When the Dust Fell, page 7
“The shimmer?” squeaked a pale-skinned science officer.
“What?” both he and Wildei said simultaneously.
“When 18’s radar cloak is deployed,” the science officer continued, “it produces an infrared shroud we call a shimmer. An unintended byproduct of the retrofit. It’s very slight, almost imperceptible. Someone would have to know it was there and have the right tech to find it. We’re talking about an extremely advanced tracking system. I can’t imagine how they’d have anything even remotely up to the job.”
“There’s a fucking shimmer?” Wildei exploded. “How long have we known about that?”
“Since the retrofit,” the science officer replied meekly. “Theoretically, it was an acceptable risk because—”
“I know why, darling,” Wildei cut in, “you can save your breath. But if the shimmer was beyond their capability to find, will someone then explain to my idiot brain how in the living fuck they found it and tracked it nearly up the ass of the most valuable person on this ship?”
“It’s obvious,” Dent Forent said flatly. “They had help.”
Forent sat at a small table, his overfed body making the table seem smaller still. Only the size of the man resembled the Dent Forent of three years ago. No one on the Kalelah appeared more transformed. His white hair had grown thinner and even whiter somehow, and his eyes had taken on a look of perpetual fatigue. Even his voice seemed to have lowered to reflect his true age more accurately. Before the war, Trin wouldn’t have described Forent as, say, “sunny.” “Curmudgeon” would have been more like it. But he had always been quick-witted, with dancing eyes and a mischievous grin. His sour outlook came with a joke. Now you just got the sour. Who could blame him?
The Correction, and the internal battle over it, had been especially hard on Forent. He was the first to confront Laird after she’d taken over the ship and the first to suffer her anger. He’d been captured by his own shipmates, imprisoned, and beaten hard. Now he was a Guide Lead with no one to guide anymore.
“If they were given the precise wavelength of the infrared,” Forent went on, “it would be a significant help in advancing technologies the population likely already has.”
“Sure,” the science officer replied. “But miniaturizing the tracking system would be a major leap in two years. Then there’d be the issue of testing.”
“Where are you going with this?” Wildei asked, still in motion around the room. “Who would be stupid enough to risk something like a tech transfer to the population? Think of what that would involve.”
“Stupid enough? No one,” Forent said looking down at his immense hands. Palms down, fingers splayed, they crowded the surface area of the table so completely that the others seated around it had no choice but to simply cede the entire tabletop to him. “But possessed enough?” He looked up at her for the first time, a shadow of dread upon his round, boyish face. “Surely someone. Or two, maybe hundreds. Enough to form—”
“A Circle,” said Wildei, finishing Forent’s thought for him.
“I looked it square in the eyes, Captain, like I’m looking in yours now. That day, the day before the war started, when Laird told me what she’d done, why we’d slept through the Delivery’s entire development, I saw what The Circle can do to a person. Laird wasn’t just insane—she was a slave to something that does not let go or find itself content with one slave. We can’t dismiss the possibility of another…” He paused, like he was searching for a word. He never offered one and didn’t need to. Two came to Trin’s mind without any help from Forent.
Fucking infection. The thought of dealing with The Circle set Trin’s teeth to grind. An ancient cult of purists and fundamentalists, The Circle took devotion to the Plan to an intolerant and sometimes violent extreme. And it had proved nearly impossible to confront. It hid its meetings and its membership. It scribed no scrolls and left no data trail. You never knew who was in The Circle until it was too late. Trin couldn’t decide if they were brilliant survivalists or just fucking cowards. Either way, it had been The Circle that put them all in the shitbox they were in now. Crashed and broken. And he hated them for it.
“The Circle died with Laird,” Wildei said softly, more like a hope than an assertion.
“We think. We hope. But you know how The Circle operates,” Forent countered. “Why couldn’t The Circle’s death be just another rumor? A misdirect?”
Wildei took a breath. She rubbed the back of her neck and sucked her lower lip between her teeth. She shook her head slightly, like she was in a debate not only with Forent, but with herself as well. Maybe herself most of all. “If The Circle wanted Trin dead,” she said, “there are easier ways to get it done.”
Forent brought his glance back down to his hands. He turned his left hand over and picked at the nail on his index finger with his thumb. “Easier, yes,” he said slowly, addressing no one in particular. “But maybe an easy kill isn’t the point.”
Trin didn’t spend much time thinking about his own death. Now how could he not? The science officer glanced uncomfortably at him. He gave a small shrug back. No sweat, he hoped it said. Except, it was bullshit; he was starting to sweat. Forent wasn’t the same guy he used to be. He was off, prone to wild theories about irrelevant things and fits of melancholy. It was possible Forent had gone mad. It was possible, too, that Forent was on to something. He was sure Wildei felt the same way. He saw it in her pacing, in her nervous eyes, and he saw it in everyone else’s silence. Forent was making sense.
That was the thing about Wildei, she could never hide what was really going through her head. Her face and body never failed to reveal her real intentions. In fact, her heroics in The Mutiny aside, it had been her almost shameless willingness to crack the traditionally stiff spine of leadership posture that had inspired the surviving senior ranks of the Kalelah to make her captain, even though she was nowhere near the service rank to inherit the job in a normal succession. Of course, what could be a normal succession after the shitstorm that was Captain Laird?
