Forgotten Suns (33 page)

The other half, all the way down deep, was living that day
again and again. Fire coming down. Ash falling like filthy snow. People
running. Screaming.

Max and Sonja. Kinuko and John Begay.

When she first knew what she had done, she had had a ritual.
She ran the names of all the dead, every one, from beginning to end. She had
stopped after she came to Nevermore. She called up the files again now, and ran
them in order, as she flew into the fire. It burned her all away, body and
mind, grief and guilt and sheer white rage, and cast the ashes on the wind.

~~~

The rover’s night vision gave her the wasteland she
expected: a city blasted to slag, rivers vaporized, a barren crater full of
rubble and ash. But its edges were blunted. The planet had already begun to reclaim
it. Trees and ferns and grasses grew in a twisted jungle over the ruins.

Radiation scans returned readings that penetrated even her
fire-dulled intelligence. They were barely above planetary normal.

That was not possible. The best scrubbers in existence took
Earthyears to clear out the detritus of a dirty bomb. Khalida knew exactly what
she had hit this city with, and as far as the scanner could tell, though badly
scorched and blasted, it was almost completely clean.

“Nobody noticed?” Khalida asked the screen.

It answered with an overlay: no vegetation, naked earth and
melted rock, and radiation readings exactly as they should have been.

“Why?”

The rover slowed and angled downward. Half instinctively she
hit the cradle’s settings, amping them up to crash strength.

Stupid. She could almost hear the nulls laughing at her.
They brought the rover in as softly as a fleck of ash falling, and laid it to
rest on an undamaged pad in an intact and obviously functioning transport hub.

~~~

“You have all this,” Khalida said. “Why bother with an
ultimatum? Just go undercover and disappear. You can hack the galaxy. Go
anywhere you like. Rescue your children—”

Mem Aurelia was physically present on the rover. She had not
asked permission to board, and two silent and cold-eyed people kept Khalida
from leaving. They were perfectly polite, but the message was clear. Khalida
was their involuntary guest.

She had had about enough of that, but training held. She
would pretend to cooperate, and acquire what data she could.

Antagonizing her host was not exactly the best strategy. She
bit her tongue and swallowed the rest of what she had been going to say.

“We have talents,” Mem Aurelia said, “and skills that are
remarkable in the scheme of things. What we don’t have is power. Political,
economic—”

Khalida swept her hand around the rover and by extension the
whole of the hub. “This isn’t power?”

“This is stolen, smuggled, clandestine, and so far, unique.
It ate most of our resources. We’ve barely been able to use it, and we haven’t
managed to acquire ships of our own. That one you want to try to chase was our
best hope, but we lost it to a bolder pirate than any of us.”

“You want me to catch it for you,” Khalida said. “In return
for what?”

“The trigger,” Mem Aurelia answered.

Khalida’s teeth clicked together. “The ship is that
valuable?”

“It will hold as many of our children as we’ve been able to
find and hope to set free. We believe it’s like them: a kind of null, with
capabilities that the Corps can’t begin to comprehend. If they can be got to
safety, and hidden from the Corps, even the end of this world will have been
worth the price.”

“Suppose that happens. Suppose you get the thing back, and
load up your children. Do you plan to stop breeding altogether? There will be
more children, and the Corps will keep taking them away. What good will it
really do?”

“Whatever the Corps wants with our nulls, we’ll take those
away. They’ll need years to build the program again—and we’ll be spending every
moment of that time finding ways to stop them.”

“That presumes you’re alive and capable of higher cognitive
functions. What’s to prevent them from shredding your minds and locking your
bodies in breeding sheds?”

“They’ll never catch us all,” said Mem Aurelia. “And our
children will be free.”

“You know I can’t help you,” Khalida said. “The man who took
that ship has no interest whatsoever in this planet’s troubles. He certainly
will not agree to turn it into an interstellar orphanage.”

“Do this and you get the trigger,” said Mem Aurelia. “Araceli
survives. You won’t add another hundred million souls to your account.”

