The Dark Reaches (36 page)

“You are their lead pilot,” Hiso said. “Don’t toy with me. And now I know, from the Hidden Worlds pilot, the woman, that there exists a refuge to which she has persuaded Tereu to lead my people—abandoning their city. Which I will not permit.” He smiled. “I intend to give the Cold Minds a much more important gift. And a reason to spare my city.”

“You’d trust the Cold Minds to keep a bargain like that?” Esayeh let all his contempt show.

“They kept the last one for centuries,” Hiso said. “Now. Take me there. I need the jump point. Then I won’t trouble you any further.”

“I don’t know where it is,” Esayeh said.

“Linnea Kiaho would tell me otherwise, I think,” Hiso said. “If I asked her. But you’ll do this for a better reason than that. You’ll do this to save Perrin Tereu.”

He looked sharply at Esayeh then, but Esayeh only waited.

Hiso’s eyes narrowed. “I give you my word that, if you provide me with this information, Perrin Tereu will live on. In prison, but unharmed.”

Esayeh looked down at his hands—then moved to his piloting chair and began snapping the leads into the side of his skull.

Hiso turned and waved the guards off the ship, then sealed the hatch. He turned and faced Esayeh, and in his hand was a knife. It looked wickedly sharp. Esayeh had always hated knives. . . . “If you go anywhere but the place I have named,” Hiso said, “you die. I can pilot your ship well enough to return to Triton from anywhere in this system. And as soon as I return, Perrin Tereu and Linnea Kiaho will die. I need the jump point. When I return, safely, with that, you will be freed, and the women will be safe.”

Esayeh felt fairly sure that he knew what kind of freedom Hiso was talking about; but it no longer mattered. Let him indulge in the kind of honor that put fine words above mercy, used them to justify cruelty. Hiso finished strapping himself into his acceleration cocoon and gave the order that freed Esayeh’s ship to launch.

The music, Esayeh’s music, filled his mind as he rose from the surface of Triton. And as he jumped.

There it was, his dream for so long:
Persephone.
Dark, immense. From this distance, at this scale, he could see no signs of ships arriving; yet he knew they must be there. The rescue of the human race was beginning. The first part. Manning the lifeboat. He smiled. “Pilot,” he said, “have you the mark?”

“Yes,” Hiso breathed. “Oh, yes. They will like this. They will like it very much.”

“They,” Esayeh said wearily, “can’t
like
anything. Are you ready to go home?”

“Ready,” Hiso said.

“Good,” Esayeh said, and jumped.

He heard Hiso’s cry of fright, or rage, when he saw the viewscreen; Esayeh’s vision, enhanced by his ship, saw more than that. The vast dark limb of a world, nightside, a tracery of pale blue light, far too near below them. And he saw the Cold Minds picket ships already beginning to close in.

Earth. He had always wanted to go there.

“Welcome home,” he said to Hiso, urged his ship forward, and tore out his piloting leads. A little blood came with them, but it didn’t matter anymore. In his second motion, gripping the arms of his chair, he raised both feet above the piloting board, smashed them down. The surface shattered, bits of metal and plastic scattered everywhere. His bare feet, soft deepsider feet, were bleeding. He smashed the board a second time, for good measure. Hiso would never pilot this ship anywhere.

Esayeh grinned as he saw the first flicker of fire along the skin of his ship, clear on the viewscreen. He raised his hands toward the light. And smiled as the other man’s fingers gripped his hair; smiled as he died. Then the light took them both.

On their first night of rest since the last shipload of refugees came in, Linnea lay side by side with Iain in the soft, fresh grass of the hills outside
Persephone
’s largest town. Linnea was tired, but in a good way.
Persephone
had been kind to them. The five thousand former deepsiders who had been living there all along had expected their own people, but not Tereu’s—ten thousand more, but not twenty. As a complete outsider, Linnea had already been called in to mediate more than once. Iain had escaped that, though not other kinds of attention; the town’s hospital had reluctantly released him only today. His condition, as a survivor of infestation, still fascinated the Tritoners who had begun to join the hospital staff. Even though none of them need fear infestation again, once they had accepted the deepsider treatments. . . .

She rolled onto her side, still awkward in the half gee, and propped her head on her arm so she could look down at Iain. Faint golden light from overhead shone in his eyes. The other side of the interior of the habitat, more than a kilometer away, glimmered with lights, as did the moving lifts at each end, rising toward the axis and zero gee; she’d learned that if she watched carefully, she could see them move. But for now she only smiled down at Iain. “Glad to be free again?”

