Second interim, p.16
Second Interim, page 16
She wasted no time in asking them about the nuke.
“It landed about three kilometers away from BunQr,” they reported.
“In what direction?”
“North.”
Kearn was overjoyed. That put it well away from the lake house. To the Rangers’ amusement, he walked to a corner and collapsed on the floor, laughing and crying at once. The only feeling that could exceed this one would be that of actually seeing Jilan again.
A report from the post was transmitted up the chain of command, using the false name Kearn gave, lest Ghonel still have Zerouali prisoner and get bad ideas. The sentries fed them rations and found them spare coats. Aprile and Kearn didn’t wait around for a reply to come back, and having no cause to mistrust Aprile, the Rangers didn’t detain them.
From there, without the necessity of hiding, the going was easier. But they soon had the choice to make of whether to head for BunQr or the lake house. Only caring about one thing, or rather one person, Kearn was torn.
After some deliberation, he agreed to a suggestion from Aprile.
“You go home. She may well be there. I’ll go to BunQr, and if she’s there, I’ll send her.”
But Kearn proposed a small change. “No, you bring her. Stay there with us, at least while you recover. You can fix some wind turbines for me.”
Aprile promised to think about it.
Not long after, their paths diverged. No longer forced to keep pace with a limping Aprile, Kearn began to make better time. As much as he could, he ran. Late in the night, on legs that could barely carry him, he reached the base of the wooded path leading up to his home. Breathless, he took up the tethered bar and swung it hard back and forth three times across the rack of dangling, scrap-made chimes.
The sound rang out loud and clear, though Kearn had no idea whether anyone was at the house to hear it. Or if there was, whether it was the right someone. He’d killed enough. He hoped not to have to fire the G55 again—ever—but if he did, it was ready. This was not the time for anyone to frustrate him.
Of course, if Jilan was here, she would be ready for trouble, too. The visitor she’d find at her gates was armed, and his unwillingness to wait had him approaching in the dark.
The signal given, Kearn started up the path determined that their reunion, if it was to happen, wouldn’t be a tragic one ending in accidental bloodshed.
Fortunately, there was one simple way to prevent that, with only the risk of embarrassment if his call fell on the wrong ears.
“Jilan!” he called out. “Jilan! It’s me! I’m home!”
No embarrassment was in store, only joy, as Zerouali came barreling down the path, hurling herself into Kearn and clutching him like the world might any instant melt into void and send them spinning apart.
Kearn did the same.
* * *
Eight days later, the chimes at the lake house rang again. It was Aprile. She came unarmed and bearing no demands. She wanted to stay, and she was welcomed.
Eight hundred days later, a transmission was received from orbit in response to the beacon broadcasting from the lake house for nearly twenty Tanrian years.
The incoming transmission's language was Commonwealth Standard.
“This is Commander Daniel Sallat of the nonaligned voidship Whisper of Death. How many down there need rescuing?”
Chapter Fifteen
A lander set down at the lake house to take the three marooned spacers to Whisper of Death in orbit. There was no packing to do, really, nothing from this existence the three wished to take with them, no goodbyes to be said, and so the departure was swift and without fanfare.
The trip itself might have been swifter had Kearn not made a special request that the crew of two ex-Fleet officers granted without argument: a few minutes of zero-gee that Kearn spent bouncing around the cabin like an idiot in celebration after a quarter of his life spent groundside.
The crew didn’t answer any questions. Those were to be directed to Commander Sallat, who minutes later met them in Whisper’s lander bay.
It was Kearn’s first time aboard a Fleet voidship. The design and appearance of its interior was considerably more intentional than private commands like Kearn’s, which were typically repaired, modified, and upgraded across centuries of objective time and gulfs of light-years.
Before the death of Lisset and consequent demise of translight, Whisper’s Drive core would have generated artificial gravity on its decks. Currently, that wasn’t the case, and the lander bay in which they arrived was in its natural state of zero-gee, which didn’t bother Kearn one bit. He’d be fine with not walking anywhere again as long as he lived.
