Llyn had a hard time believing that space travel could be accomplished with a crew of four, but the transport Regent Salbari had provided—so small it had no name, simply a hull number—seemed to be leaving Antar at a good clip. The four crew members said the ship was programmed for absolute autopilot, including life support, from the time it left Antaran local space until Tdegan tugships would nose it toward an orbital station—except for a few hours on approach to Antar Gate.
Temporarily weightless, Llyn wormed upship behind the only crew woman, Lieutenant Elna Metyline. The transport’s central corridor opened beside exposed pipes and conduits (mostly life support, Lieutenant Metyline explained) toward the command cabin. Engines thrummed a deep rhythm around her, and tiny gurgles ran up and down inside the conduits. Lieutenant Metyline’s head, shoulders, and then her body and legs vanished through a hatch. Shutting her eyes, Llyn pushed toward it. Once certain her head had passed through, she opened her eyes again.
Two crew members sat belted into seats in front of an instrument array. Hoping to see out, Llyn craned her neck and looked for a viewscreen or porthole. The only bulkhead space that wasn’t covered with instruments was flat gray metal. She didn’t bother to suppress her disappointment. Hiding her feelings was no longer necessary. Karine was eight days behind her.
And she shouldn’t feel so happy about that, she told the corner of her mind that was still leaping up and down, singing joyously. She owed Karine—her accurate diagnoses, healing techniques, and perseverance—a huge debt. She could function as a human again.
But it felt fabulous to be free.
Lieutenant Metyline clung to a handhold just above Llyn’s. “We’ll open the visor in a minute,” she said. “Just get comfortable.”
Llyn groped for another handhold and slipped her wrist through it up to her elbow.
“Two minutes to Antar Gate. Mark,” an officer said. His voice sounded mechanical, like a poorly coached news reader.
Llyn whispered to Lieutenant Metyline, “What does he mean?”
Lieutenant Metyline’s brown hair floated around her face. She whispered back, “One minute and we’ll open the visor. It’s so remarkable that crews rebelled when ship designers didn’t include retractable visors on early models of this antique.”
Llyn returned the other woman’s smile. Regent Salbari had sent her off in one of the oldest small transports in the Antaran inventory. As he told her, Tdega would tear it apart looking for new technologies. Everything on board could potentially be used against Antar.
Including its crew? They were frighteningly religious, all four of them, ultra-prepared for their own deaths—in case Gamal Casimir tried to question them or executed them outright. Llyn hated to think of her father in that light. She would’ve preferred to think of him as Regent Salbari with a long, thin black pigtail. But the crew obviously feared interrogation, and Lieutenant Metyline had shown her a suicide implant inside her upper jaw.
“Ten seconds,” announced the same crew member. “Five. Four. Three.”
He touched a control. A slit appeared in front of him. It widened as the visor slid back to reveal an unbelievable chromatic display. Llyn had seen holographic auroras over online projectors. This vista was one long curtain of red, streaked with pale rose, pink, and white. Antar Gate.
At the edge of the window, she saw part of the Gate itself. It was unreflective black, pocked and scratched but otherwise featureless, almost as dark as the space alongside it. Its workings were internal, so she had heard, protected from meteoric impacts by a surface so impenetrable that no probe had given any clue to its workings. It had been jokingly suggested that the unknown Gate builders mined an alternate universe for energy to run and maintain them. Humans had used them for three centuries with hardly a mishap, and the Devastators had left them strictly alone.
Llyn couldn’t get her perspective. “Is it a meter thick or a kilometer?”
“Eight point six three kilometers,” Lieutenant Metyline answered in an awed voice.
Llyn gaped. If the Gate was eight kilometers thick, then it was hundreds of kilometers across. She’d heard that approach angles varied, depending on what system a crew meant to target. Transfer would not be instantaneous. Not even information traveled from Gate to Gate simultaneously. Llyn had also read that time did not seem to pass between Gates for passengers, although ship travel took objective days. She was about to find out firsthand.
