Authors: Brenda Cooper
“Correction,” Alicia said. “It’s found us.” Her nails raked my thigh and Caro squealed and pointed as it grew bigger in the screens. Surely a trick of the cameras. It looked new, barely blemished by flight. “The Port Authority?” Alicia asked. “Could they find us?”
“Maybe. But why? I’m going to them, after all.” I thought about other options. “The
Dawnforce
isn’t much faster than
Creator
. The mercenaries
can’t have gotten home yet.” Besides,
Creator
was alert, not alarmed. Not that it had feelings; but it had responses. We weren’t being ordered to strap down and the weapons systems weren’t doing more than warming up.
Chelo tucked Caro under her arm and grabbed Jherrel with her free hand and took them both into the adjoining galley, murmuring something about snacks.
Liam tensed. “Could the mercenaries have sent a message?”
I glanced at Kayleen. “You were in their nets more than I was.”
“They spent a long time between attacks waiting for answers from home.” She closed her eyes and furrowed her brow. “No, it can’t be them. Not unless it’s been waiting for us since before they left Fremont.”
“
Creator
?” I asked, signaling I wanted a verbal exchange for the benefit of the others. “Is it communicating with you?”
“It’s silent,” the ship answered, its voice silky and genderless.
“Can you tell where it’s from?”
“My owner.”
Marcus! Worry turned to excitement.
Alicia’s hand relaxed on my leg, but she didn’t take her eyes from the picture floating in front of us. “So send it our identification.”
“I have been.”
Maybe it wanted me. “Is there any kind of data link?”
“Not an open one.”
A puzzle. Marcus’s own ship didn’t have access to his probe? Did he need to know it was me somehow?
Jherrel, escaped from the galley, flew his aircar into my knee, and then stopped and grinned at me. I waved him away and his little face fell so hard I picked him up and looked him in the eye. “I have to figure something out. And I think I have to be quiet to do it. Can you and Caro and your dad,” I glanced at Liam and waited for his nod, “go and draw that ship so we have a record of it?”
Even though he was only a little over a year old, Jherrel nodded seriously. “Yes, Uncle.” Smart kid.
Liam scooped them both, and I leaned over and kissed Alicia on the cheek. “Can you help him?”
Alicia tensed, still staring at the wall. “If it was meant to hurt us, it would have by now.”
She drummed her fingers on my knee.
“Please?”
She raised an eyebrow, “Well, Liam is rather cute.”
Damn her for making nothing easy. Unless it was a joke, and I could never tell with her. She didn’t like being cooped up in a tin can with no easy risks to take, no long runs, no cliffs to climb. I put my hand over hers and whispered, “I love you. I’d keep you here if I could.” We tried to keep one adult per kid.
Alicia smiled and, as if she’d never fought the idea at all, she hopped up and balanced Caro on her fabulous hip and grinned at me, and then at Liam. She flipped on the mod she shared with Induan that made her basically reflect her surroundings, and it looked like the empty air was bouncing Caro up and down, only a periodic slight smear of shifting color giving away Alicia’s physical presence. “Call us when you know something,” she said as Caro left the room.
“I will,” I said to the air.
Chelo came over and stood behind me, massaging my shoulders, establishing the closeness we’d used ever since we were little. I had no words to tell her how steadying her presence was, how the feel of her fingers and her familiar scent helped center me.
I stared at the image of the cylinder. There was no way to get to it physically. Not at this speed. Besides, to find us and match us like this, it had to be all engine and navigation and communications gear. It didn’t take much to maintain any speed you reached in space, but getting speed took lots of energy. This ship was too small to have the tools to return. What message was worth this expense?
Another thought struck me, bringing with it a fear for Marcus. This had to have been sent shortly after we left. It took us two years to get to Fremont, we spent about two weeks there, and then almost another year getting this far back. It would have taken the little ship, or probe or whatever, over a year to get here and get aligned in our direction. A year and a half maybe—the sling out, the turn, the thrusting acceleration necessary. So he’d have sent it no more than a year and a half after we left, and probably sooner than that. I could
see its likely trajectory in my head. And the timing—it had reached us before we burned the fuel to start slowing down.
