared white, burning, spitting sparks like an electric storm. Bain stared two seconds, his mouth hanging open. He turned back to his control panel and tried to find out what was in that cloud.

  Stellar dust. The cloud was all that stellar dust Lin had Ganfer collect. The metal screened them when it burned; it interrupted sensor readouts, ruined visibility and hid their entry coordinates.