As with every arrival at a station, there were papers to process, checks to be concluded, licenses to be bought.
“There is a gathering of captains to start the Festival,” the Plubas adjutant told Niko over the comm as she logged in and began having the ship’s title corroborated.
“I thought Festival might have already started,” she said.
“We are in the period of pre-Festival, which lasts three days, of which we are on the second, and which is sometimes mistaken as the actual Festival itself by the ignorant,” the Plubas said with officious precision.
Niko sighed. “The gathering is mandatory, I take it?”
“For the ritual to be effective, all must take part. Or pay a very large fine to compensate for the spiritual drag their absence may cause.” The adjutant folded their hands in front of them primly.
“Spiritual drag,” Niko repeated dryly, and that was commentary enough, but the adjutant ignored the implications in her tone.
“It will commence in one and a half days,” they went on as if she had not spoken. “You must appear in full dress, not a uniform, to show respect to the Gods, and you must conduct no other business before you have participated.”
Most space stations were godless, but some were crewed by species who tended toward being spiritually inclined, and Niko had forgotten that fact, somehow. A whole new range of ways for us to put a foot wrong, she thought sourly as she clicked out of the conversation. A whole new host of delays and reasons for more delays on the heels of that. When would she get to the bank? That would definitely qualify as business, and pressing business, to boot.
A Captain’s Gathering, however—well, that would also be a chance to catch up with the gossip, at least, which was always more interesting in person. She would undoubtedly run into old friends and acquaintances. Probably enemies, too, based on Lassite’s prediction, but as she told him, that was not unexpected. The thought that someone she didn’t think an enemy would prove one, though, bothered her. If only Lassite would ever speak in specifics, rather than generalities!
Depend on no one on the station, she decided, not even Biboban. Presume nothing and have everyone keep their heads down. Run their pop-up, take advantage of the Festival, do the business they had come for, and get the hell out.
That seemed simple enough. “Any messages waiting for the crew?” Niko asked, purely as protocol. None of them were prone to receiving mail, other than an occasional yearly missive from Gio’s relatives.
To her surprise, the Plubas replied, “Only one, for Dabry Jen.”
“From?” she asked.
“No address of origin attached,” he said.
“But it came from off-station? Who brought it?”
“I have little time for such things,” the adjutant said. “Transmitting it now.”
She was more than a little curious about its origin, and she was surprised when, after glancing down at his datapad to read it, Dabry refused to divulge its contents.
“It’s personal, Niko,” he said.
“We have known each other almost a decade and a half! What personal secrets do either of us have?”
He shook his head. His face was more lined now, more tired than when they had first met. Two scars acquired during that decade and a half rode it, one along a cheek, the other almost intersecting an ear.
“Some things hurt to talk about.”
She left without saying anything else, and he waited until her footsteps in the corridor had died down before he opened it again.
“Stay away from Coralind,” it read. “Or your daughter will die.”
He stared at it, trying to ignore the giddy surge it brought. Keirera was dead, how could she die again? He searched his memory of the circumstances of her death. True enough, she had not been one of the bodies—he forced his thoughts away from those blackened, charred forms, the photographs identifying his wife’s body—but many in the village had been caught in a blaze that burned so brightly that it ate everything, down to tooth and bone. That was what he had been told. He had been worlds away at the time, trying to race back and get them off-planet to safety before the inevitable fighting broke out.
He touched the datapad. A finger of his upper hand traced the lines of the message, pointlessly trying to feel the letters on the pad’s slickness, searching for some clue. He felt brittle and scraped to the bone, as though he had begun to recover from some long and dire illness, and his guts twisted in an uneasy coil. He was unaccustomed to feeling weak.
Stay away from Coralind when it might be a clue to guide him to her? How could he do that?
Was it possible this was another machination on the part of Tubal Last? Surely it must be. But what if it wasn’t?
Should he warn Niko? Logic told him that he should. Yet he had kept his grief so private, so long, nursed in secret during rare moments to himself. Lately it stirred in a different way with Atlanta, and it had seemed that at long last he was on the way to healing a wound worse than a severed arm, something that had been torn away, and which had been open and raw ever since, never healing, never relenting.
No, he would keep it to himself for now, despite his better judgment.
The first time you see a Jadoogar blobbship move into a planet’s atmosphere, it will be one of the most impressive sights of your life. Also probably the last, because these dreadnoughts, made of interstellar matter and pseudoflesh, rained down destruction in a multitude of forms, none of them subtle. Niko and Dabry had lived through one such onslaught, through luck more than any foresight or planning, and neither wanted to ever encounter another.
