Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) (54 page)

“Dad?” I sent a careful, small message. “Dad? I’m here.”

He rolled his eyes back into his head and his hands came up over his face. “Joseph?”

Lushia waited, her face calm. The infinite patience of someone who flies between stars and might live forever. No matter what Dianne said, I didn’t see madness in her eyes. Just intensity.

But I came to see my father and get my sister’s children. “How are you?” I asked him.

His energy in the nets was small and ragged. I focused down, closing out every other event. I had to save my father. My focus paid off, and he managed an answer. “Okay. Caro and Jherrel are down the hall.” He drew a map in my head, and I passed it to Kayleen to give to Alicia via earset. Bad to hop important information, but we hadn’t a choice.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for coming back here with me. I’ll get you free.”

Lushia still stood near him, but in spite of that, he smiled. Lushia’s calm demeanor broke into a frown. “He’s gone somewhere in our nets. Shock him.”

Ghita’s hand clenched. His body bucked.

He must be shielding me. I didn’t feel his pain although I could see his limbs stretched and his hands splayed with it, his head thrown back.

Chelo was right to hate Ghita.

The door burst open and one of their Wind Readers raced through, stopping himself just short of my father’s chair. “Both of the ship’s ramps are extending!”

A harder shock invaded my father. His back arched so far I held my breath, willing it not to break.

Lushia rose to her feet. “Moran! Can you close the doors?”

The man who must be Moran swallowed hard. “We’re trying. Something—someone—is in the ship’s systems.”

Lushia and Ghita glanced over at my father. He writhed on the floor this time, bouncing, jittering. Didn’t they know it couldn’t be him, not with the shock they’d just given him?

Ghita snapped at Moran. “Guard the children.”

Lushia overrode her, pointing down at the man on the floor. “No. Watch him.” She shifted her gaze to Ghita. “We’ll go.” She strode out, looking completely in control, except for her fist banging against her thigh. Ghita stared after her for a second, then bolted through the door, catching her quickly. “What is it?” she asked her.

“Joseph.” The way she said my name made me shiver. Not anger, not disdain. More like Alicia spoke to me, or like the young children
spoke of Akashi. “It must be Joseph in the ship.” She raised her voice, calling to me. “If you harm us or the ship, I will kill your sister’s children.”

She would do that anyway.

Nothing changed in the ship or the data. Yet. Ghita spoke to Lushia. “Let’s get him out of here first. We can find him. Surely he’s here, or nearby! Zede and Kuipul are watching the children. They were with us when the dogs attacked. They won’t underestimate the danger.”

Lushia’s answer was to walk faster, her heels ringing on the metal corridor, both of her hands now fisted. So the two weren’t always aligned.

They rounded the corner and followed the map my father had put into my head, going for Jherrel and Caro.

Could I stop them? Was there something to drop, to break across their path? Some command to give them?

The door to the room the babies were in was open. Lushia broke into a run.

Inside, Ghita raced to the side of a woman on her back on the ground, whispering, “Kuipul, Kuipul.” The corpse stared at the ceiling, a scar bright red against her white face, her brown hair spread about her. Her neck had been snapped.

A man lay in a corner, moaning, struggling to push himself up. The babies were gone.

Lushia asked, “What happened?”

“Someone I couldn’t see, maybe two, maybe three.” He gasped for breath, glancing over at the body of his dead shipmate. “The door opened, and Kuipul went down. Just like that. Someone I couldn’t see kicked her. Then I took a punch to the stomach, and another below the belt.” He grimaced, pain still shooting blackness through his blue eyes. “I felt hands on me. No one there. Just movement.” He shook his head. “How can you fight that?”

“And the babies?” Lushia demanded. “Did one or two people carry them out?”

“Two.”

Bless Alicia and Induan and keep them safe.

Lushia spoke to the ship. “Caro and Jherrel. Find them.”

The ship replied. “Looking.”

There was no way they could have gotten from here to the door so fast. Was there?

Ghita stepped over Kuipul, sprawled on the floor, and stalked down the corridor. Lushia followed.