Sallat awaited them in the bay.
“Thank you, Commander,” Kearn said earnestly. He had perhaps never felt more sincere gratitude toward anyone.
Kearn also knew the man hanging on a grabrail beside Sallat.
“I never thought I’d be pleased to see you again,” he said to Erich Fyat.
On a whim, Kearn pushed forward to collide with the ex-SES assassin in an attempt to hug him. It was a clumsy move—Kearn was rusty—and carried the potential risk of Fyat treating the move as an attack, but it worked, more or less, even if Fyat returned the embrace about as much as a brick would.
“Let me ask the obvious question,” Kearn said. “Why did you come?”
“We were sent to Tanris,” Sallat said. “In a manner of speaking. Without knowing what we’d find. We’re as surprised to see you as you are us.”
“And disappointed,” Fyat added. “Don’t forget disappointed.”
“Sent by whom?” Kearn asked.
“I had an inkling when we left Verond,” Sallat said. “Now, I’m certain.”
“Forgive me,” Kearn said. “I’ve been out of the loop for a long time. I might need another hint.”
Zerouali didn’t need more. “Lisset,” she guessed.
Fyat said, “I can see she’s still the smart one.”
Kearn fired back, “I don’t remember you being this obnoxious, Erich. Still glad to see you, though.”
Ignoring the petty squabble, Zerouali continued, speaking to Sallat, “Do you have any idea how utterly improbable this is?”
“I’m well aware. May I ask how you three came to be stranded on Tanris-4?”
“Long story,” Kearn said. “The short version is we didn’t quite realize things were as bad as they were on the surface. Apparently Tanris went and had itself an apocalypse a few years before we arrived. Mostly bio-warfare, I gather. Anyway, the people we thought we were talking to when we first arrived weren’t who they said they were. We left Lady at the refueling station with our senior engineer aboard and took a lander groundside. And that was that. We never saw the ship, or engineer, again.”
“Speaking as someone who’s hijacked your ship before,” Fyat said, “that story doesn’t surprise me in the least.”
Sallat’s reply was less insulting and more informative. “It might give you some comfort to learn that the thieves didn’t make it far. Yours wasn’t the only distress beacon we detected in this system. The other turned out to be a chunk of Lady of Chaos orbiting this system’s seventh planet.”
“Chunk?” Kearn exclaimed. “How big a chunk? Anything we might be able to get spaceworthy again?”
“Not a chance.”
Kearn’s spirits sank, and not only because of Sallat’s answer.
“Guess that means Ilias didn’t make it, either.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose you took the chunk aboard.”
“In fact, we did,” Sallat confirmed. “Given all that’s been said, what would you guess we found inside? Or do you need a hint again?”
“I expect the insults from Erich, but you, too, Sallat? I know what you found. Her. Her body. We stored it in a capsule because with Lisset, well, ‘dead’ and ‘not dead’ are sort of gray areas. You can never really know.”
“Unless something has changed in the past few hours,” Sallat said, “then at present, she is dead.”
Zerouali interjected, “The fact that you came here, found her body, and rescued us points to—I’m not at all sure what it points to. But to something.”
“Agreed.”
“It gets better,” Fyat added. “Stranger, anyway. Last I knew, which is around twenty-ship-years ago at this point, Serenity and Coura Martijn were on Reissa.”
So unexpected was Fyat’s pronouncement that it failed to register at first in Kearn’s brain. Only over the course of a few seconds spent dumbfounded did he become sure he’d heard correctly.
“Coura?” he repeated.
“That’s her name, right?”
Zerouali’s hand slipped supportively into Kearn’s. Had he been groundside, he likely would have had to sit down to avoid toppling over.
“You saw her?” Kearn asked.
“No. I spoke by comm with Valerie Coleridge. She told me they were there with her. Simon Ascher, too.”
“As prisoners?”
“No. Willingly, as far as I could tell. I was busy. We didn’t chat.”
“I have to go there,” Kearn begged. “Sallat, please!”
