Twenty-four hours later, I packed a jump bag and met Dalton and Fiori in front of docking bay one-thirty-three on the commercial hub. They’d kept Vara with them so I could move quickly and were drawing lots of attention as they stood in front of the big commercial doors of the bay. It was the middle of Melenia’s day and busy on the docks.
I hadn’t bothered trying to talk Fiori out of coming with us. In her own way, she was as stubborn as me. Or Dalton. Mace had been a challenge to deal with when he’d hit the terrible twos, as he’d acquired both their recalcitrant genes.
Besides, Lyssa in medical mode had her limitations. We might need a competent physician who could actually step off the ship. We might need any number of experts. I didn’t know what we were flying into.
I’d spent most of the night turning over the few facts Dalton could give me about the ship and its last location on the outer edges of known space. The location was on the literal edge of the Carina arm of the galaxy. When I had pulled up a stellar map and asked the computer to point to the location, the map still had the old boundaries of the Tanique Dynasty’s extended empire showing. The wildcatters were well beyond the nearest boundary.
Humans had spilled out in all directions since the array and the empire had collapsed. Now they didn’t have to wait for gates to be built to get somewhere, they were tumbling, rolling and skipping out in all directions, finding new territories every week.
Old, pre-crescent converted ships were scooped up cheap by the adventurers, who would find a likely spot for a Terran class world and go look. It was as simple as that.
If the world had breathable atmosphere—or even if it didn’t, but the spectrographs looked promising—the wildcatters would head to the surface, prospect, get samples, then dash back to civilization to announce either a mining claim, or a colonization claim.
There were a lot of very wealthy wildcatters who had given up the high-risk business a dozen years after one of their worlds had been settled, to live an easy life among the colonists.
There were also a lot of wildcatters who never came home. Space has always been dangerous. Unknown, unsurveyed worlds were even more so. Still, the lure of immense wealth drew more gamblers to try their luck with each passing year.
I didn’t have a lot of known facts about Mace’s situation, but the many scary rumors and tall stories about wildcatting shadowed it. I had not had an easy night’s sleep. From Dalton’s and Fiori’s faces, I judged they had not had much rest, either.
I nodded at both of them and shifted my pack onto the other shoulder. “Lyssa has docked and is waiting for us.”
“She really is captain of the ship…which is her?” Fiori’s voice rose.
“Danny says wait until you meet her,” Dalton said, although he didn’t sound any happier than Fiori.
Fiori was a long way from being one of the Humanist extremists, but every human who hadn’t met a digital person carried some degree of trepidation about sentient AIs. Nothing got them past that ancient prejudice as fast as meeting one, so I pushed open the man-sized door inserted into the massive commercial bay doors and stepped through.
“Come on,” I told them, as Vara and Darb trotted through with their tails up.
After a ship touched down, a commercial landing bay became a noisy, bustling cavern, with freight being unloaded and new freight loaded, while station-based engineers and laborers crawled over the rest of the ship, analyzed it, fixed it, fueled it and performed all sorts of support services in between.
Captains of freight vessels kept a careful eye on their ship while the station people marched through her. Usually a station stevedore or mercantile agent stood at the captain’s side to watch out for the station’s interests.
This time was a little different. The Supreme Lythion rarely carried freight, unless the freight came along with its paying passengers. What Lyssa did was offer luxury accommodations and private passage. Whatever the client wanted in accommodations, Lyssa could create with her construction nanobots. A single passenger could hire the ship all for himself…if he could afford it.
Today there was no freight being banged around and bounced off walls or laborers sweating and cursing over the big containers. There were, however, a good two dozen station people working on the exterior of the ship, checking couplings and umbilicals, topping off water and energy, checking fuel cells.
The Supreme Lythion was a blocky, ugly ship on the outside. It had been designed by a mad genius, Girish Wedekind, and had been so far advanced for its time that the empire had laughed him into shame and suicide. The exterior of the ship was a deep, matt black, with few distinguishing details, except for the twin rail guns on the upper surface.
The Lythion had been converted to a crescent ship shortly after the Shutdown, and the twin crescent arms emerged from her belly in the front half of the ship and ran back and up at an angle. They were meters thick but looked spindly against the size of the ship itself. At the end of each arm, the two crescents appeared to be resting against the roof of the ship. During a jump, the arms activated and swung the crescents up and over the front of the ship, then down beneath it. The crescents formed a worm hole, which was flipped over the nose of the moving ship. Impetus drove the ship into the hole, to transition across interstellar space to where the hole ended.
Once, we’d needed stationary gates beside every inhabited star system to form the holes between them. But now, the crescents were partial gates which we took with us.
Sometime since I had last seen the ship, Lyssa had coated the arms and crescents with the same non-reflecting black covering that made the Lythion almost impossible to see in the black of space.
The crescents and arms didn’t enhance the Lythion’s appearance yet seeing her still gave me a warm swell of homecoming happiness.
Lyssa stood where a captain usually stood—at the top of the freight ramp, where she could see as much as possible of both the inside and outside of her ship. She wore spacer boots and the heavy, waterproof, rip resistant shirt, pants and multipocketed jacket which space-bound workers preferred.
Since I had seen her last, Lyssa had changed the color of her hair. It was a fiery, coppery orange now, and bound up at the back of her head to keep it out of the way. Tendrils escaped around her face. She wore a speaker headset, a theatre prop to convince the station personnel she was in direct contact with the shipmind.
Melenia’s harbor master himself stood at her side, overseeing his people, for the Supreme Lythion was a celebrity these days—one of the few ships to escape the melt-down of Nijeliya’s atmosphere, after being converted to a crescent ship in the temporary workshops that had sprung up on the plain outside Eventide, racing against the clock to avoid the worst of the super flares blasting the planet.
