Forgotten Suns (15 page)

She could hang on for one more day. One more endless round
of hours until jump.

An alarm went off, so loud and close she jumped like a
rabbitzoid.

Jump alarm. One hour to jump.

But it was only—it wasn’t supposed to—

She peeled herself off the ceiling, literally in the
half-gravity of the cargo bay. She had no intention of riding through jump in a
shipping container. Strapped into a cradle at full ship’s gravity, with the
ship ready to feed in meds against the nausea and the disorientation and the
potential brain damage, was bad enough. Inside a metal container at
half-gravity, even with what she’d done to make the container fit to live in,
was really not on. She needed a better place to hide, and she needed it fast,
while ship and crew were busy prepping for jump.

She pulled on the clothes she’d brought. She was careful
about it, though the alarms made her gut tie up in knots. When she was dressed
and had everything with her that she was likely to need, she slipped out the
back door of the container and crept away through the maze of boxes in the
cargo bay.

She had the
Leda
’s
schematics memorized. She knew where the main corridors were, and where crew
went when they needed to get around fast. She wasn’t sure exactly where Rama
was, but there weren’t many guest cabins on a military ship, and they were all
on the same level. He was the only passenger on this leg of the voyage, which
meant the other rooms would be empty.

Once she thought about Rama, she knew where he was. She
could feel him. He was part of the sun she was still using to keep Psycorps
from finding her.

She did her best to keep him from feeling her. She crept
through the maintenance ducts that ran through the whole ship. For someone thin
and not very tall, like Aisha, they were big enough to walk upright in, and the
lights there were emergency lights, just bright enough to see by.

She counted levels as she went up the ladder, then went off
sideways. Nobody came at her from any direction. The crew must be all battened
down for jump, or else busy making it happen.

She wouldn’t let herself think about what it would be like
if she didn’t get to a cabin before jump. She moved as fast as she could, as
quietly as she possibly could.

The ship relied on the crew’s implants to keep track of
them. Anybody who didn’t belong there would trigger alarms. But she hadn’t
triggered any.

Maybe not having real implants yet, just the house-computer
model, meant she was basically invisible to the ship. Or maybe the ship knew,
and wasn’t doing anything about it.

She didn’t dare link to its web to find out. All she could
do was keep on going, and hope she didn’t run into a troop of marines.

She made it to the hatch. The passage on the other side was
wide and high enough for the larger end of human norm. It felt huge after the
one she’d been in.

Now she had to hope the cabins weren’t locked. That was the
down side of not being linked in to the ship. If the
Leda
couldn’t see her, neither could the doors.

Maybe she hadn’t been as smart as she thought she was.

She had to keep going. The hallway was empty, but it might
not stay that way. She went on past the door where she felt Rama, down two to
be safe, and pressed her hand to the touchpad on the third one.

“Ident code, please,” the door said.

Then the ship said, “Jump warning. Ten minutes.”

Aisha lost fifteen seconds to a panic attack. Her eyes
darted up and down the corridor. It was all closed doors with numbers on them.

The door to cabin 7 slid halfway open. A shadow leaned out. “Get
in,” Rama said.

Aisha didn’t try to pretend she wasn’t there. She dived into
the kind of cabin she’d traveled in since she was small: six jump cradles built
into the walls, two of which were open and waiting, and everything else tightly
stowed until the ship made it into subspace.

Aisha’s panic wasn’t screaming as loudly now. She dived for
the nearest cradle, but she took an instant to say to Rama, “Get strapped in.
It’s almost time.”

He was already moving as if he knew what to do. She fastened
the straps the way she’d been taught, and thought about hitting the panel that
brought the wall up over the cradle, but decided not to, the way she always
did.

Rama left his cradle open, too. She hoped it wasn’t a
terrible idea, but just about the time she started to say something, the
thirty-second alarm went off.

That was the longest and the shortest time in the world.
Aisha made herself breathe deep, in and out. Breathing helped.

