The Dark Reaches (35 page)

“So we could find refuge there?” Tereu shook her head in clear disbelief. “The deepsiders would allow this?”

“Soon it won’t matter,” Linnea said. “There are no longer two human peoples in this system, whether you see it yet or not, whether the deepsiders accept it yet or not.”

“And they don’t,” Tereu said flatly. “I was there on
Hestia
. I saw them and heard them, when they knew who I was and where I came from. They would leave us to die. I have no doubt that that was their intention.”

“That—may be true,” Linnea said. “That’s why I’m here. To make it impossible.”

“But what can we do?” Tereu had sunk into her work chair, sat there now with her hands folded tight before her. Behind her, a commscreen showed a view outside the city, Neptune high above the horizon in a sharp black sky, its bluish light faintly coloring the bleak bitter surface of the moon. “How can we get to this refuge? And why should the deepsiders allow us to stay?”

“You have three times as many ships as the deepsiders do,” Linnea said. “Do as they did from
Hestia
. Fill them with people, send them out in all directions. Then when they’re out-system, we’ll start the rescue operation while the Cold Minds are otherwise occupied.”

“Occupied with what?” Tereu looked pale.

“Destroying your city,” Iain said gently. “I’m sorry.”

At Tereu’s look of shock, Linnea spoke. “They
will
destroy it. That’s their intention. Remove the human foothold in this system. They don’t care if your people die drifting in space. They may follow some of your ships, destroy them, too—but if you stay here, you will all die.”

“I know that,” Tereu said. She kept her eyes on her clenched hands. “One more question. Why did you return? Why are you helping us? When you know—” She raised her head and looked hard at Iain. “You must know what we, what Hiso, did to your worlds.”

Iain saw dawning disbelief in Linnea’s eyes, but he only nodded. “He told them where to find us. The other secret, wasn’t it, that the First Pilot keeps?”

Tereu nodded stiffly.

“I thought it was so.” Iain felt Linnea move close to his side, but he did not touch her.

“He thought you would respond to the attack by coming here in force,” Tereu said. “When it didn’t happen, from one year to the next—”

“He thought we were stronger than we are,” Iain said. “There’s nothing to be done about it. Nothing but to try to survive this.” Now he could sense that Linnea was calmer. “Madame,” he said, “save your people. Call your ships home.”

Tereu closed her eyes for a moment. Then slapped the comm control. “Merike. Contact the patrol fleet. Tell them the First Citizen orders them home.”

“Hiso,” Linnea said. “Can you trust him?”

“We must hope so.” Tereu looked stern. “That is the risk you took when you made me this offer. The risk we all take when I accept it.”

Iain looked away, slid a hand into the pocket of his tunic. Felt the neural fuser waiting there, unknown to Linnea, to anyone.

Not so much risk, perhaps. Though he had wondered, from the moment he had seen this necessity coming, whether Linnea would understand the need for it. And whether, for all her anger at Hiso, Tereu would let Iain survive the act.

Esayeh floated in the dimness of his control room in the docking ring, struggling against his own tiredness. One or two other older men, former pilots, had agreed to help cover the shifts, now that the young people had been evacuated—but first, they had family to see to safety. And Esayeh understood. One was an oldfather, and the other had a husband in poor health. Esayeh himself had been deeply relieved to see Mick’s name, and Hana’s, on the last ship’s list of passengers when it departed. But getting the others safe was taking too long. He was so tired. . . .

The evacuation was proceeding with all the orderliness Esayeh had come to expect from deepsiders—which was, of course, almost none. But they hadn’t panicked. Not yet.

Though their fear was growing—he could feel it. He could see it. He blinked wearily at his commscreen, which showed a line of people moving slowly into the docking tube of the latest ore freighter to arrive. On the comm, when they docked two hours ago, its captain had been as angry and frightened as all of them at the prospect of boosting out of Neptune orbit, heading out into the dark almost at random, to await either the Cold Minds—or a vaguely promised rescue. . . . Frightened as they were, though, most of the habitat dwellers in the line clutched bags of food, blankets—what they would need to keep themselves alive, though certainly not comfortable, for the days they would wait for rescue. Deepsiders might not be predictable, but they had sense.

The opposite of his own people. Esayeh glanced at the nearspace status board, which was updating sluggishly now with so many of the deepsider remote monitors gone missing—as well as many of the Tritoner probes whose transmissions Esayeh had taught the deepsiders to intercept. Yet so far the Cold Minds had done little more than scout the edges of the system. As if they were waiting for something.

Waiting for news.

Esayeh shook his head to clear it. At least Lin had gotten off, and the other pilot, in that fine new ship of hers. Now that was going to be an asset for them all—why, that ship would boost ten people at once, or twelve, do the work of two or three of his little ships. He hoped Lin would get the wounded pilot settled on
Persephone
, in the hospital there if he needed it, and come back here, where she was needed, to start helping with rescue runs from the ships that were safely out of the system. A day or so, maybe, would be all the time she would possibly need. He would be glad to see her. . . .

Somebody was tugging at him, turning him in the air. He had gone to sleep again. He blinked blearily and saw Pilang hanging there upside down to him. He rotated and saw that her expression was haggard, strained. “I thought you’d never wake up,” she said. “You get someone else in here to cover this station now, or I won’t be responsible for what happens, you understand?”

He looked past her at the commscreen. The freighter had finished loading its full cargo of forty-eight passengers; their names, with their datalinks, stood in a neat list down the right-hand edge of the screen. As he watched, the light over the hatch on the inner end of the docking tube flickered from green to red, and he sensed through the fabric of the habitat the heavy docking clamps disengaging. Radio silence meant that was all the departure notification he would get. “Godspeed,” he muttered, then turned to Pilang. “Give me some more of that patch you put on me yesterday,” he said. He could hear how thick his voice sounded, and knew she could, too.

