Hunted (18 page)

23

MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME

One by one, the Mandasars came up the tube, each in his, her, or its special way.

The workers enjoyed it. They buzzed excitedly among themselves, probably comparing how much they loved getting turned inside out and pulled through a tube five hundred klicks long. (I couldn’t tell for sure what they said; they were speaking their own personal patois, made from English and Troyenese, plus words that were likely invented out of the blue. Workers who are raised together always develop private languages that no one else can understand. It drives warriors and gentles crazy.)

Counselor couldn’t decide what to make of her trip up the tube. It obviously disturbed the heck out of her, but she wanted to see it as a religious experience: zipping through a universe where her carapace bent like rubber. Gentles have a sort of mystic fear of getting their shells stripped off. If a gentle loses a sizable chunk of armor through disease or injury, she’s considered “blessed by the stars” and treated as a prophet…the terrifying kind of prophet who’s nine-tenths crazy and one-tenth cosmic bliss. (The Troyenese word for “blessed,”
ullee,
also means “naked” and “dangerous.”) So when Counselor got herself twisted every which way, as if her husk had turned to taffy…well, she must have felt scarily, vulnerably open to the Five Gods. I think she believed they’d planted some great revelation inside her, if only she searched her soul hard enough.

No such spark of divine truth for Zeeleepull—he just hated the sensation, pure and simple. A split second after he hit the landing pad, he launched into a long tirade of Mandasar cursing…and on those words, his accent was
perfect.
Next thing you know, he’d ripped open the landing pad and there was jelly slurped all over the transport bay. Zeeleepull got real huffy about it being an accident—his claws had spiked through the rubber bag when he landed, and it wasn’t his fault how the Sperm-tail spat him out. Me, I think he might have given the bag a deliberate snip during his blue-streak tantrum; but considering Zeeleepull’s temper, I kept my opinion to myself.

Festina was the only one left on Celestia…and now instead of a nice soft landing pad, she had a wobbly blob of cold wet jelly to smack into. Not a dignified entrance for an admiral, getting buried and glopped up with goo. I hurried forward to clean things, trying to push the slop back into the torn bag; but Kaisho told me not to bother. “Wait,” she said. “You underestimate our noble leader.”

“But she’s going to fly straight into the—”

“No,” Kaisho promised. “Not with Prope watching.”

And she didn’t. The rest of us had come out of the Sperm-tail like people shot from a cannon, no control at all; but Festina emerged like a gymnast nailing a perfect dismount. Two feet slammed on the floor without the tiniest stumble: Festina Ramos, standing straight and calm and balanced, well short of the guck that trembled with the thunk of her impact.

She lifted her eyes to the pinkish window at the back of the transport bay. “Captain Prope,” she said evenly. “Admiral on the deck.”

“Yes, Admiral,” came back Prope’s voice. I couldn’t see the captain, but I could tell she was gritting her teeth.

The entry mouth of the transport bay irised shut. Moments later, a door in the back wall opened and Phylar Tobit thudded forward, pouchy face beaming. He was half a second away from giving Festina a bear hug when Prope’s voice snapped over the speakers. “Explorer Tobit! At attention for greeting an admiral.”

Tobit didn’t exactly stop, but he slowed down. Then he did a passable job of faking a trip—catching his right foot behind his left leg—so he could tumble into Festina anyway, wrapping his arms around her shoulders as if to break his fall. She laughed and whispered, “Happy birthday, you dirty old man,” before giving him a light kiss on the cheek.

“Never the kisses for aliens,” Zeeleepull muttered.

I tried to give him a peck on the forehead, but he ducked.

Over the next hour, we got settled in. The two Explorers, Tobit and Benjamin, showed us to our rooms; Captain Prope and an oily lieutenant named Harque put in a token appearance (“Welcome to
Jacaranda
, always an honor to host an admiral, a consort, and a sentient parasite…”), but the captain and lieutenant disappeared again almost immediately. (“Needed on the bridge, have to get started for Troyen.”) After they were gone, I think Festina murmured, “Good riddance,” but I might have misheard.