That was a blow to the gut. Khalida had to stop and remember
how to breathe. “Even if I would or could agree, how do you expect me to get it
all done in less than a planetday?”

“I’m sure you’ll manage,” Mem Aurelia said.

“May the nonexistent gods save us from people with a cause.”

Khalida spat the words to empty air. Mem Aurelia and the
guards were gone. She was free to leave the rover and meet the shuttle as it
came down.

The shuttle was Spaceforce. Letting it know of this place made
no sense, or else the Ostians had plans within the plans within their plans.
Khalida could hardly tell any longer.

She slung her kit over her shoulder, shoved in a handful of
waterbulbs and the rest of the ration bars, and left the rover for, she hoped,
the last time.

~~~

The
Helen
was a
little more than a shuttle. It was a fighting ship in its own right, sleek and
fast. The detachment of marines that crewed it included a familiar face or two,
but no manacles for Khalida, this time.

Its commander was a message, and one that made Khalida
almost want to be happy. The
Leda
’s
XO should have been well above running pickup service for stray MI officers,
but she grinned as Khalida came onto the bridge. “You ready?”

“Commander Ochoa,” Khalida said. “I’m honored.”

“
De nada
,”
Commander Ochoa said. “I was bored, and here’s a war to fly in and out of. Now
they tell me we’re hunting a pirate ship?”

“Better than that,” Khalida said. “A living ship. Which
managed to jump into subspace in the middle of a full-on fighter attack, from a
hundred meters above the surface.”

“Better and better,” Commander Ochoa said. “Not just an
adventure, but an impossible one. Now tell me the fighters belonged to the
Corps and I’ll be a happy woman.”

“Some of them did,” Khalida said.

“I’ll take it,” said Commander Ochoa. “Here, patch in to
ship’s systems. Do you have a course to lay in?”

Khalida started to say she had no faintest idea, except to
get offworld fast. But she did. It was still there: the tracer she had put on
Aisha.

There were no miracles. There was technology that worked,
and a ship that had to have come out of subspace in time for Khalida to catch
the link.

It could jump again of course, but it was still in the
system. Very close—orbiting one of Araceli’s triad of moons.

Impossible. No ship could jump from a planet to a moon. The
interplay of gravities, the complication of solar flares, the risk of damage or
collision—

Nothing about this ship was possible. Or its de facto
captain, either.

She filed the coordinates.
Helen
’s system returned a complex and circuitous course: restricted
areas, banned areas, war zones, high-traffic clusters, evacuation zones. Even
without the worldwrecker, Araceli was coming apart at the seams.

If she won this gamble, the planet would stay in one piece,
at least—whatever happened to the people on it.

The cradle beside the commander’s post was empty and waiting
for her. So were they all. Even while the straps secured themselves around her,
the
Helen
launched herself toward the
stratosphere.

~~~

“Captain Nasir?”

Khalida had fallen into a doze. Even less than half out of
it, she knew the speaker could not be on the
Helen
.

“Captain Nasir,” he said again, while the stream beneath the
words marked his location and identity.
Zhao,
Lieutenant. Psi-Three. Coordinates—
“Request permission to board.”

“I’m not the one to ask,” Khalida said.

“Actually,” he said, “you are.” He shot her a spurt:
Commander Ochoa spitting at his Corps ID and tossing it off toward the MI
officer.

Khalida aimed a glare at Commander Ochoa, who was happily
preoccupied with flying her ship through its twister of a course. Zhao was
alone, as far as she could determine, and rapidly running out of air.

Any vestige of intelligence would have let him drop away. He
was Psycorps: the last thing any of them needed, least of all either Aisha or
the walking atavism who had effectively abducted her.

She snarled in frustration and no little self-disgust. “All
right. Come aboard. You’re not a guest, do you understand? You aren’t a
prisoner, either, but you damned well will be if I catch you slipping data to
your superiors.”

“I won’t do that,” he said. “You have my word.”

