Radu struggled with another nightmare. Laenea was on Twilight, a member of the crew of the emergency ship. The crew, rather than remaining safely in their orbiting ship, had landed with the medical team. They had arrived just as Radu had begun to feel, and deny, high fever and mental dissociation, the plague’s first symptoms. That was the reality. But in the nightmare it was Laenea who grew ill, and instead of her caring for him, he cared for her. He was afraid she would die like the others, friends and family, whom he had known would become ill but had no way to save. In the reality of the past, Laenea had saved his life. In the past of his nightmare, he saw that Laenea was dying, but refused to accept that result.
He woke. His dream, as dreams will, began to dissolve to nothingness.
He pushed at the lid of his body box. His hand encountered rough wood. In a moment of pure terror and resurging memory he jammed his hands up against the planks. He had been dying of the cold, he had been attacked by a creature. He had been taken for dead and no one had read his will. Instead of burning him and sending his ashes home, they had boxed him up and put him in the ground. A recurrent nightmare was coming true.
After the plague he dreamed over and over and over again that he had been buried along with the rest of his family and most of his friends. In the peculiar multiple time flow of the dreaming state, he saw himself as gravedigger for himself just as he had been gravedigger in dreams and in reality for his mother and for his other parents, for his sisters and brothers, one after another till he was alone. In his dreams they, and he, struggled to get out of the coffin, to throw off the thickening cover of soil, and to return to life.
I’ll never save them now, he thought. Not them, or Laenea —
The lid stayed solid above him and he flung his hands apart, searching for some weakness in his prison. One hand hit a wall, but the other clutched only air, and the combined motions made him lurch sideways.
He fell out of bed.
The air was fresh and the echoes those of a room. So many levels of dream and nightmare, memory and reality, swept around him that he wondered if he had gone mad.
The lights flicked on, bright enough to dazzle him. A vague shape jumped down beside him.
“Radu, are you all right?”
He recognized Orca’s voice. His eyes reaccustomed themselves to light. Orca sat on her heels before him, watching him anxiously.
Radu pushed himself up and looked around. Books lined two walls; the built-in bunk beds lent the cabin a nautical look. But the underwater porthole over the desk, and the chamber’s dimensions and floor plan, revealed it to be one of the ocean spaceport’s sleeping rooms.
“What happened?”
“I had a nightmare, and I remembered one I thought I was having again,” he said. “I’m awake now.” He tried to stand, but could not gather the strength. “I thought…” He glanced down. His legs were unwounded, unscarred.
Orca nodded toward the porthole. In the light that dissolved through the glass into the sea, the black-and-white form of Orca’s friend the killer whale glided by. Radu shivered.
“My cousin heard you,” Orca said. “We hadn’t gone very far, we were playing. When she heard you dive she thought you might be one of us, but neither of us recognized the swimming patterns. Then you started moving like you were in trouble, so we came back.”
“I’m very grateful that you did.”
She shrugged, then scowled. “Did they push you in?”
“No,” he said. “They followed me. They wanted me to come with them, but… I declined. I don’t think they intended to drive me into the water. It’s only that they scared me, and I panicked.”
“‘Only’ scared you? Like the other time?” Orca said angrily. “They weren’t even trying to help you — and by the time I got you out of the water they’d just disappeared.”
“Where are they now?”
“Some of them are waiting for you. They can’t come into the divers’ section without an invitation. But they’re waiting outside.”
“I’ve made a very bad mistake,” Radu said. “I’ve put you in danger but left you in ignorance. I can try to correct that, if you still want me to.”
She helped him back into his bunk, pulled a blanket around him, and sat crosslegged nearby.
“I guess you’d better.” She sounded much less eager than before to hear what he had to say.
He would not have believed the simple telling of a story could exhaust him so completely, but when he reached his dive from the edge of the landing platform he was shaking with fatigue.
“Good lord,” Orca said. “Awake in transit… no wonder.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Radu said, pressing the heels of his hands against his closed eyes, trying to drive away some of the tension and fatigue. “Marc said to wait until he had news for me, but who knows how long it might take him to…” He had kept Marc’s secrets and told Orca only his own, but that made some things difficult to explain. “To make any progress.”
“Why don’t you call him and see if he has any help for you so far? Then at least you’ll know if you need to try something else.”
Radu suspected that Marc’s illness was too serious to be dispensed with overnight, but a call was worth a try.
