“Humans do not often come out to visit us,” said one of the swimmers.
“This is our first time,” Howard said. “We’d like to see how you live.”
The kelp raft had an uneven surface of woven fronds and bladder nodules. It looked wet and squishy, with uncertain footing. Confident in his balance, Howard swung out of the mudskimmer and climbed onto the kelp, arms out at his sides, wobbling and testing each step before he rested his weight.
Not to be outdone, Shareen bounded onto the kelp, and one foot promptly slid between fronds and into the water. She flailed, grabbed on to Howard’s arm, and pulled him down with her. They both fell into the water, clambering over each other, pulling themselves up through the thick weeds. Shareen tried to help him, but he sputtered and flung water from his eyes, and “accidentally” dunked her. The swimmers laughed and steadied both of them, dragging them onto the raft.
One young male swimmer came up and inspected their two dripping forms with something like satisfaction. “I am Tora’m. I met you when we delivered kelp flowers to your big structure. I was intrigued by you then.”
Shareen recognized him by the distinctive speckle pattern on his cheeks. “Oh, I remember you. We were less of a mess then.” She nudged Howard.
“Yes, my friend wasn’t so clumsy,” Howard said.
“Careful, or I’ll pull you into the water again.”
“That would be acceptable, if you’d like to swim with us,” Tora’m said. “We were made for the water. You two . . . perhaps not. Come, we can relax where it is less wet.”
Tora’m guided Shareen and Howard to a cluster of stretched-fabric awnings on metal poles, which offered shelter against intermittent sun or intermittent rain. The swimmer kith didn’t seem bothered, regardless.
Swimmer families walked across the matted island, stooping to cut fronds and harvest whatever the kelp raft and the oceans had to offer. “Fish, plankton, shells . . . all we could ask for,” Tora’m said. “Kuivahr has bounty for all of us. This is a good splinter colony. Other Ildirans aren’t so fortunate.” He smiled, showing tiny pointed teeth. “Even our brothers on Ildira itself don’t have such a beautiful ocean.”
Other groups sliced open bladder nodules to drain the liquid from them. Tora’m said the liquor inside was intoxicating, though it tasted foul to Shareen when she sipped it.
“We range far. We watch the seas. We help your distillery when we can, we help ourselves when we wish. Most of all, we help Tamo’l in her sanctuary domes. That is the main reason we came here. This is a perfect refuge for the misbreeds.” He grinned again. “And of course, the Kuivahr ocean is perfect for swimmer kith. A hundred volunteers came at first, and we do not miss the light of the seven suns. We were made for the water.”
Shareen and Howard had a chance to dry off as they moved about the floating island. The swimmers obviously enjoyed living on the organic rafts, which drifted from place to place, currents taking them in slow circles around the tidal areas.
For their guests, the Ildirans sang an eerie thrumming song that was hypnotic and disturbing at the same time. Tora’m insisted the music would sound better under the water, but they performed it on the surface so Shareen and Howard could hear it.
The two stayed for hours, intrigued by the swimmer kith and glad to be with each other. While the swimmers gathered close to listen, Tora’m asked Shareen and Howard about the distillery, then about skymines, then about human culture, which the swimmers found both funny and fascinating. Shareen enjoyed herself so much among the strange folk that she lost track of how late it was. When the gray drizzly skies darkened, she realized that someone might grow worried about them back at the distillery.
“We better go, Howard.” She rose to her feet and immediately lost her balance on the squishy platform, but Howard caught her by the wrist. Although it was unnecessary, he also slipped an arm around her waist to steady her. They made their way back to the mudskimmer, helping each other.
Tora’m dove over the side of the kelp cluster, plunged into the water, and bobbed back to the surface. After the two visitors were aboard, a few swimmers detached the mudskimmer and towed the craft away from the kelp island.
As Shareen started the thrumming engines, Tora’m struck out ahead of them, swimming at top speed. “I’ll guide you back!”