So the Mandasars got five separate cabins, and left four of the rooms empty so they could all squash into the fifth; Tobit and Festina went off to talk about unspecified old times; Kaisho got a new hoverchair, and amused herself discussing intimate details of her condition, while a terrified Benjamin tried to lift her into place without touching her legs. (“A hundred and ten years old, but I’ve started menstruating again! I suppose it means I could have a baby…if I found the right man. Dear lovely Benjamin, what would you think of having a fuzzy-haired child whose head glowed in the dark?”)

Me, I found myself in an exact twin of the room I’d occupied on
Willow.
No big coincidence since cabin design was standardized throughout the fleet, but it still felt a little creepy. As I sat there alone, wondering why I’d agreed to all this, Prope’s face appeared on my vidscreen with that half-light half-shadow trick she’d used before. “Attention, all passengers and crew. Now leaving Celestia orbit. Next stop…” (dramatic pause) “…Troyen.”

I was such a bundle of nerves, even such cheap theatrics could give me the chills.

There’s a routine you’re supposed to follow when you’re stationed on a new ship. I wouldn’t have remembered it, except that I’d gone through the same thing recently on
Willow
—two women from Communications Corps had walked me through the whole procedure, taking every possible chance to brush against me accidentally on purpose. (The more I thought about it, the more I realized how everyone on
Willow
had been keyed-up to the point of craziness: ten times more wild and impulsive than you got from mere boredom.)

So I went to the cabin’s terminal and introduced myself to the ship-soul. Gave my name, rank, and access code so the computer could fetch my records from Navy Central—not that I had much in the way of records, but at least there’d be stuff about the Coughing Jaundice and my allergy to apples. (That ran in the family—my father and sister too. The doctor who engineered Sam and me offered to fix the problem, but Dad ordered it left in. He didn’t want his kids snacking down on a nice juicy apple when he couldn’t. That tells you something about my dad…and it tells you something more that he
told
us what he’d done: “I could have made you perfect, but I didn’t want you little brats enjoying yourselves in a way I can’t.”)

Once I’d given my ID to the ship-soul, I figured it would take a while to get any response—the closest copy of the navy archives was Starbase Iris, a full light-minute away. But the instant I finished the identification process, the ship-soul announced I had a personal, confidential, eyes-only recorded message.

Um.

“Eyes-only” meant no one could read this message before I did…despite the long-standing fleet tradition that if
you
belonged to the navy, so did your mail. The only people authorized to send eyes-only messages were admirals; and there were only two admirals likely to care about Explorer Second Class Edward York:

1. Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos. But if she wanted to pass me a note, she could just walk down to my room.

2. Admiral of the Gold, Alexander York. My father.

If
Jacaranda
carried a recorded message from Dad, when had he sent it? Probably a while ago…when
Jacaranda’s
mission was to make me disappear. I wondered if the message could possibly be an apology: “Sorry we’re forced to do this, son, but the Admiralty can’t let you go home.” No, not much chance of that. More likely, he wanted to call me a disappointment one last time—his final chance before I got dumped somewhere cold and airless.

Well, only one way to find out. “Ship-soul, attend,” I muttered. “I’m alone, so you can display the message.”

When the video flicked on, I found there was another possible sender I hadn’t considered. “Surprise!” said Samantha from the screen.

“Hold!” I shouted. The picture froze.

Sam. It was Sam.

The honey brown hair, the giggly blue eyes, the spatter of freckles across her nose…twenty years and she’d hardly aged a day. Heaven knows how she managed to get hold of YouthBoost on a planet at war; but if anyone could manage, it would be Sam.

My twin sister was alive. And that picture of her in my memory, with her gold uniform soaked scarlet…the jagged hole punched through her rib cage, gushing out blood…

“Tricks,” I said aloud. Something was a trick. Either Sam’s death long ago, or the picture I was looking at now. Experts could play games with computer images, everybody knew that. I couldn’t trust what I was seeing. But who would be cruel enough to send such a thing if it wasn’t real? And who had the authority to deliver the message with eyes-only status?

“Ship-soul,” I said, “identify message’s sender.”

“No identification.”

“No name? No transmission information? Nothing?”

“Negative. The recording itself is dated by the Troyenese calendar, 23 Katshin.”