“That’s a good idea,” he said.
“I’ll wait for you in the lounge,” Orca said, and left him alone.
Leaving off the outgoing video, Radu called Marc’s number. If he did not answer, Radu would try to reach Laenea again. Surely she must be back by now.
The flowing colors Marc used to represent himself intertwined and separated.
“Hello.” Compared to his real voice, the electronic tones were smooth and uninteresting. “Who’s calling, please?”
“This is Radu Dracul, Marc. Are you better?”
“I beg your pardon? Who are you?”
Too startled to answer, Radu stared at the screen.
“Would you repeat your name, please?”
“Radu Dracul. Laenea Trevelyan’s friend.” But it was clear to him what had happened: The illness had wiped out Marc’s memory of their conversation, and of Radu himself.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“It’s only that I can’t find your name. I have Laenea’s, of course.”
“I was with you a few hours ago, just before you became ill. I shouldn’t have disturbed you so soon.” Upset and disappointed, knowing he was being unfair, Radu reached to cut the connection.
“Wait,” said Marc’s voice. “Are you aware that Marc has an analogue? I’m not Marc himself. I’m in use when he isn’t available.”
“No,” Radu said. “I wasn’t aware of that.”
“I apologize for being unfamiliar with you, but my personal programming is several hours behind. Marc feels it is bad manners to record everything he handles himself. That sometimes creates difficulties when he is… called away suddenly, as he was last night.”
“I know. I was with him.”
“With him?”
“Yes. Is he better?”
“I’m specifically prohibited from discussing that subject,” the analogue said. “May I help you in some other way? Are you calling about Laenea? Marc, too, was friends with her. I’m not looking forward to telling him she’s lost.”
“Lost…?”
“Her ship is lost.”
“How could it be lost?” Radu said, completely stunned. “I don’t understand. I was just about to call her, she’s out in training, there’s no indication that anything’s wrong —” He was babbling. He stopped.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said the analogue, in a tone of sincere regret. “When you mentioned her I thought you’d heard.”
“I haven’t heard anything.”
“Her ship has been declared lost. Her teacher’s ship, I mean, of course.”
“But — it’s only overdue. A few days —”
“The ship is two weeks late. Dear boy, the first trip out is meant to be brief.”
“How can they declare her lost? Just because someone says so —”
“The training flight Miikala chose for her takes between half an hour and half a day. Her presence introduces an unknown, of course, into an equation that is empirical at best. But they’ve waited a very long time —”
Radu stopped listening to Marc’s sympathetic, informative, compassionless analogue, refusing to be forced to believe Laenea was gone. He shut out the screen’s decorative patterns. Laenea was too real to be lost. He had not yet even managed to convince himself they could never be lovers again, though he knew it was impossible. He would never convince himself she was lost: dead. He would never try.
He thought: She was in danger, and I knew it. I woke up in transit because I knew it. Then he thought: It’s like the hallucinations back on Twilight. Maybe they weren’t hallucinations. Maybe Marc was right… And finally: The way Atna was right. He was wrong in detail, but he was right all the same.
The silence drew his attention back to the phone. Two pools of brilliant blue, like eyes, peered out at him. Startled, he blinked, and the pattern swirled into abstract shapes again.
“I’m sorry to have been the one to tell you,” Marc’s analogue said. “I would have said it more gently had I realized you had no intimation.”
“It isn’t your fault,” Radu said dully. “I’d better go.”
“Do you want to leave a message? Where can you be reached?”
“I don’t know,” Radu said. “Tell Marc…” He could think of nothing of any substance to say to Marc. “Tell him I called.”
“He will know.”
“Good-bye.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t know who you were,” said the analogue. It broke the connection and the vibrant colors faded away.
In a daze, Radu slowly drew on his clothes and went into the divers’ lounge.
Orca’s smile faded when she saw his expression.
“What’s wrong?”
“Laenea’s ship has been declared lost.”
“Oh, Radu —” She took his hand in a gesture of comfort, led him to a couch, and made him sit down. “I’m so sorry… I met her, on the crew. I liked her.”
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t... I won’t.”
They sat together in silence for some minutes. If Orca accepted that Laenea was dead, she did not try to persuade Radu to bow to inevitability.
“Do you want me to leave you alone for a while? Or do you want me to stay with you?”
“I dreamed of her on the way back from Ngthummulun.”
