She hesitated a long time before she spoke. “I don’t think so, not on my own.”
I knew it must have cost her to make that admission. “What about your datapad—Pita? No super navigational abilities we don’t know about?”
I heard a smile in Sord’s voice, a rare thing. “She can do a lot of things, Captain, but she can’t fly a ship by herself.”
I swallowed again. My mouth had gone dry, and my throat felt like sandpaper. But we couldn’t let ourselves be blown up or captured by PrimeCorp. We had to warn Nearspace. Unsteadily, I pushed myself out of the chair. “Okej. Then I’ll try to help you. Maybe between us—”
I made it halfway to the co-pilot’s seat before my legs buckled. Baden tried to catch me, but my arm picked up a heavy tremor and he couldn’t hold me. I crashed to the metal decking, legs kicking feebly, completely out of my control. My head banged painfully onto the floor, so hard I felt the lump begin to swell immediately.
“Luta!” Hirin was up from the nav console and at my side, awkwardly turning me on my side. Oddly, I smelled strawberries. The word asteroid seemed to be stuck in my head, my mind looping it over and over asteroid asteroid field asteroid orbit asteroid belt asteroid asteroid. Black dots starred my vision, expanding like the mouth of a wormhole until I could see only black. My eyes were wide open, but I couldn’t see.
I could still hear, though. I heard Jahelia Sord telling Baden something that didn’t make any sense.
“That storage room behind the head,” she said. It sounded like speaking hurt her throat, but the words tumbled out, terse and sharp. “Rear wall, behind a box of dried pasta. Inside a bag marked ‘filters’. There’s some stuff there—get the med injector—it’s the one that Chron doctor used on her. Still a dose in it. I don’t know if it will do any good. But if the convulsions have started, I can tell you it can’t hurt.”
Skimchair rolling across decking. Running feet. Yuskeya’s voice . . . Maja’s voice, too? She must be all right. Tears pricked my eyes at that. Hirin’s hand under my head. Someone clutching my hand. Words and voices spinning around me, cluttering up the air, meaningless, noisy. Asteroid asteroid asteroid.
The running feet returning. Something cool and round pressed to the base of my neck, and a familiar spreading tingle that was half-pleasant, half-pain. I thought about drawing in a deep breath, tried, and found I could. Specks of light like tiny fireworks danced in my vision, and sight returned as they cleared. My body returned to me. It had stopped shaking. The lump on my head felt tender where Hirin’s hand held it, and I managed to get a hand on the decking and push myself upright. In the space of a few more heartbeats, I felt clear and light and absolutely purposeful.
“Whoa, Captain,” Yuskeya said, her hand on my shoulder. “Take it easy. I don’t know what just happened, but you’re in no shape—”
“No, that’s the point, Yuskeya. I am in the shape—the shape I need to be in to help Sord navigate the asteroids. Look.” I held out my hand to her. Rock steady. I put the hand on the comm board next to Baden and pulled myself to my feet, a little wobbly but a thousand times better than I’d been minutes ago. “But we don’t know how long it will last, so there’s no time to lose.”
“The other PrimeCorp ships are almost in torpedo range,” Baden said.
“And the asteroid field is dead ahead,” Jahelia Sord said. “Decision time, people.”
“Yuskeya—the coordinates?”
She gave me one more hard, searching stare, then crossed hurriedly to the nav board and keyed in commands. When she turned back to me, her eyes were dark with concern. “No good. The configuration has changed.”
“All right.” I squeezed Maja’s hand—she’d been the one holding it, still pale-faced and trembly, but moving under her own power—and let it go, sliding into the co-pilot’s seat. “Sord, you’re dock. I’ll take starboard. Viss will shut down everything but the maneuvering jets. We’re going to weave our way through this to the wormhole, and then engage the skip drive, okej?”
Jahelia Sord didn’t take her eyes off the board, her fingers skimming the controls like a musician playing a delicate instrument. Her lips were pressed tight together, the muscles in her neck strained. “Got it.”
There was no time to say anything else as we plunged into the tumbling field. Like the other field Rei and I had navigated, the asteroids came in every size, from pebbles you’d find scattered along a riverbed to monsters twice the size of the ship. Their smooth and cratered surfaces loomed terrifyingly close on the screen as we ducked, dodged, and wove through them, always focused on the spot where the wormhole’s dark mouth waited for us, if we could only reach it in one piece.
