17

On the ship above the planet, hovering several miles above the research facility, Jane Haley, technician first class, pressed her palms against her temples. There was something wrong with her head. It had come suddenly, a numbing wave of pain that had swept over her and made her almost fall out of her chair. And then, almost as suddenly as it had come, it was gone.

When she opened her eyes, Ensign Erik Orthor was staring at her, too attentive. “Anything wrong?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Bad headache,” she said.

“Get those a lot?” asked Orthor, as if hoping to start a conversation.

She ignored him. She looked around and saw that some of the others on the bridge looked dazed as well, though nobody as much as she. Maybe it wasn’t just a headache, but something else. But what? Orthor, though, seemed unaffected, as did Commander Grottor. The latter was staring at her, a look of deep curiosity in his eyes.

“Have you felt that before?” he asked.

“Headaches?” she said. “Sure. Hasn’t everybody?”

He looked at her a moment more, then nodded, the curiosity fading. “Take a few minutes away from the bridge. Gather yourself,” he said.

“But I’m fine, sir,” she said.

“That’s an order,” he said.

She nodded and stood, left the bridge. An order, she thought. Since when did you have to leave the bridge if you had a headache?

But it was good to get away for a moment, catch her breath, gather herself. Ensign Orthor made her nervous. He was nice, or tried to be, but there was something strange about him, and he was always preaching Unitology. He seemed just one step away from either asking her out on a date or inviting her along to a religious revival, maybe both. And Grottor, she had noticed, treated her a little differently than some of the others. Not enough to notice unless you paid close attention. It was hard to pin her finger on what it was exactly, but she was sure he did it. But she had no idea why.

She made her way to her quarters, lying down on the bed for a while. The headache, if that was what it had been, was now completely gone. Strange, that. But it hadn’t been a headache, exactly, or not the headaches like she usually knew them. There had been little flashes of something, images jagging like lightning into her head, but broken and incomplete, impossible for her to make into coherent shapes. It had been like watching a broken vid screen, one in the process of fuzzing out. She felt that there was something there to be seen, but she just couldn’t see it.

She lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. It was no secret to her that there were tensions between the commander and Ensign Orthor, and though Grottor did little to give himself away, she’d noticed that there were things that he’d say around her that he wouldn’t say around Orthor. It was, she supposed, a mark of privilege that he’d say them to her. She tried to take it that way. But she also had to admit that when she’d signed up for the academy, she hadn’t imagined it would be like this. She didn’t know what was going on down on the planet proper exactly, but she knew enough to know that she wouldn’t approve if she knew more. Which made her wonder why Grottor had chosen her as part of his crew. What did he expect from her? she wondered for the fiftieth time. Why was she here?

After she deemed sufficient time had elapsed, she washed her face and made her way back to the bridge. Orthor was still there, and he immediately tried to engage her. She mumbled an apology and slipped back into her work at her console.

But the work itself wasn’t holding her attention. There was little to do; they were hovering above Aspera, not orbiting the planet exactly but doing a strange loop that unnecessarily expended fuel, it seemed to her, and which kept them in proximity to the structure below that she’d been the first to identify. Why they were doing it, she couldn’t say. Grottor had hinted about what was taking place on the planet, and she’d seen the supply ships come and pass through, seen as well another structure being built below over the course of a number of months. It was a research facility of some kind, but of what and for what exactly, she couldn’t say.

Someone had stopped to hover behind her. For a moment she thought it was Orthor. She prepared herself to become irritated, snap something at him that might drive him back.

But Orthor, she saw out of the corner of her eye, was still at his station. When she craned her neck, she saw it was Commander Grottor.

“Do you mind explaining where that came from?” he asked.

“What?” she asked, and then he flicked his finger at her vid pad.

With her stylus, she saw, she’d been tracing something. It looked like a pair of tusks of some kind, but instead of curving they twisted around one another. Funny, she thought, it looks like the Unitology symbol. All of Orthor’s talk about Unitology must have sunk deeper into her skin than she realized.

But it was different from the Unitology symbol, too, or at least more articulated. It was covered with dozens of small squiggles, distinct but bizarre symbols

“I don’t know,” she said.

“What have you seen?” he asked. “What have you been up to?”

“I haven’t seen anything,” she claimed.

“This doesn’t mean anything to you?” he asked. “Then why did you draw it?”

She shook her head. “Nothing, sir,” she said. “I swear. I was just doodling.”

“And what are these numbers?” he asked gesturing to the right edge of the pad. “These equations?”

Were they equations? Well, yes, they looked like them.

“Probably just the remnant of some old navigation computations,” she suggested.

“No,” he said. “They’re not.”

“No?”

“Who have you shown this to?” he asked.

“Shown?” she said, confused. “I … it was just a doodle, I haven’t shown it to anybody. Why would I?”

“Not Orthor?” he asked.

“Of course not,” she said.

He stared at her for a long moment, as if assessing her, and then nodded. “Forward it to me and then erase it,” he said. “And then we need to have a serious talk.”