“When? How could you? We didn’t have time for any real sleep.”
“In transit, before I rejected the drugs. I usually dream in transit, but this time I had nightmares.” His last image was of Laenea crying out in distress, crying out for help he could not give. He did not want that to be his last memory of her. He wanted to remember her with her head thrown back, laughing.
“Oh, gods,” he groaned. He hid his face in his hands. “I thought they were hallucinations, I thought they’d stopped. Why do I dream about when my friends will die?”
Orca hesitated, then said, “You mean you dream they’ll die, and they do?”
“I dream they need help, but I never know how to help them. It happened during the plague,” he said miserably. “I know it sounds crazy…”
“Not particularly,” Orca said. “But you seemed to think so, when it was Atna.”
Radu drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “I did… but I didn’t. I thought what happened to me was hallucination, or fever memory.”
Orca stroked his arm.
“Back home,” Radu said, “when people started getting sick… my dreams changed. After a while I began to think I knew who was going to die. I tried to warn people…”
“Oh, lord,” Orca said.
“Yes.” Radu shook his head. “It should have taught me something, but I think I learned the wrong lesson. I acted toward Atna just the way the others acted toward me.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” Orca said. “There wasn’t anything you could do back on Twilight and there wasn’t anything you could do in transit. Even pilots don’t look for lost ships. I’m sorry Laenea is gone, but you’re the one who’s in trouble now. You’ve got to look out for yourself.”
“Why?”
“What? Do you want to just give up to the pilots?”
“That isn’t what I meant,” Radu said. The slash on his wrist throbbed. “I mean why doesn’t anybody look for lost ships?”
“Because they tried for years to find any of them, even one, and they never did. So they stopped looking.”
“They can’t find them because they can’t communicate with them. But Laenea did need help, and I knew it.”
“Radu, she’s lost.”
“Lost — that doesn’t mean she’s dead. Nobody knows what it means! She could still be alive.” He looked toward the exit door, thinking about what lay beyond the divers’ quarters.
Orca followed his gaze. “You can’t go out there!”
“I have to. I have to try to get them to listen to me. I dreamed I could help, if I only knew what to do. Now I know. I have to find her.”
“What makes you think they’ll believe you?”
“Nothing,” he said. “They have no reason to trust me and several reasons not to. And they see me as a threat. But I have to try. Otherwise Laenea and her teacher and the people in their crew will all die.” He stood up. He still felt shaky.
Orca caught his arm, gripping him just hard enough to remind him of her strength.
“What the hell did I come back for you for, if you’re just going to go out and let them throw you in the ocean again? I could be halfway home by now,” she said. “This is just crazy.”
“I don’t blame you for feeling that way,” Radu said. He laid his hand gently on hers, and she relaxed her grip.
“Sorry.”
“Never mind,” Radu said. “You’re probably right, after all.”
“If you believed that, you wouldn’t be going out there.” She followed him into the hall and to the center of the divers’ quarters, where a doorway led to the public elevator lobby.
“Thank you, for everything,” Radu said.
“I don’t guess you happen to be one of those people who think that since I saved your life I get to tell you what to do with it from now on.”
“I’m afraid not,” he said, then laughed. He hugged her, perhaps a little longer, a little more tightly, than if this had been a regular farewell between two members of a starship crew. If the pilots believed him, if he could persuade them to do as he wished, then he would have to endure their company for some inestimable time alone, without the buffer of another normal human being. He was very glad he would have the memory of Orca’s friendship.
“Good-bye,” he said.
“Good-bye.”
He faced the door, reluctant to open it, then stepped close enough for it to sense him. It slid aside, then slid closed behind him.
The two pilots waiting for him rose. Vasili Nikolaievich, particularly, looked surprised to see him. Neither pilot appeared to have any idea what to do with him now that he had come to face them of his own free will.
“You wouldn’t tell me what you wanted of me,” Radu said, “so I’ll say what I want of you.”
Vasili scowled. “I don’t think you have that choice.”
Radu walked toward the pilots, feeling more and more tense.
“Laenea Trevelyan’s ship has been lost,” he said. “I think I can find it. I think that was what was happening to me when —”
“You… what?” said the other pilot. “Wait. We can’t discuss this here.” She reached out to take his arm. “Come along with us, will you?”
Radu drew back.