Smaller rocks battered against the shields, translating into tiny bursts of light on the viewscreen. We couldn’t avoid them all, not this time. I flinched at every impact, waiting for the one that would burn out the weakened shields.
“I never want to see another asteroid after this,” Jahelia Sord said conversationally. The strain in her voice belied her composure.
“Shields are holding,” Viss reassured us.
I knew they couldn’t protect us from the larger rocks, not in their current state, but it was nice to know we didn’t have to do this perfectly in order to survive.
“Looks like the PrimeCorp ships won’t follow us in,” Baden said after a few minutes. “They’re getting close to the field, but slowing.”
The asteroids finally thinned, the wormhole mouth a shadowed disc up ahead. “Initiating skip drive,” Sord said.
I sat back from the board, letting my hands fall into my lap as the spun-rainbow colours of the wormhole swallowed us up. Fatigue flooded me, reaction and relief making my arms feel heavy and weak, even though I knew the injection wouldn’t be wearing off yet. “Thanks, Jahelia Sord,” I said, turning to her. She had her eyes focused on the pilot’s board, guiding the ship though the delicate dance of wormhole skipping, but she smiled.
“Don’t thank me yet; you’re still not home,” she said.
“But I think now I’ll make it,” I told her, “and that’s thanks to you.”
“True.” She grinned. “So what you’re saying is, you owe me one?”
I laughed, the first time I’d done so in a long time. It felt good. “I was thinking maybe it made us even. But I guess we can talk about it.”
“Yeah, let’s do that,” she said. I had the feeling it would be an interesting talk. I leaned forward, resting my arms on the co-pilot’s board and closing my eyes. After a moment I felt Hirin’s hand on my shoulder.
He bent low and whispered in my ear, “I think we can take it from here. Why don’t you go and rest?”
Before I could answer him, Rei woke up. Luckily, we were out of the skip by then.
“IT’S OKAY,” I heard Gerazan say. I was about to answer him when I realized that he wasn’t talking to me. He’d been sitting on the deck with Rei all this time, waiting for a break in the multiple crises so he could help move her to her quarters. She must be coming around. I forced my eyes open again to see how she was doing.
Rei opened unfocused eyes and looked around blearily. Then she seemed to notice Sord. She sprang like a scalded Erian cat, up from the floor where she’d been lying, to catch Jahelia Sord by the shoulders and shove her bodily out of the pilot’s chair. Sord hadn’t had a chance to see Rei coming. She lurched across the bridge decking, off balance, finally falling against a vacant console. The ship lurched to the side, and Rei staggered.
“Rei!” Hirin yelled, and she turned but didn’t seem to see him.
I pushed myself up to sit again, staring up at her. “Rei! It’s all right,” I barked. “Sit down, dammit, and let Sord fly the ship! You’re hurt!”
Confusion slid across her face, tracking over her darkly beautiful tattoos. She focused on me with an effort. “I thought—Luta, are you—”
“Rei, Luta’s sick, you were knocked out, and Sord was helping us pilot. Nothing’s wrong.” Hirin’s voice was strong and lucid an
d seemed to break through the fog of her mental disarray.
She glanced over at the vacant console where Sord had fallen. She hadn’t moved to get up. “I don’t think she’s going to be able to keep helping,” she said carefully.
Of course not. Jahelia Sord was out cold.
“THEN SIT DOWN and start driving,” Hirin roared at Rei, and it worked, because she did just that. Her fingers didn’t move with their usual fluidity, but she straightened out the course that had begun to drift.
“Yuskeya,” Viss said, one of the few times I’d heard him speak directly to her in weeks, “wouldn’t you have something in First Aid that would help Rei?”
“I would,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Thanks, Viss.”
She jumped up from the nav board and ran for the First Aid station, returning almost immediately to slip an injector up against Rei’s arm implant. Rei shuddered and nodded. “I’m good.”
I still felt okay, if a little weak, so I got up and crossed with Yuskeya to take a look at Sord. She had a welling red lump on her forehead, and I suspected that our momentary camaraderie might be forgotten when she woke up. I sighed. If I didn’t owe her before, I thought maybe I did now.