What did that mean was happening at home? Had the rumored war started?
Worrying wouldn’t make answers.
“Kayleen, can you watch over me, stay linked to
Creator
in case I’m . . . gone? Tell the others what’s happening?”
“What do you mean, in case you’re gone? Surely you won’t go far enough I can’t reach you. Besides, I can’t fly
Creator
yet. I don’t know when I’ll be good enough to fly. Should I use the PA system or call them if something happens?”
If I hadn’t felt that way myself, I’d have laughed at her nervous rambling. I put up a hand to forestall her usual thousand questions. “Just trust yourself.”
There was a moment of silence, and I wondered what Chelo thought. She’d never been in space before. I touched her hand with mine, noticing that she trembled slightly. “It will be all right. Marcus is a friend.”
“Go,” she whispered.
I shifted in the chair, looking for a position where I didn’t feel the edges of it. Eyes closed, I clenched and opened my hands, stretched my ankles. What kept me from just knowing what to do?
I talked myself through it.
Open. Be the data. Be the maker. Be my blood, the gift of my genetics and the nano that swims in me
. To fly the ship I didn’t need to be it, just to feel it in me. The last time I’d let myself be as open as I was trying for this time, I lost control. I could say it was in the heat of battle, except I was on a ridge far away from the skimmer and people inside when I threw them screaming in the sea. Their dying voices still echoed in my head. They hadn’t been trying to harm me. Not that moment. They were innocent. And dead.
Chelo felt my tension, my distance, and worked my shoulders harder. “Focus,” she demanded, her voice just louder than a whisper. “You can do it.”
Don’t think about losing control. Know you can keep it. Fall deeper. Start someplace safe. Creator
thrummed through me and in me, and me in it. Data in my blood and bones, until my awareness of the bones and ligaments and veins and cells that made me live began to fade into streams of information.
Kayleen rode the same data, higher than me, not so absorbed in it. I felt her register my presence, wish me well. It helped.
I let myself fill the ship, take the feeds from the cameras and sensors outside. I worked my way into the communication stream from
Creator
. At this speed, small packets. I tried sending my name.
Nothing.
Marcus’s name.
Nothing.
My father’s. Maybe Marcus was expecting him to be piloting instead of dead.
Nothing.
I curled back about and watched
Creator
ping the ship, which responded to every question with its speed and location.
There had to be another thread. “Send it our speed and location,” I told
Creator
.
This time it responded, but only with an opening . . . machine talk for the way Alicia could ask me a question with her eyes.
If Marcus were me, what would he do?
And then I got it. I sent it a challenge. Marcus constantly teased me for being too naïve. “Who are you and why are you in our space? Prove yourself!”
A burst of data leapt across the void, flooding the
Creator
, captured by its sensors.
“Let it in?”
Creator
queried.
Who else would have known where to find us? “Yes.”
The data fl owed into the
Creator
. My instincts had better be right.
A
fter I made sure
Creator
accepted the data from the strange little message ship, I slid back up into the slower, normal world. Chelo had one hand and Kayleen the other, my hands cold in their warm ones. Their eyes held questions, but they waited, letting me adjust.
Creator
still hummed inside me in all the usual ways, status and speed, atmosphere and temperature, all the little facts that keep a fragile cylinder safe inside emptiness. “Water,” I whispered, rewarded as Chelo slipped into the galley.
Kayleen’s hand trembled slightly. “What did you see?” I asked her. “What data came in?”
“It was too fast to read. Not meant for me anyway.”
That made sense. Marcus had never met her, hardly knew she existed.
Chelo came back in with water and I drank, feeling the water fill empty places deep inside me. “
Creator
? What did we get in? Is the message urgent?”
“Yes.”
Dumb question. I sounded the
all hands
bell again, and waited for the room to fill up before shifting us to the galley, which had a makeshift playpen for the kids across the back. I filled everyone in quickly while Kayleen served up col she flavored with redberries so that it smelled like Fremont.