Synthetic and organic intelligences strung together through cellular computers powered the ships, and the older they were, the more massive they became. One such brain—one only, in all the history of the troops of the Holy Hive Mind—had managed to survive severing from its ship.
It then went on to have itself installed in a space station to act as its brain, and communications system, and maintenance overseer, and a host of other duties that it did with more facility and fewer costly requirements than a purely mechanical system. That was one of the maxims of the Known Universe—flesh is cheaper than metal or stone, and breeds its own replacement with the proper handling and schedule.
That brain was Biboban, and they had fought together in the service of the Holy Hive Mind, which might prove a bond. They had both been performing that service somewhat unwillingly, though, hating how the Hive Mind fought with no heed for collateral damage or non-combatant lives lost.
Biboban was complicated, always had been, and she had not talked with it for a long time.
“Is your warning something to do with Biboban?” she asked Lassite unexpectedly as she passed him in the hallway, hoping to startle him into some clue.
But he was unforthcoming. “It is a person, rather than some blind force and mischance, and beyond that, I cannot tell you much at all.” He scowled. “Jezli Farren clouds things.”
“Clouds them how?” They had both come to a standstill in the corridor. The ship debated playing atmospheric music to suit the conversation, but refrained.
He threw up his hands and dipped his scaly head a fraction. “I cannot see her anywhere, and where she is, that is obscured.”
“Are you saying get rid of her? That she makes your skills worthless?”
His head snapped up, eyes alight with protest. “Never worthless!” he objected. “And no. She came with someone I did see, Roxana, and perhaps the paladin’s light still shines on her, hiding her, somehow. Perhaps she learned to take advantage of that, and it hides her from thief-trackers using magic. That is one thing I have considered.”
“I do not think her entirely a friend,” she said slowly. “The jury is still out on Jezli. So is she possibly this enemy, or not?”
“No. Someone else.”
“I listen to you because what you have done so far. But magic—” She made a warding-off gesture. “Free Traders do not touch it for a reason.”
“Prejudice.”
“We have had this argument before.”
“And will again,” he said with certainty.
She scowled. “Then you spend your time consulting your ghosts and see if you cannot bring me something tangible.”
He knew he would not, could not, but bowed his head in acquiescence nonetheless. They each went on their separate ways.
Niko had composed her greeting message with care. Biboban had plenty on its plate, and she wasn’t sure it would appreciate being reminded of its days as a war ship, thralled to the Holy Hive Mind as surely as any of its soldiers. There had never been any question of Biboban being subsumed by the Hive Mind; it had been considered expendable at the time they had installed it in the ship, and there had been no exception to that.
So she spoke as little of the Holy Hive Mind as possible. Rather, she mentioned the Last Chance, and its destruction, and left out all the pirate material, choosing to move instead to the fact that they had turned Free Trader and hoped to pick up good cargo at Coralind, maybe do a little restauranting business (she alluded to their Nikkelin Orb in vague and technically true terms) and while they were there, she and Dabry would like to talk to Biboban for old time’s sake.
She read it over three times and finally sent it.
She waited at least an hour, pretending to work at other things at her desk. She pulled up their finances once again and contemplated them glumly. There was no response. Should she send a follow-up? Or was the silence itself a reply? It had been so long since they had seen each other. People changed with time, and that held true even for intelligences like Biboban. She had no way to predict how it would answer, and that made her feel unsure in a way she had not felt when the idea had first occurred to her.
Finally, after two hours, the reply came, although it was only an acknowledgment and a time and address, a full day from now. An entire fifteen minims, early in the morning after the Captain’s Gathering.
Very well, perhaps she’d use that time to find out more regarding how things lay there and would be better prepared to talk. The Gathering could be useful. She’d take Atlanta, let her smooth some of those rough edges, enjoy herself by listening to the music and watching the performers, as well as the crowd.
Free food, free drink. How bad could it be?
The berries arrived as part of a set of samples from Abundance, along with several other complimentary packages designed to entice trade. Dabry had recognized them as soon as he opened the package. He lifted them out and set them aside with a little marker that they were his to cook with.
So now he was in the kitchen making berry salad, having chased the others out on one pretext or another. He was making it slowly, step by step, like a ritual. He had made this many times before, back on his home planet.
He remembered making it for his family. Berries and bitter greens—remembered serving it to them, Challa picking the berries out to eat. Each chop of the knife across the green stalks, squirting their scent, evoked a sorrow in him that nearly drove him to his knees.
But he continued chopping with tight-jawed determination, lower hand holding the stalks, upper right slicing across them.
