Kal was gone, melting like hot wax into the floor of the ship. Only Syl and Fara remained. The dimensions of the observation deck altered. The ceiling grew lower, the walls moved in. The lighting became more subdued. The effect was not threatening, merely intimate. Fara and Syl sat across from each other in chairs that molded themselves around their forms, cradling them snugly and securely. It would be easy to fall asleep in them, Syl thought. All the more reason not to.
Perhaps it was the dimness, but to Syl, Fara seemed more like the Lady Orianne than before. No, it was not the light; Fara had subtly changed once again. Her eyes were different, her jaw slightly less pronounced. She was now Syl’s mother come to life.
Syl understood that this was, at least in part, her doing. She was feeding strands of her memory to Fara, snapshots of her mother taken from the video images of the late Orianne that she had watched throughout her life, her only connection to this lost figure, both so familiar to, and yet so distant from, herself. And Fara was acting on them, using them in an effort to bring Syl closer to her. All this Syl knew, just as she knew that the changes to Fara were not merely superficial. There was now a distinction between Fara and the Cayth. The collective was still part of Fara, but Fara was no longer entirely a part of the collective. That was the trouble with memories, Syl thought: they gave life to the dead, and allowed them to make demands upon the living.
“Would you like something to eat or drink, my dear?” asked Fara.
“No, thank you.”
“I am sorry about your father.”
“As am I.”
“You loved him.”
“Of course. I still do.”
“Despite what he has done?”
“The being that sanctioned my death is not my father.”
Syl’s hands were clasped on her lap. Fara reached across the space between them and laid her own hand gently upon them.
“And yet it is.”
Syl looked at Fara’s hand. It felt a little too warm. She was still adjusting to the unfamiliarity of physicality.
“Ask me,” said Syl.
Fara withdrew her hand in surprise.
“Ask what?” she replied, but there was falsity to her tone.
“You want me to stay.”
Fara’s mouth moved silently as she tried to find a response that would satisfy.
“We want you to stay,” she said at last.
Syl permitted a part of her consciousness to probe her surroundings. She was getting better at it with every hour that went by. Before, it had been one thing or the other: she could either be present or absent. Now she could allow just a fragment of herself to float free. It was like being able to hold two melodies in her head simultaneously.
She could feel the Cayth around her, and could hear their constant quiet buzz. They were listening, curious but not involved. Syl’s powers interested them, but only to the degree that they might be used against the Others, just as Kal had intimated. They wished to know more about her and her capabilities, but Syl also detected puzzlement, and it was directed not at her but at Fara.
“Why?” asked Syl. “Why do you want me to stay?”
“We wish to learn more about you. There are similarities between you and us. Your sensitivities are not unfamiliar.”
“No,” said Syl, “why do you want me to stay?”
There it was again, that faint jolt; her question had provoked a reaction in the collective of the Cayth, because they were all one, and they knew the answer. They waited to see if Fara would reveal more of her former self, the individual that had long been submerged in the sea of the collective. The buzzing increased, and Syl listened, separating the parts from the whole, as images began to form in her own mind. The Cayth opened themselves to her, and she felt herself opening up too, like a forgotten flower placed beneath a warm sun. She leaned backward, turning her face upward, drinking it all in. With a delicious shiver, she allowed her thoughts to continue expanding outward until her mind became as clear and free-flowing as water, trickling freely into secret places, her consciousness and the Cayth’s becoming one. It was here, tangled in her own truth, that she discovered the Cayth female’s ancient hurt, and she understood.
Oh, Fara, she thought, and her whole being filled with sadness.
“We—” Fara began. “I—”
“What was her name?” Syl asked gently.
“Her name?”
“The name of your dead child.”
Fara turned to the glass and the stars beyond it, as though the word that she sought might be written among them, or the child she had lost might be found there.
“Elea,” she said. “Her name was Elea.”
And Fara opened herself to Syl, engulfing her in a wave of love and loss. Syl saw a little huddled thing, a blur, barely a mound, breathing its last, and heard a cry of grief that was beyond consolation, the echo of which had lingered even until now, hidden only by the babble of the collective. The clear water still lapped in her mind, like all the tears ever shed in the universe, and she found her cheeks were wet with them.
“You were one of the first to give up your physical being,” said Syl. Through Fara, she watched a body fall away as form was shed by consciousness. The creation of the collective had begun.
“Yes.”
“Because you could not endure the pain any longer, and you thought that by abandoning your body, and surrendering your individuality, you might rid yourself of it.”
Fara’s face in the glass was a mask of desolation.
“I thought that if there was no ‘I,’ there would be no ‘her,’ ” she murmured. “I chose to forget because the memory of losing her was too much to bear. I could not be a mother because I had no child, and I decided instead to become one voice among many, so that my single drop of pain might be consumed by an ocean of consciousness.”
