Forgotten Suns (36 page)

It was a poor connection, full of extraneous noise. Pain,
she thought. The ship was in pain.

Commander Ochoa met her stare through the link. Khalida shot
her a burst of data. Not orders, exactly. Unless she chose to interpret them as
such.

She caught the burst, scanned it. “Got it,” she said.

Khalida jerked a nod that was half a salute. “Godspeed,” she
said.

~~~

Khalida’s instant on the web had seen little change on the
bridge. Aisha had moved, that was all. Edging toward one of the crew, the woman
whom Khalida had seen with Aisha in the shuttle bay. She seemed unaware that
she was being stalked, intent on the screen in front of her.

Khalida’s mind was moving almost too quickly to keep up with
itself. That was it. The weak link. The connection to Rinaldi. MariAntonia—that
was her name.

The ship’s pain had mounted. While Aisha descended on
MariAntonia, Khalida aimed for the screen.

Aisha sprang, bringing the spy down bodily while Khalida confronted
what the spy had done: opening the link to Rinaldi; restoring the Corps’
modifications to the ship.

Not all of them; there had barely been time. The shields
first. The jump drive and the basic controls were still incomplete.

There was no safe way to rip them out. The ship kept a
memory of what Rama had done—the bright one, it called him; the living sun. It
was well beyond any capabilities Khalida might have had.

She tried speaking directly to the ship. “Wake him up. You
need him.”

The pain was too strong. It could maintain essential
functions, life support, even opening the port that released
Helen
into space, but nothing more
complex.

She scanned the bridge. No one was doing anything useful,
except Aisha, and the big crewman, who had moved past Aisha to lock MariAntonia
in a set of shackles. Khalida would have been interested to know where those
came from on a research vessel, but a Corps slave ship—now that made perfect
sense.

What came to mind made no sense at all. It was simply there,
out of nowhere, except possibly the ship.

“Marta,” she said to the woman sat quiet in the midst of the
commotion, listening and taking it in without offering to add to it.

Marta lifted her chin. It was answer enough. “Come here,”
Khalida said, moving as she spoke, toward the other center of stillness.

He was as immobile as that statue of him on Nevermore. The
carved stone had been more alive than his living face.

“Sing,” Khalida said to Marta.

Marta’s eyes widened slightly, but she offered no argument. She
drew breath, paused, then released it in a torrent of sound.

That voice was trained to fill the cavernous spaces of an
ancient opera house.
Ra-Harakhte
’s
bridge was larger than the command centers of most Spaceforce destroyers, but
not nearly as large as that. Every cell in Khalida’s body sprang to attention.
Her ears rang, and kept on ringing, as Marta transformed that first note into a
cascade of melismas and intricate flourishes.

Khalida felt him wake. Consciousness soared from
unimaginable depths to a blaze of living light. Eyes opened, with nothing human
in them; nothing mortal at all, seething and swirling like the surface of a
sun.

They blinked; darkened. Became a man’s eyes, white and iris
and pupil, but the sun still lived in them.

Khalida had all but forgotten the fore screen and the image
that still flickered on it, Rinaldi shaking his head and trying to laugh
through evident pain. His lips moved; she did not trouble to read them.
Something witty, no doubt. Marta’s aria drowned them out.

Marta’s aria, and the ship’s pain. Cutting off MariAntonia
had been too little and too late. Boarding parties stung like blisters along
the hull. Two, six—ten. Rinaldi was taking no chances.

“That will be enough,” Rama said, soft, as if to himself. He
should not have been audible. He was perfectly clear.

His eyes met Khalida’s. “Shield yourself,” he said.

She should not have known what that meant, but it too was
perfectly clear. Aisha, and even Zhao, had fixed on him. Like a firewall on the
web, Khalida thought. Layers on layers of encryption. Closing in her mind;
sealing this thing she had become.

He nodded. Warmth brushed past her like the flicker of a
smile. Then the world was hard and sharp and globed in glass.

Rinaldi screamed.

It was incomprehensible at first. Blood streamed from eyes,
nose, ears. His body convulsed.

He was not dying. Dying was a gift. He would live. On and
on. In agony.

Psis of the Corps had felt none of the ship’s pain. Until
Rama gave it to them. All of it. In all its vastness and its unfathomable
depths.