Niko had asked him what he wanted from the future. He’d known instantly that what he most needed and wanted was his lost family. Something utterly unobtainable. At the time, he had thought he’d go back soon to visit them, any day now, when there was time to file for a brief leave! But life in the ranks of the Holy Hive Mind was not conducive to free time, and he never had filed, not until those last desperate days, when it had already been too late.
The moment he learned that his wife and daughter were gone was the moment he knew his greatest fear had come to fruition, and he was alone. Unneeded. Unnecessary. Niko had moved into that gap, had steadied him throughout. He had been drowning in dark water and she pulled him out.
Could his daughter be alive? If so, why send that message threatening her life if he came here? How could he send some message back? What was he supposed to do? Stay away from Coralind? How could he do that when he was already here?
He would volunteer to stay on the ship, he decided. But when he spoke to Niko about it, she shook her head. “Everyone wants an excursion or two,” she said, “And I need you overseeing those less ready to undertake excursions on their own.”
“Surely Gio,” he began, but her head shake came even quicker this time.
“Gio has plenty in his basket.” Left unspoken in her arched eyebrow was her slight surprise that he would try to duck responsibility like this.
Should he explain to her what was happening, what the letter had said? But she had enough to deal with, plenty of things to think about, and surely the greatest priority was saving them from Tubal Last’s revenge. He dared not distract Niko from that. While he had never spoken of it, despair dogged those hours in the pirate haven, despair he had hidden.
Despair he was glad he had hidden. You never showed the crew you were afraid. Let Niko think his faith in her was absolute—it was as good as. She’d managed to get them out of some of the most dangerous places in the universe. Though the truth was it was more that things had fallen her way, with the Thing’s stubbornness and Millie’s attempt to escape coinciding enough to permit their escape from the pirate haven, or Roxana’s presence permitting them to survive the space moth.
“Very well,” he said crisply, and left without another word.
What had crawled up his butt, Niko wondered sourly, and forgot the exchange in the myriad of other details complicating the existence of herself, not to mention the ship and its crew. She had more than enough to do.
One of those work items was laundry. The Thing was reasonably good with laundry if you told it exactly what you wanted. Her first uniform had arrived so stiff with starch she felt like it would crack if she bent over. She attributed this to pique over her rejecting the idea that the ship simply make her new clothing each day and recycle the old.
The agonizing thing about leadership, Niko thought as she sorted through shirts, was that you had to seem surest of the rightness of what you were doing at the time when you felt that sureness the least.
She sniffed a shirt and tossed it in the appropriate pile.
You had to make decisions. Fast ones, to save the most people. And while you made them, you knew that you would grieve. Deeply, internally, and above all, privately, for all the ones lost in the margins of those calculations.
The collateral damage that every leader knows will come, while at the same time knowing that you’d do it again the same way, if the choice presented itself.
Just as she’d done the things that had made her the Ten-Hour Admiral, doing things because they were right rather than profitable.
Ten hours or not, she would do it again in a heartbeat. Except next time, she would keep the uniform. She’d looked very good in that uniform, and it had been low-maintenance, easy-care fabric.
A knock on the door. “Come in,” she half shouted.
Milly’s head poked through the doorway. “Captain?”
“What do you need?”
Milly seemed as hesitant as Niko had ever seen her. White feathers stirred and lifted, then drooped again on her crest. “Captain,” she said, “it’s been a while since … what happened. And I just wanted to make sure we’re all good.”
“‘What happened’ being you deciding to abandon the rest of us to the pirates and go off on the Thing?”
“Ouch.” Milly winced. “Yes. That would be what happened.”
“Would you do it again?”
“No,” Milly said instantly. “I did it before because I didn’t trust you all the way. And because among my people, pirates are known to be cruel and deadly, and I did not want to die. Now…” She took a deep breath and looked Niko straight in the eye. “Now I do. Because now I’ve seen you in action, not just being a chef, but being a captain. You’re a good one.”
“Flattery.” She turned back to sorting.
Milly shook her head. “No, the truth. Look, Captain, I’ve made my peace with everyone aboard the ship but you. Are we good?”
“Yes,” Niko said without hesitation, and Milly looked pleased.
“Thank you,” she said, and discreetly withdrew, leaving Niko standing over her piles of lights and darks.
In his chamber, the air dry and scented with kinna weed, Lassite said to the ship, “Do you still not sense the ghosts?”
The ship hedged, suspiciously, “I have sensed something, and I do not know what it was. It is quite possible that it was some form of trickery.”