My focus split. Part of me watched the babies float quickly down a corridor in invisible arms, Caro screaming and Jherrel giggling, and another part focused on my father’s captivity.

I found the slender connection between Ghita’s controls and the manacles on my father’s hands and snapped it. Ghita wouldn’t notice immediately, as she chased the floating babies down the ship’s corridors. My connection to my father felt weaker than the one I had with Kayleen or Marcus. I had to put too much energy into it. “Go. Get out while you can.”

He scrambled up, racing. I directed him. “Go right.”

He hesitated, confusion on his face. The
Dawnforce
had a good interior surveillance system, and I could see them all. I threw even more of myself into my connection with him, no longer caring if they pushed me out of the ship. I had to get him out. “Right!” I forced at him. “Go right.”

He scrambled in the correct direction.

“Get out,” I told him, flashing a thread of the ship’s interior map at him.

Every alarm Klaxon on the ship went off at once.

I was discovered.

I dumped auditory threads, ditching the awful sound of the alarms. Crewmembers looked up, began checking for commands and information. I told them all to stay put. There was no way I could imitate their real authorities, but I could confuse them.

The babies, the girls, and my father converged, racing toward the cargo door of the ship. Lushia and Ghita followed, Ghita pressing on her wrist while she ran, an attempt to stop my father with pain. She snarled as she realized it wasn’t working.

Three more people pelted behind them, weapons in their hands.

“Stop!” Ghita yelled.

No one even slowed.

The doors on
Dawnforce
closed down, rather than folding out to ramps like ours. The outside ramps would be pulling in while the
door lowered. Whichever of the girls had Caro ducked through the closing door, Caro still screaming in her arms.

Lushia had almost reached the other one, running alongside my father now. I struggled to block the door, but whoever had found me and started the doors closing again had slammed tougher security in place. There wasn’t time to hack it.

I stayed, watching, riveted to the scene, no longer a player for the moment.

The door was over half-closed. The girl carrying Jherrel ducked low, and Lushia took the moment to reach toward empty air, hooking a foot. Lushia fell, thumping against the hard metal floor. Her face shone with surprise and satisfaction. Jherrel screamed as his little body hit the floor.

Just over a foot of light remained between the door and the ship’s deck.

A bit of Alicia’s hair glowed black for a second as she scooped Jherrel from the floor.

My father reached down and grabbed Lushia by the shoulder. She screamed. Something hit my father from behind.

Ghita.

He fell, face down. I raced down my connection to him. He was there. “Joseph!”

“Yes?”

“Thank you. I’m …I’m better now.”

“I love you.”

Jherrel and his savior had disappeared through the door. Ghita tried to follow, down on her stomach. There wasn’t enough room.

His presence with me had become space. “Dad?”

He didn’t answer. He never would, now.

J
oseph’s breathing quickened beside me. I looked down, but could make out very little of what was happening in town. The noises around me were all natural, the night-birds, Kayleen’s soft breath, and Joseph’s faster breath. He shifted under my hands, a subdued struggle to remain fully away, fully connected. I murmured to him, softly, telling him I was here the same way I had when he was ten and just beginning to work in the Fremont nets with Gianna’s guidance.

Kayleen remained completely still, her eyelids occasionally fluttering as if she dreamed.

Joseph screamed. His body bucked under my hand. I held him, leaning into him, bracing my feet against the stone, my belly against his back. He moaned.

Kayleen sat bolt upright, her eyes flying open. “They killed him!”

“Who,” I asked, reaching for her hand. Joseph bucked again.

“Your…your father. The people on the ship killed him.” She clutched at her blanket, looking around, her eyes unfocused. She glanced at Joseph. “He’s still out.” And then she fell back, her head hitting the stone so it made a soft thunk.

I grit my teeth. There was no time to mourn a man I didn’t know. But Joseph. What would this do to him? I gripped him harder, filling myself with soothing energy.

He twisted under me, so I sat on his thighs. His eyes flew open, his words echoing Kayleen’s. “They killed him.”