Finally, everyone sat looking at me with expectant faces. “Okay,
Creator
, what’s the message?”
Even the children quieted as the screen showed Marcus seated in his garden. I recognized the light-link butterflies caught like prisms in the purple flowers behind his head. The video was just a frozen image at first, giving me long enough to drink in the sight of him. My savior, my teacher, the man who bankrolled my trip to save my sister. As always, he looked like power. Sunlight poured down on his brown hair, touching the ends with red almost as deep as fire, a contrast to his green eyes.
If only I could reach through the air and touch him.
“He looks so young,” Chelo said. “Like he’s our age.”
The slight condescending tone in Alicia’s voice made me squirm as she said, “They all do.”
I sipped my col, hungry for a rush of clarity from the stimulant. Colors sharpened. The video sprang to life, the butterflies and small birds moving, and Marcus’s face still showing no hint of a smile. “Joseph . . . or David, whichever of you gets this message”—Alicia squeezed my hand at the mention of my dead father’s name—“do not return to Silver’s Home. Joseph has been declared ‘wanted’ by the Port Authority and the Planetary Police. If you’re seeing this message, I’m uploading a new destination. You must have trusted this ship but, Joseph, don’t be so naïve.”
He paused and smiled. Damn the man to hell. “I love you, too,” I
whispered almost silently, although Alicia, Chelo, and Kayleen all gave me quick, odd looks.
The video Marcus continued. “I trust we found you before you slowed. If so, do nothing—the new coordinates will be in
Creator
’s nav subsystem. If not, work with
Creator
to get as close as you can with your remaining fuel, and we’ll figure it out from there.”
His smile faded again. “Don’t try to communicate with me. I’ll reach you.” He looked directly into the camera. “Trust me. I’ll find you. I found you now, didn’t I?”
And that was it.
I shivered. Alicia looked both angry and excited. “He must be sending us to one of the other Five Worlds,” she whispered.
“I want to go home,” I said. There were things I wanted to do on Silver’s Home. Swimmers mods. Go back to Pilo Island. Meet the other people in our affinity group. That’s what Marcus had been preparing me for—to take my place there.
Alicia had apparently been thinking, too. “Lopali. Maybe we can go to Lopali. Where the fliers live.”
But as always, it was Chelo who saw the real truth and spoke it. “That means we have no home.”
I
was better at being invisible than any of them thought. Even Joseph, who knew me best. At the moment, he didn’t see me on the floor across the room from him and Kayleen. They sat side by side, holding hands, lost in the other world of data where he sometimes became as invisible as me, even though I could still see his body. He’d grown as tall as Liam. Even with the slightly slack-faced look he wore when the data fields took him, he still glowed with energy, like there was more of him than anyone else. The muscles in his hands and calves twitched from time to time, as if he could leap up from whatever far place he’d gone to and chase me around the ship. We’d done that just this morning, me leaving my invisibility mod on low-res so it’d change too slowly from time to time and give him clues. I’d been grateful when he caught me in a maintenance tunnel with only the silent bots to see what we did after that.
We didn’t get much time together anymore. He was always worrying about something. So I watched him when I could. It let me feel like we were still close.
Kayleen, beside him, looked like me with her eyes shut. Hers are blue and mine are a violet that screams bioengineering even though she’s actually more altered, since she can Read the Wind like Joseph. I can’t. Her feet are bigger. We’re both a head shorter than him, slender and strong, and beside him, right now, her dark curly hair fell in a mess down her shoulders, the edges licking her breasts.
They’d been down deep in the data for so long that one foot had
gone to sleep. I twisted it gently, feeling the pins and needles of blood rushing into cramped veins. It was important not to make a sound; me being invisible didn’t make them deaf. If Joseph woke and caught me, he’d think I was jealous of her, but I wasn’t really. Not much, anyway. Being invisible had taught me how much she loved Liam, and Chelo, the little family they’d made.
I worked my foot back alive before Kayleen twitched and moaned, burying her face in his shoulder for a moment. He whispered to her. “Shhhh . . . you did well.”