Shareen chuckled. “Our boat goes a lot faster than you can swim.”
Tora’m seemed to take that as a challenge. “Remember, I was made for the water.” He stroked away furiously.
Shareen gunned the engines and set off, cutting across the water. The swimmer surprised them by keeping up the entire way back to the distillery.
ONE HUNDRED AND THREE
ORLI COVITZ
For more than a day the Proud Mary drifted in silence among the cooling debris of the alien space city. Orli didn’t want to take any chances. Rather than sending out pings, which Tom Rom might detect, she used passive scanners to keep watch for the other ship, but there was so much radiation and dissipating gases that the resolution was poor. Even with DD double-checking the readings, Orli had little confidence in the results.
She had very little confidence in anything at all right now.
“The best way to be certain we are alone is to extend a full-range active scan in the vicinity,” the compy suggested. “His ship will display a reflective signature and energy readings—if you would like to be sure.”
“I’d like to be sure, DD—but if we do that and he is still here, he’ll notice us as well.”
The exploding ekti canister had made a bright flash, a diversion, but a hunter as determined as Tom Rom would never be fooled by a decoy. She hoped he had concluded that she had activated her stardrive and streaked away. But if he thought the Proud Mary was still hiding . . .
As her ship drifted among the half-melted shards of the Onthos city, the wreckage tumbled and reflected the distant starlight. With its external systems shut down and engines giving off no heat or energy signature, the Proud Mary should look like just another piece of metal rubble.
This helpless waiting, though, was maddening—especially as the plague took hold.
Orli spent time reviewing the records that BO had provided them, studying the last messages from clan Reeves, as well as the green priest’s translations of the Onthos records, and the progress of the alien disease that she felt in her body. And no, it wasn’t her imagination.
As Orli reviewed how the epidemic spread among the poor Retroamers, she hoped with all her heart that something might be different in her, that she wouldn’t react the same way as those other victims had. One hundred percent mortality.
The progression of her symptoms was different after all, but not in a good way. The effects manifested much faster in Orli than in the other victims. Her nausea increased, accompanied by dizziness and a rising fever. Maybe the constant surge of adrenaline had accelerated the progress of the virus.
When she saw the first dark discolorations appear on her forearm and her face, she knew they would soon turn into black splotches from subcutaneous hemorrhages. Her time was running out. Orli looked out at the space wreckage drifting around her and said to DD, “This isn’t going to end well.”
“I am happy to assist you in any way possible.”
“You already know what you’ll have to do, and you won’t like it. Maybe I should just have you set our power blocks for a chain-reaction discharge and vaporize the Proud Mary now. Get this over with.”
“My programming precludes that, Orli,” the compy said. “You are still alive. And we have not yet delivered the scientific information that you said was priceless.”
Orli grimaced as another bout of nausea raced through her. She clenched her jaw, fought it down. “I know all about your damned programming, but I don’t like to put something off until tomorrow that I can do today.”
“You are still alive, Orli Covitz,” DD insisted, sounding like a stern Teacher compy. “My response is not because of my programming or the paradox
choice of having to let you die to save other human lives.”
“Well, what is it, then?”
“I will not let you give up on hope.”
Frustrated, Orli powered up the Proud Mary’s systems and activated the engines. “We’ve waited long enough, and I’m tired of just sitting here. You’re right. We have to get to a human settlement, so I can disseminate this information. Then I can rest in peace.”
First, she would head down into the asteroid belt where she could plot her course and make sure Tom Rom couldn’t follow her. She wasn’t clear which human settlement was closest. Clan Reeves—and the Onthos refugees before them—had not chosen a very populated section of the Spiral Arm.
She eased the Proud Mary away from the expanding debris cloud under low acceleration with running lights off. DD sent out an active scan to search the area, but could detect no sign of Tom Rom.
Orli guided her ship down toward the asteroid field. She blinked hard, and rubbed her eyes. She was having difficulty focusing her vision, and she felt weak. When she could not hold back the nausea anymore, Orli staggered out of the cockpit to be sick in the reclamation chamber. DD took over the controls.