Would this little transport go poof like the Aliki?
“Secure grips.” The crew member’s voice sounded stressed.
“Just hold on,” Lieutenant Metyline said. “You won’t feel much. But watch.”
Llyn clenched the metal handle and tucked both feet behind a silent conduit.
The crew member counted down. “Three, two, one, mark.”
Without any hint of a purple middle state, the pale pink aurora became pale blue, still streaked with white. Llyn gulped, almost too overwhelmed to appreciate what she was seeing. This was real space, its appearance distorted by light waves and particles playing tricks at inter-Gate speed. Slowly, the streaks resolved into coldly gleaming stars. Llyn stared, crouching close to the bulkhead, as visors once again swallowed the view. Plain bulkheads enclosed the crew once more, and a wave of claustrophobia washed over her. The transport had never seemed so small.
“We’re in Tdegan space now,” the crew member said. “Lieutenant, take her below. We can assume we’ll be challenged momentarily.”
“Are you all right?” Lieutenant Metyline spoke softly.
“I will be.” Llyn shut her eyes, She needed to imagine herself someplace huge. The Rift Station cafeteria popped into her mind, so she reconstructed its visual details until her head felt less light. How could it be less light when it was weightless? It wasn’t, but eventually she felt more or less normal.
She opened her eyes. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you all.”
The front-seater who hadn’t spoken turned around and squinted at her. Huge eyes, almost all pupil and iris, bulged from his face. Seers saw too well in darkness to function comfortably planetside, but they excelled at starship navigation. “It would be a crime,” he said, “to bring someone out so far and not let them experience this.”
Llyn wondered what miracles of color and darkness he’d seen. Was Gate passage his equivalent of her inner-world paradise?
The crew would broadcast Regent Salbari’s message momentarily. If no Tdegan challenged them, the ship would remain in free fall for a few more hours and begin deceleration. There would be gravity again. Unfortunately. Weightlessness wasn’t wafting, but she liked it.
“I’m right behind you,” came Lieutenant Metyline’s voice. The woman had been friendly, although her religious lecturing had sounded as if she were trying to prepare Llyn to die, too—just in case.
At the bottom of this section, the crawl hole opened almost into a “room.” Faint hissing noises, so soft that Llyn had to strain to hear them, distinguished the compartment from her silent cabin. She took a handhold and waited for Lieutenant Metyline to catch up. She considered groping for a drink bulb from the cabinet, but she decided not to bother. She wasn’t that thirsty. She had tried a sip of juice an hour ago. It was too much work to drink now. She would wait until deceleration imitated gravity.
Lieutenant Metyline groped into the wide space and anchored her feet, then straightened toward Llyn at an impossible-looking angle. She looked like a hydra in Director Graybill’s aquarium, glued to the glassy side with its tendrils waving out into the water. She groped at her ship suit’s collar and pulled out a delicate chain. “I wanted to show you something,” she said. She fumbled at the back of her neck for a moment and flung something into the cabin.
Llyn plucked it out of midair and untangled it with both hands. A triangular garnet floated on the chain. It looked all too familiar. “Oh,” she said. “I’ve seen these.”
Lieutenant Metyline’s eyebrows rose. “Has anyone explained them? At the center of our sphere is a Creator who—”
“Yes. I’ve heard that story. Many times.”
Lieutenant Metyline pulled her feet loose and pushed off so that she drifted toward Llyn. “You won’t live forever. None of us do. What will you experience after you die?”
“Nothing, I assume.” Despite Karine’s lectures. She handed back the garnet.
“Suppose that isn’t true? Suppose you are accountable—”
Oh, enough. Llyn let go of her handhold and pushed toward her cabin in the lower passage.
Lieutenant Metyline caught her by a pant leg. “Has it occurred to you that Tdega might not send out a tugship? The easiest thing in all the worlds would be to just let gravity catch us and burn us.”