~~~

Justice.

Khalida laughed. Roared; howled. Rolled on the floor like a
mad thing, till there was nothing to do but lie hiccoughing, with tears
streaming down her face, and Rinaldi’s screams fading beneath the whoop of the
boarding klaxon—his, not
Ra-Harakhte
’s.

Ochoa had gone to arrest him for high crimes and
misdemeanors. It was a crazy thing, and should have been a dangerous thing, but
not any more. No psi in this system was a danger to anyone but herself, now and
for who knew how long.

Forever, Khalida hoped, though she knew better than to
expect it.

Rinaldi’s screams cut off. One of Ochoa’s medics had dropped
him with a tranq.

Ochoa was in battle armor with the helmet pushed back. Even
through the dicey connection, she looked faintly green around the edges. “What
in the name of the twenty hells did you do?”

Rama spoke before Khalida could find the words. “Their eyes
opened, and they learned to see.”

“Stop talking like that,” Aisha said, startling them all. “He
means they were giving the ship such pain it was almost out of its mind. They
didn’t know. Now they do.”

“All of them,” Khalida said as the datastream caught up with
her. “Every psi-five and higher, all through this system. Every three with any
claims to be an empath, and even the ones, if they had enough of that
capability to do anything with. It’s a massacre.”

“Not one of them is dead,” Rama said.

“No,” said Khalida. “They only wish they were.”

He barely hinted at a shrug. He felt no more guilt than she
did, and no more grief, either.

What guilt she felt was for feeling none. Every psi in the
system could not have known or colluded in torturing the ship. Some of them
might even have been innocents.

They were Corps. The children in stasis—those were on their
account, too. The planet that had nearly died. The corruption that ran through MI.
And more, much more, that she did not know and could not prove but had heard or
suspected.

Justice.

She met Ochoa’s stare. The feed had steadied, though it was
still grainy and visibly pixelated. “Tell Captain Hashimoto I wish her luck.”

“She’ll rip me a new one for letting you go,” Ochoa said.
She did not sound terribly perturbed. “Try to stay alive, will you?”

“I’ll do my best,” Khalida said. Slightly to her surprise,
she meant it.

Ochoa nodded. “Better get out of here while you can. Nobody’s
chasing anybody for a while, but once the thrashing and blaming stops…”

“…they’ll blame me.” Rama sounded almost pleased with the
prospect. “We understand, Commander.”

Ochoa’s salute included him as well as Khalida, with a fair
portion of respect. The screen blanked, then opened again to a field of stars.

Khalida drew a long breath. She felt strangely light. Empty;
free.

The ship had settled down now the Corps was done torturing
it. Rama gave it a course that it was happy enough to set: toward a system
called Kom Ombo, out toward the edge of United Planets’ space.

Under the euphemisms that clouded the web stream, Aisha
recognized an old and almost completely worn-out warning. The system belonged
to pirates.

Free traders. That was what they called themselves. Most of the
stream was perfectly dull: missing taxes and shipments that didn’t add up. But
a little was at least distantly like a pirate vid. Smugglers, chases, the
occasional arrest. U.P. usually gave up after a while and issued letters of
marque, and then the system ran itself.

Kom Ombo had been running itself for a long time. There
weren’t any Earthlike planets in the system, but a cluster of planetoids
orbited its sun at a usable distance. Those had grown, with the addition of a
web of stations and orbital colonies, into a trading hub for that whole part of
the Outer Reaches.

It would be a while before they reached it. The ship was
still in orbit around Araceli’s moon, but its systems had shifted into jump
mode.

Rama called them all together in a space the scientists had
been using as a lab. It was smaller than the bridge but ample for everyone who
was awake and out of stasis.

He was still stretched thin, but Aisha didn’t think anyone
else could see it. He’d stopped talking in gnomic utterances, which was a good
thing. Mostly he looked like the Rama she’d known on Nevermore: solid, sturdy,
and blessedly clear-eyed.

He scanned them all. Crew, scientists, recent additions—even
Lieutenant Zhao, who was managing to hold himself together.