Yuskeya made another trip to First Aid and soon had Sord sitting up and rubbing her forehead. “Kristos, Rei, what was that for?” she said. “We were friends half an hour ago.”
Rei glanced over at us, and a bright red flush crept over her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, and turned her eyes resolutely to the console. “I was confused when I woke up. And I thought maybe you’d—maybe you’d—”
“Knocked out the Captain and hijacked the ship?” Sord said, an edge of sarcasm sharpening her voice.
“Um. Yeah.”
“With Gramps standing right there, and everyone else on the bridge, too?”
Rei gulped. “It was—like I said, I was confused. Sorry.”
Sord prodded the bump. “Ouch. Yeah, well, I guess I could understand it.”
Satisfied that Sord was all right, I finally had a chance to glance at the main viewscreen. Just when I thought I’d seen enough asteroids to last me the rest of my life—even a very long life—we’d emerged into the Tau Ceti system, famous for its enormous debris disk of asteroidal and cometary material. We’d landed in the thick of the symmetrical disk, which explained how the Chron had been able to camouflage an artifact object here. The wormhole that linked Tau Ceti to the rest of Nearspace, via Eta Cassiopeia, emerged far enough from the solitary G-class star to be at the very edge of the disk, far from where we were now. Tiny Quma lay on the edge of the star’s habitable zone.
“Yuskeya, we need to scan for the Chron artifact,” Hirin said. “I can do it if Sord still needs attention.”
Jahelia Sord waved Yuskeya away. “I’m fine,” she said, pulling herself up into the chair at the vacant console.
Yuskeya returned to the nav console, and I pulled another skimchair over to sit near Sord. “Hirin,” I said, “it’s probably overdue, but you have the chair.”
He bowed in acquiescence, and I turned to Sord. In a low voice I said, “You know a lot more about my bioscavs than I understand. Want to tell me how?”
She regarded me for a long moment, her brown eyes unreadable. “I’ve told Maja some,” she said finally. “Suffice to say, my father worked with your mother. He, and my own mother, and I, all have—or had—similar bioscavs to yours.”
“Had?”
Her eyes flicked away and then to me. “They’re both dead. My father, eight years ago, my mother, a while before that.” She leaned forward in her chair, resting her elbows on her knees. “Here’s what you need to know. My father tried to save my mother’s life when her bioscavs broke down, like it seems yours did. He filtered them out of her system, same as that Chron doctor did on the station.”
I swallowed hard. “But—it didn’t work?”
She turned her eyes to her hands, as youthful and unlined as mine, studying them as she remembered. “She got better—for a day. And died that night. Nosebleed, headache . . . convulsions. It was only a wild guess that whatever the Chron doc had injected you with would keep the symptoms at bay for a while longer, but even the first injection didn’t give you much time. You’ve got to get to your mother as fast as you damn well can.”
I nodded. “As soon as we locate the artifact here, we’ll use the activator drive and try to ghost this wormhole to Mu Cassiopeia, where she is. Should be,” I added. I knew she was scheduled to travel to the Schulyer Group’s labs on Mars sometime soon. I could only hope that she hadn’t left yet, and that the Corvid drive really had access to all our nav data. If the conversion hadn’t worked—but I wouldn’t let myself think about that.
“Found it,” Yuskeya said. “Baden, I’m feeding the data to you. We should be able to lock on with the activator drive.” She glanced over at me. “You still okay, Captain? If this works, we’ll have you to your mother in no time.”
“I’m fine,” I told her. If the injection had bought me a limited amount of time, we couldn’t waste any. I returned to Sord.
“I’m . . . not going to turn you over to the Protectorate,” I said, almost surprising myself. I really hadn’t known I was going to say that until the words were out, although the idea had been bubbling in my mind for a little while now. I didn’t understand all the reasons Jahelia Sord had become entangled in our lives, but I felt sure that whatever they were, they’d changed along the way. We’d been through things together, and I thought we’d both come out the other side feeling differently.
Her eyebrows rose. “You’re not? A bit of piloting and a filched medical injector and all’s forgiven?”
I chuckled. “Not quite. I’ll need your datapad—and all those files—in order to prove to the Protectorate what PrimeCorp has been doing.”