“Free but pinned flat,” he growled. “Even when you aren’t crushing me down. I liked eight percent better.”

“So what will you think of full gee at home?” She smiled again at the thought. They
were
going home. No other ship could make the necessary jump; no other ship could carry this news. Pilang, and now it seemed Hana, would come with them; Pilang’s grief over Esayeh had not prevented her from seeing the need for someone expert in the deepsider nano to present the idea in the Hidden Worlds. It was going to be a long fight to get them to accept it.

Iain yawned. “By the time we get to Terranova, I’ll have forgotten even half gee again.”

“It won’t be so rough this time,” Linnea said. “We know where we’re going. And how far it is.”

“And how long an argument we’re going to face when we get there,” Iain said.

Linnea turned onto her back again and studied the pattern of lights across the sky from them. That dark patch was a lake, she was fairly sure she remembered that much from daytime. She wondered if there were fish in it. Probably. “Our people will want this place,” she said. “What’s in it. We lost so much, leaving so fast. This is like—like finding a living piece of Earth.”

“Almost,” Iain said. He turned his head and looked toward the lights on the end cap, where a lift was rising toward the hub.

Linnea had ridden that lift the day before, to see Pilang and Hana—and catch a glimpse of Mick. Most of the deepsiders were still living in the hub, or in the end caps, which did not rotate. “The deepsiders are crowded in those hubs.”

“I’ve heard,” Iain said. “Do you think, once they start moving into the Hidden Worlds, that they’ll ever learn to live groundside?”

“I think they’d feel even more crowded there,” Linnea said. “Held down, held in. . . . Anyway, why should they move groundside? We’ve got whole systems where we’re only using one world. Plenty of room for them to live where they like. How they like.”

“If we win,” Iain said somberly.

“If we don’t lose,” Linnea said. “That’s about the most we can hope for.” She turned to face him. “I wish Esayeh had lived to see his people safe.”

Iain looked at her. “He made them safe. He died for the deepsiders.”

“Not just for them.” Linnea looked up at the lights again, to hold the tears back. “He knew what I was going to do. He could have used the time he had to stop me. But instead he put himself between us and Hiso.”

“I know,” Iain said quietly. “He saved Triton, too.”

Linnea rested her head on his shoulder, and they lay quietly for a while. Then she said, slowly, “Do you regret this? If we hadn’t come, we’d still be at home, and maybe the deepsiders and Tritoners would still be where they’ve always been.”

“With the raids, and the fear,” Iain said. “No. That was already ending. It had to end. Though it took a man from two worlds to see it.”

“And a woman from no world at all to help him,” Linnea said.

He caressed her cheek, kissed her gently. “That’s always been your gift. To hear what no one else will hear.”

She sighed. “I wish we could have saved him.”

“Hiso would only have killed you instead,” Iain said, his voice deep with anger.

“It’s a price I’d have paid,” she said. “Ending those raids mattered to me. It still does.”

“And you did,” Iain said. “Twice now you’ve helped patch together two halves of humanity—”

“By wrecking all their peace,” she said glumly. “And you helped.”

“So,” he said, “let’s go home and wreck our own people’s peace again. Maybe in the end we’ll be strong enough to win the war.”

“Or at least to outlast it,” she said. “Yes. Let’s go home.”

She lay there beside him in the cool, prickling grass, hearing the wind in the trees behind them, and faint music from the town over the hill. A home, built when the old one was lost. Made in necessity, in fear and danger. And yet it was no less a home for the people there because the human race had never been born to such a place. They made it theirs, as her own people had made the Hidden Worlds theirs: by building their lives there. By finding love there. And always, by holding on to hope.

She slid her hand into Iain’s and felt his fingers tighten around hers. He had taught her hope, once; and she had taught him the same. And, always, love. The home she’d thought lost—maybe she’d been wrong to think to find it on any one world. Maybe parts of it were everywhere—in the people, and the places, she loved.

And, always, the stars. The stars—and Iain by her side.

Kristin Landon lives in Oregon with her husband, a daughter, two occasionally present college-age sons, and a spaniel puppy. In addition to her writing, she works as a freelance copy editor of a wide range of nonfiction and technical books. Visit her website at
www.kristinlandon.com
.