“Shhhhhh,” I whispered, bringing a hand to his cheek. “I know.”

“I…I have to go back.”

I nodded. “Caro and Jherrel?” I asked.

“I have to go back! They …maybe they got away.”

Hope. Maybe our children were safe. For now, I could only care for Joseph. I handed him a water bottle and he slurped quickly, dropping the empty bottle on the blanket by his feet. He twisted sideways and his body went limp.

I placed a hand on his side. He breathed. He’d be okay. He had to be. He had become so much stronger since I’d seen him last. I curled up at his back, between he and Kayleen, touching them both, blinking back tears. All he ever really wanted to do was fly a space ship. He used to sit in the park with toy versions of the silver ship, making engine sounds and throwing rough-hewn pointed wooden cylinders into the sky.

So much rode on him.

I wanted to race down the High Road, find Jherrel, and hold him. I wanted to find Liam and pull him free of the conflict so Jherrel would always have a father. I wanted to protect him forever from the kind of world that did this to my brother.

I
had nearly come all the way out of the nets to see Chelo. When Steven and Therese died, I’d let that happen, and hadn’t been able to go back for a long time.

This was different. People needed me.

I felt Chelo’s body curled around me, spooning, giving me support. I had no way to tell her I may not have ever needed her more. It felt like she knew.

For a disorienting moment, I lost direction and found myself looking back at the sleeping dog in the park. I raced back up the nets.
Dawnforce
’s door was open again; the three people who had been chasing Ghita, Lushia, my father, and the babies and girls down the corridor stood uncertainly in the light spilling from the ship.

I couldn’t see the babies, had to assume Alicia and Induan had gotten them away, down the cliff face. Since I had turned the one camera back in on itself, there was no net close-in there, no way to do more than check from a distance.

Anger threatened to kick me back out. Ghita killed my father! A river of anger, drowning the data threads I followed, obscuring the myriad messages that flashed through my nerves. I struggled against it, fighting the anger.

A memory surfaced. Akashi’s voice. “
You cannot reduce anger by fighting it. You must surrender to it, let it flow through you. Only then can you rise above it.
”

I breathed my anger out into the nets, following after it, picking up layers and threads of data, holding them while I blew out more anger,
following it, picking up more and more data. I filled myself with the mercenaries’ nets. Less room for anger, more for information.

They killed my father!

I let it go, thinning myself until I encompassed all of the webs, held electronic renditions of the continent, the sea, even Islandia inside my being. Even more information than all of the Islans’ nets danced in me, as if the very planet breathed data into my cells.

I trembled.

It knit into a whole. More than data, more than the sum of the data I held. The raw beauty of it ripped through me, taking my breath, my anger, all feelings except awe, stripping me invisible.

A small crowd just over the lip of the cliff path, turning downward. Our people, capable, not in need of me. Following Alicia and Induan, who held the babes tenderly, still mostly invisible, so the children might have been floating in the air.

Akashi, Jenna, Bryan, and Ming, and a hundred ragged hungry people from the bands, creeping through Artistos, searching for mercenaries to attack. Bryan running into Garmin in the streets, unsheathing his claws, but going on to look for enemy targets.

The Autocracy web saw everything as I saw it. Not because I saw it, but because the data was what it was, because the initial forms and programs and desires of those who created it infused it. It might have been a god. A God. Something bigger than all of us. Data about the invaders (about us!). Location and direction for each of us and each of the mercenaries, for the sleeping dog, for the skimmers, all of it flowing to some single point in the
Dawnforce
and back out to the skimmers and both webs. Waves of information.

Skimmer engines starting.

I could drop it all, let the winners choose amongst themselves. Or I could take the skimmer, send it into the sea, send the
Dawnforce
out into the sky.

Should I try it? Was I strong enough?

One of the skimmers rose from the ground, and I slid into its controls like I owned it. I threw it up, up, and out, over the Grass Plains, over
Creator
sitting as silently as
New Making
used to, a single silver ship on the sea of grass.