18: Basement Afternoon
I was no stranger to the selfless courage of Humans. What Evan Gooseberry had done for Lambo was no more than Paul had done for me, many times.
Experience didn’t make seeing the young diplomat unconscious on a cot, face and hands coated in medplas, any easier. “I should have gone back.”
“And I shouldn’t have left them, no matter what Lambo said.” Paul ran a hand through his hair. “I let Johnsson—and her nonsense—distract me. None of that matters.”
All of it did. But I agreed with my friend. What Johnsson had told us of the Sidereal Pathfinder and his mother—however troubling—was history. It could wait.
The Elves of Dokeci-Na? Might not have that luxury. While Duggs treated Evan’s injuries—her calm “seen worse on the job site” attitude a comfort—I’d told Paul what little I knew.
Leaving out the part where I’d planned to go with Evan and meet this shiny new, if endangered, sentient species in person.
Since Paul had given me that look when I’d finished, it was possible I hadn’t needed to bother.
“What do we do now?” I asked quietly. Because it wasn’t up to me alone. Because we’d important responsibilities.
Most of all, because I trusted him.
“Now?” Paul rested his fingers on Evan’s shoulder. “Whatever we can, Old Blob.”
My ears rose in feigned surprise. “We?”
A dimple appeared. “You don’t think I’d let you meet a new species without me, do you?”
I’d certainly hoped not.
Relaxing my jaw in a grin, I merely replied, “Field trip it is.”
“Eat somewhere else, scum!” The claw, freshly immaculate in its black gleam, left a deep new dent in the Chow’s abused food dispenser.
Clearly the molt hadn’t helped the mood, though Lambo Reomattatii did look much better, other than the faint, now-permanent bootprints on his/her carapace. Bigger, if not yet her full size and ultimate shape.
Fortunately, or there’d be nothing of Evan to mend.
For now, the only threat to safety or machine posed by this Carasian was temper. That I could deal with, I decided, perhaps optimistically, but you didn’t grow up as I had without learning to appease those furious at you. “You don’t have to go back to work—right away,” I qualified hastily as the being whirled to glare at me. “Or you can. I’m here to apologize. What happened to you and Evan was my fault. I’m sorry.”
Lambo’s raised claws lowered, slightly. “You shouldn’t have rushed into danger.”
“You’re absolutely right.” At least not when someone was watching.
They sank a notch lower. “You were stupid.”
I preferred charmingly impulsive, but whatever worked. “Yes, I was.”
To the floor. “Stupid Celi abandoned the Chow. Ungrateful wretch. When I find him—” a menacing rumble.
The change of topic took me by surprise, but I chose not to complain about the withered remains of my poor fystia. Celi had enjoyed a good nap in them, at least. “You mustn’t threaten a—”
“And you abandon Evan. Again! Grasis’ Sucking Scum,” in a melancholy mumble.
Ah. Neither I nor Celi was the object of this particular tantrum. “Evan needs to rest, undisturbed. That’s important for Humans.”
Especially one who’d been through a tough few days and nights before lacerating hands and face. Lambo’s bellowing, accompanied by the wanton destruction of a good part of the wall around the window facing the Library, had alerted Garden staff. They’d come looking for us, dealing with a Carasian trapped in a loft not remotely in their job descriptions.
By the time we’d arrived, it was over. Lambo had lowered Evan in a sheet. She’d then jumped down, the species agile for something so massive, ruining the Botharan rosebushes planted by Paul’s great-great-grandfather, but Evan was intact, if alarmingly still.
Duggs had sealed his deepest wound, a cut on Evan’s face, and pronounced the rest “not worth mentioning.” Then again, our head contractor was scarred from head to toe. If Evan needed his lovely skin repaired properly, the Library would take care of it. We would.
I put my paws on the counter, regarding Lambo. “Evan helped you because it’s his nature. He’s—” I wanted to say a good person, but the Human expression didn’t translate well into Carasian mores. “He acts responsibly and with courage.”
A subdued rattle. “Yes.”
Despite Lambo’s past conduct, I believed I faced a being who did the same. “You came with Paul to the farmhouse, in case Johnsson was here.”
Eyestalks whirled. Tension, not denial. I’d thought so. “When you saw me about to run into her, you tried to stop me.”
A claw snapped. “I did stop you.”
I conceded the point. “But when you followed me up the stairs, I don’t think you were trying to catch me anymore—you were trying to get to Johnsson yourself. Why?”
An unnerving focus. “The female talked to you, didn’t she?” Gone were the surly tone and shipcity dregs’ dialect; her posture altered, too, subtly different. Confidence, rather than bluster. “A trade, then, Esen-alit-Quar. Information, for information.” A delicate snap. “Or do you need the director’s permission to share?”
