Forgotten Suns (32 page)

“None of us said anything about—” Dr. Ma began.

“Doctor,” Kirkov said surprisingly gently, “in your way, you
did. Besides, you owe the ship, after what you did to it. Don’t you think it’s
the least you can do?”

Her lips were tight and her eyes were angry, but she spread
her hands. “Call it what you like. This is my ship. I will not leave it.”

“To your quarters, then,” Rama said. “You will know if you
are needed.”

Oh, that was sharp. Dr. Ma thought so, too: Aisha suspected
she might have done her best to kill him if she’d had a weapon within reach.

She turned on her heel instead and stalked out, followed by
the rest of the scientists. The crew were already getting to work, figuring out
the new configurations of the controls and the screens, or heading off to their
stations elsewhere on the ship.

~~~

The war hadn’t stopped because they weren’t paying
attention to it. Underneath the ship, according to the screens, the civilians
who had been fighting on foot had managed to escape, and take their dead and
wounded with them. The Corps had taken to the air.

The ship opened a channel to the web when Aisha asked. It
had the buzz in the back teeth that said it was encrypted, but she didn’t mind
that at all.

None of the public traffic had anything to say about a
hijacked experimental ship or a battle between Psycorps and a hundred or so
civilians. The security channels were full of buzz and crackle about the
war—and an ultimatum. The non-psis had set a deadline. Either they got what
they wanted, or they broke the planet.

There weren’t even two planetdays left. As far as Aisha
could see, and she ran so many searches she made herself dizzy, nobody in the
Corps was talking about surrender. They were chasing pirates offworld instead,
and rounding up nons under cover of safety patrols, and tracking down and
neutralizing what they called nulls.

It was more complicated than Aisha could keep straight in
her head. She gave it to the ship, for what good that would do, in time to hear
Robrecht say over the conn, “Shuttle’s loaded and secured. Are we sure we want
to let it go?”

Everyone in the bay turned to stare at Rama. He spoke the
way he would to any of them, but the person he was talking to was halfway back
to the port by now.

“Captain Bowen. We’re releasing a shuttleful of
noncombatants. May we ask that you vouch for their safety?”

One of the screens that had been dark came alive with a
crackle and sputter. Aisha looked through it into the pilot’s compartment of a
fighter, and Captain Bowen’s startled face. “What in the name of—”

“Captain,” Rama said. “You heard me. Will you place them
under your protection?”

He’d sent a manifest underneath his words, a list of people
who were on the shuttle. Captain Bowen scowled at some of the names on it. “I’ll
vouch for them,” he said grudgingly.

“Good, then,” Rama said. “What is it your people say,
Captain? Godspeed.”

Captain Bowen was obviously not amused, but whatever he’d
been about to say, the ship—or Rama—cut off. The screen went dark.

“Robrecht,” Rama said, still in that calm and casual voice, “let
them go.”

“Aye, sir,” Robrecht said on the comm.

The shuttle showed up on one of the side screens, emerging
from a bay that Aisha didn’t remember seeing in the ship before she came
inside. It dropped fast, then leveled out, turning in a wide arc until it aimed
toward the port.

“Now,” said Rama, “we go. We’ll jump as soon as we clear
this planet’s gravity well. If you have cradles, I suggest you find them now.”

Aisha’s heart thudded. He and she didn’t even have quarters,
let alone jump cradles. Maybe for him it wouldn’t matter, but for her it did.

She started to remind him of that, but before she could get
the words out, the ship lurched. Screens flashed to life all over the
bridge—she hadn’t known there were that many.

Black-winged fighters swarmed them on all sides. Something
much bigger hovered above.

Command vessel. Military Intelligence, the web told Aisha,
with Psycorps agents on board in force. Which told her which side of the war MI
was really on.

She looked for some sign of Aunt Khalida, but she didn’t
recognize any of the names on the ship’s manifest. The commanding officer’s
name was Aviram. What little she had time to catch about who he was didn’t
reassure her at all.

A voice crackled across the comm. “Command vessel
Shad Iliya
to
Ra-Harakhte.
Stand by for boarding. Stand by.”

“I think not,” Rama said.

“You are surrounded. We are armed. You are not. Stand by for