Llyn bumped the bulkhead beside the passageway. She turned around and shook her leg free. “It doesn’t take much imagination,” Llyn said, “to realize that Gate travel is dangerous. Always.”
“Or they could shift us off into space. That’s a major reason for sending any crew at all in a preprogrammed transport. We’re supposed to be able to steer to safe haven. But there’s no haven we could reach with the fuel we’re carrying, not inside three systems that have seceded.”
Llyn had hoped that these crew people wouldn’t infect her with their pessimism. Now, worry grabbed her other pant leg and shook shivers up her spine.
She tried to shake it off as easily as she’d shaken off Lieutenant Metyline. “Karine says your faith is a matter of free choice, though she presented it as factual. But once she started giving me choices, I had to get free of her. Had to. You can’t know what it was like for me.”
“You’re right.” Lieutenant Metyline reached the next bulkhead and anchored herself by an arm. “I can’t know. Nearly all empaths hold to the sphere, though.”
Karine had used the same lingo. “You’re an empath?” That was disquieting.
“No. I had an empath grandmother, but I didn’t get the mutated gene.” She sounded as if she felt cheated.
Llyn, on the other hand, felt relieved. “Thanks for your concern,” she said, mentally adding, If that’s what it really is, and you’re not simply recruiting. Before the other woman could speak again, Llyn dove downship.
She was bolting the hatch of her silent cabin when she remembered that Regent Salbari wore two of the garnets. This was his view of the universe, too. Which of them lived by it, Regent Salbari or Karine?
Until she found her own sphere, she decided, she would serve Regent Salbari. If anyone’s listening, she formed words silently, is it all right to ask for a safe landing? I’m scared. She pictured Regent Salbari when she imagined a higher authority. He had known she was frightened. Did everyone who finally escaped a terrible situation reach this point—when they also realized they’d left everything familiar?
She curled up and reoriented her hammock. Incredibly, this narrow space had bulkhead bolts for four of them. The crew had given her the cabin to herself, squeezing Lieutenant Metyline in with the men. Llyn hadn’t paused to wonder about the arrangement. How did they find privacy?
Maybe they were so convinced they were about to die that they didn’t worry about civilized details.
At the end of her module, inside a bulkhead cabinet, she’d found an AR helmet with one-eighty-degree projection capacity. Lieutenant Metyline said spacefaring crews often carried AR units to let crew members refresh themselves with a sense of open spaces. Llyn had bolted that compartment shut. She was determined not to fall back into that addiction. She’d been delivered.
Delivered, she repeated as she wrapped her hammock around her, keeping both arms free. Antar had been a womb of rebirth for human settlement, and for Llyn Torfinn. She’d never seen an infant being born, but it was reportedly both sudden and slow, joyful and anguished. Like her long, slow, and painful-at-the-end deliverance from Karine Torfinn. In that sense, she could finally think of Karine as her mother.
The cabin’s other compartments held a beautiful new Tdegan wardrobe, created for her at the Salbari estate—including one of Stasia’s flowered dresses, a parting gift. Maybe Stasia had felt that the next best thing to going to Tdega would be knowing her dress was worn there.
Llyn also missed Ilke and Tana. She wished she had asked if they wanted to send messages. She intended to tell Tdegan authorities about them once they started “debriefing” her, as Regent Salbari delicately described it.
Abruptly, she noticed a taut string of the hammock pinching her arm. She felt it. Karine’s surgeon had said this might happen eventually. Artificial nerves he’d implanted at the biochip site might one day kick in and start functioning.
Delighted, she anchored herself against the other strings of her cocoon and rubbed her arm back and forth.
A voice from her bulkhead startled her. “We are being hailed and told to prepare for boarding,” the crewman said. “Secure for full deceleration.”
Llyn had drilled for this maneuver with the crew. She double-checked her orientation relative to shipboard g-forces, secured her hammock straps, and made sure everything was well tucked into bulkhead compartments.
So much for Lieutenant Metyline’s imaginative worries.
Welcome me home, Father!