The features on her face softened, went hazy, as though seen through narrowed eyes.
“And I did forget, or perhaps I simply chose to do so, until you came. I felt your loss from the moment we became aware of you, and it called to my own, and woke my memories. We sent Kal, and I followed with him.”
Now it was Syl’s turn to reach out to Fara. She rose from her chair, and put her arms around her. She closed her eyes, and Fara closed hers, and for a time they gave themselves up to a beautiful illusion in which one was the mother of a living child, and the other a daughter in her mother’s arms. And when, by unspoken consent, they broke the embrace, each was stronger for what they had shared.
The universe is cold, and life is harsh.
We take comfort where we can.
• • •
“Paul?”
Meia’s voice came over his coms link. Paul stepped away from the weapons console of the Nomad, where Rizzo was supervising the reset while Alis was fitting the first of the torpedoes into place.
“I hear you, Meia.”
“We have a problem . . .”
• • •
Paul and Meia stared into the exposed interior of the Varcis’s main command console. A smell of burning plastic emerged from the tangle of wires and circuitry.
“So essentially, they booby-trapped it,” said Paul.
“Fenuless knew that even if she and her crew were permitted to live, it was unlikely that they would be allowed to leave,” said Meia. “She didn’t want anyone taking her ship, so her last act was to fry the wiring.”
Meia held up a small wireless signaling device.
“She must have had it in her hand when she was talking to you. As soon as the Other in her head began to react, she activated the mechanism. It didn’t destroy the console completely, but it’s done enough damage to delay any departure in this ship.”
“How much of a delay?”
“Many hours.”
“But you can repair it?”
“I’ll have to scavenge from nonessential systems but, yes, I can repair it.”
Paul sighed.
“Keep me posted on progress,” he said. “I need to go and speak to my brother.”
• • •
Steven reacted just as Paul had anticipated.
“No! No way!” he shouted. “We’ve waited long enough.”
They were in the captain’s cabin on the Nomad. Paul thought that it might give them some privacy, but it had hardly been worth the effort now that Steven was barking at the top of his voice.
“Steve, if you’d just let me finish,” said Paul loudly, but Steven was having none of it.
“Why should I bother?” he shouted. “You’re just going to order to me to stay here while the repairs are done.”
Steven made inverted commas with his fingers when he said “order,” and Paul resisted the urge to bend those fingers back to hurt him, just as he would have done in their shared bedroom in Edinburgh. Instead, he perched on the edge of the cabin’s small desk, sat on his hands, and tried to remain patient.
“Stevie,” he said again, “bruv . . .” but his brother cut across him.
“Don’t you dare baby me, Paul! Not here, not after everything. I’m not a bleedin’ kid! But that’s how this is going to end, isn’t it: with you pulling rank? That’s how it always ends these days. Right, Lieutenant?”
“Actually, that’s not what I’m going to do at all,” Paul replied.
Steven appeared confused. “What?”
“I’m going to give you the choice—you, Rizzo, and Alis. You can choose to stay and wait until the Varcis is ready to boost through the wormhole alongside the Nomad, or you can go through it alone.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s not what I want, not in an ideal world, but we haven’t lived in an ideal world in a very long time,” Paul explained. “It’s a calculated risk. I don’t think the Corps will have left a fleet sitting on the doorstep of the Derith wormhole, not while it’s engaged in a war with the Military. Nothing that the Illyri have sent through the wormhole has ever returned, and even if they have suspicions, they’ve no actual proof. Already years have gone by for them, and the Nomad has shown no sign of returning. Neither has the Varcis. So I’m guessing that there’s one vessel out there, or two at most, with bored crews who won’t be prepared for a fight. With the Cayth’s weaponry at Rizzo’s command, and you and Alis at the controls, no sleepy Illyri are going to stand a chance.”
He sounded more confident than he felt.
“But like I said, I’m not ordering you to stay or go. You’ll be in command of the Nomad whatever happens, because the rest of us will be in the Varcis. Rizzo and Alis will be your crew, but I think you should make sure that they’re prepared to go with you willingly. Talk to them, and come back to me once you’ve all reached a decision. I’ll wait for you here.”
Steven stared dumbly at his brother, but did not move. Paul was pleased to see that he still had the capacity to surprise his younger sibling.
“I didn’t say that I’d wait forever,” said Paul.
Steven snapped out of his daze.
“Okay,” he said, “and thank you.”
“For sending you through a wormhole to face an unknown force alone, then leaving you to somehow make your way to what may be a home planet overrun by the Others?”
“Yes,” said Steven. He grinned.