“Not possible,” Whisper’s commander answered. “Once this vessel is identified, which it will be, it won’t be allowed within weapons range of Reissa. Even if we managed to falsely identify as some other missing voidship, we’d be required to submit to boarding on approach and allow our crew to be swapped out for one of theirs.”
“There has to be a way!” Kearn said. “Reissa is where we need to go. Don’t you feel that? You think what’s happened here is improbable? You also happened to bump into four other people who were aboard Lady of Chaos at Ona? We can’t ignore that. Reissa has to be where Lisset intends for us to go. Jilan, tell them.”
Before Zerouali could back him up, Sallat said, “I don’t disagree. However, it is a fact that this voidship won’t be allowed to approach Reissa.”
“We can try! We’ll falsely identify, like you said. We’ll tell Fleet... I don’t know what we’ll tell them yet, but we have a lot of ship-years to think of something.”
“About nine,” Fyat estimated. “Who’s to say your daughter will still be there by then, if she even still is.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Kearn snapped. “But what else do we have?”
“We have Lisset.” Zerouali said.
“Yes!” Kearn was glad to agree. In just the few minutes since he’d learned that Coura was there, finding a way to Reissa had become his obsession. “The body of hers we had aboard Lady grew out of a vial of blood. That took some time, but if it’s still as intact as it was when I last saw it, it shouldn’t be long before it walks and talks... if it’s going to. Have you monitored the body for signs of regeneration?
“No,” Sallat said. “I admit that didn’t occur to us. She remains in the capsule. But in our defense, if she were to wake up and knock, we’d notice.”
“Commander, please take us to her,” Kearn said. “If she tells us what to do, there won’t be any mystery left.”
“Right,” Fyat scoffed. “All will be clear once the corpse speaks.”
Sallat took a moment to ponder, then spoke to his crew elsewhere on Whisper by comm: “Open the container of specimen T5.” Then he said to those assembled in the bay, “Alright, let’s go speak to the dead.”
The trek to wherever Lisset waited represented two opportunities for Kearn. One, it was undertaken in zero-gee, an environment he’d been away from for so long he’d stopped missing it. Two, it was a tour of the innards of a Fleet voidship. The corridor they entered seemed to move in a spiral, which was bizarre, but then, Fleet’s designs had not come from the minds of human engineers. They had come from Lisset via her creation, the Artifact.
Kearn had seen the interiors of those alien, or alien-like, ships at the Artifact while looting the black spheres that turned out to be translight cores. But he’d never been inside a Fleet ship. In the past, he could only have boarded one as a prisoner. The primary difference was that the Interim had turned Lisset’s designs, with their FTL capability and engines that extracted fuel from the fabric of space itself, itself into weapons capable of appearing in any system and turning inhabited worlds to cratered husks.
That was not an improvement in Kearn’s mind. He regretted his role, accidental as it was, in ushering in the Interim, its translight monopoly, its social engineering, and eventually, interstellar genocide.
Such dark thoughts dampened much of the excitement that might otherwise have accompanied his first visit to a voidship. But even that wasn’t why he couldn’t fully appreciate the experience, or even enjoy zero-gee again.
Neither was enough to distract Kearn from the incredible opportunity that suddenly loomed.
He could see Coura again, something he had given up on many years ago in order to stay sane on Tanris-4. For so many years of his life, most of them lived under another name, Will Gareth, he had gone out of his way to avoid being dragged back to Reissa. Now, he couldn’t get there fast enough.
If anyone could get him there, it was Lisset.
After several minutes spent gliding through gently curving corridors of matte-black fibresteel, they reached an oddly shaped chamber with contoured edges and an asymmetrical shape. No two bulkheads were exactly the same size. It looked to Kearn to be a med suite.
Several of Whisper’s uniformed ex-Fleet crew occupied the room, but Kearn barely noticed them. What he noticed, and immediately propelled himself toward without concern that Sallat’s crew might object, was a pale, auburn-haired corpse pinned to a bulkhead by safety webbing.
