Forgotten Suns (16 page)

~~~

With luck Khalida might have kept Tomiko distracted until
the alarm called her to her day’s duties on the ship, but Khalida had never had
much of that. When their breathing had quieted and the sweat had dried on their
bodies, Tomiko propped herself on her elbow and said, “I’m putting you in for a
psych evaluation.”

“Good,” said Khalida, and she meant that.

Not just because she needed it, either. A new evaluation
would delay the orders, if not invalidate them. Whatever had knocked her flat
on her back had not even touched that memory.

Report to authorities in Centrum. Secure transport to
Araceli. Mission specifics attached.

Those were secure in her head, too. She had been breaking
apart by then, but the download had completed before the blackout.

The situation she had supposedly resolved, was not. All
those lives were gone for nothing. Castellanos was still at war with Ostia.
Ostia, broken, battered, be-nuked Ostia, would not stop fighting. Would not
stop demanding that she come back, not because it wanted to indict her for high
crimes and misdemeanors, but because it would not negotiate with Castellanos
unless she served as mediator.

It was insane. It was impossible—which was why Ostia was
insisting on it; she needed no terabytes of analyses to be sure of that.

She could not go back there. She was broken already. That
would crush her to powder.

A psych evaluation would show MI exactly how damaged she
was. It would end her career, too, but by now she was ready to let it happen.
No one had any business using Khalida for anything more challenging than
cataloguing artifacts on an archaeological site at the back end of nowhere.

It was all so simple after all. Clean, almost. Clinical.
Insane, no question, but insanity was good. Insanity would keep her away from
Araceli—and Araceli far, far away from her.

“I owe you,” she said to Rama in her head. She had no sure
way of knowing if he heard, but she suspected he did. He sent no answer that
she was aware of. He had his own insanity to wallow in, and his own obsession
to chase after.

Khalida smiled at Tomiko. It was a great relief to have
everything settled.

Tomiko did not look relieved at all. But there at last was
the bell for the day shift, and she had a ship to run. She left Khalida with
stern orders not to get into any more trouble than she could possibly help.

Those were orders Khalida could easily obey. She found she
could sleep then, and when she woke she treated herself to a long, blissful
session in the cleanser. When she was clean inside and out, she dressed in a
fresh uniform and ate a solid meal of shipboard rations. Even those tasted good
in the mood she was in.

~~~

A ping waited for her in the ship’s system. Captain’s
dinner tonight. She was expected to attend.

Captain’s dinner was a formality she could hardly avoid.
Whatever Tomiko was to Khalida, Captain Hashimoto of the
Leda
and Captain Nasir of MI were expected to observe certain
proprieties. Which meant at least one official gathering during the voyage, and
suitable courtesies paid to the ship’s officers.

It also meant that she would have to face the boy from
Psycorps. She braced for that, fortifying herself with the assurance—even if it
might be false—that he could not get into her head. There were protocols for
that, and MI had backups of its own. She was safe.

So, she hoped, was the other guest at the captain’s table.
Civilian passengers were always invited, and if they were wise, they accepted.
Rama was wise.

He seemed to be on his best behavior. He wore the plain grey
suit that Vikram had given him, and no torque. No jewelry at all that she could
see. He still refused to cut his hair, but tonight it was clubbed at his nape:
enough of a Govindan style to avoid attracting notice.

For the most part he kept quiet. He ate enough to be polite,
and sipped the wine that came with each course. The conversation flowed over
and past him.

It dawned on her gradually that he was controlling it. He
was very subtle. A glance, a word, a brief question: he steered them all in the
direction he wanted.

She could not tell exactly what that was. War stories, old
jokes and older gossip, the virtues of this wine over that—there seemed to be
no particular order in it.

Lieutenant Zhao had got married not long ago. He linked them
all to an image of a handsome young woman in Psycorps green, with five pips on
the collar.

He was transparently proud. No one said what most of them
must be thinking: that the Corps was breeding for more than looks. This was an
island of civility; the response that was expected was to share one’s own joy,
one’s spouse or family or child, or if one had none, one smiled and asked after
those who did.