They scanned him back. Crew and scientists especially. Dr.
Ma looked as if she would have liked to dissect him on one of the tables pushed
against the wall.

When they’d all had a chance to decide what they thought of
each other, Rama said, “Before we reach Kom Ombo, it’s time we turned ourselves
into a functioning ship. We can’t afford another adventure like the one we
just, somewhat miraculously and with thanks to my friend here, managed to
survive.”

It dawned on Aisha that he was talking about her. Heat
flooded her face; she had to work to keep her head up and not duck and try to
hide.

“Agreed,” said the crewman named Kirkov, “but as far as I
know, you’re the only one with psi high enough to control the ship. Unless you’re
planning to install the slave circuits again?”

The ship shuddered. Aisha braced herself, but the movement
stopped. Rama had calmed it down.

Not everybody had felt the tremor. Zhao had, and Aunt
Khalida: they both looked slightly wild. Kirkov might have. It was hard to
tell.

“No more slavery,” Rama said. “It lets us ride it; but it
needs a certain slant of mind.”

“Psi,” Kirkov said.

“Not necessarily,” said Rama. “You’ve ridden land animals,
yes? Horses?”

“A long time ago,” Kirkov said.

He was wary, but Aisha could tell he was interested. One or
two of the science staff were, too, though maybe not in the right way.

“When we’re in jump,” Rama said, “I’ll teach as many of you
as can learn.”

“And the rest of us?” Dr. Ma inquired. “Are we to keep to
our quarters and stay out of your way?”

“That depends,” he said. “I’ll be learning myself what goes
into the running of a ship. Is that something you can teach?”

“I might,” she said.

She hadn’t thawed even slightly, but Rama smiled as if she
had. “Go now, prepare for jump. We’ll gather again once we’re all safe in
subspace.”

Some of them would ride out jump here: the remains of the
maintenance crew, the lab techs, a handful of people who looked after the
kitchens and the storage bays. Rama would want to know them all by name, Aisha
thought, because he was like that.

But first they had to begin the deep dive. The ship was
ready. It wouldn’t wait much longer.

Subspace was its native habitat. She could feel how it
yearned to go back. It had come out like a whale breaching, to feed in the
harsh dry wastes of what she knew as space; but its home, its sea, was the
endless deep below.

~~~

It went down soft and slow, sliding seamlessly through the
layers of the multiverse. No mechanical ship could ever do what this living
creature did. It knew the exact angle and the precise speed. It was beautiful.

Aisha had let the ship feed her a light dose of drugs, but
she barely needed it. She could feel Rama riding the way he did his antelope on
Nevermore: quiet, balanced, letting the ship move the way it was born to move.
All he did was ask it to go where he needed to go.

Because he asked and didn’t compel, it was happy to oblige.
It was young—a baby. Still growing; still learning how to be itself.

Subspace was different from inside a living ship. Aisha
could hear the singing clearly. She could almost understand what it meant.

She wanted to lie in her bunk and just listen, but there was
too much to do. There were crews and duties and rosters, and everyone had to
help.

Even Rama, though Aisha didn’t think anyone asked him. He
did it, that was all. Taking a turn on kitchen duty. Inventorying cargo.
Presenting himself as lab assistant.

“No,” said Dr. Ma.

Aisha had been enlisted to record data streaming off a set
of sensors. She wasn’t told what it referred to, but a quick search told her
they were measuring the ship’s responses to shifts in the external environment.
Which was subspace, but to the ship it was real space.

She didn’t tell that to Professor Robrecht, who took the
data after she’d organized it, and went away to mutter and scowl and tear out
what hair he had left. The datastream was mostly running itself by the time
Rama came in and took a station over by the sample-analysis bay.

He’d already started in with a set of samples when Dr. Ma
stopped him. “It’s not appropriate,” she said.

“For whom?” he inquired.

For some reason Aisha could not understand, Rama didn’t hate
Dr. Ma. He found her interesting; he wasn’t insulted when she snapped at him.

She did not return his sentiments. At best she was frostily
polite. At worst, she looked ready to take his head off and run it through a
scanner to see what it was made of.