Then the world fell apart.

Supposedly it was different for everyone. For Aisha it was
like being blown up in slow motion, with each piece of her spinning away into
infinite dark. The dark was full of stars, but they were all stretched and
twisted and their light had collapsed into itself. They flowed around her like
water.

Chronos said jump lasted a minute at most. Inside Aisha’s
head, that minute was forever. She had heard of people going into that place
and never coming out. Even people who did come out could keep a part of it in
them, a piece of infinity that floated up at odd moments and sometimes drove
them insane.

Aisha could see Rama, because she’d turned her head right
before the jump took her. He was lying on his back like an effigy on a tomb,
and his eyes were open.

They were full of stars. Galaxies wheeled under his skin. He
reached up his hand, though the straps should have kept him from doing any such
thing, and gathered a handful of suns.

He was smiling. It was a sweet smile, nothing evil about it
at all, but it made Aisha’s skin shiver. Nobody ought to be
happy
about being in the middle of jump.

As quick as that, they were out. The walls were solid again.
The
All Clear
rang through the ship.

There was not supposed to be any difference from inside
between truespace and subspace, but Aisha had always been able to tell. Subspace
felt deep and cold and quiet, like being under the ocean. It was supposed to be
empty of life, too. It was just her imagination that filled it with vast
shapes. They swam all around the ship, paying no attention to it, except to
slide past when it got in their way.

She unfastened the straps and got up slowly. Rama hadn’t
said a word since he pulled Aisha into the cabin. He stowed the cradles he and
Aisha had been in, and ordered the cabin to rearrange itself into a proper
stateroom. Then he sat cross-legged on the bunk farthest from the door.

He was in the ship’s computer. Aisha felt it like a tickle
in the back of her skull.

He could walk inside a system without triggering any of its
security alarms, because he wasn’t accessing it in any way they’d been
programmed to recognize. He was even more invisible than Aisha was—and he could
get into systems she couldn’t get near.

He was terribly dangerous. He didn’t scare Aisha, though she
supposed he should have.

“Your parents are beside themselves,” he said. He was still
in the computer, but he was in the room, too, looking straight at her. “They
think you’re somewhere on-planet; that was clever of you, setting a rover to
fly out to sea the day after you left. Were you planning to let them know where
you really are?”

“Eventually,” Aisha said. “Are you going to tell them?”

“I might,” said Rama. “Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

“I need you to help me find a way to keep Nevermore from
turning into a U.P. colony. And you need me to help you make your way through
this universe you’ve found yourself in,” she said, though she wasn’t as sure of
that as she’d been when she worked it all out. “You can get into the computer,
but you don’t know how people are when they’re face to face: what kinds of
things they do and say, and how they keep from strangling each other. I know
those things. I can take care of them while you follow the trail. There is one,
isn’t there? You’re not just running around at random?”

“All I know is that the answer is out here,” he said. “I’m
following my gut, you would say. I can’t explain it any more clearly than that.”

“I know about gut,” said Aisha. “You do that, and I’ll keep
people from figuring out that you’re
really
not from around here.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “You have a plan?”

“I always have a plan,” said Aisha.

People laughed when she said that. So did he, but he wasn’t
laughing at her, exactly. He appreciated her.

It was good that somebody did. She narrowed her eyes at him.
“You’re not sending me back?”

“That’s not possible from this place,” he said.

“What about Centrum? What will you do there?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

“Look,” said Aisha. “Just keep quiet and I’ll take care of
the rest. I promise I’ll send a message to Mother and Pater and Jamal when I
can.”

He didn’t like being told to do anything. She knew that
already. She braced against his glare, and didn’t more than half wilt under it.

When he relaxed, so did she. She shouldn’t have. “So you’re
going to swear yourself as my servant,” he said.