She shook her head stubbornly. “You’ve had enough, old man. Done enough. There’s no freighter due for eight hours. You go get a sleep sack in the layover barracks, or I stop helping you at all.”

For a moment the prospect of sleep pulled at him, and he sighed heavily, dizzy with longing. But as he reached out to lock down his board, he saw the urgent pulse of the message light. He touched it, and the message flicked onto the commscreen.

He blinked at it in puzzlement. It was a code, but a code he knew well. A recall order—for every Tritoner ship. Even the patrols.
Return to port.
Now?

Then he saw the authorization code at the end of the order. One he knew well.

Tereu.

Tereu, who was supposed to be here on
Hestia
, waiting for the trip home he would arrange when he could.

Which meant she had found another way home. And the only possible ship was—

“Oh, no,” Esayeh breathed, and called up the departure logs. Lin’s ship had launched twelve hours ago—with three aboard. Three, not two. Jumped as soon as it reached range. But not, it seemed, to
Persephone
.

Lin was on Triton.

Lin knew where
Persephone
was.

He swung to face Pilang. “I need those drugs,” he said. “Now. And I need to get to my ship.”

“You can’t just—”

“Lin is on Triton,” he said raggedly. “In a few hours, Kimura Hiso will land there. He’ll arrest her. Find out all she knows. And Kimura Hiso is in communication with the Cold Minds.”

He saw horror wake in Pilang’s eyes. Then she turned away and opened her medkit.

 

 

 

I ain watched, out of pickup range, as Tereu spoke to her people. Linnea stood beside him, expressionless, her hand in his as they listened. There was no turning back now, not for Tereu, not for any of them. Tereu had told her people the truth, the long secret of the Tritoner pilots, and why the bargain must now be repudiated.

“We will not surrender one more child, even a deepsider’s child, to the control of those machines,” Tereu was saying. She was speaking without notes. “I have chosen for you. Maybe not wisely, but the only choice I saw. We will all be refugees now. A fleeing people. And yet I can offer hope. I can say no more than that: There is hope, more than we ever had here even in the best of our years in our beloved city.” Her voice had become unsteady. She looked hard into the pickup. “Trust me. Trust in my love for you. And get ready to board your ships.”

Now she did glance down at a datapad. “Assignment lists will be distributed to neighborhood newsboards. Families with children will receive priority. The rest of us will follow soon after. I know that my pride in you—” Her voice broke, and she waited a moment. “I know that pride is well placed. I know that you will show me, again, that Tritoners face even great fear with calm, and order, and respect for law.” She held up her right hand, and her voice steadied. “The oath I made you thousands of days ago binds me now: to protect your lives and our city with all my strength and will, to the last ounce of my blood. Well, you are our city now—the people of Triton. And I will lead you to the stars.”

Esayeh landed at Triton port without clearance; there were no patrol ships to stop him, and he ignored the frantic queries from Control. As he expected, they ordered him to stay in his ship. He considered asking to speak to Tereu; considered trying to send a message, through her, to Pilang. The worst of his regrets was that he had not been able to tell Pilang how long, and how deeply, he had always loved her.

He settled into his piloting chair, waved the cabin lights down, and called up some music.
The
music—his beloved Bach. The endless trove of recordings on
Persephone
, transferred to his ship, had been his companion on many long, lonely jumps over the years, and though his ambition had been to hear all of Bach, somehow he never had. Because there were some he returned to, again and again. He closed his eyes, and his breath caught as the first notes of the massed voices washed over him. In a language long dead, a cry for mercy—a cry that he had never thought would be answered again.

And now, perhaps, against all hope, it had.

But it did not seem to matter, now. He settled back in his chair and gave himself to the music: an intensely human construct, and a noble one, called into existence by a sense of the nearness of God.
Standing on the brink of the infinite.
Whether judgment or reward ever came, for Esayeh or for anyone he loved—whether or not he ever knew it—for now it seemed not so trivial a thing, to have been human. Not so worthless a thing, to have been alive.

He waited, peacefully, for what he knew was coming.

 

 

 

The demand for entry came within the hour. Esayeh silenced the music, rose, and undogged the hatch.

Kimura Hiso stood there, smiling at him. “Suarez Esayeh,” he said.

“Not my name any longer.” Esayeh studied him. Had he hurt Lin? Or did he not yet know what she could tell him? “Ask my family. They’ll tell you.”

“Oh, they’ve forgotten you were ever part of them, I’m sure,” Hiso said. “But now it is time for your city to reclaim you, even if your family will not.”

Esayeh only looked at him. Kimura Hiso had always talked too much. Sometimes over the years Esayeh had wondered whether Tereu had found Hiso as hard to bear as he did.

“Link in again,” Hiso said. “You’re going to take me somewhere.”

Esayeh shook his head, the weariness coming back as the drugs Pilang had given him wore off. She had warned him that that was truly the last dose, that his heart might not survive another. And she had watched him go, with that look of worry he had so often seen on her face. Because of him.

“You’re going to take me,” Hiso said, “to
Persephone
.” Esayeh felt the lurch of fear in his chest, making his heart stammer. “I don’t know what that is,” he said.

“I have known that name for thousands of days,” Hiso said. “Just not what it was, or where. Only that it was important—the man who said the name died soon after, without saying anything more.”

Esayeh lifted his chin. “The deepsiders don’t tell me everything,” he said. “They remember where I was born.”