“I’ll come,” he said. “I don’t mean to be rude. Your proximity is as uncomfortable to me as mine is to you.”
“You think so, do you?” Vasili said.
“Shut up, Vaska,” the other pilot said. “We’ve screwed this up badly enough already. Come on, let’s go someplace where we can talk.”
o0o
Orca let Radu Dracul leave, all alone. He was an adult; he had the right to make his own decisions, even if he did not know what he was doing, even if the decisions were stupid ones.
Her cousin glided past the porthole, brushing the glass with the tip of her fluke. The soft sound reminded Orca of her other responsibilities, and her promise to her family; it reminded her of last night, swimming free with her friend. Orca always felt isolated when she left the sea, as if all her senses had been damped down to half intensity. It was not only sound that carried much more efficiently in water than in air, but touch and scent and heat perception as well. The texture was altogether different. The density of experience increased a hundredfold. Orca cupped her hands against the port so she could see through reflections. Her cousin swooped by again.
Orca turned on the speaker. She and her friend could converse only in middle speech, when one of them was in the air. The language was denser than Standard, but filmy and insubstantial compared to true speech.
The cousins were more intelligent than human beings, though not as much more intelligent as were any of the great whales, about whom Orca felt too much awe for friendship. Yet they were naive as well. Thousands of years of predation by humans had done nothing to temper that quality into cynicism or doubt. Since the revolution, whales were no longer legal prey of humans. A few outlaw whalers had tried to defy the ban, but they disappeared and no one ever saw them again. Orca’s mother knew something about that, but seldom mentioned it unless she had had a long day undersea and one brandy too many after dinner.
The differences between whales and human beings, which Orca’s brother hardly noticed, seemed so enormous to Orca that she found it marvelous that the two species could communicate at all. There were great gaps in understanding. Humans could not understand the whales’ acceptance of events; whales could not comprehend anger or hatred, or the even more alien emotions of ambition and fear. They had concepts so far beyond human understanding that even the descriptions made no sense, even in true speech. Orca’s brother knew what they meant, but he had tried to explain them to her, both in the water and in the air, and failed every time.
Come out of there, her cousin said. I can’t see you properly, I can barely hear you, I can’t touch you. I want to hear about what you’ve been doing.
I know, Orca replied. I want to touch you, I want to feel the coldness of the sea at my back and the heat of your body against mine, but, oh, my friend, I can’t come with you now.
You’re going away again, to unsounded regions.
Don’t worry about me, Orca said. The places I’ve been haven’t harmed me, it’s only if I can’t go back that I’ll be sad.
You are sad when you have to stay, her cousin said, and I am sad when you have to go.
Go, to the whales, was the same word as disappear, which was in turn the same word as die. Her cousin did not mean die, but the connotation of distress was unavoidable and unmistakable. The sea was a medium in which another family, the gray whales, could sing a song one day and by the next day hear its echo — echo was the nearest concept human speech possessed, though what they and the other cetaceans and the divers heard was the song’s direct sound wave, stretched and changed by its circumnavigation of the globe.
In the sea, intelligent beings did not disappear from hearing unless they died.
I know, Orca said. I know, and I’m sorry. I love you.
Her cousin slid past her, wanting her to come back into the sea and play. Play, with the cousins, involved love-play and sex-play and joy-play; the same sound sequence meant all those things.
Orca wished she could be playing with her cousin, gliding around and through and between her songs.
I’m sorry, she said again. If I left now, it would be like leaving a newborn underwater…
Her cousin made a sound of surprise, for accusing someone of the ability to abandon a child to death by drowning was the worst insult one could offer.
This acquaintance of yours is not newborn, cousin. Has he so little sense that you must care for him?
If I don’t help him, he’ll be all alone.
There are others.
Yes. But he’ll only be with — Orca combined the sound sketch of a pilot with the sound sketch of a shark. Even though the result was very crude, in middle speech, a blood cousin would have understood. But the name-cousins, having evolved in an environment where nothing threatened them, found fear incomprehensible even in true speech. There was a word for it, but it was made up as a courtesy to the divers, and it meant, to the whales, a feeling their cousins had in response to potential experiences they preferred to leave unrealized. Even that was difficult for the whales to understand, for to them all potentiality was opportunity.
I’m sorry, Orca said. He’s part of my other family. Do you understand?
No, her cousin replied. I don’t understand. But I accept. Good-bye.
Good-bye.