It might have been her imagination, but he sounded
breathless. His shuttle was a maximum altitude and straining to stay there, but
he was already outside it, suited and with jets engaged.

Trusting of him. Or suicidal.

Helen
’s rear hatch
opened to take him in. Khalida was halfway there, escalating to a long lope as
she hit the half-gravity of the stowage bay.

~~~

Lieutenant Zhao out of his suit looked almost wild, and
distinctly hollow-eyed.

“Why?” Khalida asked him—calmly, she thought, but he shied
like a startled horse.

He answered steadily enough, even so. “I took responsibility
for the child.”

“I absolve you,” Khalida said. “We’ll have to keep you until
we’re done with this; then we’ll drop you off at the nearest Corps
installation. You will stay out of the way and you will not communicate with
the Corps. Do you understand?”

“I understand that you trust me,” he said, “and that you
have no idea why. Except that you can.”

“My head hurts,” Khalida said.

He did not laugh at her, which was merciful of him. She
turned her back on him and led him up to the bridge.

Something about the way the living ship jumped was
different. Aside, of course, from the fact that it could jump straight off a
planet and end up next to a mini-moon of that same planet.

Which turned out to be more of a space station than a simple
moon. System maps didn’t say so, either. They just labeled it
Morta
and listed its size, mass, orbital
period, and all the rest of the ordinary data.

Everything was different in this universe Aisha had dropped
herself into. She wasn’t sick the way she usually was during and right after
jump, but she wasn’t right, either. She kept feeling as if she’d left her skin
off.

Rama had been keeping her inside herself since Nevermore.
Taking over the ship had pushed him so hard there was nothing left for anything
else. Including Aisha.

He was hanging on. He couldn’t sleep, but the ship took care
of that for him, for now.

She could feel it doing it. She could feel the people on the
ship, too, like sparks popping against the inside of her skull, some stronger,
some weaker, and some barely there at all.

She had to focus. The near side of this moon had Corps
markers all over it, but they were blurred and broken. The far side made her
think of the port down below. There were even some of the same people.

Everyone seemed to be screaming at the ship. No one was
firing on it, or trying to, which was an improvement.

“Why are we here?” she asked Rama. “I thought we were headed
for deep space.”

“We were.” He sat back in the chair the ship had made for
him. Aisha felt it give him another shot of whatever was keeping him awake and
able to function. “Ship says we have to stop here. Fueling, it says.”

“Why? If it eats star-stuff, what’s here?”

“Star-stuff.”

Of course it was. Hydrogen and helium were everywhere.
Denser in interstellar gas clouds, and densest where stars were being born, but
every system had its share. “It’s not going to eat the moon, is it?”

“Not if the moon leaves it alone.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

His lips stretched. It wasn’t a smile. “I don’t, either.
Tell me: would you rather I start a war or end one?”

“You have to ask that?”

“
I
would rather do
neither. This is none of my world or my people or my concern. But it keeps
getting in my way.”

While they talked, Aisha had been feeling the people on the
bridge: scientists at screens and running data, crew backing them up. They were
listening, and they were not happy. Some because they thought him impossibly
arrogant. Others because they’d started to understand what he was.

One of them was a complete blank. She was crew. Her name,
Aisha gathered from ship’s web, was MariAntonia. She’d been part of the
original expedition, but past that, her history was as blank as she was. There
was an overlay of backstory, which evaporated when Aisha leaned on it. Then
nothing.

Except for one thing. She was born on Araceli. There was a
smell of the Corps around her, but she wasn’t Corps. At all. Even in the
blankness that made Aisha’s skin itch, that was impossible to mistake.

Aisha moved before MariAntonia did. So did the ship—throwing
up a loop that caught MariAntonia securely.

She didn’t seem terribly perturbed. “Sir,” she said, “you do
have a debt to pay.”

“By winning your war for you?”

Rama didn’t sound angry. He didn’t sound sympathetic,
either.

“We’ll do our own fighting,” she said, “but we need
something from you.”

“I’m not giving you this ship,” he said.

“That’s not what we’re asking.”