“Pace yourselves,” warned Fire. “Eat a little of everything they offer, and eat slowly. Otherwise, you’re going to get uncomfortable pretty fast.”
This was a culture shock for me. All my life, food had been rationed, and a lot of it had been nutrient broth grown in vats. More recently, we had all been able to expand our palates on Olympia, but we were austere compared with the Belters. Both Ashur and I were plied with more treats than we could manage. “You’re too skinny!” people kept saying. “Eat!”
We tried. I did my best to relax and enjoy what was offered. My hand was feeling a lot better, thanks to the painkiller and the intermittent soaking, but even with the nap I had taken earlier (albeit under forced circumstances), I was beginning to flag. I had done far too much talking in the last several hours, and I was beginning to feel like a bit of an impostor.
Commander Lana treated me like a legitimate liaison. “Let’s meet again, once you’ve concluded your business on Graveyard,” she said. “Get to know each other. Then we’ll negotiate. We like you, Oichi. We like your Minis. You give us good feelings.”
“You give us good feelings, too,” I said. “The best we’ve had in a long time. We’re glad to meet you.”
She smiled and pressed her forehead to mine. “Then aloha. Until we meet again.”
We took that as our cue to say goodbye to the crowd. Some Belters wanted to continue their partying, but these folks were younger, and had spent the first half of the festivities waiting on others; the consensus among Merliners and Olympians was to leave them to their well-earned fun. Our group headed for the doors in the company of Fire and Queenie.
Something had shifted. Maybe the grapevine spread the word that the Olympians had come, and partied, and talked of trade, and possibly a few had whispered that I had spoken with a very important personage. Now the boisterous folk who had fêted us turned back into the hardworking people who wrangled asteroids and refined the materials they harvested from them. When we made our way back through the passages of Maui, we passed a few people who gave us friendly nods. Most had already focused on other things.
I rested a hand on her stretchy middle.
When the doors opened onto the broad access lane, and I saw the spaceships lined up on either side, I experienced another sensation. I would call it déjà vu, except that I hadn’t been in the spaceship graveyard yet, so I couldn’t be seeing the scene again. Yet it wasn’t quite a premonition, either. It plucked chords in my soul.
“Ashur,” I said, “will you take Kitten and Dragonette back to Merlin? I need to have a private conversation with Fire and Queenie.”
Ashur was young—the age when most teenagers would bristle about not being included—but Ashur was no ordinary teenager.
“Thank you for the nice party,” he said to Fire. “Um—see you later?”
She smiled at him. “Yes.”
Ashur gathered Kitten and followed the Merliners up the access lane. Kitten stared at us over his shoulder. “We need to start growing the orange food on Olympia!” she said.
We waited until they were out of earshot. Then Fire and I walked together. “This was a good visit,” she said. “I hope you’re pleased with the way it turned out.”
Despite a rocky beginning—I was. My experience with the Belters reminded me of the time I had impersonated Sezen Koto, an Executive woman who could shape policy and form alliances with other powerful people. That charade had ended much too soon for my tastes. Now I was the Real Deal. “I like to meet people. Particularly when they’re reasonable.”
“That’s one thing I know about the Belters,” said Fire. “True, most of them are from my neck of the woods, so I may be biased. How is your hand?”
I flexed my fingers. “Much better. Are you and Queenie the ones who warned Baba Yaga I had been kidnapped?”
Queenie answered,
In that case, I hoped the Engineer wouldn’t find out I had doubted her insight. “Ashur is disappointed that he can’t talk with you some more.”
“He’s young,” said Fire, “and far too clever, and he asks questions that shouldn’t be answered yet. I’ll spend my time with you, Oichi.”
“You don’t answer most of my questions, either.”
“They’re just the wrong questions. I know you want to ask about the Alliance of Ancient Races. That information is proprietary. Your guide, Ahi, will answer your questions as well as she can once you’re in the graveyard. I want you to know the right things, when you need to know them.”
“Will you destroy Itzpapalotl?” I said.
That surprised her. “The Weapons Clan have observed all proper protocols. They haven’t ventured into the Charon system. We have no reason to destroy them. Do you want me to? Would that solve your problems?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m just wondering how much visitors have to alarm the Alliance of Ancient Races before they get on the kill list.”
“My bosses are cautious,” said Fire, “but tolerant. A ship loaded with weapons would be destroyed if it entered our system. Weapons operated remotely would also be destroyed, and their sources tracked.”
“Remotely—like sunbusters?”
“Absolutely.”
“How do you track them?”
We stopped in front of Merlin. Thomas and her crew had gone inside, as had Ashur and the Minis. It remained for me to board, and we would head out.
“I’ll meet you on Graveyard,” said Fire. “I’ll be waiting for you inside Joe’s Salvage Yard, next to the canyon.”
