Second interim, p.20
Second Interim, page 20
Tears streamed into the air around her head by now. Coura pushed her face, the one unsuited place where she could feel things, onto her father’s neck and nestled it where his short hair tickled the end of her nose. She squeezed and squeezed and drove her wet cheek harder and harder against the impossible reality of his warmth. Her heart pounded inside her suit. Her breath shuddered and heaved. So did his.
They breathed together now, as one, sharing the same air, a single, pulsing organism. Where for so long light years had separated them, now not even a sliver of light could pass between.
Chapter Nineteen
Coura lost herself in the improbable embrace. Nothing else existed, including the woman’s voice near her ear saying softly, sincerely, “I’m so happy for you both,” before the hatch at Coura’s back hissed shut.
Even time ceased to matter as the two bodies hung suspended outside its flow. Coura could not have told whether a minute or an hour had passed already. If this instant, this feeling, could go on forever, she would let it. It seemed a perfectly fine way to spend eternity.
As if they shared one mind, her father voiced the same thought in a voice that cracked.
“I don’t ever want to let go of you again.”
“Okay,” Coura squeaked.
Could she only say stupid, single words that were barely words?
After a short or long while spent fastened to each other, they sank back into time’s inexorable flow. The pressure on ribs lessened, their faces parted, and they gazed on each other once again.
Kearn was the first to find words, if barely.
“H-How... how are you here?”
Coura wet her lips to answer, but her racing mind let her down. Her answer was barely audible and not even an answer.
“I don’t know.”
Her father smiled and touched her face again. “Who cares? You’re here. Nothing else matters.”
As if eager to prove what a big, dumb idiot she was, Coura continued to say nothing, leaving Kearn to go on.
“You’re so, so beautiful,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you grow up. I understand if you’ve hated me. I still love you. I always have. I always will.” Weeping, he repeated, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t hate you,” Coura faintly uttered. Words still only came to her with difficulty, but necessity forced her to find a voice. She couldn’t, by omission, let him think she felt hate.
“I gave up hope that I’d ever see you again,” Kearn said, his shame evident. “I was stuck. I would have come. Please know that I would have come to you. It hurt so much that I couldn’t. I had to let go of you. I had to let go of hope. I’m sorry for that.”
Coura found that the earlier words eased the path for more. “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I’ve had a good life. I was never angry at you. Aren’t you angry?”
Kearn laughed through a veil of tears. “What would I possibly have to be angry about?”
“I’m Fleet,” Coura said. Now it was her turn to feel ashamed, something she had never felt with regard to her service until this very moment.
“Are you insane?” Kearn said. “I couldn’t be prouder.”
“I used to have a higher rank, a commission,” Coura said. “I was a lieutenant. I... wrecked that.”
“I’m sure you had a good reason.”
A realization hit Coura. “Turns out this was the reason. I threw everything away for you.”
“No pressure,” Kearn joked.
Coura wasn’t in a joking mood. “It’s fine,” she said. “If I hadn’t ruined my career, right now I’d be in hibe between this star and another. But that wasn’t really my dream. This is.”
Momentarily speechless, Kearn looked at her with gratitude. With love.
“Mine, too,” he said at length. Then, with a sigh, “Sallat’s been comming me. I should answer. I’ll put him on the cabin speaker. No secrets.”
A second later, a disembodied voice spoke through a bulkhead panel in the small living quarters— surroundings that Coura had barely noted before now.
“Kearn, congratulations on your reunion, but it’s time for decisions. I see no reason to remain here and play hunter and prey with two voidships. Whisper is leaving this system. The question is who stays aboard.”
“I understand,” Kearn started. “My daughter is—”
Coura’s sense of urgency was too strong to let him finish. “I won’t leave this system without my mom and—” One word did make her hesitate. “—dad. Simon.”
“Welcome aboard, Corporal Martijn,” Sallat greeted her. “And goodbye, if that’s your choice. Kearn, am I correct in thinking you’ll accompany her?”