Allowed to reach Lisset, Kearn arrested his movement on the cords holding the dead body in place. For all the many years she must have spent adrift in the wreckage of Lady, Lisset looked only slightly worse than when she’d succumbed to her second death in Kearn’s arms at Ona. She still wore the same black singlet she had when they’d stored her away in a hibe capsule, just in case. Her skin was more pallid now, and her eyes were swollen shut. She didn’t look bad, as far as corpses went, but neither did she look ready to start speaking at any moment.
“I know this is probably crazy,” Kearn said in low tones that reflected his embarrassment, “but if you can hear me, Lisset, tell us what to do. Where do we go from here? Give us a sign. Is it Reissa? My daughter—”
“Kearn.”
The sound of his name gave Kearn a start, but it wasn’t the corpse speaking. It was Zerouali. He turned his head to look back at her and the others and found them to be wearing strange looks.
“We got our answer,” Zerouali said. She asked Sallat and the others clustered around her on grabhoops, “Did you all...” She seemed to struggle for the right words. “The moment we entered, there was no voice—but the sense of one. Like after someone has spoken, and it’s silent again but there’s no doubt you just heard the voice.”
“What do you mean?” Kearn asked. “I didn’t... sense anything.”
“She’s right,” Sallat said. “I did.”
“Yes,” Fyat agreed. So did the other ex-Fleet personnel in the room.
“Aprile?” Kearn asked.
She mirrored Kearn’s own confusion with a facial shrug.
Kearn looked back at the corpse, finding it unchanged, then back at Zerouali.
“Why would you hear and not us?”
Sallat and Zerouali answered almost simultaneously: “Neurilace.”
That made sense. Kearn and Aprile were the only ones in the room without it.
“So what’s her answer?” Kearn asked. He put his gaze back on dead Lisset and held his breath in fear of any answer that wasn’t the one he desperately wanted.
“Reissa,” Zerouali said, fulfilling his hope.
Still, before he dared exhale, Kearn looked to the former Interim officers for confirmation they had received the same message. Judging by their lack of objections, they had.
“Then it’s settled?” Kearn asked Sallat. “We set course for Reissa?”
“I accept that that’s what she wants us to do,” Sallat said.
Fyat interrupted, “What’s her agenda? You don’t even know who or what she is.”
“True,” Sallat agreed. “However, in lieu of other guiding authority, I’m willing to accept hers. So long as her directives do not cross any red lines. If she urged us to bombard Reissa, or even threaten it, for example, that would change things. But until then, the only alternatives I see for this ship are wandering aimlessly between systems, or choosing one and settling down. My crew has already rejected the latter option, and if we’re to wander, it may as well be with the promise of discovering something... interesting.”
Fyat objected, “I wouldn’t exactly call Kearn and his family interesting.”
“Indeed. It would be disappointing if so many light-years were to be traversed only in service of a family reunion,” Sallat said. “My hope is that it is more than that.”
“It is,” Kearn said—selfishly, since he had no idea whether or not it was true.
Zerouali did a better job at making the same argument. “When I met her, Lisset made it clear she had enemies. Five hundred and ninety-nine of them, to be exact. She wasn’t clear about much else, but I got the impression she was on our side—humanity’s, that is—and the others were not. The death of Lisset’s body on Lady of Chaos seemed to mark her defeat. Given that, the fact...”
Ever the scientist, Zerouali corrected herself to allow for healthy skepticism.
“—the apparent fact that she’s communicating with us again could indicate the presence of renewed danger.”
“Or she could be the danger.” Fyat gestured at the corpse. “How do you know this is even the same entity—whatever that means—that you once knew? All we have is a feeling. Take it from a veteran of the Social Engineering Service, feelings can be manipulated. Easily. You think that wherever these entities come from, they’ve never heard of disinformation?”
“Certainly,” Zerouali said. “We can’t discount deception as a possibility. But what end might that serve? Our destruction? One ship with a small crew in a vast universe? Obviously, we would be displeased with that outcome—for a few seconds—but on a grand scale, so what?
