The Dark Reaches (4 page)

“We know that we did,” Iain said. “We had no choice, Linnea. We—assumed they all died soon after, that none of them could possibly have survived.” He looked down at his hands. “And they didn’t survive. Not as humans.”

“You saw the markings on their bodies,” Linnea said. “Those tattoos. Flowers. Decorations. They
were
human.”

Iain looked away, remembering: a chain of daisies around a wrist, a brightly banded snake twining up an ankle. Faded signs of a previous life that—Linnea was right—must have been at least partly spent in freedom. But as the pilots were, catatonic, eyeless, deeply and permanently linked to their ships—“We couldn’t have done anything to help them, Linnea.”

“Iain,” she said, her voice unsteady, “you know what we’re facing. Years, decades, of fighting the Cold Minds, we have to expect that—but centuries? Look at me. Answer me honestly. If we don’t defeat the Cold Minds soon—do you think that, fifty years from now, any human will still be alive and free in the Hidden Worlds?”

He looked steadily down into her eyes, concealing the ache in his heart. “No.”

“Then the fact that there are free humans still living in Earth’s system is vital,” she said. “Don’t you see? Six hundred years after the fall of Earth, and they are still alive, still—some of them—free. We need to understand how they’ve done it.”

Iain sighed. “But we can’t, Linnea. Earth is too far. You know that.” He spoke as gently as he could. “Any exploration mission to Earth would take far too long. Years would pass here. It would be decades before we got an answer. And for what? How could a pilot even find a few human survivors hiding in an entire solar system? And what could he learn from them if he did?”

“The human thing to do,” she said stubbornly, “is to try anyway. Not to give up. Not to let a Line Council ruling stop us. We never have before.”

Of course she would say that.
“Please,” he said. “Let it go. We have battles to fight right here in the Hidden Worlds. Torin says Hakon sen Efrem is whispering that you and the other non-Line pilots want the Line’s move to Terranova to fail. You don’t want them to rebuild their power.”

She stood up. “He’s right about the power.”

“And it’s let him do a lot of damage since you and I left Terranova.” Iain rose and faced her. “We have to get back there and work to undo it.”

“I wish you’d joined me in the petition,” she said. “They respect you.”

And not me.
He heard the words as if she had spoken them. And, of course, she was right, about the older Council members anyway; despite her deeds on Nexus, Linnea Kiaho was still only a woman, only an outsider. But—

“You know why I couldn’t,” he said. “I can’t spend my political capital on a—a side issue, Linnea.”

“It is not,” she said coldly, “a side issue. Not to me. Not to anyone who truly thinks it through.”

Iain looked soberly into her angry eyes. No, it was not a side issue. If even a few fugitive humans still survived in the shadow of Earth, now the center and fortress of the Cold Minds—it should be impossible, and yet they’d both seen the evidence that it was true. Linnea was right: Understanding how humans had survived under those conditions could be vital.

But the Hidden Worlds were fighting their own war, right here, right now. How could Linnea, how could anyone waste time, energy, resources, on so slender a possibility, so dangerous a journey?

“We’ll talk about it at home,” Iain said. “Please. Let’s go home. Marra is safe now. You’re free to move on.”

“I’m ready to move on,” she said, her voice tight. “I’m sick of being groundside. I can’t rest. I want—I want to be out in the stars, in otherspace.” She looked at him squarely. “Away from people judging me. From politics. From seeing everything from seven points of view. It’s the only freedom I’ve got left. I need it so much, sometimes, sometimes I think—” She broke off, and he saw that her eyes were bright with tears.

“Linnea.” He pulled her gently against him. “Tell me.”

She was rigid in his embrace. After a long time, she said, in a choked voice, “I’m having—dreams.”

The back of his neck prickled. “Dreams about—”

“About otherspace,” she said. “I dream about it all the time.” Her voice was distant, slow. “Every night. I dream about what I see in otherspace—pictures, images, places I’ve never been. And all I want in the dream is to get there. I wake up crying, I want so much to be there. It—it calls to me. Somewhere out there is my home.” Her voice changed, tightened again. “But I don’t know where it is.”

She could not go on. He stood there holding her, his hand absently caressing her hair, but he stared off into the shadows across the room, his heart beating slowly with dread. This happened sometimes, to young, new pilots.
Othermind
, the Line called it—that, and blunter names. He felt cold, remembering. Othermind could end a career, ground a pilot forever.

But Iain had thought Linnea was past the risk. Too well trained, too experienced. Otherspace overwhelmed the mind and senses, its beauty undeniable; he loved it himself, missed it when he had been groundside too long. But this mindless yearning—He hid his face in her hair.

This happened sometimes.

This was madness.

 

 

 

Linnea shivered in the cold, still morning air. Santandru’s distant, pale sun, masked by a thin haze, hung low over the snowy eastern hills. Its light did not warm her as she walked around her ship again, her booted feet crunching in frozen slush. Once again she checked that all fueling and power connections had been properly released, all supply ports were sealed, the skin seamless as it should be. Ready for launch.

She still did not feel completely one with this ship. Iain had urged her to accept it, new from the yards, when the chance came, and she hadn’t resisted. The old ship Iain had stolen for her had suffered damage on Nexus that left it better suited to short training jumps in local space; it could no longer land or take off safely in planetary gravity.

This jumpship was a beauty, a long narrow knife blade of gleaming gray metal with none of the usual marks of age or wear from many atmosphere landings. Its smooth skin was unbroken by ports; when Linnea piloted in normal space, she “saw” with the eyes embedded invisibly in that skin, not through any window.

And in otherspace, of course, she could not see at all. Not in the same way. She had only the inner sight, entirely within her mind—the experience no pilot could describe in words, even to another pilot.