After Orli washed her face and dragged herself back into the padded captain’s seat, she nodded her thanks to the Friendly compy. “You’re a good copilot, DD—and a good friend. Thank you for your help and for being here with me.” It wrenched her heart to think that she had nobody else.
Not exactly the way she had imagined her last days . . .
The asteroid field was like a snowstorm of rocks, large and small. “When we get in there, you’re going to have to pilot. I don’t trust myself.”
Since they had detonated one of their spare ekti canisters, they had a smaller fuel reserve than Orli would have liked, but she wasn’t planning to go far. In fact, she was losing patience—and time. She looked at a darkening splotch on her arm.
Tom Rom’s ship came from nowhere, streaking down toward them at the edge of the asteroid field. He must have been lying in wait, watching, silent.
He flashed past the Proud Mary and opened fire without warning. DD nudged the ship just enough so that the blast didn’t destroy their engines, merely damaged one of the three.
Alarm lights danced across the control panel. Orli snapped back to full concentration and leaned into the controls. She took over for DD and hit the engine acceleration, and the ship careened toward the randomly tumbling rocks.
DD said, “I’m sorry I didn’t detect him, Orli.”
“Not your fault. He seems to be good at this.” She was already queasy, and now the tumbling ship nearly made her vomit again, but she squeezed the chair’s padded arm and closed her eyes so tightly that tears trickled out from under her lids. She commanded the pain, “Not . . . now!”
Tom Rom’s ship swooped in, and his weapons lanced out. Another impact struck their hull, doing external damage and causing a slow atmospheric leak, but at least two of her engines still functioned.
Nevertheless, the Proud Mary was a smaller, slower ship than Tom Rom’s. Even before she had lost an engine, she wouldn’t have been able to outrun him in a straight-up race.
As they bolted into the asteroid field, DD grew more alarmed. “Orli, the safety parameters won’t let us go close to those rocks. The margins are not adequate.”
“We’re going to have to adjust the margins,” she said. “I’m flying.”
“But you informed me you were too weak, that your concentration—”
“My concentration’s just fine right now. There’s nothing like facing a madman to focus your thoughts.”
The pursuer kept after them, ominous and silent. Orli was oddly thankful for that.
They streaked past an outlying asteroid, the first jagged chunk of rubble rolling overhead in a silent pirouette. The field may have looked dense from a distance, but the rocks were separated by many kilometers. Orli picked her course one step at a time, weaving among the rocks, looping over them, hiding behind and then around one, hoping to block herself from view.
But Tom Rom kept coming after her.
She could dodge the largest fragments, and DD helped her by scanning ahead and identifying intercept courses. The smaller rocks, though, proved the most troublesome and damaging. The Proud Mary was constantly pelted by a hail of sand and gravel, which wore down the shields.
“We are sustaining damage, Orli,” DD reported.
“I can tell. If we ever find some safe haven in the asteroid field, you’re going to have to complete the repairs yourself—I won’t be able to.” Then Orli caught herself, realizing what she had said. “All the instructions are in the database. Upload them into your personal memory now, so you have the full background as a starship mechanic.”
“That would be a useful skill, Orli, but I hope you help me do the repairs.”
“Just upload the skill module.”
That would also give DD all the specs he needed to trigger a power-block overload in the Proud Mary when it was time. That would vaporize everything, including the compy. Maybe she would tell him to exit the ship before it blew up. He could remain functioning on an airless asteroid . . . like a castaway on a deserted island. No, Orli wouldn’t do that to DD.
She swerved around another asteroid, dove among three that orbited around a common center of mass, then changed course abruptly. Tom Rom’s ship was bigger and faster, but that wasn’t necessarily an advantage here. She burned a great deal of fuel, but managed to stay ahead of him in the cat-and-mouse game.