What it must be like for someone whose whole world was so
long gone that no one else alive remembered it, Khalida could not imagine. Rama
was perfectly opaque, and perfectly polite.

Then Lieutenant Zhao said, “You’re from Dreamtime, yes? Bai
was stationed there before we married, in Woomera. Have you been there?”

His gaze was limpid, his expression perfectly innocent. As
traps went, it was not too badly laid.

Rama smiled. “There is no Psycorps station in Woomera.”

“She was liaison to the ambassador from Araceli,” Lieutenant
Zhao said.

Khalida’s spine went stiff. This was a trap, yes, but maybe
it was not laid for Rama.

He raised a brow. “Ah,” he said. “So you are both from
Araceli.”

“Bai was born there,” said Lieutenant Zhao. “I was born on
Earth, in Chengdu.”

“In the old city?”

Lieutenant Zhao nodded, with some regret. “We left before I
was old enough to remember. I grew up on Araceli, near the Ara itself.”

Rama did not move and his expression did not change, but
Khalida felt his alertness like a prickle on the skin. “Is it true what they
say of that? That it’s a remnant of a race that went before?”

Khalida opened her mouth to decry the myth. The flick of his
glance stilled her.

Lieutenant Zhao shook his head and smiled. “That’s very
pretty, but it’s just a story. It’s a natural formation, a stone arch. Someone
a long time ago carved glyphs in the rock, but those are forgeries. Araceli had
no human inhabitants before Earth colonized it.”

“That you know of,” Rama said.

“We’re sure,” said Lieutenant Zhao. “There’s no evidence of
such people at all. Just that one arch and the carvings on it. Stargates are an
old story, a fiction from Earth. There’s never been any such transport in this
universe.”

“Too bad, too,” said
Leda
’s
XO. She was a wry and wickedly humorous woman, and she had been greatly
enjoying the wine. “We’d be out of a job, but imagine opening up a gate and
walking from one world to the next. The whole universe would be as close as the
bodega down the street.”

“We’d still need security forces,” Tomiko said. “First-contact
units. Armies.”

“Right,” said the XO. “You never know what you’d find on the
other side, if you opened up a new one. Still—the possibilities!”

“All sadly mythical, I’m afraid,” said Lieutenant Zhao. “There
are only two ways to get from world to world: sublight slog or subspace jump.
You can’t tame a wormhole and turn it into a gate.”

They all nodded and sighed. All but Rama. He sat back, and
Khalida could swear he was biting back laughter, or possibly tears.

Maybe she imagined it. His face was expressionless. He
reached for his cup and drank slowly, as if hiding behind it. Or else he simply
admired the captain’s taste in Shiraz.

“Tell me about this Dreamtimer with the Govindan name,”
Tomiko said.

Khalida had not expected Tomiko to miss a word or a glance,
but she had rather hoped not to have to explain Rama. They were still in the
captain’s mess, finishing off the last bottle of wine. Everyone else had long
since rolled off to bed.

Khalida turned the goblet in her fingers. In that light, the
wine looked like blood. “He does have Govindan relatives,” she said. “You know
Vikram, on Nevermore? That’s his cousin.”

“I’ve read the dossier,” Tomiko said. Her tone was as dry as
the pinot blanc she was finishing off. “It’s as interesting for what it doesn’t
say as for what it does. Is he one of yours?”

“MI’s?” Khalida was stalling. They both knew it. “If he
were, would I be able to say so?”

“No,” Tomiko said. “He looks modified, but the scans say he’s
not. Whoever gengineered him, they were good. They weren’t trying to hide it,
either.”

“Truth in labeling?”

Tomiko bared her teeth in a grin. “If I swung in that
direction, I’d be jumping his bones. Have you noticed the way he moves?”

Khalida had noticed. No one with eyes could avoid it.

“He was doing katas this morning,” Tomiko said, “down in the
cargo bay with his ninja. He’s better at them than she is. In half-gravity, he
was literally flying.”

“His—” Khalida bit her tongue.

Tomiko’s grin stretched even wider. “Oh yes, he omitted to
declare that part of his cargo. I’ve docked his account accordingly. So far he
hasn’t said a word about it.”

