The Dark Reaches (16 page)

Who were these people? What did they want from Linnea?

But she could no longer speak at all—her body was exhausted, her mind fuzzed into incoherence.

“Esayeh, go, get the board warm,” Pilang said. “That
gorilla
had a security code, they’ll be—” A yellow light in the ceiling of the bay began to flash. “Damn. Hana, help me load her. No, wait, one moment—”

Another touch on the side of Linnea’s neck, a wave of some strange, chilly scent, heaviness in her chest—

Darkness.

Esayeh turned from his station to look at the Hidden Worlds pilot as Pilang worked to seal her into her travel couch on the deck. The young woman was a sickly greenish brown—what he could see of her face around the vomit mask. Her eyes were squinched shut, and she looked flaccid, unpromising. He shook his head. “
This
is the one? You’re sure?”

“She’s the one my cousin sent to me,” Pilang said, sealing the last seam. “She gave me the sign she was told to give. And she’s definitely the one who was piloting their ship. Cleopa says she verified that with the crew that pulled them out—the other one was only a passenger, still sealed up when they got in.”

Esayah shook his head. “A pilot. That. She looks—pathetic.”

“You
might
want to get us out of here before they lock down the ship,” Pilang said, hurrying to strap herself in next to Hana, who was already snug in her acceleration cocoon. “We need to be two jumps away from here before they come after us.”

Esayeh turned back to his board, brought the engines from standby to full. Pilang was right, as always; he was grateful for her sense, really he was. Yet there was never time to ask her the questions he wanted to ask, about what she might think was wise; and later he would forget them. He knew it. Otherspace, all his time there, the work of his life—it had done something to his memory, fragmented it.

Or maybe he was just getting old.

Esayeh pulled the piloting leads out of their cubby and snapped the connections into the side of his head. Once again, after the flickering transition, he saw the status displays overlaid on the view through his port: the wide, bare, frozen plain of Triton, dirty white with contaminated frozen nitrogen, dim-lit only by Neptune at full, almost overhead. Far away, well beyond the close-in horizon, he saw the high, lacy plume of a geyser. So beautiful. . . .

“Go, go,” Pilang’s voice urged him, and he cut the cabin lights, cut loose the docking clamps with three sharp clanks, started the launch jets. Recklessly, he ran the acceleration up to nearly half a gee, feeling the strain on his heart, hearing groans of protest from the women behind him—
all but the Hidden Worlds woman, she’s used to this.
Even Tritoners wouldn’t follow so fast, not this ship—they’d know it was no use. The strangely regular nubbled surface of this half of Triton fell away fast, and Neptune in full phase rose higher, sharp-edged blue against black. He cut the launch jets and felt the familiar lift and freedom of zero gee. Silence echoed in his ears. Almost the moment, almost the moment—
Jump.

A flicker of the familiar nothingness, then they were back in normal space. He knew by the stars he was thirty degrees down-orbit and a little out, more or less what he’d been aiming for. Random jump, so the Tritoners could never follow. He touched a control, and the view through the port was overlaid with points of colored light, small, numbered. Refuges, way stations, mining outposts.

Any one of them would do, for the beginning of his young guest’s education—for the beginning of his chance to see what she was made of.

Whether he could trust her with his people’s lives.

He chose a habitat whose name he remembered and jumped again, into nothingness—toward the beginning of his hopes.

Late morning. Iain sat restlessly at a table in Tereu’s parlor, at one of her library commscreens, working his way down a list of histories: accounts of events in the first years after the last Line jumpship left the Earth system. He kept glancing at the chrono in the corner of the screen. Linnea was late, of course. No more than that. Something, some person, had caught her attention; someone usually did, in a new place.

It was absurd to worry, when he knew how carefully she was being guarded.
But not by me. . . .

He forced his eyes back to the screen, to the words there, looking for the answer he’d sought: How had humans survived here? The Tritoners in their tidy, static city did not live like people in danger of imminent attack, people who could be wiped out by one well-placed missile—so what made them safe?

Hiso and Tereu had answered all his polite questions with polite evasions. The commscreen in the suite he and Linnea had shared had no access to Tereu’s library, or any other. So when he’d found the parlor empty just now, he had slipped in, activated the comm, and gone straight to the library listings.

He tapped the current file shut and moved on to the next. So far he’d found no clues in these histories, carefully preserved as they were, some of them facsimiles of handwritten records.
Account of the Noble Death of Pilot Miguel Echeverria. List of the Survivors of the Fall of Birmingham, with Notes on Their Various Escapes. Memoir for My Son, by Susana Wyeth.
But nothing covered the period relevant to his search, the time just after the Triton settlement was established.

By any logic Iain could imagine, the Cold Minds should simply have smashed what was left of the human settlements—fragile shells that they were, in the cold and vacuum of the outer system. Human pilots for Cold Minds jumpships could be bred in captivity—a horrible thought, but surely they would do it if there was no other choice. So why were there still free humans in the Earth system? Free to fight, free to plan against the Cold Minds?

Iain rubbed the bridge of his nose thoughtfully.
Just how free are the Tritoners?
He wished again for Linnea’s cynical insight; she saw things through people’s words that he sometimes wrongly accepted, wanting as he did to believe that everyone was honorable. . . .

The early records that had been made in this settlement only railed against the Line’s betrayal of humanity, or boasted of the refugees’ success in setting up bases on Triton that could support all of the remaining survivors. No mention of the Cold Minds, of plans for attack or defense. Iain thought he could sense gaps in the narratives, places where something might have been deleted, but there was no way to prove an absence. With a sigh, he turned to the next file.

At that moment, the light in the room flicked to full brightness. Iain controlled his startlement, made himself turn calmly to the door—only to see that it was not Tereu who stood there, but Hiso.