Her hand twitched as if to grab something, but she only shrugged and said, “Sure. I understand.”
“But whatever else is in the storage room that ‘belongs’ to you—you can keep. On one condition.”
She tilted her head. “Which is?”
“You sell it to anyone but PrimeCorp,” I told her.
She laughed. “Deal.”
We’d pulled up near an asteroid that looked like any other . . . until you magnified it on the screen, as Viss had done. Then you could tell that it had been constructed, the way the first artifact moon we’d found had been. “About to initiate the activator drive,” Viss said. “Everyone ready?”
“Go ahead,” Hirin said, after a glance at me. I smiled and nodded.
The light flashed out from the Tane Ikai and, as expected, had no obvious impact on the asteroid. On the viewscreen, however, the wormhole began to glow blue and silver, just as it had when the Chron had activated the moon near the wormhole to Delta Pavonis. The colours spun, swirling like a whirlpool, and the cone of silver-blue light pushed out from the mouth of the wormhole. I was glad we’d seen this phenomenon already, and knew it was normal. I never would have had the courage to order Rei to fly into that pointed tip of light otherwise.
I felt a sudden heaviness grip my chest and squeeze, as if I were back on that gurney on the Chron station and someone had pulled the restraints too tight.
“Some of the beam reflected,” Yuskeya said. “Doesn’t seem to have had any effect on us, though.”
“Ready for skip,” Rei said. “Viss, initiate the drive?”
I gasped, the sound abnormally loud in my ears. The icepick headache returned, stabbing into my temple and shooting all the way into my eye. I think I cried out.
All heads—except Rei’s, since she was guiding us through the terminal point, swivelled towards me. Jahelia Sord’s hand gripped my arm. It felt as hot as a Lobor’s fervid touch. I leaned forward in my chair and vomited, then slid forward off the skimchair seat. Sord’s hands grabbed me around the shoulders and lowered me to the deck, away from the spreading puddle I’d created. My legs began to jerk, kicking feebly at nothing, and cold sweat stung my bro
w. This time a fog seemed to be lowering over my vision, closing in from the sides, narrowing my field of view down to a hazy tunnel with no discernible light at the end.
No. No. I was suddenly so tired of this. Tired of being sick, and weak, and never knowing when my body would rebel against me again.
Hirin was there then, taking my hand, whispering to me. “Hang on, Luta. We’re almost there. One more skip. Hang on.”
And Maja, stroking my hair away from my face. My beautiful daughter. At least we’d solved our differences before—
That was my last thought before the fog rolled in to claim me.
Chapter 42 – Luta
After the War
THE NEXT FEW days were ones I don’t remember, since I was unconscious for the vast majority of them. I know, because Hirin has told me, and my continued existence makes it evident, that we found Mother as expected on Kiando, and she was able to give me—just in time—an infusion of new nanobioscavengers. They apparently went to war with the mutated ones the Chron filtration system had missed, and won, and were now hard at work repairing whatever damage had been done. I missed this internal bioscavenger war entirely, being deeply sedated so the bioscavs could do their job.
I learned that the Stillwell reported in a few days after we landed on Kiando, having mysteriously found itself once again on the Delta Pavonis side of the wormhole. I strongly suspected the Corvids might have had a hand in that, since Jahelia Sord’s ship had also been found drifting nearby. I said nothing, since the crew was intact and healthy, despite widespread confusion and a large gap in their collective memory. Maybe someday I’d get the chance to ask Fha about it.
I know that Hirin did as I’d promised, despite deeply mistrusting my judgement at that moment, and let Jahelia Sord walk off the Tane Ikai and disappear. I finally got a chance to sit up in bed and ask him some more questions about her a week after we arrived on Kiando. Gusain Buig, Duntmindi’s Chairman on the planet and Mother’s significant other, had opened his house—his mansion—to all of us. I felt quite pampered. My bedroom had been decorated in soothing, creamy tones with touches of rose and yellow striping the furniture and the window hangings. Soft rugs covered the floors, and fresh flowers scented the room every morning. I could have spent more time snuggling into the softness of the bed and enjoying the idea that I’d be back to normal soon, but I had questions and Hirin had been deflecting them, telling me to “wait until you feel better.”
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