Orca turned off the speaker and sprinted out the door. The whole interchange had taken only a few moments; she hoped she still had time to catch up to Radu.
The elevator doors were sliding closed. She jammed her hands between them and forced them open again, then stepped calmly inside with Radu, Vasili Nikolaievich, and another young pilot named Chase.
“What do you want?” Vaska said. She had startled him, and now his surprise was turning to anger.
Orca shoved her hands into her pockets, hunching her shoulders. She spoke to Vasili with irritation equal to his own. “Since there isn’t any reason Radu should trust you half as far as he could throw you, there isn’t any reason why he should go with you all alone.”
“You aren’t needed.”
“I will be, soon enough,” Orca said. “No matter how small a ship you take, you’ll need a crew of at least two to run it, and on this flight you might have a little trouble finding volunteers.”
“What flight?”
“That’s part of what you didn’t want to talk about in the hall,” Radu said.
“Oh,” said Chase. “Then you’d better wait till we’re more secure.”
Like the divers, the pilots owned a floor of the stabilizer shaft. No one else was permitted inside who was not an invited and accompanied guest. The isolation was not only for physical privacy; they guarded against electronic invasion as well.
“Orca,” Chase said, “we’re shielded for all modes of transmission. The feedback’s fairly severe. If you need to communicate with anyone, it would be safer to go outside our quarters.”
“I understand,” Orca said. “Thanks.”
Radu whispered to Orca, “What did she mean by that?”
“About feedback? That was a tactful way of telling me not to try to use my internal communicator unless I want my skull exploded.”
“What!”
“It’s okay,” she said. “We don’t like strangers coming into our quarters and making transmissions, either.”
They followed Chase through several concentric rings of chambers, deeper and deeper into pilots’ quarters.
o0o
In the center of the pilots’ deck, in a windowless room, more pilots than Radu had ever seen before had gathered together. He recognized several who had surrounded him on Earthstation, and many he had seen in news reports, and Ramona-Teresa.
She stood up. Beneath her shirt’s red lace inset, a triangle with its base at her collarbone and its point at her navel, her scar was a vivid white slash.
“Well, Chase,” she said. “Well, Vaska. You finally found him.” She looked drawn and tired.
“Found him!” Orca said. “You nearly killed him twice!”
“Never mind, Orca,” Radu said.
“We didn’t mean to scare him, out on deck,” Vasili said. “It was an accident.”
“We didn’t expect you to jump off the side,” Chase said. “By the time we found a life ring that whale was swimming you toward the ferry dock.”
“I was not anxious to be surrounded again.”
“No, I guess not,” Chase said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think of it that way.”
Ramona-Teresa sighed with exasperation.
“Well, I apologize to you, too, then,” Chase said. “None of us is exactly trained for spying and kidnapping.”
“I realize that. Still, you might have handled this more gracefully. And why did you bring the diver here?”
“We didn’t bring either of them,” Chase said. “They brought us.”
“Orca thinks she’s his bodyguard,” Vasili said sarcastically.
Radu felt Orca tense with anger; he curled his fingers around hers, but he doubted he could restrain her if she chose to free herself.
“As she’s already saved my life twice in encounters with pilots,” he said, “I’m extremely grateful to her for offering to come with me.”
“Radu Dracul,” Ramona said, speaking so slowly and distinctly that it was clear she would not put up with another interruption or change of subject. “It’s true I… invited you to come to speak with us. But that was last night. Now is a bad time. A ship is lost —”
“I know. That’s why I’m here. To ask you to help me find Laenea.”
After the uproar — some of it laughter — died down, and Radu explained what he believed had happened to him in transit, he had to endure an hour of skepticism, questioning, and speculations. He kept his back to a wall, and the pilots stayed farther from him than when they had been trying to frighten him. They discomforted him, but the discomfort was bearable.
At first none of the pilots believed a word he said, and then, as they began to be intrigued by the possibilities of what he told them, they asked him to repeat random bits of his story, again and again. He answered, though he refused to discuss his friendship with Laenea beyond the fact that they were friends. It was none of their business.
Ramona-Teresa, who understood that they had been lovers, hardly participated in the inquisition. She sat in a chair in the corner, watching and listening and smoking a cigar.
Clearly, something strange was going on, something that had not happened before. The speculation changed focus again and again, moving from just exactly what was happening, to why it was occurring, to the ways it might damage or benefit the pilots.