Hiso, pale with anger—or fear.

Iain got to his feet, his mouth dry, as Hiso moved to stand directly in front of him. A guard in green followed Hiso into the room, a man with pale skin and pale gray eyes who moved behind Iain, out of sight. Iain did not take his eyes off Hiso. “What is this?”

“You’ve succeeded in surprising me, Pilot.” Hiso flashed white teeth in a snarl. “Tell me how you and Pilot Kiaho arranged her escape.”

Iain stilled himself. “Arranged her
what
?”

Hands gripped Iain’s arms and Hiso struck him in the face, a stinging blow. “You know about it,” he growled. “I know they made contact with her yesterday.”

Iain did not struggle against the man gripping his arms, made no effort to return Hiso’s blow. He let the pain bring his thoughts to cold clarity, helping him push his anger away, down, kept to use later. “Linnea—has escaped?”
To where?

Hiso’s dark eyes were icy. “She’s your woman. She would do nothing without your knowledge.”

“If you think that,” Iain said, his voice uneven, “you don’t know Linnea.” He worked his shoulders impatiently, and at a nod from Hiso the man released him. “Tell me what happened to her.”

At the naked fear in Iain’s voice, Hiso’s anger seemed to diminish. “She disappeared from the marketplace,” he said. “By obvious arrangement with a deepsider. One of my men, her escort, has been injured. He saw her taken aboard a deepsider jumpship, which broke free without clearance and launched.”

“Did you send a ship after them?” Iain’s voice shook.

“No point,” Hiso said. “The pilot jumped away as soon as he was clear.”

Iain looked away, thinking hard. He wished again, bitterly, that Linnea had found a way to take him with her—that she had
wanted
to take him with her. This whole journey had been her quest, her adventure; and now she had gone on, to what end he might never find out.

“You know what she sought,” Hiso said, echoing Iain’s thoughts. “Word of these dreams of hers, of this pilot she said called her here. He must have been a deepsider, there’s no one else.”

“How many deepsider pilots are there?”

“Only a few,” Hiso said. “Five or six, they come and go, and it’s hard to keep count of them.” He shook his head. “I would have arranged a meeting with one of them, here, where she would be safe. But—”

“She isn’t safe with the deepsiders?”

“No,” Hiso said. “They’re primitives, really—living in disorder in ancient habitats, improvised shells of old ships or hollowed-out asteroids. They seem to be dying out in some parts of the system; now and then our patrols find habitats that have been completely abandoned. Perhaps the deepsiders have become desperate. . . . And their pilots are under the command of a man without mercy or shame, a traitor to his own people—a former Tritoner, but a dishonor to our city. I would not willingly let either of you fall into his hands. Or allow him to learn more of your ship.”

“And so now this man has Linnea,” Iain said, bitterly.

“If it suits his convenience to return her to you,” Hiso said, “he will do so. His whims are not always cruel. But if it does not suit him—” Hiso shook his head. “You will never see her again. Among the deepsiders, it’s all we can do to keep rough track of the major populations. We could never find an individual they’d chosen to hide. Or who chose to stay hidden.”

Iain lowered his head, took a steadying breath. “Let me go after her, then. Perhaps they’ll be willing to take me to her.”

“No,” Hiso said flatly. “We can’t spare a ship. It’s a pity you cannot use Pilot Kiaho’s.”

“But I can.” Iain raised his head and met Hiso’s hard stare. “I will, if I can use it to search for her.”

He saw Hiso’s eyes narrow slightly, and knew that he had said too much. “If you imagine,” Hiso said, “that I will let you leave Triton freely, aboard that ship, you are deeply naïve.”

“I can find her,” Iain said. “The sooner I go, the better the chance.”

“No.” Hiso’s voice was sure. “You have no idea of the volume of space the deepsiders inhabit, of the number of their settlements, large and small. There are deepsider habitats in the Neptune system, the Uranus system, in the Greeks and Trojans in Jupiter orbit, in the outer fringes of the asteroid belt. They live everywhere, inside anything that will contain pressure. No one who does not know where they’re hidden can find them.” His eyes were cold. “You’ll see her again when the deepsiders consent to it. Not before.”

Iain did not speak—could not speak.

“You will remain here,” Hiso said, “as Perrin Tereu’s guest, and mine. Your welfare, and your future, strongly depend on how well your assistance satisfies
me
.”

Iain breathed deeply. “You’ve made our relative positions clear.”

“It was necessary to clarify the urgency of the situation,” Hiso said. “And don’t imagine that you can subvert Tereu simply because she’s a woman. You don’t interest her at all; she is my instrument, and content to be.” He smiled slightly. “Remember that. Remember who holds power here. The pilots—always the pilots. And I’m their leader.”

“Then tell me how I can earn my freedom,” Iain said flatly.

“I need the use of your ship,” Hiso said. “Which, for the moment, only you can pilot.”

Iain took a steadying breath.
“Your ship.” To Hiso, Linnea is already dead.
“And in exchange?”

“If I am satisfied,” Hiso said, “and if your jumpship can be adapted to my use, I will detach one of my jump pilots to take you anywhere you wish within this system. You will not, of course, be permitted to return to Triton after that.”

He turned on his heel and left Iain there.

Iain touched his burning cheek where Hiso’s blow had landed. Decision burned clear in his mind. For now, for Linnea’s sake, he would do what Hiso required—and look for any chance, any chance at all, to escape this place and find her.

And more: Linnea’s ship would never be Hiso’s. Before he saw that ship in Hiso’s control, with its power, its range—Iain closed his eyes.

Before that happened, he would destroy Linnea’s ship—even if it meant stranding them both here forever.