If she only knew . . . I kept my voice even. “Paul sent me here to do just that. The female’s name is Victory Johnsson. She told us the Sidereal Pathfinder was destroyed during a test of a revolutionary new star drive. That ship’s crew, including Veya Ragem, escaped in lifepods, all but those working in her engine room. The data from the ship’s final tests was lost. All that remained were the navigator’s logs.”
“Which, by protocol, Ragem kept with her.” Another snap.
“You said she stole them,” I countered. “That she left Survey in disgrace.” A service Paul believed she’d left for good years earlier. Secrets upon secrets.
“I said she was accused and dishonorably discharged,” Lambo corrected. “The accusation couldn’t be proved. By what I’ve learned—and I will not share my sources—Ragem claimed she handled the ship’s logs properly, handing them to the appropriate superior officers as she stepped from her lifepod. They denied receiving them.”
Johnsson hadn’t known that—or told us. “They lied.”
“A working hypothesis.” Eyestalks glinted. “A thorough search of her pod and the rescue ship failed to locate the logs. There was sufficient doubt that Ragem was discharged without further penalty.”
Other than her future. “Johnsson believes Veya Ragem kept them. That she died when her ship was destroyed by someone after the Sidereal Pathfinder logs.” My voice held a growl; I’d seen Paul’s face.
Worse, if possible, I knew he mourned more than his mother. The Smokebat had been lost with all hands. Like most such small freighters, like most of Largas Freight’s fleet, the ship would have been home as well as employment for an extended family. Veya would have been the exception. Knowing Paul, he had to be asking himself if they’d died because of her.
“If that were true, and the logs lost with Veya Ragem or taken by some unknown entity, why has this Johnsson come to the Library? And why now?” Lambo laid a gleaming handling claw on the counter, making a point.
Or for my admiration. Post-molt Carasians were prone to vanity, deservedly so; they never looked better than those first hours, and this one had been shabby for a very long time.
I was letting myself be distracted. “If,” I stressed, “Veya ever had the logs. We don’t know that.” And if it were true, how could I tell Paul?
“We do not.” The claw waved in the air. “But we can work from that assumption. This Johnsson has, has she not?”
I didn’t like any of it, but as Ersh often reminded me, The universe doesn’t care what you like. “Yes. She’d have come before if there was reason to believe the logs were on Botharis. To come now? The only thing new is the Library. Maybe Johnsson thinks it holds some new clue to finding them. She could have asked before tearing apart Paul’s room,” I finished sourly. Rotten manners, that was.
“What you have gathered here is unique and valuable. I must concur.”
Aha! So much for Paul’s secret access panel. Lambo wasn’t here to operate the food dispenser at all.
Which was hardly news, so my momentary triumph faded. “There’s nothing about the Sidereal Pathfinder or a secret drive in the collection.”
There was a plethora of entries about “secret this, thats, and other things” but that was simply because some clients insisted what they brought for us was, indeed, secret. That it wasn’t the moment we received it didn’t appear to matter, so long as we kept the word with their information. There were times ephemerals perplexed even me.
Lambo gave a low chuckle, amused for some reason. It occurred to me we were getting along a little too well, all of a sudden. I remembered Ersh’s warning about females of this species: they’ve minds like floating ice—it’s not the little they let you understand you need to worry about. It’s the depths.
The chuckle was followed by, “I mean no offense, Curator—”
For her first time using my title, I suspected a distinct tang of irony to the word.
“—but I’m a drive engineer. An extremely good one. How I search is not how you would.”
“Fair enough,” I acknowledged, thinking of the broken gemmies under the counter. Depths to avoid. “Any results?”
Her head plates dipped from side to side, a shrug. “Not yet. Nor have I found the rest of the Sidereal Pathfinder’s crew. By all accounts, each has vanished.”
Well, that was disturbing. Another tidbit Johnsson hadn’t known—or shared. Mind you, I’d serious doubts about her veracity be she Chase or Johnsson, and no trust for this new “willing” version. I grimaced inwardly. Skalet insisted the Human repeat her story for Esolesy Ki, presumably so I could compare details and catch any falsehood. Since Johnsson was too smart for that, I concluded the unpleasant assignment was my web-kin entertaining herself at my expense—a favorite hobby—and would have refused. Alas, Paul thought it a good idea, too.
I supposed it was, if it reinforced to Johnsson that Esen and Esolesy Ki were distinct individuals with only Paul and the Library in common.
“What good are the logs alone?”
