The Dark Reaches (9 page)

“In otherspace,” Linnea said, dizzy and sick. “I heard you. You sent me the jump point. That’s how we came here.”

“Not possible,” the man said stubbornly. “No one sent for you. Maybe a trick, maybe the Cold Minds.” He tugged Linnea forward. “Move.”

Linnea closed her eyes, helpless in the man’s strong grip. No answers here, no answers yet.

But she would find them.

Their captors manhandled them through a chilly boarding tube and a cramped air-lock into the docked ship. Linnea’s grip on awareness was wavering as her thirst and fever increased. The lock cycled, and her thoughts revolved uselessly: Who were these people? Not infested, she kept assuring herself—but how could she know?

Their captors slung them into a small metal compartment, barely two meters in any direction. This was like no ship Linnea had ever seen: the crudely finished metal plates that formed the bulkheads were joined by roughly welded seams, and the hatch was merely a swinging metal plug with a hand-wheel in the center. Nothing like the refined, beautifully machined Line ships Linnea had known.

The suited men backed out through the hatch and pulled it closed. The wheel turned with a screech, then latches clanked shut outside.

Clutching Iain’s slack body against her with one arm, hanging on to a metal loop with the other, she looked around the bare, dirty compartment. Its old gray paint was scraped and scuffed in the way of a ship used to carry cargo. Faint light gleamed from a recessed panel covered with yellowed plastic. There were no acceleration couches, no padding of any kind. And she realized, with a jolt of fear, that this ship would be moving at any moment.

Which way would be “down”? She looked around, made a frantic guess based on the positions of the light and hatch—tugged Iain with her into a corner, where she braced them both in place as best she could, pressing her bare back, her bare feet against the metal. Then waited, her heart beating hard.

But the acceleration, when it came, was gentle, prolonged—nothing like the quick fiery maneuvers of a well-handled Line ship. And she’d guessed right: They were lying against the bulkhead that was “down.” The compartment was cold, the metal rough against her bare skin, but she could do nothing about that but endure it.

And wait. Someone would help them soon. Otherwise, these people would simply have killed them.

During the acceleration, Iain stirred and muttered but did not open his eyes. She held him close against her, feeling his quick, feverish heartbeat against her own. After an indefinite time, the acceleration stopped abruptly, and they began to drift away from the bulkhead.

Then she recognized the whistle of atmosphere along the skin of the ship and the steadily increasing tug that meant deceleration.
No—
She tightened her hold on Iain and closed her eyes. They could not hope to survive a landing without any padding whatsoever.

But again the changes in motion were strangely gentle, and the thin scream of wind against the skin of the ship never built to the roar of a landing through heavy atmosphere. After a long time, the ship settled, the engines cutting off, leaving an echoing silence. Gravity, real gravity, held them gently to the deck—so gently that the hard metal was almost comfortable, except for the cold.

Linnea eased Iain to the floor and untwisted the wire from his wrists and ankles. It hadn’t cut in, thank God. Then she gathered him close again and fought to order her thoughts. The descent through atmosphere meant that this was a planet or moon, not a station. Thin atmosphere, light gee—it must be a moon. Not that green gas giant from her vision, of course—probably one of its satellites.

Maybe the one who had called to her was here, on this moon. She felt a twinge of hope.

She heard, distantly, the receding clank of suited foot-steps, then the heavy clanking slam of a hatch. The lights dimmed, and the faint hiss of circulating air stopped.

Then came silence, silence so deep she could hear only her rasping breath, and Iain’s. Nothing else. Without life support, without heat, how long could they last?

In her arms, Iain stirred again, still feverish. They both needed fluids, electrolytes, food, warmth. Surely their captors wouldn’t leave them to die in this cold compartment after they’d traveled so far. She’d told them she was from the Hidden Worlds. Surely that would get someone’s attention, and help and relief would come.

And someone with answers. Someone
had
sent that summoning call. Why else would she and Iain have dared such a voyage—sliding past all the long, cold dark, the hard vacuum and radiation, tunneling instead through the intricate beauty of otherspace, the endless depths. . . .

 

 

 

Second Pilot Timmon Abrakam, commander of Gold Wing Triton and chief of the Night Guard, stared at his commscreen in disbelief. Patrol Pilot Smid, his voice carefully respectful, said, “It’s more impressive up close, sir.”

“Look at those lines,” Timmon said reverently. “Look at the
size
of it. I’ve never seen a ship like that. Never even dreamed of one.”

“No, sir,” Smid said.

“And the pilot—alive, you say?”

“Held for testing, sir,” Smid said. “Two of them, a man and a woman.”

Timmon pulled thoughtfully at his chin. “If they’re clean, put them in isolation. And—message First Pilot Kimura. He’s got to see this.”

“He’s at the Residence, sir, with Madame, and he specifically ordered—”

“For this,” Timmon said, “he will want to be waked. You may tell him the responsibility is mine, Pilot Smid.”

Smid bowed and left, leaving Timmon alone to contemplate the mystery. A ship from nowhere.

So was this the first happy result of the grand new strategy the First Pilot had been hinting at?

Or was this the first sign that, like all the other grand new strategies, it had failed?

 

 

 

An endless time later, Linnea jerked awake, instantly afraid, as the hatch of their compartment clanged open. She flung her arm over her eyes to shield them from the harsh light playing over the compartment—someone’s hand-light. Beside her, Iain made a rusty sound of protest.

Two people entered—the same, different, she could not tell—sealed inside anti-infective barriers, their faces again invisible behind gleaming reflective visors. But this time one of them carried a medkit, the red cross shape clear and familiar. Relief washed over her, then vanished when the figure opened the case and pulled out a syringe—a syringe with a
needle
on it, like something from an old simspace historical tale.