“How will you get there? In a ship like Merlin?”
I sighed.
I may as well be having a conversation with Baba Yaga.
That seemed oddly specific. I filed it away.
“We’ll also be waiting for you,” said Fire, “when you come out of the graveyard. You’ll still have plenty of questions for Queenie and me. By then, I’ll be able to answer more of them than I can now.” She took both my hands in hers. “Aloha, Oichi. Until we meet again.”
“Aloha, Fire. And Queenie.”
Fire grinned at me. When she turned and walked away, I couldn’t resist watching her. She appeared to carry Queenie without effort.
Maybe they carried each other.
Once she was out of sight, I walked up Merlin’s ramp. I paused outside her air lock and accessed her security system to search for Medusa. She wasn’t back yet.
Are you still talking with Argus Fabricus? I wondered. Are you talking with someone else? Did you even know that I had been kidnapped?
Calling her was out of the question, mostly because I didn’t want to have my call ignored or rejected. I didn’t try to look Argus Fabricus up, either. Instead, I wandered in the general direction they had gone together, though there was no practical reason for me to do so, half hoping I would meet Medusa on the way back.
Half hoping I wouldn’t.
Wandering among those ships was no casual stroll, and I suppose it wasn’t meant to be. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might be crushed when one of those vessels was moved toward an arrival/departure lock. The access lane was fairly safe, but I didn’t stay there. I wanted to see what was behind those ships.
Tow cables crisscrossed my path, forcing me to pick my way along. I doubted I had the will to search indefinitely, since I wasn’t looking for anything in particular.
On the other hand, maybe I was looking for myself, and that could take a while. I wasn’t walking toward anything, so maybe I was walking away from that empty space where my partner was supposed to be. Maybe I was trying to walk out of my own skull.
You’re an idiot, you know that? I thought, and stopped to assess my surroundings. The vessels docked in this cavern were an eclectic bunch. Just beyond the curved edge of another ship, a structure splayed its claws on the floor of the holding cavern, pinning several of the smaller tow cables beneath it like worms it had trapped for its supper.
I laughed. That claw reminded me of something Medusa and I had seen in the folklore database when we looked up Baba Yaga.
“Just like the fairy tale,” said a voice nearby. “The hut that walks on chicken feet.”
Timmy materialized from the darkness in much the same fashion that her voice had.
The one person who could have helped me fight her was nowhere in sight.
* * *
I didn’t have much faith that I would last long with Timmy in a knife fight—or in any kind of fight.
She wasn’t even looking at me. The claw had captured her attention. “Of course, if we move any closer, the illusion will be lost.”
Running did not seem an option at that point. I decided to try another tactic: conversation. “You seem to know a lot about Baba Yaga. Is that why she hired you to kill Captain Nemo?”
She smiled. “You know it wasn’t Baba Yaga who hired me. Stop fishing.”
“If you don’t work for Baba Yaga, why are you here?”
“I was curious about the Engineer.”
Close up, Timmy looked like someone out of a dream—or a hallucination. She was more startling than the Woovs had been. Her odor was subtle. Not unpleasant, but something that alerted me that I was not in the presence of my own kind.
“My people are Hybrids,” I told her, aiming for a diplomatic segue. “I’m told that your kind are as well.”
“True,” said Timmy. “We are the product of a war between two peoples. We were made to end that war, but also to fight other members of my Mother race, from clans that have no family ties with us.”
It was fascinating to watch the way her face moved when she spoke, how the scant light glowed on her pale skin. My eyes were wide when I looked at her, perhaps comically so. Yet she didn’t ridicule me. She spoke courteously.
“Clans,” I said. “It always seems to come down to wars between families.”
“Doesn’t it?” said Timmy. “Sometimes it seems primitive to me. Combatants can be so black and white in their judgments against each other. Though the ones who move them like pawns have more practical motivations.”
“Often involving power.”
“Or fragile egos.”
That was a pretty good assessment of Baylor and Ryan Charmayne. “I’ve also been told that you have a strict code of conduct.”
“Yes,” said Timmy. “It takes the ambiguity out of the decision-making process. Usually.”
“It has for me, too,” I admitted. “Usually.”
Timmy smiled again. Her teeth were sharp and irregular. That imperfection made her seem more human to me. I realized how steadily I had been staring at her when she returned my gaze without blinking. “I don’t mean to be rude,” I explained. “I’ve never seen someone who looked like you.”
“I can stand a little surveillance,” said Timmy. “It gives me an excuse to stare back.”
“Have you ever been inside the graveyard?” I’m not sure why I asked her that. The notion didn’t occur to me until that moment.
Timmy’s smile was tempered. “Not yet. Before you ask me anything more about that, Oichi, understand that I am between jobs at the moment. I have had a new offer I may accept. So let’s keep it neutral—shall we?”
