The Dark Reaches (3 page)

Marra sighed. “And what is that, Linny?”

Linnea looked away, into the gathering shadows.
Freedom.
The soaring joy of otherspace, of openness, beauty, possibility. There was danger, yes, but with Iain at her side . . . “Nothing I can explain. I’m sorry.” Her hands tightened on the windowsill.

“You
have
changed,” Marra said, her voice hard. “I saw that on Terranova. This—life you’ve found for yourself. You don’t care, you don’t even understand what you threw away so you could have it.”

“Yes, I do,” Linnea said. It had taken her half a minute to look the room over when they got in last night: a narrow, sagging bed; a small table and two battered chairs; a basin on a low cupboard; a plastic tank of drinking water; the sharp, salty tang of mildew.

This morning, in the chill gray light, she had read the handwritten list of rules tacked neatly to the wall.
Please keep a tidy room. Blankets on the shelf. Clean linens in the cupboard. Wash them at the village laundry—see map. Meals in the refectory in the parish hall.
Times for setup, for eating, for cleanup.
Please be present for all three. No liquor. Please attend church on Sundays. Eucharist offered each morning, thirty minutes after dawn. For questions, please see the village priest.
The placard was signed, in neat square printing, FR. HAVELOE.

“I know what I threw away,” Linnea said. “And I’d throw it away again.”

Marra sank down on Linnea’s bed. Its metal springs screeched. “Then you really have moved on,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “You and Iain, you took my son from me, my oldest, I’ll never see him again. Or if I do, he’ll be one of those people. Those
pilots
. Like you.”

Linnea knew the next step in the old, familiar dance: She would go and sit beside Marra, hold her, comfort her for the pain of all the mistaken things Marra could not stop believing.

Yet she could not make herself move from the window.

No gift for happiness.
Maybe that was true.

Marra buried her face in her hands. “Linny—” She looked up. “I don’t know how to say this.”

“Say it anyway.” Though she knew.

“It’s—it’s best you go.”

Linnea took a steadying breath. Another. Her chest felt cold, hollow.
Don’t let her see.
“All right,” she said after a moment. “We can leave in the morning, as soon as the children are ready.”

Marra went still, staring down at the floor. Then she said, “I bought tickets for the children and me on the flatloader two days from now.”

Linnea’s head went back. “You would pay
money
to spend three days in the back of a ’loader, when I could get you home to Asper in a few hours, for nothing?”

“The flatloader is our way,” Marra said, her voice stronger. “The flyer is yours. I have to live on this world, you see.” She looked up at Linnea. “These are my people.”

“So you don’t mean—” Linnea took a breath.
Make her say it.
“You don’t mean just, I should leave Moraine. You mean—”

“I want you to leave Santandru,” Marra said. “And don’t come back. Unless you’re bringing my son home to me, to live the life his father would have wanted—don’t come back. It’s best.”

Linnea stared at her. Then dug into the pocket of her tunic, brought out a few coins, slapped them down on the little table. “Give those to the priest,” she said. “It ought to be enough to cover the hospitality I’ve had.”

“Linny—”

She pulled the coat she’d borrowed from Marra off the peg, laid it on the bed beside Marra. “There’s nothing else of yours I have?”

Marra took a shaking breath, clearly on the verge of tears. “That’s all,” she said.

Cold black tremors filled the hollow place inside Linnea. But her hands were steady as she stuffed her few possessions into her travel bag. “I’m off, then.”

“Tonight! But, Linny, the wind—”

“I’m a pilot,” Linnea said. “I know how to handle a flyer in wind.” In the deepening dark, Marra’s face was a shadow. Through the age-scoured plastic windowpane beyond, Linnea could see that the rain had turned to wet snow. The promise of spring, broken again.

Marra stood up, picked up the coat. “Won’t you even say good-bye to the children?”

“Tell them—” Linnea broke off. “Tell them what you like. You will anyway.” She held out her hand. “Good-bye, Marra.”

Marra hesitated, then took the offered hand. Her rough fingers closed tight over Linnea’s. “I didn’t mean—I’m only thinking of my children’s good. Of your good, Linny.” Linnea heard the despair in her voice.

“My life’s no concern of yours anymore,” Linnea said. Then relented a little. “Look. I’ll message sometimes. Through the commnet, so no one will have to know you’ve heard from me.”

“I have no right to ask it,” Marra said. Her voice broke. “But—tell me how Donie is. . . . And take care of yourself. Oh, be careful. Be careful. So much has hurt you, I wish you could just come home and be safe.”

“But this isn’t my home,” Linnea said. As if through some stiff barrier, she took a step toward Marra. Kissed her cheek. “Good-bye, Marra.”

Outside, coatless in the cold wind, the wet snow, in the blue dimness of almost-night, Linnea let herself shiver. The small landing field where her rented flyer stood was only a couple of hundred meters from the row of attached guesthouses. When she reached the flyer, she moved around it, hurriedly casting off the tie-downs as the little craft rocked in the stiff wind. Finished, she opened the hatch, tossed in her bag, climbed in after. Her hands moved over the board, lighting it, starting the engines warming. There was no one attending the field for her unexpected flight, so she’d have to risk lifting off without field lights—flying bare-eyed, without the intimate links she would have had with her jumpship, the visual interface that could turn night to day. No such thing in this little vessel.

Rising into the sky, sensing and compensating for the pressure of the wind, she kept her hands tight on the controls. Below, the few dim lights of the village sank away into the haze of falling snow, then the flyer shuddered in buffeting wind as she rose into the low clouds. All ties to ground gone. Flying free.

Rootless
—No. The feeling of emptiness was freedom, that was all. Freedom at last.