boarding.”

“No,” said Rama. “Aisha. Lie down.”

The words didn’t make sense at first. Or after a minute or
two, either. “What—”

“Lie down,” he said. “Now.”

Aisha obeyed slowly. It wasn’t her imagination: the floor
was curving up to meet her. Taking the shape of a jump cradle.

All that kept Aisha from running screaming was the fact that
there was nowhere to run to. No way she was heading for the Corps.

The floor was warm, not too soft and not too hard. The
cradle that grew around her looked like an ordinary one, but didn’t smell like
it. This smelled green, with an undertone of fresh dirt.

The only way to deal with it was to shut off the part of her
that kept trying to make sense of it all, and just let it happen.

“
Ra-Harakhte,
” the
Shad Iliya
said. “On our signal, open
aft port. We would prefer not to open it for you.”

“I would prefer not to obliterate you,” Rama said
pleasantly. “Out of my way, if you please.”

“Stand by,” the MI ship repeated.

“No,” Rama said.

That was all he said aloud. Aisha could feel the flow of
communication that ran underneath, too deep and complex for words. He asked,
and the ship answered.

The answer was a song, deeper than deep. The cradle had
almost completely closed around Aisha now, but when she pushed at the lid, it
let her keep it open.

The rest of the crew that she could see were in cradles,
too, or cysts or whatever they were. All but Rama. The ship had given him a
chair to sit in, but he was out in the open, eyes on the screens.

The swarm of fighters was almost on them. One of the screens
streamed a warning:
Weapons aimed and
locked. Ready to fire.

“Now,” Rama said.

The Ara Celi was gone. The maps showed it ahead of
Khalida, but on the rover’s screen was nothing but empty sky.

It reminded her with surprising vividness of the broken
cliff on Nevermore. A finger of granite stood up still. The rest was rubble.

She had been staying off the web, partly to avoid the
inevitable screaming and the orders to return to her post, and partly to preserve
what sanity she had left. She held her breath as she opened the connection.

Even tightly filtered, it was a deluge. MI was losing its
collective mind. Psycorps had received the ultimatum from their slave classes,
with uprisings in all the cities. And a rogue army was in the process of
hijacking a most peculiar ship.

Ships were still leaving Araceli—loading and running. No one
pursued them, or did more than record their essential data. This must be
something special, to rate its own priority-level feed.

Science vessel. Experimental ship. Psycorps had it under
deep cover—no wonder; they had hijacked it from an expedition out of Beijing
Nine. The political implications of that were interesting to say the least.

None of which could possibly matter to Khalida, except that
her search string placed Aisha inside the ship. That had to be a scanner error:
she must be near or above it.

Khalida was trained to speculate at endless length based on
negligible data. She shut that off as best she could. She had one mission: to
get Aisha out of there and ship her offworld.

That was not going to be easy. MI had a new set of marching
orders from Psycorps: Converge on the ship and secure it. Eliminate any
opposition.

The rover qualified as MI, as did Khalida while her resignation
continued to be ignored. She set a course toward the shadow spaceport.

While the rover did its own piloting, she hunted down
information. If Rama wanted a starship, there were several hundred less heavily
protected vessels in this hemisphere alone, and a good few thousand in orbit or
close in in the system. Many of which would be delighted to take on a wealthy
passenger with a lucrative obsession.

But he had sought out this one, or so she inferred from
Aisha’s presence near it.

Maybe it was the name that lured him.
Ra-Harakhte
: a fine old Egyptian divinity. There was no
manufacturer listed, officially or unofficially.

Nor would there be. The ship had been discovered by a
deep-space mission, a coalition of astrophysicists and xenoarchaeologists,
searching for remnants of a theoretical but as yet unproved species of
interstellar explorers. It had been drifting in a stellar nursery, where it had
apparently been feeding on infant stars, until for reasons unknown to the
discoverers, it had, essentially, beached itself.

The mission found it by crashing into it, and so damaging
their ship that they had no choice but to improvise. They had cannibalized