Meaning she might yet venture there. Maybe at the same time I planned to be there. Maybe working for the same people who hired her to kill Nemo.
“I’m told that your upbringing was harsh,” said Timmy. “At least by human standards.”
“I don’t know how harsh it was, compared with the lives of other people,” I said.
“Perhaps I can give you some perspective. I began life alongside more than one hundred siblings. Once we crawled from the birthing chamber, we were sealed in the Children’s Caverns. There we learned to love and to kill.”
I heard emotion in her voice, but I couldn’t decide what it was. Pain? Anger? Also nostalgia? “How long?” I said.
“How long were we trapped in there? By your reckoning, about four hundred twenty-four-hour cycles. We grew quickly in that time. Not so quickly as our Mother race, but faster than you who are the offspring of our Fathers. We reached adolescence during that time.”
“With no adult supervision?”
“We possess racial memories,” said Timmy.
“Who taught you to speak? To count, and so on?”
“Our math skills are innate,” she said. “We polished them once we emerged. As for language, they left us clues throughout the caverns, puzzles we must solve. It was rather fun. Except for the part where our brothers and sisters tried to eat us.”
“What stopped them from doing that?” I said.
“We ate them first.”
“Oh.” That made sense. Really, it should have occurred to me.
“We loved them, but we couldn’t help it any more than they could. We were so driven by instinct at that stage. Not even grief could stay our hands.” Timmy stroked the handle of her knife as if it were a pet she cherished. “From our Mother race we have grace, cleverness, a talent for killing, and an ability to take exquisite pleasure in the pain of others. From our Father race we have compassion, love, and an appreciation of, and longing for, friendship. It’s an uneasy balance we must strike within ourselves. We make it work, for the sakes of both our races. That is why we exist.” She gave me a lingering look. “Why do you exist, Sister Killer?”
I could think of one answer. “Because someone made me.”
“I know the feeling.” Timmy turned her attention back to the mechanical claw. “Have you heard the Baba Yaga music, Oichi? By Anatoly Lyadov?”
“It’s in my father’s database.” I tried to imagine what a Baba Yaga ship might look like, walking inside a gravity well. Would it hop around, like the icon that had appeared in my message box? Would Baba Yaga have to wear a seat belt?
“Tell Kitten she need not fear losing her head to me,” said Timmy. “I enjoyed her company, though she didn’t know it was me. I enjoyed yours, too.”
“I’ll tell her,” I promised. “I’m sorry you had to eat your brothers and sisters, Timmy. The adults were cruel to lock you in those caverns.”
Timmy shook her head. “We are the most dangerous at that age. We would have learned to fool humans into thinking we were safe. We had to be isolated, so we could fight against equals who would test us to our limits. We had to suffer loss, and we had to learn how we were responsible for those losses—how they hurt us and also how we benefite
d from them.”
It was making me uncomfortable how much we had in common.
“I’m glad we had a little time alone,” she continued. “I’m curious. Will you teach Ashur how to kill?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that, not because the question made me uncomfortable, but because I hadn’t thought about it. “He should know how to defend himself,” I said.
“It’s not the same thing,” Timmy chided.
“Maybe it is. We have powerful enemies.”
“You do, but you have powerful friends, too.” She said that without a trace of sentiment in her voice, though I wasn’t sure I could judge what Timmy felt. She was as cool as the Belters were warm, and both of them baffled me.
“I don’t offer advice often,” Timmy continued, “but I am a survivor of the Children’s Caverns, Oichi, and I know how a heart breaks. You may find this hard to believe, but I know how it heals, too. The way I see it, you have two choices. You can teach Ashur how to kill—or you can let him teach you how to live.”
I stared at her. She was so beautiful, she made me feel shy. I remembered the way she had moved inside that air lock, when she could have killed Medusa and me, but refrained. I would not have shown that sort of mercy, not once I made up my mind to act.
Maybe she had made up her mind. Maybe killing us had never been on her to-do list.
At least, not that time. She might decide to accept that pending contract.
“You brought wonder into my life. I suspect you’ll do it again.” Timmy blew me a kiss. “I wish you luck, Sister.”
Timmy shimmered and disappeared. In another moment, I knew I was alone, though I never saw the slightest ripple to betray where she had gone.
In my mind, I heard the music by Anatoly Lyadov. Baba Yaga was another piece that used the bassoon, percussion, wind, and strings to suggest action: walking on chicken legs, across the fields. I let it play inside my head as I picked my way back through the tow cables and spaceships, to the relative safety of the Visitors’ Lock.
Will you follow us to Graveyard, Grandmother Witch? I wondered. Will we see your chicken-hut spaceship lurching along the rim of the canyon?
I made my way back to Merlin. When I got there, Medusa had returned. She had already tucked herself back into hibernation.
Medusa in the Graveyard (The Medusa Cycle) Page 16