She brushed her hand along the chilly metal, seeing the blurred reflection of her own face, dark against the white glare of the hazy sky. This ship had a range far beyond her old one. It could carry three passengers safely on a long jump, swaddled in its state-of-the-art passenger shells, and it had supply and recycling capabilities to match. Even though it was larger than the expensive Line linker ship that had been Iain’s since boyhood, it was almost as fast and maneuverable. Torin had been justifiably pleased with the ship, the first of a new model come fresh off the yards on Terranova, and he had presented it to her with obvious pride.

And yet the ship still felt like a new winter coat—a little stiff, a little strange.

But it would take her where she needed to go.

She had persuaded Iain to make one stop on the way back to Terranova, to check on the patrols at the little farming world of Paradais. That would give her two more jumps, not just one, before it all ended—before she and Iain were tied down again to Terranova orbit and the political wrangling groundside in Port Marie.

Two more jumps. Two more chances to open herself to otherspace, to let herself listen.

“Good morning, Pilot,” Iain said behind her. “Ship status?”

She turned and forced a smile. “I could leave this moment.”

He did not answer her smile. “I’ve scheduled us with the portmaster,” he said, “for launch at noon.”

She looked at him for a moment, and clenched her jaw to keep from shivering again in the still, icy air. “That’s hours yet. Why the delay?”

“Let’s go aboard,” he said.

“You don’t need to check my boards, you know,” she said, flushing.

“It’s not that. There’s something I don’t want to discuss in the barracks.”

She turned and set her palm on the slightly duller oval of metal beside the hatch. The cold from the metal bit into her skin, but she felt the faint vibration as the hatch dilated in response to its pilot’s touch.

Inside, through the tiny lock, the narrow passenger compartment was warm, silent, brightly lit. Three empty passenger shells hung closely stacked against the far bulkhead. Storage lockers crowded the rest of the space. But Iain had already moved through the door to the pilot’s compartment. It was comfortable, almost roomy for one person, with a tiny refresher compartment and a workstation and chair for use in port if the pilot chose to live aboard. Silently, Iain gestured Linnea into the chair.

She sat with a feeling of dread. He leaned against the bulkhead opposite and folded his arms. The dark piloting shell loomed in the center of the space, a barrier between them, half-hiding him.

“I’m worried about you,” he said. His voice was quiet, but she saw how rigidly he held his folded arms. Control with Iain, always control. Especially when he was afraid. “It’s these dreams.”

“Everyone has dreams,” she said.

“Tell me that they have only been troubling you since you came to Santandru,” he said. “Tell me that your urge to get back to otherspace, back to the jump, only came when you knew you had to leave here.”

He was inviting her to lie to him. What could frighten him so much? “But that’s not how it is,” she said. “This has been coming over me since the jump from Nexus. It got worse when I had to make that run to the yards on Kattayar and back. Worse yet on the way here.”

“Worse,” he said. His eyes were dark, unreadable. He looked down at his booted feet. “This can be—a difficulty. A danger, with new pilots.”

“You mean other pilots have these dreams?”

“Some,” he said reluctantly. “Images from otherspace, things they remember there, that come back to them in their dreams.”

“Iain, these aren’t anything I
remember
,” she said. “I’ve never seen them before. A canyon, red rock, bigger than any in the Hidden Worlds. A jungle that goes on all the way to the horizon. There’s nothing like that here.”

“You may think you’ve never seen those images,” Iain said. His voice was tight. “But you have, you must have. Your mind supplies them out of your memories, to explain what you experience in otherspace. The emotion you talked about, too—that’s a response to the strangeness, when it threatens to be overwhelming. It’s a sign that you’re—you’re letting too much in. You’re too open.”

Make him say it.
“What are you afraid of, Iain?”

“Sometimes,” Iain said reluctantly, “pilots like that—they jump to otherspace and—never come back.”

She got to her feet. “You think I’m weak. That I’m going to fail. After all this time.” She let him hear the anger in her voice.

“I know your strength,” he said with obvious pain. “More than I ever would have believed, in the beginning. I trust you, Linnea.” He took a breath. “But you’re not well. You may need—rest.”

The breath left her body.
Rest.
He meant not piloting. Maybe never piloting again. Panic caught at her throat, and she breathed carefully, mastered it.

She set her hand on the piloting shell. He must not see the fear that filled her mind at the thought she might be grounded, cut off forever from otherspace, beyond the reach of—of whatever it was that spoke to her there.
Tell him what he needs to hear.
“Iain, what can I do? How can I show you that I’m all right?”

“You and I will review some of the techniques Line pilots learn, for lessening the impact of otherspace.” The patient compassion in his voice only frightened her more. He was speaking to her as he would speak to a child. Or to a person with a deadly illness. “I went over them with you in training, but obviously not well enough.”

She remembered that part of the training. “You want me to deliberately close myself off from otherspace,” she said. “Blind myself to everything but my course, the timing of the jump. Is that it?”

“Otherspace is too much,” Iain said. “Too much for anyone. You don’t look directly at the sun.”

She smiled stiffly. “I can’t say that came up very often, growing up here.”

The worry in his face did not ease.
Keep pushing.
She went to him, set her hands on his arms. “Iain. I’ll be all right. It’s just—worry over Marra, over coming back to Santandru, that’s all. But we’ll review those techniques if you want, and I’ll try to learn them.”

At last his tense expression eased, and he set his hands on her waist. “And you’ll use them,” he said, giving her a gentle shake. “Promise me.”

Her heart gave a thump. “I will try.”

He looked down at her searchingly, then seemed to realize that this was the only promise he would get. He leaned down and kissed her, and she tried to make the kiss another promise.

Because she was not sure, not sure at all, that she
wanted
to close herself off from the experience of otherspace.

Or that she even could.