Khalida was on her feet. Her head only swam a little. When
she roared out of the captain’s mess, she was aware that Tomiko followed.

Good. She was going to need the backup—and the authority.

~~~

Aisha was asleep in the bunk closest to the cabin’s door.
Her black robe must have been appropriated from Blackroot tribe, though she
seemed not to have borrowed the weapons to go with it. The veils lay crumpled
beside her.

Rama was awake. He had the walls set to show a star field
approximating the one they were jumping through. It looked as if he was
floating in space.

Khalida’s grand fire of outrage died, but the ember was hot
enough to keep her going. “That,” she said, perfectly reasonably, she thought, “is
my niece you’ve kidnapped.”

“She kidnapped herself,” said Rama. “She stowed away. I
believe she found the inspiration in a novel about pirates.”

Khalida opened her mouth, then shut it with a click. “And
you
let
her?”

“Didn’t you?”

“I had no idea she’d even try it!”

“You should have,” he said. “That is a very determined
child.”

“Determined to do
what
?”

“Solve mysteries. Find answers. Save the world.”

That was Aisha to the life. Khalida was near to hating this
alien, this creature out of time, for understanding Aisha so much better than
her own family did.

“You let her do it,” Khalida said. “You abetted it.”

“I never knew she was here until just before the jump,” Rama
said. “Should I have let her go through it in the hallway? Or in the cargo bay?”

“How could you not know?”

He let the echoes die before he answered. “I do not know
everything.”

Was that a flicker of regret? Khalida was too angry to care.
“The minute we come out of jump, she’s going straight back to her parents.”

No one argued with that. Even Aisha, who was awake: dark
eyes, stricken face, staring at her. Khalida held out her hand. “Get up. You’re
coming with me.”

Aisha sat up but made no move to take Khalida’s hand. “Where?”

Khalida had not thought that far. Yet. “Out of here. Where
you’ll be safe.”

“She’s as safe here as she is anywhere,” Tomiko said.

Khalida spun toward her. That was betrayal, that
salt-in-the-wound sting. “You
knew
!”

Tomiko shrugged, a lift of the shoulder, a graceful
spreading of the hands. “Like Meser Rama, I didn’t know she was here until
right before the jump. I didn’t know who she was until today. There were other
priorities, and I had her under surveillance; she wasn’t a threat to the ship.”

“You should have told me.” Khalida was not sure which of
them she spoke to. Both, she supposed. All of them.

None of them reproached her, or gloated at her, either. She
settled on Aisha as the cause of it all, but it was Rama she spoke to. “If she
gets so much as a sniffle between now and the time I ship her home, I’ll hold
you personally responsible.”

“I do take that responsibility,” he said.

“Does it mean the same thing to you as it does to me?”

Rama met her glare. His eyes could be hard to meet: there
was so much in them, so many years, so many things she could never understand.
At the moment she was too angry to care. He said, “It’s quite possible it means
more.”

That
was a rebuke.
She shook it off. “You had better be telling the truth,” she said.

~~~

She slept alone that shipnight, in the cabin that had been
nominally hers to begin with. Tomiko did not try to force sense or reason on
her.

In the morning, directly after shift change, she went down
to the cargo bay. There were other people going down there, too, and not many of
them had official reason to be there. They were circulating in that direction,
that was all.

The cargo bay was useful for troop maneuvers and martial
training. The gravity made a soldier work for her balance, and the open spaces
away from the cargo could host a whole mock battle.

This morning a small crowd had gathered halfway down the
bay. Most of them were watching. A few, dressed for exercise, were doing katas.

That at least was what they looked like. Khalida had seen
something like them before, in one of the sword dances in the tribal village on
Nevermore; but this was the root from which they must have sprung. They had a
great deal of elegance and a great deal of speed. They were completely
merciless.

Rama led them, wearing the bottom half of a
gi
and nothing else. It was not
surprising Tomiko had called his shadow a ninja: she did look like a secret
warrior of old Japan in her black robes and veils. He had a real sword, slim
and slightly curved like a katana. Hers was a practice sword, made of plasteel,
with a blunt blade. The others had hands or staves or practice blades or
whatever they happened to have brought with them.