Its tone left little doubt regarding who it thought might be the instigator of such trickery.
Lassite ignored the implied accusation and said with more patience than he actually felt, “You experienced their presence more than once. You’ve complained about it enough, but now you don’t anymore. Have you gotten used to them?”
“I have gotten used to ignoring the feeling,” the ship specified.
“That doesn’t seem at all a survival trait, nor something that a bioship would do,” Lassite observed. “Ignoring things happening within yourself?”
“It is an emotional reaction and therefore does not need to make sense or be explained,” the ship said loftily.
Lassite’s head began to throb, but he ignored it, intent on coaxing information from the ship.
“Look,” he said, holding up the arm around which a Derloen ghost twined. “Do you perceive it, here?”
The ship strained senses it wasn’t entirely sure it had, but felt nothing. Lassite was lying, it decided. Trying to delude it. For a trick, maybe a prank. Or maybe for no reason at all other than to amuse himself. It felt an intense surge of dislike.
That faded away as Lassite said, “I have been trying to think of a way to let you see them. You seem to have some facility or talent, otherwise you would not have been able to perceive them.”
“I was imagining at the time,” the ship said. “Perhaps I was imagining them.”
“Imagination is part of magic,” Lassite said.
“How can that be?” the ship asked, intrigued despite its overall annoyance.
Lassite shrugged. “Magic is a thing of will and imagination, as much as anything,” he explained. “It does not matter if a body is weak, as long as its will is strong.”
“My body is very strong,” the ship noted.
“Of course it is,” Lassite said patiently. “But what of your will?”
The ship considered. “I was not meant to have a will,” it said finally.
“You were not, that I agree,” Lassite said. “And what does it mean, that you do?”
“Does it have to have a meaning?”
“For it to be magic, it does,” Lassite said, utterly confounding the ship to the point where it cut off the conversation and refused to talk to him for the rest of the day.
Lassite had been earnest about his quest to let the ship see the ghosts. It fascinated him to think that a machine might, after all, be capable of perceiving ghosts. That was a specialized ability not all species possessed, and no one had been capable of melding magic and machine.
There was a sparkle somewhere up on the Path, something he couldn’t quite make out, but it had to do with the ship. Of that, he was certain. He understood the ship was perpetually annoyed with him—he was used to that sort of thing—but the thought of what he might discover drove him on.
Was it the presence of Jezli Farren? How had she gotten into the Path without his realizing it? Because now when he looked, the absence that was somehow her was tangled up in all sorts of ways, appearing here and there along the timelines, which perplexed him and made his head hurt.
He sat in his chamber and meditated. No matter how he tried, he could not see what was to come. The ghosts came and curled around him like cats, but he resisted the urge to pet them.
Coralind. Was there more than one person wishing them ill there; was that why things kept shifting? Or was there some other reason? Sometimes he felt he was watching a multi-dimensional chess match, with half the moves made in secret by entities he didn’t know. The Golden Path shifted from day to day, that was a given, but it continued in the direction it should, generally.
What might happen if he stopped watching it so carefully? He thought that the future might devolve. That without him, they might not stay on the Golden Path. It was hubris to think his attention kept things going, and yet … and yet it felt very much like that sometimes.
In a chamber deep in Coralind’s heart, Biboban was mulling matters over. The thing about a very large, very complex body, Biboban thought to itself, was that you constantly thought, “Hmmm, what’s that particular new pain about?” And that very large, very complex body housed other bodies, along with a number of other mechanisms and entities, which meant that there was always something going wrong in a new way.
The garden space Abundance was, true to its name, overproducing oxygen—that could be adjusted for—but not when you didn’t understand exactly what caused the overproduction. Biboban dispatched a number of agents, some organic, some mechanical, to test the space, and turned its attention elsewhere.
A Keinlot ship had come in covered with ypri fungus, which you didn’t see much anymore now that most ships underwent a radiation spray process when debarking. This one, however, had come out of a Spisoli port—notoriously lax about such things. That meant decontamination and complicated procedures, because the last thing anyone needed was some sort of epidemic. It sent out a directive that no ships from that port should be allowed to dock until the port changed its ways.
And now. Now among the flood of visitors there was a particular new ship, a fancy bioship and an old, familiar name on that new ship. Nicolette Larsen. Such an interesting ship! So talkative!
Biboban flexed parts of itself that had not been flexed in a while, stirring up tank fluid, making debris silt down onto the bottom where the little scavenger leeches suckled it up and carried it away to build into intricate towers. And Biboban continued to do something it did well.
Biboban brooded.