“No,” Radu said for at least the tenth time. “I don’t understand what relation my time perception has to my perception of transit. Probably none. I keep telling you, I don’t perceive transit. But it doesn’t kill me, either.” The pilots, growing more and more interested, drew closer to him. Another question probed at him. He heard the inflection, but the words blended into the background like smoke into fog, and then the noise blended into the real smoke of Ramona’s exceptionally foul-smelling cigar. Radu wanted to ask her to put it out but could not. He still found her as intimidating as the first time he had met her, and this was her territory. Someone else asked another question and he replied without even trying to hear or understand what had been said.
“It doesn’t matter. None of this matters right now. All that matters is that I can find the lost ship, if you’ll let me — if you’ll help me. I don’t think it’s safe to waste time, either.”
He pushed through the half-circle of pilots and fled to the farthest corner of the room, fighting to keep himself under control. He wished for a window, even one peering out into the sea. He was near crying from frustration, near collapse from the concentrated attention of all the pilots. Someone touched his arm and he flinched violently.
“Sorry,” Orca said. “Are you okay? Let’s go out on deck for a while.” The pitch of her voice was several tones higher than usual, and when Radu took her hand, her fingers were cold.
“You’re shaking,” Orca said. She chafed his hands between hers. “And I’m about to start. What is it about them?”
“Did anyone ever tell you about the safeguards ships carry, in case they get lost?”
“No. I don’t know what you mean.”
“When I knew I had no choice but to go into transit awake, Vasili gave me a vial of suicide pills, to use if whatever happened to me was too much to bear. But what they’re for is if the ship gets lost and the only other possibility is starvation or asphyxiation.” He closed his eyes, but he could feel the tears squeezing out from beneath his eyelids anyway. He could see the slender vial of shimmering translucent crystals.
Orca hugged him, offering comfort friend to friend. “I never thought about it,” she said. “I guess I just thought when you get lost, you vanish, the way it seems to the people you leave behind.”
“I don’t know how long she’ll wait,” Radu whispered. “I don’t even know how long ‘long’ is for her, in transit. But Laenea isn’t someone who holds back from — from things that need to be done.” He looked across the room at the cluster of pilots, who spoke in low tones and paid not a bit of attention to him and Orca.
“Did you hear me, Vasili Nikolaievich?” he shouted. “Don’t you remember the pills you offered me?” The pilots turned to stare at him. “Ramona-Teresa, how long do you think Laenea will wait for us? She’s too proud to choose despair.”
The older pilot left the group and strode toward him, stopping just before the point at which they would be able to touch if each extended a hand to the other.
“You need more patience, my boy, and so did Laenea. If she had waited to understand herself better, it’s possible she and Miikala would never have been lost. Perhaps none of this would have happened.”
He was ready to fight to keep her from declaring Laenea dead and gone. He started to speak, but she silenced him with a quick, sharp motion of her hand.
“If we find them —” she said.
“Ramona,” Vasili said angrily, “I think you’re letting your personal feelings —”
She needed only a glance to silence Vasili. She shook her head, and began again. “If you find Laenea,” Ramona-Teresa said to Radu, “she’ll still be a pilot, and you — I don’t know what you are, but if we tried to make you into a pilot, the process would kill you. Do you understand that? That part of it cannot change.”
“I understand,” Radu said. “I understand that she’s suited to being a pilot and I am not. I understand that the transition back —”
Ramona-Teresa narrowed her eyes.
“— is seldom made successfully, and would not be attempted even if it were simple.” That was as far as his pride allowed him to go. If the pilots thought he wanted Laenea to give up all her ambitions and all her dreams and destroy herself for him, then they did not understand why he loved her, or why — he believed — she had loved him.
Ramona-Teresa’s expression cleared. “The patience will come with time. For now, you’re right to be impatient.” She turned her attention to Orca. “You know what’s planned? You understand the danger?”
“Yes, pilot, I do.”
“Yet you wish to crew this ship?”
“You can hardly take someone along who doesn’t know what they’re getting into.”
“Ah, good. You also understand that no one else must know of the attempt before we leave. The administrators —” She glanced at Radu and laughed, a clear and hopeful sound after so much silence and grim discussion. “If you think we’re slow to make decisions, Radu Dracul, you should spend some time with the administrators. You will, if your mission succeeds. You’ll learn patience then.”