Lyssa was taller than the harbor master by a big hand’s span, and Umar was my height. Despite the red carpet treatment the station was giving her, Lyssa was pissed. Her hands were planted firmly on her hips as she rained trouble down upon Umar’s head. She wasn’t shouting, but fury made her voice project. I couldn’t quite make out the words, yet. We weren’t close enough.
“Is that Lyssa?” Dalton breathed, next to me.
Fiori’s mouth opened, and she pulled her gaze back to Lyssa on the ramp. She had clearly dismissed the woman as some sort of bottom-rung spacer. Now she reassessed, her eyes narrowed.
“That’s Lyssa,” I confirmed.
Dalton let out a heavy gust of breath. “Damn…”
Vara and Darb were close to the bottom of the ramp. I reached out to Vara quickly and told her to halt there. She stopped obediently with her paws nearly touching the end of the ramp. Darb stopped with her.
“…water was so shot with impurities last time I had to jettison it. My passengers got sick, Umar! I should have had you clean up the mess they left,” Lyssa was saying, as we drew closer.
“I assure you, the water we provide is warranteed consumption safe, captain—” Umar began.
The storm was merely Lyssa being picky. It was her insides the water impurities coated. I couldn’t blame her for fussing over it. But it was an interruptible crisis. “Permission to board, captain?” I called out.
Lyssa had been on the point of responding to Umar. She closed her mouth and turned to us where we stood at the end of the ramp, smiling hugely, her green eyes dancing. She threw her arms out wide. “Vara! Darb! Oh, look at you guys! You’re so big now!”
I told Vara she could climb the ramp, and she hopped up onto the end. Darb followed her.
Lyssa crouched down to greet them, while Umar stepped back. He looked relieved to be off the hook, even if it was temporary.
I hid my sigh as Vara looked as though she might veer around Lyssa and keep going. Vara knew there was a heated sandpit waiting for her inside, and the pit was where deer carcasses were delivered for her to gorge upon. Lyssa was merely another non-living object to step around.
The parawolves could deal with images on screens and 3D displays and equate them with real people, but they could not seem to grasp that Lyssa was another type of display of a person.
I quickly ordered Vara to halt and sit. She sat on the very top of the ramp so quickly it looked as though someone had pushed on her hindquarters.
Lyssa threw her arms around Vara’s neck and buried her face in the thick grey-white fur of her ruff.
Vara just panted, waiting for my next order, while Darb sat next to his sister, looking around the empty freight bay with curiosity, his gaze not once lingering upon Lyssa.
“They can’t see her…” Dalton murmured.
“She’s non-living nanobots,” I reminded him, just as softly.
“She’s what?” Fiori added.
“When we’re inside,” Dalton told her.
A small furrow formed between Fiori’s pale brows, but she nodded.
We stopped behind Vara and Darb. Lyssa rose to her feet, smiling. “I had the sandpit rebuilt for them,” she told me.
“Thank you.” I looked at Vara and told her she could go find her pit now. She raced away, her toes clicking upon the iron fiber floor. Darb leapt after her. They shot through the interior bay door and disappeared. Then I glanced at Umar. “Master Umar.”
He nodded at me. “Colonel Andela. I didn’t realize you were the Lythion’s passenger today. The manifest says nothing.”
“This is a last minute trip.” I turned to Lyssa. “Hello, daughter.”
She gave a little happy sound and threw her arms around me and squeezed. I realized that I was squeezing just as hard and we were both laughing.
Fiori cleared her throat. Either she was recovering from my calling Lyssa “daughter” or she was uncomfortable with the physical display. Either way, I didn’t give a damn.
Lyssa let go of me. I wouldn’t have been able to break her grip if she had not, for she made herself out of construction nanobots, these days. Screw the expense. She charged enough per passenger she could afford the heavy pull of energy it took to use them.
She glanced at Dalton and Fiori. “Hello, Gabriel. It has been a while.”
“It has. You’ve grown up, Lyssa.” He was saying that for Umar’s sake, for the harbor master hadn’t moved out of earshot. But he also meant it. I could hear the admiration in his voice.
She grinned. “If you ask Lyth, he’ll tell you it’s all appearance and I’m still a brat.” She shifted her gaze to Fiori. “You have to be Fiori, then.” She held out her hand.
I held my breath, watching Fiori closely for any signs of hesitation or distaste. She did pause just for a heartbeat. Then she reached out and grasped Fiori’s hand, her expression polite. “Captain Andela, I’ve heard only a little about you. Everyone insisted I meet you, and I’m starting to understand why.” Her gaze shifted down to her hand, enclosed in Lyssa’s.
Lyssa grinned and released Fiori’s hand. Fiori didn’t shake her hand or flex the fingers, so Lyssa hadn’t squeezed too hard. Lyssa was behaving herself, then.
Lyssa glanced at Umber. “I’ll get my guests settled, then come back and sign off. Yes?”
“That suits me,” Umar said with badly hidden relief. He nodded at me.
Lyssa took off the headset—it was a real one, not a construction made out of her nanobots. She hung it over a hook by the ramp doorway, and waved us in. “Come aboard,” she added.
Dalton and Fiori followed her through the empty, echoing freight bay, which smelled faintly of old, dusty oil and the musky, astringent aroma the standard freight containers gave off when exposed to extremes of heat.
I’d lived aboard the Supreme Lythion for years, but every time I stepped aboard, I wondered what would greet me, especially since Lyssa had nominated herself as captain. Today was no different. I followed them into the ship, curious to see what novelties waited for us.