Which meant Sam had made the recording the day after
Willow
picked me up from the moonbase…unless the date was a trick too. Gritting my teeth, I told the ship-soul, “Resume play.”

Sam’s picture came back to life. “Poor Edward,” she said, “I hope you’re not having a heart attack or something. This must be an awful shock for you, but you’ve handled worse stuff than this.”

She was talking the way she always did to me, kind of imitating the way I spoke. When she was playing diplomat, Sam could toss off flowery phrases with the best of them, but behind closed doors with me…well, I guess a really good diplomat always suits her words to her audience.

If this really
was
Sam. I had to remind myself it could be fake. But a fake by someone who knew exactly how Sam talked to me in private.

“The thing is, Edward,” she went on, “I’m still alive. As you can see. It’s way too complicated for me to explain right now, but I will someday, I promise. In the meantime, I want to make sure you’re all right…and that means you have to join me on Troyen.”

She reached toward the camera lens and turned it to one side. It swung around to show a golden summer afternoon in a place I knew well—the Park of the Silent God, on the outskirts of Unshummin city: no more than fifteen kilometers from Verity’s palace. Sam and I used to go there for walks all the time, especially during the redfish migrations each spring; the park’s creek would turn scarlet with thousands of new hatchlings, and the air would fill with the strong smell of sugar-sap, as Mandasars heated cauldrons on the shore. Redfish boiled in sugar-sap…we ate that every year, sitting on the creek bank under the diamond-wood trees.

The trees were still there—I could see them in the camera shot. Twenty years taller and thick with green leaves. I always liked those leaves: they were the same color of green as the oaks on my father’s estate.

“Not much sign of the war, is there?” Sam said in a soft voice. “That’s because it’s almost over. One queen has come out on top, and I’m her favorite advisor. By the time you get here, there’ll be peace; and I can protect you from those bastards on the High Council of Admirals.”

She swiveled the camera lens back and looked straight at me. “If you want the honest truth, Edward, I know everything that’s happened to you. I found out about
Willow
, and how they sneaked in to get a queen. The idiots took Queen Temperance, Edward—the last queen who was standing in the way of peace. She’s one of the outlaw queens and nearly the most vicious tyrant on the whole planet, even if she has a placid-sounding name.

“So I know what’s going to happen,” Samantha went on.
“Willow
will pick you up, then head for Celestia. Dumb idea—the moment
Willow
crosses the line, the League of Peoples will execute Temperance and most of the ship’s crew. Maybe all of them. You’re safe, brother, because there isn’t a more innocent person in the entire universe but when
Willow
coasts into Starbase Iris and the navy sees all the corpses, the High Council will have a grade A large conniption.

“Next thing you know, they’ll try to get rid of you, Edward. That’s how admirals think—when they screw up big-time, their first reaction is to lose the witnesses down some deep hole. And I don’t want to let you get lost.”

She smiled again: a big bright smile that made me want to smile back…even though a dozen worrying thoughts were nibbling at the back of my mind. If Sam didn’t want me getting lost, why had she let me sit on the moonbase for twenty years and never once tried to contact me? If she was the top queen’s closest advisor, couldn’t Sam have found a way to send a message? But no word at all—no hint she was alive—till suddenly I left the Troyen system, and
that’s
when she got in touch.

Like she was happy to ignore me, right up to the point when I headed home.

But the message kept playing, and Sam kept smiling: my smart and pretty sister who taught me everything I knew. “I didn’t find out about
Willow
right away,” she was saying. “Not till they’d taken you with them. But I’m sending people after you, Edward, to get you back. It turns out I have a starship: a nice black one, run by Mandasar friends. If you want the honest truth, it used to belong to the navy—a sweet little frigate named
Cottonwood.
But, umm…” She leaned toward the camera and said in a loud whisper, “I stole the ship, Edward. Just before the war started. I knew the navy would stop all traffic to and from Troyen, and I wanted an escape route in case things got really bad.”

“Hold!” I snapped. My sister froze in the middle of a blink, her eyes half-closed and clumsy-looking, the way people always come across in blink-pictures. It was a pretty unflattering shot, but I wasn’t so interested in Sam’s appearance at the moment.