She always had the option of just ramming into an asteroid now—and she would do it if Tom Rom got too close. She studied the screens, looked for any traces of his ship. She had left him behind at least five minutes earlier.
She kept leapfrogging from one asteroid to another. Finally, as she pulled around to the dark side of a potato-shaped rock, she found a cozy crater where she could set the Proud Mary down, a place where DD could repair the ship.
Or a place where she could die.
ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR
GARRISON REEVES
When the job-transfer approval came in from his LOC supervisor, Milli Torino, Garrison wasn’t surprised. His skill set qualified him for much more than debris-survey flights along the Moon’s old orbit. He had decided it was time to do more than just “run around in circles”—and all the damaged CDF warships crowding the repair docks now fundamentally changed the orbital complex. There was work to do.
With the unexpected threat of the allied Shana Rei and black robots, the Confederation was in a tense state, gearing up for a possible, yet incomprehensible, war. Everyone at the Lunar Orbital Complex, both civilian and military, had seen General Keah’s report about the devastating shadow cloud at Plumas—stunning destruction inflicted upon the CDF, the Solar Navy, and Roamers alike.
But for Garrison, the shock and sadness struck closer to home. The deaths of clan Reeves had hit him hard—Dale, Sendra, even his father—and made him think of lost possibilities and diverging courses in life. He should have tried harder to find common ground, to talk his father out of his impetuous decision to fly to a space city in the middle of nowhere . . . but changing Olaf Reeves’s mind would have been like altering the course of stars, and that had never been within Garrison’s ability.
Even so, the knowledge made him assess his own situation. Elisa always had enough ambitions for both of them, while Garrison remained content with his job at Sheol so he could be with his wife and son, choosing family success over career or financial success. For years he had focused on escaping his backward clan, running away from rather than toward something. After losing his wife in the bloater explosion and sending his son off to Academ, he had withdrawn, convincing himself he was just recovering.
But he was taking too damn long, and it was time he opened his eyes and looked for his Guiding Star again. So he applied for a transfer and a promotion at the LOC. Even though his prickly supervisor had never given him particular kudos, barely even noticed his p
erformance among the LOC crew workers, she approved his transfer within a day.
After Plumas, numerous battered battleships now overloaded the orbiting shipyards, industrial processing facilities, and the military training yard. The damage was extensive on the battleships, particularly to Admiral Haroun’s Juggernaut.
Scientists combed over the marks left by Klikiss robot weapons as well as the bizarre shadow creatures that no one seemed to understand. They hoped to find clues that would allow them to develop new defenses or weapons. King Peter and Queen Estarra were heading to meet with the Mage-Imperator to retrieve plans for ancient Ildiran weapons that might prove effective. Garrison thought they might be better off turning the Roamer genius Kotto Okiah loose on the problem in Fireheart Station.
Now that the Confederation was facing a new enemy, the CDF’s operational mission dramatically changed. Even if he had not asked for a new assignment, Garrison would have found himself doing other work, since mapping and shepherding lunar rubble was no longer going to be a high priority.
Torino assigned him to a metals-processing station where he supervised a crew that manufactured spare parts needed for the repair work. It was a typical Roamer operation, run mostly by experienced clan members. He had no trouble overseeing their operations because they were Roamers and knew what they were doing.
Thanks to his efficient coworkers, Garrison easily did his job, and the station produced the needed Manta spare parts faster than they could be installed. Now that the routine ran smoothly, he was surprised when Milli Torino pulled him from his duties one day and assigned him to escort Deputy Eldred Cain on a tour of the LOC shipyards and industrial facilities.
“I can certainly show him around, ma’am, and give him all the details he needs, but I don’t have any protocol background.” Cain was possibly the most important man on Earth. “Perhaps you’d be more suited—”
“I couldn’t agree more, but I have many duties that keep me busy,” she said in a clipped voice. “Besides, Deputy Cain requested someone with hands-on experience, preferably a Roamer.”
The Dark Between the Stars Page 51