“Wait, Sallat,” Kearn said. His gaze remained on Coura while behind his sharp eyes, thoughts churned. “Please. She and I need more time to discuss what’s next.”
“You shouldn’t stay,” Coura said to her father—with great difficulty. “You wouldn’t be safe.”
“It’d be a privilege to be turned over to Fleet by you,” Kearn said. “As long as you visit me in prison.”
“They might execute you. Don’t make me responsible for your death.”
“I won’t delay by more than an hour,” Sallat warned.
“What if...” Kearn began. Then he started over, addressing Coura, perhaps having muted the comm. “If we could somehow get your family aboard... would you leave with us then?”
Coura couldn’t answer that. The thought had crossed her mind, in a vague way, during the short span she’d known Kearn to be aboard this ship. But then, a lot had crossed her mind in that time. Most of it was a jumble.
Then, with supreme disappointment, she realized how easy this question was to answer. “It isn’t possible. Not in an hour. It would take days.”
“I know,” Kearn conceded. “It’s settled, then, Sallat. I’ll stay. Thank you for—”
“No,” Coura said adamantly. “You have to go. Just tell me your destination, and maybe, one day...” It was another thought in the jumble. “One day, I—we—can follow.”
Kearn’s face brightened, though it was clear he viewed that plan’s prospects of success with the same dim view Coura did. “What is Whisper’s next destination, Sallat?”
“You know we came here not knowing that. Nothing’s changed.”
A thought began to surface through Coura’s jumble. At present, it remained partly under cover, but she glimpsed enough to begin speaking, especially given the shortness of available time.
“I was guided here by Lisset,” she said. “Aprile told me you were, too. Is that right?”
Kearn looked surprised, then impressed. “Coleridge told Fyat that you were on Reissa. That led us here. But yes, Lisset has to be behind it.”
The mention of Coleridge in turn caught Coura by surprise, but she hid it. “But Lisset hasn’t given any sign where she might want you to go next?”
“Not that we’ve understood,” Sallat answered from the comm panel.
Coura inhaled deeply prior to revealing a secret she hadn’t revealed in thirty years, under unspoken penalty of death.
“Fleet has clones of Lisset. I saw thirty of them in a lab, long ago. More recently, I saw another and was told that every Fleet voidship keeps one aboard for... reasons. They think the clones are connected in some way that might let them use her as some type of translight communication. I don’t know if that’s true, but this is a voidship. Do you have a Lisset aboard?”
Both Kearn and Sallat were silent for a short time.
Sallat replied first: “We do.”
“Not a clone,” Kearn said. “Clones are news to me. What we have is her original body. Well, one of them. The body that was at Ona.”
“The last time I went near a Lisset clone,” Coura said, “she ‘told’ me that I shouldn’t leave this system. Now, years later, I understand why. If she hasn’t told you where to go next, then maybe if I got close to her, she...”
A second, more profound realization stole Coura’s ability to speak, to think, to breathe.
“What?” Kearn asked. When a still-speechless Coura failed to answer, he moved on without her. “What she suggested may work. Sallat. Let’s—”
“I already know!” Coura blurted, causing her father to fall silent. “I know where this ship needs to go.” Her breath, only freshly recovered from the shock of meeting Kearn, ran away once more as she observed, in quiet amazement, “I’ve known for years.”
“Where?” “Where?” both men demanded to know at once.
Coura took some time to steady herself before delivering an answer she knew neither would like.
“I’m not going to tell you. Not unless and until three people are aboard this ship: my parents and Valerie Coleridge.”
* * *
Sallat broke a lengthy silence.
“That can’t happen. Corporal Martijn, I suggest you reconsider.”
“No. Maybe Lisset will tell you, but you won’t get it from me. Not unless you get them here. I have a small intrasystem ship, the Gorgar. Coleridge can bring my parents here in it if you help me get word to them.”
