The Dark Reaches (20 page)

Late the next day, exhausted, Iain returned to Tereu’s compound from his work on Linnea’s ship. All day, as always, the memory of Linnea’s face and voice, and his deep fear for her, had underlain all his thoughts—slowing the delicate process of installing himself as the pilot of her ship, so that its control systems would be attuned to his mind, his reflexes.

Reluctance slowed him, too. He was erasing her, in a way. That ached in his mind. Oh, the ship would remember her, when she returned; but her command settings were deeply buried now, in the core of the shipmind. The ship—her ship—was now his.

Iain made his way down a silent, carpeted corridor toward the quarters he had shared with Linnea. She would return. He knew she would come back to him—as soon as she had found the answers she sought. However long that might take, however far she might have to travel. This was her chance—she had broken free.

Converting her ship to his own use was like closing a door on her. He was bleakly certain that he would not see her, would not hear her voice, for a long, long time.

He entered their dark, silent suite and turned toward the bath without tabbing the lights on. He’d rinse off the sweat of the day’s work, eat something, then try to sleep for a few hours before—

“Pilot sen Paolo.” Tereu’s voice, from the bed. “Don’t turn on the light.”

Iain went still, then turned to face her, a shape in the darkness, seated upright on the edge of the bed. “Why are you here?” He did not trouble to make the question sound polite.

“Hiso has given you a mission,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. There was no reason for Iain to lie to Tereu; any trouble it made for Hiso was not his concern. “You know what it is, then.”

“Yes. It’s something he’s spoken of to me for years, a dream—your ship has brought it within his reach.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “Tell me. If you succeed—what did he promise you?”

“Freedom to search for Linnea,” Iain said.

“He won’t free you,” she said bluntly. “He’ll keep you and your ship for his own purposes. He’ll never let you go.”

“I don’t need to wait for him to let me go,” Iain said calmly. “I’ve escaped from worse prisons than this.”

“Ahh.” She stood up. “Do you think his plan could work?”

“No.” He regarded her, wishing he could see her expression. “I think it will prove to be a method we can’t use. Those pilots have been radically altered from human norms, you know.”

“I know.” He heard her take a breath, let it out in a sigh. “I wanted to ask you something.”

“A favor of your own?” Iain stirred, restless. “Hiso will hear this, won’t he?”

“This is my own house,” she said. “I know its systems, I designed them. He will never know I was here.”

These twists of deception, of mutual betrayal—how he missed Linnea’s clear truthfulness. “Ask, then.”

She stood there, a tall, shadowy figure. She did not move toward him. “I want you to take Hiso’s place,” she said. “Wait, let me finish. You are the one pilot in this whole system who clearly can match his skills, and you can more than match his ship. The others would follow you gladly. You could send them out to find Linnea for you. Or, or whatever you wish—whatever you need.”

“You’re afraid of Hiso,” Iain said harshly.

She sighed again. “I’ve endured Hiso for many years,” she said. “He’s nothing. My fear is for my people.”

“Because of this plan of his?”

“Because—” She broke off. “Because of many things. You don’t know him.” Abruptly she stepped away from the bed, turned her back to him. He could almost see her now, outlined by the faint glow of the commscreen next to the bed. “If you were to set Hiso aside—”

“Kill him, you mean?”

“Exile would do,” she said. “Exile without a jumpship, far across the system. It’s done sometimes, with criminals, undesirables, they find work in deepsider mines. They don’t die. But they never come home.” Her voice sounded empty. “If you took Hiso’s place, you would own a share of this house. You would be my formal consort, according to custom.”

No.
“I belong to Linnea.”

Now she turned to face him, and he saw the gleam of her eyes in the near dark. “And if she’s dead?”

“Living or dead,” he said sharply, to hide the fear in his heart.

“You would not be required to—there would be no need for any real relationship with me,” Tereu said after a moment. “You would be at my side at formal events and ceremonies, at the city games, for festivals. But in privacy you could have any—liaison you wished. If Linnea lives, and returns to you, I would not ask you to dismiss her.”

“No,” Iain said. “I will not consider this. I won’t interfere here. If Hiso is a problem for you, you must solve it. My concern is finding Linnea.”

“That’s final?” Her voice was tight.

“It is final,” Iain said.

“Then I have only one other thing to say,” she said, and now he could hear fear in her voice. “Watch him. Watch behind yourself. He wants your ship. You are all that stands between him and taking it.”

“If I were dead, he couldn’t use it,” Iain said. “He could not even gain access.”

“He would find a way,” she said. “Don’t underestimate Kimura Hiso, Pilot sen Paolo. Don’t trust him, or any situation he controls.”

“He’s dishonorable?”

“He has,” Tereu said, “his own idea of honor.” She laughed, a dry, bitter sound in the darkness. “For Hiso, you see, any act is honorable if it’s done in the service of the only good he understands.”

“Which is—”

“Human survival,” she said. “The survival of our people.”

“Survival
is
a good,” Iain said cautiously.

“Not when there is no limit to the price one is willing to pay.” She walked to the door and turned. “I won’t speak of this again.”

“Nor will I,” Iain said, his voice quiet. “Thank you for your warning.”

“I hope that it can save you,” she said, her voice empty. The door closed behind her with a soft click.

Iain sank down on the bed, on the side where Linnea had slept. There was still some trace of her in the air, half a breath of her clear, clean scent.

He would keep his word to Hiso—but only to regain his ship.

And then, as soon as this task was done, he would free himself—and find Linnea.