She looked down at her clothes. She’d decided on black robes
and veils—not like Malia’s, exactly; the tribes weren’t the only people in the
worlds who followed that tradition. She didn’t have any weapons, and she wasn’t
likely to get them. “I’m not swearing anything,” she said. “This makes it
easier to be invisible, that’s all.”

“You know what these robes mean where I come from,” he said.

“Yes, but who else in the universe does?”

“I do,” said Rama.

Aisha resisted a sudden urge to shrink down small. “My
religion has these, too. They’re called the burqa. It’s
very
old-fashioned and some people think it’s horrible, but we can
use it. I don’t need to turn into a fighting machine.”

“No?”

“No,” said Aisha.

“Then what will you be? My concubine?”

Aisha knew what the word meant. She didn’t mean to blush. “You’re
’way too old for me,” she said.

He stared; then he laughed. “Oh! My wounded heart. A warrior
you’ll be, then. I’ll teach you enough to keep you safe.”

Aisha could argue with that, but she decided not to. “I know
some of it already,” she said.

“Good,” said Rama. “You’ll be learning much more before we’re
done.”

“I’m ready for that,” said Aisha. Maybe she even believed
it. Some of it.

Ship’s night found Khalida unable to sleep. The consensus
that dimmed the lights in the public areas and put the majority of the crew off
duty was out of sync with the time zone she had left. Her body still, after
three shipdays, insisted on waking up halfway through ship’s day and staying
awake well into the night.

Tomiko was sound asleep, curled in a ball in the middle of
the doublewide captain’s bunk. Khalida kissed her ear, which made her stir, but
barely; then slipped softly out of bed.

She was hungry, maybe. The buzz of last night’s brandy had
worn off. The headache was no better than it had been when she started, if no
worse.

The captain’s quarters had a direct link to the ship’s main
computer. Khalida’s clearances got her in; she found the files where she knew
they would be.

Hands slid across her bare shoulders and down over her
breasts. Tomiko’s arms clasped tight around her.

She clasped them in return, but most of her mind was on the
link that Tomiko had refrained from mentioning. Her orders were here, not on
Centrum. She could go that far to get them from someone higher up, or she could
access them now.

If she did that, there was no getting away from them. No
last few T-days of strictly relative freedom. No blissful ignorance.

She keyed the codes. The locks let go one by one. Her orders
from MI streamed through the implants into her brain.

~~~

“Khalida?”

She was lying on her back. Tomiko bent over her. Her
headache was gone.

“God damn,” said Tomiko. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Khalida said. She caught herself groping
around inside her mind, hunting for the pain that had been part of her for so
long that she had forgotten what it was like to be without it.

What she found instead made no sense at all. It was like the
strongest, clearest, highest-security uplink she had ever been part of, but the
ship’s feed was off. She should have been alone inside her head.

She looked at Tomiko and saw layer on layer on layer. Worry
on top, love and fear below that, calculation down deeper, a quick run-through
of possibilities, including the one that Khalida might be a security risk or
worse. Psych repair was supposed to be foolproof, and Khalida had been duly
repaired—but she had refused followup therapy. She might have been more broken
than anyone knew, or have broken all over again for reasons Tomiko could not
know. She had been isolated on a nearly deserted world, after all, with only
the most basic medical services.

That barely stung, even the parts that were true. Tomiko was
Spaceforce. She ought to be thinking that way.

Khalida should not be inside Tomiko’s head. She was not
psi-five—because that was what it took to be doing what she was doing.

What was Rama? Was there even a number for what he was?

That thought appeared completely at random. It shut off the
stream of thoughts that poured from Tomiko. It put her face to psychic face
with the man—psi master—mage—whatever he was—from Nevermore.

Nothing ever seemed to surprise Rama. He did something that
she would replay over and over in her memory, to try to understand it. It felt
as if he had tucked in all her flapping edges, smoothed and secured them, so
that nothing could get in and she could not, inadvertently, get out.

All of it passed in the fraction of a second. She reached up
and pulled Tomiko down and kissed her until they were both dizzy.