“That would be fine if the two voidships sent to intercept us were happy to let us take all the time we needed. Sadly, that will not be the case.”
Coura proposed a solution on the fly. “Let me talk to them. I’ll tell them the truth. They’ll be interested in what I know, too. Maybe interested enough not to destroy us.”
“Kearn,” Sallat said angrily, “would you please talk some sense into your offspring?”
Coura gave her father an instinctively adversarial look that she softened into one of pleading.
Neither, she quickly realized, had been necessary. Kearn smiled as if to ask, Why would you think I’d be on any side but yours?
“Sallat, with all respect, I think she has more sense than any of us. Let her try it.”
“And risk the freedom, if not the lives, of everyone on this ship? Absolutely not. She may even be bluffing. In fact, I find that likely.”
“It’s no bluff,” Coura said. “I have the knowledge you want. And there are powerful people on Reissa who will want it, too. The ones who cloned Lisset obviously understand she’s special. They even decided I was special, long ago, just because I had some connection to her. Let me talk, and at very least, the voidship captains will take the time to communicate with Reissa and get an answer. They won’t just shoot.”
“Even if you’re not bluffing, and even if you’re right, that’s not enough time to bring your people aboard.”
“It’s more than we’d have otherwise. It just depends on how interested you are in knowing what Lisset wants. You’ve followed her this far. I sort of think that if she wanted you to have more, instead of getting it from me, she would have told you already. I’m all you’ve got. Now that I understand what the next journey is, I’ve decided I want to make it. But my family is all I’ve got, so they’re coming with me.”
For the first time since making her stand, a flicker of doubt crossed Coura’s mind, causing her to add, “Or I’ll ask them to, at least.”
She desperately hoped they would choose to follow.
“She’s right, Sallat,” Kearn said. “Take the risk. If you run, you may keep your freedom, but what will you do with it that’s more important than this? You ask me, whatever Lisset is leading us to might be the only thing in the universe worth knowing.”
Her father’s words of support warmed Coura. Simon had always believed in her, but never quite enough to stand up to Serenity. Here was a man she’s just met, an enemy of the uniform she wore, but his belief in her was strong enough to make him stand up to the one whose word was law on this vessel.
Even if Coura lost now, she’d already won.
Sallat replied in a bitter growl, “Stand by.”
“That’s a good plan,” Kearn said to Coura when they were ‘alone’ again. “I’m sure you wouldn’t, but don’t even tell me your secret. Not until you get what you want.”
“I know,” Coura said. Then, tired of words, she nudged herself toward Kearn once more, reached him and wrapped her arms around him, setting her head under his chin. Her biological father responded in kind, holding her tightly.
“If it doesn’t work out,” she said with her cheek against him, “whatever happens, don’t stay here. I don’t want to be the reason anything bad happens to you. This time we’ve had will be enough. You kept your promise. You came for me.”
She felt Kearn press his lips into the hair at the crown of her head. When they came away, he said, “Depending on what goes wrong, you might have trouble staying here yourself.”
He was right. Once she spoke in favor of making a deal with wanted criminals, Fleet wouldn’t just welcome her back. She might be the one locked up, or worse.
“Maybe I didn’t quite think it through,” she admitted.
“That only proves you’re mine.”
She laughed.
“Does it change your mind?” Kearn asked.
Coura peeled herself from him before answering resolutely, “No.”
Separation brought the opportunity once more to look at each other, which they did, in silence. Coura, for her part, bathed in the wonder that this could happen at all. It still felt as if she might awaken on the shaker at any moment and find the SOT to be another lump of rock and ice.
“That woman who was here, Jilan,” Coura said at length. “I knew her, didn’t I? You were marooned with her all this time. She’s... family.”
“She is.”
“Call her back in, if you want.”
Kearn did. Moments later, the dark-haired woman reentered through the cabin’s hatch.
“Hello, Coura,” she said. “It’s so good to see you. You’ve grown a little.”