As his ship emerged from the brief final jump, Iain sen Paolo gasped. Immediately before him, dark but brilliantly clear through the “eyes” of his ship, hung an immense, brown-yellow gas giant, its shadowy bulk cut by knife-edged concentric rings. The planet’s shadow stretched toward him across the rings’ surface, but beyond it on each side they were brilliant with sunlight.
Saturn
—the old name lingered from lessons in childhood. His ship floated deep in its penumbra; the vast planet glowed all around its edge, a vivid line of sunlight.

“Pilot,” Hiso’s voice said in his ear. “Stay sharp.”

“Right,” Iain said, deliberately avoiding the old formulas of command and response. Hiso was with Iain, of course, in Linnea’s ship—linked in through the instructor’s pad, but with no control linkages. Iain had carefully made certain of that.

Iain finished scanning local space, then reached for some readings, checking his position. His field of view showed a few faint objects that the shipmind had marked as moons. But among them was a yellow circle, set by his shipmind to indicate the object he’d told it to seek, swinging in orbit around the huge world. Three hundred kilometers away, it read as an irregular rock, a hundred meters long, temperature barely higher than the surrounding space.

“We’re in position,” Iain said.

He heard Hiso’s pleased laugh. “Your ship is cold?”

“Running lights off, maneuvering jets off, ancillary systems on standby. Jump engine on standby.” That last item worried Iain; it would take him several seconds to bring it back up, another second or two to jump. Plenty of time for a Cold Minds missile to cripple or destroy his ship, if he was unlucky.

“Now we wait,” Hiso said. “It should be only a few minutes. My information was quite definite.”

Iain kept his vision on the surrounding space. He’d seen images of Earth and its solar system since his earliest childhood. But brought close and huge, all around him, the black bareness of space in this part of the galaxy still chilled him. Utter dark, pierced by scattered stars that, when he queried, his shipmind marked with strange old names or merely a string of letters and numbers, some in an alphabet he could not read.

They were exposed, helpless, waiting in darkness for the Cold Minds. Waiting in a ship armed only with a missile whose use he had never tested, one that might or might not function as the yards had designed, that might or might not disable the Cold Minds ship. But it would certainly tell them that an enemy was here.

“That rock,” Iain said. “It’s a settlement?”

“Yes,” Hiso said. “A deepsider way station. This one is mostly shut down—some kind of failure, or perhaps they simply ran out of oxygen. There’s almost no deepsider traffic passing through the Saturn system now—the Cold Minds have been active farther out since their invasion fleet left.”

“We should help those people,” Iain said.

“Not until we’ve achieved our objective here,” Hiso said severely. “They’re safe enough. Everyone left in that habitat is in cold sleep, slow metabolic storage, waiting for rescue.”

“Except that it’s the Cold Minds that are coming for them,” Iain said. “Is that how you know they’ll come here? Because these people are helpless?”

“Silence,” Hiso said. “Stay alert.”

Inside his piloting shell, Iain shook his head. It still didn’t fit—how did Hiso know that
this
was the moment, if—

Two orange-circled readouts flicked into being, between Linnea’s ship and the habitat. Numbers flickered near the circles, showing the change in vector as the ships maneuvered.

“That’s them,” Hiso said.

“They’re not deepsiders? You’re sure?”

“Deepsider jumpships? Here? Two of them at once?” Hiso snorted. “I think they have five, maybe six in all. . . . And look at those maneuvers. A deepsider pilot couldn’t handle half a gee. Those are boosting at two, three gees.”

Iain kept his voice level. “How did you know they would jump in at this moment?”

“Not your concern, Pilot,” Hiso said. “If those deepsiders matter so much to you, this is the best way to defend them.” The scorn in his voice was clear.

Iain took two careful breaths, letting his anger dissipate, then chose the detonation point for the shipmind, near enough for the electromagnetic pulse to disable the Cold Minds ships, but not so close as to damage the way station.

He flexed his mind in the unfamiliar signal to launch the missile. The ship lurched as if knocked by a hammer, and the image of the missile, circled in blue, receded in his vision, accelerating. One second, two, three—

One of the orange circles flicked out.

An instant later came the flash of detonation, sun-bright, blocked to blackness by the shipmind to protect Iain’s sight.

Now the remaining unknown ship drifted, under no control, not maneuvering. “The other one jumped away,” Iain said.

“And will be back in minutes, with reinforcements,” Hiso said, “to search the area.”

“And then to complete their mission,” Iain said. “To take those people and turn them into—” He broke off.

Hiso ignored his words. “Jump back to the staging zone. We’ll signal the others to go in and retrieve that thing.”

“We can fight,” Iain said.

“Not what they’ll come back with,” Hiso said. “Five ships, or ten. Those people are lost. Forget them.”

Iain bit back rage. “But—”

“Jump,” Hiso said. “Or our agreement is void.”

A brief flick of a jump, and they floated in the shadow of one of Saturn’s larger moons, surrounded by three jumpships in Hiso’s command. Hiso snapped an order, and all three flicked out.

“Now home,” Hiso said.

“We’re leaving those people to die,” Iain said.

“They might not have died,” Hiso said coldly, “if you’d fired half a second sooner. Reflect on that, Pilot.”

No.
As Iain jumped away through a flicker of otherspace to safety, he felt bitterly certain that Hiso had never had any intention of interfering with the habitat, of saving its people.

The moment Linnea’s ship was locked back into its landing cradle, even before the connections to the Triton port were complete, Iain disconnected the neural leads, then shoved his shell open and stepped out. Hiso stood across the cramped piloting cabin with his back to Iain, combing his hair in the ship’s selfscreen.

It took Iain a moment to master his voice. “I understand it all now,” he said at last. “You knew that deepsider way station was helpless because you’d found it yourself, you or your men. And you knew when the Cold Minds would come because
you
sold those people to them.”