Forgotten Suns (35 page)

They didn’t necessarily know about the second two, but the
first was obvious. Even standing up straight, she had to tip her head back to
glare at the big one named Kirkov.

He wasn’t the one who got in her face. MariAntonia was
almost as small as Aisha, but she didn’t seem to care.

Aisha could learn from that. “Let me by,” she said.

“So you can sell us out to Spaceforce? I don’t think so.”

“Oh,” said Aisha. “Is that what you’d do? My aunt’s on that
shuttle. I want to see her.”

“No,” said MariAntonia.

Aisha walked through her. She gave way, which surprised
Aisha, but Kirkov didn’t. It was like running into a wall.

She leaned back till she could see his face. “You think you’re
taking over the ship now?”

“I think you need help, and you don’t know where to find it.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“I’m not psi,” he said, “but I connect data for a living.
Your friend or employer or whatever he is may be able to control this ship, but
if he wants to get anywhere with it, he has to have help. That means crew. You
think Spaceforce will or can give you that?”

“I’m not asking Spaceforce,” Aisha said.

“Someone in the Force, then,” MariAntonia said. “When will
it sink in that you can’t trust any of them? Even relatives. Especially
relatives. They want you back home with Mummy and Daddy, and they’ll do
whatever it takes to make that happen.”

They were getting some of it wrong, but enough was right
that Aisha had a serious thought about pitching the same kind of fit she’d
pitched when she was three years old.

She couldn’t do that. She had to make herself calm, and then
force herself to think. She wasn’t getting to the
Helen
from this direction. What she was getting was an offer she
maybe couldn’t afford to refuse.

“All right,” she said. “Tell me why I should believe you.”

Because you don’t have a choice.

She could read that one in MariAntonia’s face, but Kirkov
wasn’t quite so blunt. “I’ll let you read me,” he said.

“But I don’t—” Aisha bit her tongue. She was in so deep she
couldn’t imagine how to get out. Now they all thought she was psi.

She was. She could face that. But she didn’t have the first
idea how to
be
it.

It felt as if the crewpeople around Kirkov were closing in.
Their eyes were hungry.

All she could think of to say was, “I’ll do it. But not
here.”

“Yes, here,” MariAntonia said. “You don’t get to stall us.”

There was no Rama to help her. Aisha was all alone.

“Kneel down,” she said to Kirkov.

She thought MariAntonia might squawk, but she didn’t. Kirkov
dropped down to where Aisha didn’t have to strain to see his face.

His eyes were calm. They looked kind. She thought about them
the way she did about a web portal, a set of access codes that opened a new
stream of data.

At first she wasn’t sure it was working. She might be on the
web, more or less by accident, but if she was, it was a weird, staticky, now
blurry and now painfully sharp connection.

The static eased up a bit. The sharpness smoothed out. The
stream had an undertone of words—a lot of words—but what she focused on was the
way it felt.

He was nervous, but clamping it down. Trying to make sure he
was focused and coherent. Hoping she wouldn’t find—what?

A mob of children in a dirty street on a world with a
greenish sun. The air had a smell to it, a bit like burning and a bit like
sulfur. His pants were down and his backside was cold and he was so embarrassed
he wanted to die.

She backed up fast. Up, and sideways, just like navigating
webstreams. She followed the feelings. Not just the ones on top, that he was
trying to make her see. The others, running underneath. The fears and worries.
Anger—he had plenty of that.

It wasn’t at her, or anything that would hurt her. Psycorps,
Spaceforce, that was different. The things they’d done to him…

She pulled back again. She had what she needed. She could
get out, she was sure. Just keep pretending his mind was a webstream, find the
portal and shut it.

Except it kept sliding away. The stream wanted her to go
down into the parts he was trying to keep from her, the deep swirls and eddies
where the mind stopped making sense and started making its own rules.

“Up here.”

Brisk. Sharp. It might seem angry, but that was fear honed
to a keen edge.

It wasn’t Lieutenant Zhao. Aisha didn’t know who it was at
first, because it was so unexpected.

It was Aunt Khalida. Her voice guided Aisha up through
levels like sucking mud, toward something she decided to see as light. Once she
made the decision, it was light: the soft, faintly underwater glow that lit the
inside of the ship.