“Then you’re welcome,” said Paul. “Go. Talk to your crew.”
Steven left. Paul remained where he was. He knew that he was putting his brother, along with Rizzo and Alis, in mortal peril. It didn’t matter if that was what they wanted: the risk remained. Most of all, for the first time that he could remember, he would be sending Steven off without the protection of his big brother. Yes, it would have happened eventually. Even if they’d gone through the wormhole together, their paths would have diverged not long after. The moment had just come sooner than anticipated, but then it would always have come sooner than expected. It would never be the right time to send Steven off alone, to release him from his brother’s guardianship. Paul’s guts tightened, and he felt sick about what was about to happen. He thought of their mother. If she was alive, Steven would find her, or die in the effort, and that was what worried Paul most of all.
Steven bounded back in, eager as a puppy. Rizzo and Alis were behind him, smiling, and the Mech was wiping her hands with a rag.
“The torpedoes are in place,” said Alis.
“And the systems check showed no glitches,” Rizzo added. “They’ll fire when I press the button.”
“We’re ready to go,” said Steven. “All of us.”
Paul went through the plan with them three times. It would mean another delay before Steven could start the trek back to Earth, but he understood the reasoning behind it, and he made no argument. Thula had been assigned to assist Meia on the Varcis, but Paul summoned them both back to the Nomad for the final briefing. When they returned, Syl was with them. She looked like she’d been crying, but Paul had only a second to check that she was okay. She kissed him quickly on the cheek.
“I’m fine,” she said. “And you don’t have to worry about me, or the Cayth. They mean us no harm.”
It was the reassurance that Paul needed. If Syl said it, then it was true. For the fourth and last time, he detailed the mission that the Nomad was about to undertake.
“How will we rendezvous?” asked Thula. “The universe is a big place, in case no one else has noticed.”
It was a good point, Paul knew, but right now he was also concerned with how they would find out if the Nomad had even made it past any sentinel ships on the other side of the wormhole. He didn’t want the Varcis to emerge into the wreckage of the Nomad, and only then discover the fate of his brother and his crew.
“A message in a bottle,” said Rizzo.
“What?”
“We know what this Cayth weaponry does,” she said, grinning. “It immobilizes a ship, then kills its crew. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll have at least one more empty vessel. We board it, set the autopilot, and send it through the wormhole emitting a simple signal. That way you’ll know we’re alive.”
“Excellent, Rizzo! And we’ll have access to the ship’s records,” added Meia, and she was smiling too. Paul couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen her smile properly before, but it made her appear terribly childlike and sweet, even though she was neither of those things.
“We may be able to find out how the war has been going while we’ve been away,” Meia added.
“Nice thinking, Rizzo,” said Paul. “Let’s do it.”
“It still doesn’t answer the question of a rendezvous point,” said Thula.
“One moment,” said Meia.
A series of maps began to flash before them, images of star systems both familiar and unfamiliar. It was the Mech who had called them up: they could see her controlling the images with the movements of her eyes. They waited until she found the one that she was seeking.
“Here,” she said.
Paul saw the name of the remote galaxy: Tessel. He called up the wormhole map and overlaid it on Meia’s. There was a wormhole in the adjoining system.
“Why there?” he asked.
“Because that’s where I must go,” said Meia.
“The Mechs,” said Paul. Now he understood.
“The refuge lies in the Tessel system,” Meia confirmed, although Paul noticed that she was careful not to say where exactly in the system it might be. Tessel was huge. Lifetimes could be spent scouring it, and still only a tiny fraction of its worlds might be explored.
Meia pointed at a small planet in the corner of the system. It lit up like a Christmas tree light, and its coordinates appeared alongside it.
“This world is uninhabited, and uninhabitable,” she said. “Its atmosphere is toxic, and its surface is obscured by gas clouds.”
“Sounds great,” said Thula. “Let’s buy it and move there.”
Meia ignored him.
“A whole fleet could be waiting in those clouds, and no one would know,” she continued. “Let the Nomad, and whoever else it may bring with it, rendezvous with me there.”
“When should I get there?” asked Steven. “Months from now?”
Meia shook her head. “Longer, much longer. We need to get that ship going. It’ll take me hours. At max, another day here—that’ll be a year on your side.”
“So a whole year?” Steven swallowed.
“Yes, and then I need to get where I’m going. Give me fourteen months. At least.”
“Jesus wept,” said Steven, looking a bit ill.
“And the rest of us?” asked Paul. Syl and Thula—his tiny crew—were gathered closely behind him.
Meia’s face could be so expressive, he thought; she didn’t even try to hide her sadness.
“I think you three will follow your own path,” she said. “And it will lead you back to the Marque.”