I’d time to compare my reflection in an assortment of black eyeballs before Lambo answered. “With the prototype drive and its inventor lost with the ship, the navigation logs would offer the only clues. Did the drive work at all? If it did, how well? Knowing the Sidereal Pathfinder’s route could answer those and other questions.”
“Questions only someone like yourself would know to ask.”
“Exactly.”
I hadn’t paid much attention to starships, other than to value good maintenance in something that could crack open and spill you into space without warning. Too many trips as a Quebit, that.
Ersh-memory remained stubbornly silent on the topic. It made sense, for a being evolved to be a starship, if the achingly wondrous ability to swim through oceans of unseen light and delicious energies could be compared—
An ability I’d forbidden myself, and Skalet, more importantly, for excellent reason. That said, for the first time I realized I’d no idea how what we could do related to what star drives accomplished. Had Ersh steered us away from such learning, by instinct or design? Let Skalet have strategy, Mixs architecture, Ansky relationships—as complex if messier, and Lesy her art? Me—the undecided and difficult, fed scraps from the rest?
She’d been capable of it.
Or was it simpler? Had she chosen to forget? After all, Ersh had learned to hunt starships, dropping into normal space, following them with unmatchable speed and stealth, all to rip them open and taste what screamed inside—
“You’re drooling on my counter.”
Embarrassed, I rubbed the spot with my sleeve. “Why are you interested? In this star drive.” Not the drool. “Twenty years ago—whatever was new then isn’t now.” Had it been a century, I could see it. The excited discovery of what they’d let lapse was a trait of most cultures.
“The Sidereal Pathfinder’s drive is rumored to be of a type never seen before—or since.”
Making my case. “Because it didn’t work?” I hazarded.
A claw snapped. “That, too, is information worth having.”
To a drive engineer, maybe. To Victory Johnsson?
Unless they were one and the same, Lambo the one looking through her eyes, a regrettable thought given the proximity of those restored, larger claws to my neck. Johnsson hadn’t named her employer or partner; more self-protection than honor at a guess. Turning her over to Skalet’s lack of mercy remained an option we’d prefer not to use.
“I didn’t hire the Human or her scum. I do my own hunting,” the creature replied, either uncannily aware of my inner fussing or, more likely, deducing it would be my next logical assumption. Logical Esen, there was a concept. “I am reduced to hypothesizing her motives, in the lack of more complete information.” Suggestively.
My turn, that meant. “Before coming here, Johnsson went to Senigal III to find Stefan Gahanni, the individual male with whom Veya Ragem contracted to father Paul.” Carasians were passionate beings, but as they’d evolved to have sex in tidal pools, shedding the results into the sea to return if they survived? The direct lines of Human reproduction made them uneasy. “When she couldn’t find him, she came here.” A shop—and livelihood—she’d destroyed to cover the signs of her search.
“Why seek Paul’s father?”
“Johnsson’s sources,” more distressing unknowns “discovered Veya paid Stefan a visit.”
Rudy had told us, late one night and after too many beers, how, upon learning of her son’s supposed death, Paul’s mother had abandoned her Survey ship and risked her career to return home. How, while on Botharis, she’d been interviewed by none other than Lionel Kearn, who’d told her and anyone else he could find that Paul had been in league with a monster and died a traitor.
How, the very next day, without a word or warning, Veya Ragem had headed back to deep space. She’d found ships that would take her farther and farther out.
She hadn’t come home again.
That we knew. There was no official record to prove Veya had ever returned to Senigal III either, but there wouldn’t be, if she wanted to keep attention from Stefan.
Secret Survey research. The Sidereal Pathfinder. How different her actions looked now, warped by that lens.
Lambo rattled, coming to attention. “This visit by Veya Ragem was after her ship was lost?”
“Yes.” I wanted, suddenly and badly, to find Paul. To ask him what he thought of all this, what it might mean. He’d been close to his mother. She’d been his inspiration. Paul would tell me her stories, remembering them all with the clarity only an impressionable, brilliant child would. As I’d listened, what had impressed me was Veya’s own curiosity. Whenever her ship was fins down, she’d leave it and explore. She’d rent transportation and go beyond the confines of shipcity and tourist haunts, seeking those places other spacers didn’t go. She’d even learn phrases in alien languages to teach her son.
Was there something in what she’d done, I thought abruptly. A pattern only Paul would understand?
That was it, wasn’t it. “Johnsson wasn’t searching Paul’s room for the logs,” I thought aloud, forgetting I wasn’t alone. “She came here for him.”
High-tech eyeballs. Iftsen suits. Weapons.
And I’d left Paul alone.