Saying nothing, Coura crossed the few feet of space need to pull the woman into a hug that Zerouali reciprocated without hesitation. When it broke, Zerouali took Kearn’s hand and drifted to his side to deliver a celebratory kiss on his cheek.
“Do we have a plan?” she asked either of them.
Kearn’s subsequent summary of Coura’s proposal to leverage the knowledge granted her by Lisset into cooperation from Fleet was cut short by a new comm from Sallat.
“Corporal Martijn, prepare your messages. Once I approve them, inform Vice-Commander Nitya of the best means of contacting Coleridge and your parents.”
Wasting no time, Coura went to work composing. After some minor changes prompted by a brief back-and-forth by comm with Sallat, they were soon complete.
The first message, to Valerie and her parents, was personal. In it, Coura pleaded with them to trust her and depart Reissa immediately to the embedded rendezvous coordinates. She pleaded, but she was also firm. Without saying as much—lest she lose her bargaining power with Sallat—she made it clear that her path was set. If they chose not to come, they would be left behind.
Coura tried not to think yet about whether that was true or not. For her current purposes, it had to be.
She might not even have much of a choice now but to leave, since Kearn was right. Once these messages were sent, she could not plausibly return to anything like her prior life.
Per Coura’s instruction, that message was transmitted by Whisper of Death via Reissa’s commsat HSB-59 using Gorgar’s unique encryption key. Gorgar wold notify Valerie of the incoming message through neurilace, and she could pass it along to Serenity and Simon.
The second message represented the second time in Coura’s life that she’d willfully blown up her career.
“To the Fleet vessels en route to intercept the object reported by the boarding party to be ISS Last Before the Storm. I am Corporal Coura Martijn, Outside-5 squad leader, Fleet ID 966-51-ZD-326. Please do not interpret this vessel’s actions as hostile. They are not. Its crew means no harm to Reissa or any civilian or military installation or asset in the system. The members of the boarding party, including myself, are safe. I am not being coerced.
“Aboard this ship is something—someone—I believe to be of high value not just to Reissa but to humanity: the body of Lisset Hawthorne. It’s not a clone but the one she inhabited at Ona. It has communicated with this crew. It sent them here, and it will soon send them onward to another destination. Whatever awaits there, whatever goal Lisset may be pursuing, it cannot be claimed by the use of force. She has ensured this. If you don’t understand, the scientists at Section J15 will. Please relay this message to them. Thank you. We await your reply.”
It had been at Sallat’s insistence that his name and that of the voidship, Whisper of Death, were excluded from this initial communication. He believed the mention of it would only make the two ships’ commanders, and Command on Reissa, less inclined to behave reasonably and more likely to attempt to immediately destroy a sworn enemy of the Stellar Union.
Coura had thought the opposite, that Fleet’s belated discovery of Sallat’s involvement would make them feel they’d been tricked. However, since he controlled the means of transmission, the final say was his.
There was less conflict over the decision to conceal Kearn’s and Zerouali’s presence. While the true names of the voidship and its commander were almost certain to come out, those two could potentially remain under wraps for as long as it took to leave the system.
If Fleet might react badly to learning that the ship lurking at the fringes of their system was commanded by the man responsible for the abduction, and ultimately the murder, of Karina Althauser, their anger was bound to be greater were it known that the same ship contained two more villains they’d been chasing even longer.
They might learn these things eventually, but—Sallat’s thinking was, and Coura didn’t exactly disagree—the longer they could drag out their communications with Fleet, the better their chance of rendezvousing with Gorgar. And to Coura, that was what mattered.
With the signals let loose, now there was only to wait. Coura, of course, spent the time with her father, as well as Zerouali and Aprile. It felt strange giving them her biography, from her childhood on Houdos to her checkered career in Fleet. Kearn didn’t have a great deal to say about his twenty-plus ship years stranded on Tanris-4, where civilization had collapsed, but not because he was hiding anything. He just wasn’t proud of the long span of life he had endured rather than lived, while pressed into the service of some militia.