Aisha was still on her feet, but once she realized that, her
knees gave way.

Kirkov held her up. She could still feel him, partly inside
and partly through his big warm hand. “You’re trustworthy,” she said. “That
doesn’t mean anyone else is. Say you’ll take responsibility for them.”

His answer was steady, though inside he wasn’t quite so
sure. “I’ll speak for all of them. We’re in this together. We’ll help you get
out of this system, and crew the ship at least as far as the nearest free
station.”

“Which is how far?”

“That depends,” MariAntonia said.

Kirkov shot her a look. “Simplest route would take us to
Tien Shan.”

“Which is glaringly obvious and promises us a welcoming
committee,” MariAntonia said. “I’d head for Novy Novotny, myself.”

“I see,” Aisha said. She hoped she sounded neutral. She wasn’t
about to tell them the ship might have its own ideas, and Rama definitely did.
Would. When he woke up.

She’d stopped the beginnings of an argument, at least. “I’m
going to see my aunt,” she said. She tilted her chin at Kirkov and then, after
a pause, MariAntonia. “You can come. Just be quiet.”

Kirkov wasn’t offended. MariAntonia obviously was. Aisha
didn’t care. She walked between them, and let out a breath when neither tried
to block her.

Commander Ochoa’s ping woke Khalida out of a dream in which
she had been walking in a man’s mind beside Aisha, guiding her up and out and
into the light. It was an odd dream, not because it was strange, but because it
felt so ordinary. As if she did such things every day, with as much ease as if
she were running the web or piloting a shuttle.

The dream scattered. “Captain,” Ochoa said. “You need to see
this.”

Khalida swung out of the bunk and onto the bridge. The main
screen was running a data feed that notably lacked the usual MI hallmarks.

“Hacked?” she asked Ochoa.

The Commander nodded. “It’s running everywhere in this
system.”

It must have been set to release as soon as the children
were safe. Khalida had seen most of it, or heard it from Mem Aurelia.

It was slanted, of course, for maximum shock and outrage. MI
itself could hardly have done better.

“I would say,” Ochoa said, “that things just got ugly.”

“Ugly,” Khalida said, “and extremely, and intentionally,
distracting. You’d better get off this ship, Commander. Unless you want to go
wherever it’s going.”

“‘You’?”

Khalida had not made a decision, exactly. One of the
secondary screens showed three figures striding across the shuttle bay: two
strangers, and a small but upright figure in alien black.

“I’m done,” she said. “I did what MI said it wanted. I
defused the trigger; I kept Araceli from being killed, though what happens to
it now, I don’t know or care.”

“This just got a whole lot bigger than Araceli,” Ochoa said.

“So it did.” Khalida shouldered her kit. “Good luck to you,
Commander. Give my best to Captain Hashimoto.”

Anyone else might have tried to talk Khalida out of it.
Commander Ochoa did not even try. And that, Khalida thought, was one more
reason why Tomiko had sent her.

Messages within messages. She snapped a salute—for the last
time, maybe. Commander Ochoa returned it; and so, to her surprise, did the rest
of the crew on the bridge.

Her throat was unexpectedly tight. She walked out without
interference, through the shuttle and down the ramp and into the bay just in
time to meet Aisha and her escort.

~~~

“Aunt,” Aisha said.

Her face was stiff and looked cold, which meant she was
close to tears. Khalida was not a person for hugging or comforting, but then
neither was Aisha.

“You have quarters?” Khalida asked.

“I don’t—”

“She does,” said the big man with her. “Follow me.”

Aisha stiffened as if she might rebel, but Khalida swept her
around and aimed her toward the man’s retreating back.

~~~

The cabin in which he left them would have been quite
ordinary if one had not known that it was formed of living substance. Khalida
suspected that it had been intended for scientific staff: its many connectors,
now disabled, would have allowed for the running of multiple experiments, and
its half-dozen bunks, all convertible into jump cradles, showed signs of having
been used as specimen storage.

Two meals were laid out on the table by the far wall, each
contained in a micro-stasis field. Khalida had no appetite, but Aisha fell on her
share, even while she burst out in a flare of pent-up temper. “I wanted to talk
to Commander Ochoa!”