their own ship, slaved the foundling to it, and made their way back to
civilized space.

Nowhere in the datastream did anyone remark on the fact
that, as far as anyone could determine, the ship was a living thing. The
expedition’s report declared that it had a rudimentary nervous system, a large
but remarkably efficient digestive system that processed and recycled interstellar
gas and gorged on the leavings of newborn stars—and functioned, in ways not yet
understood, as a powerful and almost inconceivably fast subspace drive—and no
discernible brain or functioning intelligence.

Hence, Psycorps. The deeply classified report, signed and
cosigned by a gaggle of Sevens and a pair of Nines—including one all too
familiar name—maintained at length and in highly technical detail that the
living creature commissioned as a ship and named the
Ra-Harakhte
was devoid of sentience.

On which grounds, a new order had come down from the heights
of both MI and Psycorps. A joint expedition was to be mounted, to hunt and
capture creatures of this new and wonderfully useful species. The hunt would
begin in the cradles of stars, but would proceed in subspace as well, under the
direction of a psi-ten.

Ten?

Khalida’s hunger for data devoured that snippet. Before it
could dive for more, the stream broke in a shower of pixels. They stung like
shrapnel in the blast of a warning klaxon.

ALL PERSONNEL! ALL PERSONNEL IN THIS AREA! PIRACY IN
PROGRESS! ARM AND LAUNCH! ARM AND LAUNCH!

The command code on it made Khalida hiss with a crazy mix of
anger and laughter. Colonel Aviram, at least, had wasted no time. He was in
command, and these orders superseded any and all that she might have given.

“We’ll see about that,” she said.

But first, she patched in to the commander’s feed. The
fighting that she had observed on the ground was more or less bog-standard
civil war. This was something else.

The ship had risen out of its well. Fighters completely
surrounded it. They looked, in this feed, like a sphere of glistening insects
enclosing a large and subtly shimmering shape.

The sphere was not, she realized, intentional on the
fighters’ part. The ship was generating it.

Colonel Aviram’s own ship hovered above it all. It was
smaller than the
Leda
, designed for
planetary atmosphere and solar-system runs but not, rather to her surprise,
deep space.

Someone had not been thinking. Or had been caught
flat-footed between a conventional haves-and-have-nots civil war and an act of
pirate bravura.

Khalida in her little rover without even near-space
capability could relate to that. She did not need to scan the feed to know who
the pirate was. Of course Rama could not hire a ship like a sensible citizen.
He had to go for the one that would cause the maximum disturbance. In the
middle of a war.

She doubted he cared about that, and she would hardly have
cared about him except to wish him luck. But Aisha was on that ship.

She started to patch through to the
Ra-Harakhte
, but paused. Panic gave way to cold clear logic.

She and Aisha both were safer if she stayed out of it. Rama
would protect the child. He might not promise anything else, but that she was
absolutely sure of.

On the screen in front of her, the sphere of fighters
collapsed abruptly. The
Ra-Harakhte
was
gone.

Khalida was well beyond surprise. She threw up a new link,
and that one she let go through. “
Leda.
I need that shuttle now.”

She did not wait for an answer. The rover had its return
route to the port mapped and locked in. “Execute,” she said.

“Don’t.”

Mem Aurelia sat in the copilot’s cradle. Her edges shimmered
faintly. “Not the port,” she said. “They’ll impound this rover before it lands.
Send it here.”

The map she raised on the screen marked a site so familiar
Khalida spat a curse. “I have no time for your games and petty revenge. Get out
of my cockpit.”

“Maybe it is a game,” Mem Aurelia’s holo said, “but we play
it in earnest. No one will be looking for a shuttle to land in the ruins of
Ostia. Do you want to get offworld in one piece or find yourself in a Psycorps
detention chamber?”

“I want—” Khalida bit her tongue. “Get out.”

Mem Aurelia melted away into the reconstituted air. Her map
persisted on the screen. With no joy at all, Khalida reset the rover’s course.

~~~

She had divided perfectly down the middle, as the rover
carried her through day into night. Half of her was grimly calm, prepared for
whatever would come. Planning; strategizing. Focusing on the mission.