Above the clouds now. The sky overhead, unusually clear in the bitter wind, showed her the familiar hazy nebulae of the Hidden Worlds. They were calling to her, calling. . . . Her hands moved on the controls, and the flyer leaped forward toward Middlehaven. Toward Iain.

Toward her jumpship, and the freedom for which she had paid . . . everything.

I ain sen Paolo watched from the shelter of the control shed’s wall as Linnea’s flyer settled onto its pad, its jets sending up puffs of steam from the frozen slush. It was well past midnight and bleakly cold. Wind-driven snow made long slashes of white in the harsh beams of the field lights. His long coat, made for Terranova’s mild weather, swirled around him, barely keeping him warm.

His apprehension held him back. He left it to the Middlehaven skyport ground man to secure the little vessel against the wind. Linnea’s voice had sounded—strange, remote in her communications with Control. She had sent him no private message. And she was arriving two days earlier than they’d planned.

Iain grimaced and tugged the collar of his coat higher against the cold. On top of whatever her sudden arrival meant, he was not looking forward to telling Linnea the latest news from Terranova.

The hatch of the flyer opened at last, and he saw Linnea scramble down, her old cloth travel bag slung over her shoulder. She turned and closed the hatch firmly.

So Marra and the children had not returned with her. Now that was a
very
bad sign.

Iain strode forward, into the wind, into the glare of the lights. She looked up, her eyes wide and dark, the wind streaming her black hair out behind her. Then she moved forward to meet him.

He kissed her quickly, then set his arm around her shoulders as they turned toward the control shed. Inside, in the close, wavering heat from an iron stove, he waited near the door as she settled her account for hiring the flyer. She seemed steady enough. Too steady, maybe, counting out the coins to the attendant. And that was another little insult dealt out by this world: hard currency only, for pilots’ dealings with the port.
Your credit’s no good here.

Then it was back out into the bitter night, across half the field to the pilots’ barracks, the quarters for the squad of young Terranovan pilots who made up Santandru’s new orbital patrol. The building was new, made with materials brought in by cargo ship: a linked string of prefabs, laid out and inflated, their double walls of thick plastic filled with spray foam cure-hardened into rigid strength. No time, no money to build anything better.

Iain opened the door and waited while Linnea ducked through, then followed. Inside, the ceilings were low, the angles odd, but at least the thick, insulated walls cut off the howl of the wind.

At this late hour there were no off-duty pilots in the tiny front lounge, but Iain still waited to speak until they had reached the small room they’d been assigned. As soon as he latched the door, Linnea dropped her bag on her bunk. And then she was in his arms.

Her strong hold on him, her stubborn silence, made his heart turn over. He stroked her damp, wind-tangled hair. “Tell me.”

Her face, turned away, was half-buried against his shoulder. “You were right,” she said, her voice low and hard.

“They told you to leave,” Iain said.

“No mistake about that,” Linnea said. She took a breath, and another, while Iain waited patiently. Then, in a rush, she said, “But I didn’t think that Marra would—” She broke off, and her arms tightened around him.

Marra, too, then.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Linnea. I’m so sorry.”

She did not weep, of course; she wept far too rarely. But it was another four breaths, five, before she could speak again. “I want to leave tomorrow morning. Go on to our next stop. Get back to what we came out here to do.”

Carefully, Iain released her, guided her to her bunk, sat down beside her. “About that,” he said.

In the weak light of the little lantern, her face was stiff with distress, her dark eyes wild, trapped. “Iain, don’t tell me we can’t. I need—I need to get back to my ship. I need to move on. Get away from here.”

“I see that,” he said. “I’ll get us clearance to leave tomorrow. But we can’t go on with the trip we planned. I’m sorry. We’re needed on Terranova.”

He saw her expression shut down. “No. Please. We left Zhen and Torin and the new board in charge of training, and the Line was beginning to cooperate with setting the patrols. Surely together they can handle—”

“There have been five new Cold Minds incursions,” he said. “Five that we know of.”

He saw her frown as she absorbed that. “How bad?”

“One death,” Iain said. “A ship found drifting in-system off Prairie, with a dead pilot—infested. He’d killed himself.” Then he added quickly, “Not one you trained.”

She said nothing.

“And an unmanned scouting probe vanished in the Terranova system—expensive, and too close to home. The Line Council has set a higher level of alert in the Terranova system. Zhen says it’s straining our resources, keeping us from sending reinforcements out to the fringe worlds on schedule.”

“I told you the Line would do that at the first sign of danger to Terranova,” Linnea said, sounding irritated.

“And there’s another matter,” Iain said. “They refused your petition.” He took her hand. “Torin sent a detailed report on the results of the debate. There will be no expedition to Nexus. The Pilot Masters say that the matter of what we discovered there last year is closed. They’re angry, Linnea. The Honored Voice himself says you are not to present such a request again.”

She shook her head. “How can they bury this?” she said. “How can they ignore what we found out about those Cold Minds pilots? We need new weapons, new defenses to help us in this fight. Or we’ll lose. We’ll
lose
, Iain. I know you understand that as well as I do, I see it in your face every day.”

“But those poor maimed people—” Iain took a breath and made himself choose different words. “Those pilots. What is it you think we could have learned from them? They’re gone, they’re burned.” He hated the memory of the mute, mutilated, permanently installed human pilots of the Cold Minds ships they had investigated on Nexus, after the grim, costly Line victory there.

“We might have been able to recover some genetic material from the burn pile,” Linnea said. “We might have been able to learn how we are related. Who they are. We could guess where they came from.”

“They can’t be our brothers,” Iain said, without thinking.

“We’ll never know, now,” Linnea said. “The Line has put them out of reach.” She shook her head. “And I thought we killed them and burned them out of mercy.” She lifted her chin. “But I see now. The Line doesn’t want evidence of the truth. It would mean facing the fact that they failed at Earth. That they left living humans behind.”