One of them gripped her arm in a gloved hand while the other tied on a tourniquet, jabbed her with the needle, drew blood. “Are you testing me for infestation?” she asked. But neither of them troubled to answer or even to give any sign they had heard her. They drew an identical sample from Iain and vanished again. The hatch banged shut.

She slept some more, and endured the times of waking with Iain increasingly restless. His eyes opened, once, but he looked at her with frightened incomprehension and did not answer when she spoke to him. Her fear for him grew. She could feel herself getting weaker, dizzy with it, and he must be weakening, too.

She woke from a dream of the shadows in the corners growing, leaning over her, to find herself in motion. Hands gripping her arms and legs, carrying her headlong, somewhere. She heard muffled voices, but she could not understand.

They passed out of the ship into a high, wide, cold space. Thin, bitter air, lights sliding past overhead, smells of metal, paint, chemicals. Faces looking down at her, hard to see, dim light. “Iain,” she croaked, and a female voice said something indistinct, in a peremptory tone. The lights stopped moving past, stayed still. Now she was lying on a table, no, a bed, soft enough for a bed, and warm water trickled along the skin of her arm. Then pain stabbed the back of her hand. “Iain,” she muttered again, starting to cry. Her eyes were too dry for tears.

Someone said “Quiet”—her own voice, Iain’s? The leaning shadows joined, flowed, rose all around her bed, and she sank under the surface into silence.

Esayeh burst into Pilang’s sleep cubby, startling her awake—caught her hands in his as he floated against her sleeping sack, kissed her on the forehead. “He came,” he said, joy making his voice tremble. “Twelve hours ago. A beautiful ship, like nothing I’ve ever seen, I saw the images through Thaddeus’s telescreen—he came!”

She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Wait. Who?”

“The pilot! The one from the Hidden Worlds!”

“From the Hidden—” She stared Esayeh in the face. “Is he here? Now?”

“Well—” He looked away. Not deepsider courtesy, but Tritoner evasion—she knew it of old.

“Then it can wait until I wake up,” she said.

His face fell. “I thought you’d be pleased. This is important, Pilang.”

She sighed and ran her hands along his shoulders. “All right, then. Tell me about it. Did you even see him?”

“No. The ship jumped in too close to Triton—damn the timing, a day either way, and they’d have been out of range, I could have gotten there first. The orbital monitors spotted the ship. And the patrol picked it up—and whoever was aboard.”

Pilang wriggled out of her sleeping sack, floated to where she had left her work clothes, started pulling them on. “So your mysterious Hidden Worlds pilot is now on Triton,” she said. “Locked up safe in fifteen layers of guards. And probably lots more comfortable than he would be here—your Madame Tereu wouldn’t dishonor herself by showing poor hospitality.”

“I’ll get him out,” Esayeh said.

“You can’t even set foot on Triton,” she said. “Not outside your ship. They’ll arrest you.”

“Which is why,” he said, “I need someone who can go there freely, someone who won’t be suspected—”

Her head went back. “Oh, no,” she said. “No, no,
no
.”

“I’ll send some messages ahead,” he said, pleading now. “The way will be set for you—all you have to do is receive the pilot when he comes to you and guide him to the ship.”

“No,” she said. Esayeh and his wild dreams, his crazy rickety structure of hope, his “bridge between worlds”—she would not be pulled further out on it. “You can’t expect this of me. If I do anything against the Tritoner regulations, they’ll revoke my visa. I’ll lose my right to go there, lose all the trade credits I depend on to keep my circuit clinics alive. No!”

“But if this works—we won’t
need
their trade credits anymore. Not ever.”

“Wild hopes,” she said stubbornly.

“What other kind do we have?” Esayeh floated away from her to the opposite wall, clung there stubbornly, facing her. “If this fails, if the pilot does not appear, I won’t ask you to try again. I promise you.”

“You promise,” she muttered. She pursed her lips, then gave him a fierce look. “One try. Send your messages.”

He bounded across the little space to her, caught her up in a hug, kissed her resoundingly. “You are the fountain of my hopes.”

“I,” Pilang said bleakly, “am a fool.”

He laughed, flipped neatly in the air, and launched himself out through the curtain of her cubby.

She looked after him.
I promised myself, no more of this. . . .
Then she caught a glimpse of her face in the bit of mirror. She was smiling. She twisted her face into a fierce scowl and went on getting ready for her day.

Morning, maybe. The chrono on the wall said so, anyway. Linnea knelt beside Iain’s bed in their lavish, windowless hospital room—watching him sleep, schooling herself to patience. Since waking, she’d asked everyone who came in here the questions burning in her mind: Where was the pilot who had called her here? Could someone please ask a pilot to come and talk to her? But no one seemed to understand. The middle-aged nurse who was tending them, a tall, austere-looking man, only pursed his lips and shook his head, as if her questions were somehow improper.

Linnea itched for answers, itched to go out looking for them. But she knew she could not risk leaving Iain alone here, helpless—not after the hostility their original captors had shown. They thought he was Line—and clearly that was not a good thing here.

The nurse had been kind enough—professional kindness, dealt out with impersonal efficiency. He’d helped her sponge off the dried sweat and dead skin of the journey, given her clean blue coveralls to put on. To be clean and warm was grace enough for the moment. That and the intravenous fluids that she knew were gradually restoring her strength, and must be helping Iain as well. Their reserves in the jumpship had been so low, she guessed, that the shipmind had dropped the infusion rate well below optimal—keeping them on the bare edge of dehydration but getting them through the jump alive.

And the nurse had given Linnea a comb, with which she’d tidied her damp hair and tucked it behind her ears. She had not tried to do anything with Iain’s long black braid; best leave it as it was until it could be washed.