“Commander Ochoa will be on her way back to the
Leda
as soon as the ship lets her go,”
Khalida said. “What were you going to say to her that you can’t say to me?”

“Everything!”

Khalida paused to let the ringing in her ears subside. “I
quit, you know. Resigned. Left. I’m out of MI.”

Aisha stopped with chopsticks halfway to her mouth. “You
what?”

“If you’re looking for help from Spaceforce, I don’t think
you’ll get it. A planetload of ordure just hit the fan out there, and every
ship in the system will be called to fend it off.”

Aishal set her chopsticks down. Her eyes flickered:
accessing ship’s web, and maybe something more. “Oh,” she said. “Oh my. They
really want us to get away without anyone chasing us, don’t they?”

“They really do,” Khalida said.

“That’s the problem,” Aisha said. She breathed deep, then
let it go. “The only one who can control this ship is Rama. And he’s out—just
gone. Though he’ll come back. I think. I got the ship to keep feeding for a
little while, but I won’t be able to hold it for long. Then I don’t know what’s
going to happen.”

Khalida took her time digesting that. “Do you know where he
wants to go?”

“I know he has star maps,” Aisha answered. “I saved them.
But which ones matter, or where they eventually go, I can’t tell you. I’m not
even sure he can.”

“I believe this is what’s called a fine mess.” Khalida was
almost happy, saying it. It was not MI’s mess, or hers, unless she made it so.
She raised her voice slightly and pitched it to carry outward. “I know you’re
listening. Come in and join us. If we’re all in it together, we may as well be
honest about it.”

~~~

It was a while before anyone responded to Khalida’s
invitation. She took the opportunity to eat, having found her appetite after
all. She needed fuel, if this adventure was going to continue.

Ship’s web, she discovered, was open for her access. She
idled through it, searching out its nooks and corners. Aisha’s star maps waited
for her at the end of a search string, linked to downloads from Araceli’s
worldweb of the carvings on the Ara Celi.

They suggested no pattern to her. A sequence of separate
systems and clusters of systems, curving up and over a stone arch, but leading
nowhere she could discern. The distances from Araceli seemed random, the routes
as suggested by the web equally disconnected. There was no telling in which
direction they were meant to run, or even where the progression began.

Either they really were random, or they were a code for
which she had no key. The key was sitting on the bridge, apparently in a
trance, and no one dared to wake him.

People were coming: the ship sent a shiver along her arm,
like feet walking down one of its corridors. Khalida saved the maps to a file
of her own.

As she slid out of the web, the ship shuddered.

Khalida was on her feet and running. Aisha ran ahead of her,
trailing black robes and tightly controlled panic.

They passed a handful of people: the big man from the
shuttle bay and the woman who had been with him, and one or two in science-team
uniform. One of the latter fell as the ship lurched again. Khalida kept her
balance, hurdled the fallen body, and sprinted onto the bridge.

Rama sat upright and motionless in the captain’s cradle.
People swirled around him: crew, scientists, Marta from Araceli in a trail of
virtual stars. Lieutenant Zhao from the Corps, as blankly shocked as the rest
of them.

The screens showed no changes outside the ship: the moon
below, Araceli floating in the distance, and a faint, disconcerting shimmer
that might be a cloaking field. Then what—

The forward screen flicked off. While Khalida stared at the
darkness where it had been, a new image formed: the bridge of a Psycorps
cutter, a blur on the edges that must be crew, and Rinaldi in the center, for
once in Corps black with nine pips on his collar, smiling. “There you are,” he
said.

Khalida spun and clipped Zhao alongside the ear. He dropped.
Rinaldi’s image, unfortunately, did not.

“You don’t think I’d be that obvious, do you?” he said. “We’ll
be boarding now. Don’t trouble with an escort. We’ll find our own way in.”

“They’ve got a tractor beam on us,” Kirkov said from one of
the side stations.

“Yes,” said Aisha, “and ship doesn’t like it.” Her face was
tight, as if her head hurt.

Khalida sent a quick query on ship’s web.
Helen
was still in the shuttle bay; the
ship had not yet released her. It allowed Khalida to open a link.