The ship had loved Argen for his strength and his simple goodness. Transparent, though, he wasn’t. He and Laird had that in common. They both wore the captain’s uniform like a shield. Their crews saw only what they wanted them to see. Now, after the damage that shouldn’t have happened, after the loss of faith, after too many dangerous secrets, people were done with the need-to-know crap. People simply needed to know. So Wildei, with her rebel past, her easy warmth, her humor, and her willingness to ask questions about things an ordinary captain would already know or pretend to know, and her “darlings” and her “lovelies” all felt like something a ship full of broken spirits could almost trust. After the war, the Correction, and The Mutiny, almost was close enough.
“Let’s start with the most basic assumption,” Forent went on. “If you’re The Circle, you don’t think the Correction was a mistake. You think the mistake, the most blasphemous thing of all, was stopping it. If you’re making a dead list of those who did the stopping, Trin is most certainly on it. At the top I’d say.”
“Thanks, Dent. Do I get a plaque or something for that?”
A few nervous chuckles went through the room. Forent waved away the joke. He was just getting started.
“Think about how much better Trin’s death would be if it looked like the population had killed him. If the missiles had been a little faster, or Trin had been a little slower, the real explosion wouldn’t have been the missiles hitting their target.” The large man looked around the room, his own eyes flashing as if reflecting the fires conjured in his mind. “The real explosion would have been our reaction.”
“I’m with you to a point,” the captain said. “I agree that somehow those missiles got an inside edge on Trin. And I have to admit that I don’t know what I would’ve done had they succeeded. But even if I had gone out of my mind with rage, I couldn’t have given The Circle, if they do exist, what they want. Sure, we can do some damage, but we’re grounded. Without flight, without all the guns working at once, there are limits to what we can do. Even if they killed us all and took control of the ship, even then they couldn’t finish the job. As long as we’re stuck in this moat, completing the Correction is impossible.”
“Maybe they don’t want to finish the job. Maybe what they need more than an ending is a never-ending middle. There’s nothing like a good long fight to bring the faithful to their feet.”
The captain stopped pacing. “Dent, you think The Circle wants to up-tech the population so it might actually have something like a fighting chance against the Kalelah? Feed it our own weapons and defenses? Teach it how to hurt us?”
“We’re a Guide Ship, are we not?”
8
Sarah was already in the pool when Trin got to the bathing pod. The overhead lights were dimmed, and the room was mostly illuminated by the soft, white glow of the large underwater light at the pool’s bottom. Ripples of reflected color danced across the low, white ceiling. He threw his clothes on the steel bench, eased himself into the water, and sat on the ledge that ran along the inside of the bowl.
“Too hot as usual.”
“And you’re late as usual,” Sarah said.
“Ran into some complications on the recon.”
“What kind of complications?”
“Nothing major. We needed a debrief.”
She pushed off her side of the pool and glided to his. She straddled him, put her arms around the back of his neck, and kissed his chest. He held her with one hand at her waist, the other along her thigh. She raised up to his eye level and smiled, her nipples brushing against him as she rose.
“You’re a liar,” she said. “You think I don’t have friends?”
She pushed back to her side of the pool and got the glass of wine from the deck above the water.
“Fuck me,” he said, making a mental note to thank Wildei for blabbing to Sarah.
“Yeah, I don’t think so.”
“I didn’t want to make you worry.” It was true, he hadn’t. Something was up with her lately. Not sleeping, walking the concourses in the middle of the night. She was acting like she did right before the Correction, when the shit was hitting the fan from twelve directions.
“What makes you think I’d worry?” she asked.
“Now who’s a liar?”
Her smile faded and Trin saw her blue eyes glisten, highlighting the color. She turned her head and drank.
“I had plenty of time,” he said. “Wildei’s making too much of what happened. Forent was off his nut, but what else is new?”
“I need to know something,” Sarah said.
“Okay.”
“What is this?”
“What is what?”
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Of course I do.” He absolutely did not.
“The two of us. Is this our life together? We just do what we’ve been doing. Shouldn't we be more somehow? To each other. Shouldn't we get married?” She said the last four words in English. “I mean, does that even happen in your world? Probably not, because as I was thinking about that question, I couldn’t even find the words in Origen.”
He pushed over to her side of the pool, but she pushed him back. He stayed in the middle of the pool, treading water. She tucked her hair behind her ears, a gesture he could watch over and over.
“Get married,” he repeated in English. “What does it mean?”
“Forget it. It was a stupid question. I never even wanted to get married.” She gave a tiny laugh. “My mother married twice. The second was a total disaster. It ruined her life. It ruined all our lives. I swore I’d never do it.”
“Do you still feel like your life is ruined?”
She looked at him for a long minute.
“No.”
“Then tell me what it means.”
“I’m embarrassed now. What if you disagree? Then, you know, what? We just fight this fight for the rest of our lives? We keep trying to make a peace, to share what we know, and they keep hating us and trying to kill you? That’s the sum of it?”
“They’re not trying to kill me, exactly. It’s more like us. They’re trying to kill us.”
“Oh, that’s better. You’re really managing the shit out of this moment.”
“Tell me already.”
“Okay.” Sarah took another drink. She looked him in the eyes and spoke slowly and carefully, with a look that somehow managed to mix bold confidence with naked vulnerability. It was a kind of beautiful that drove him mad. “It means that we’re forever, no matter what. It’s a vow. A solemn promise. Even if we get separated, we’re never apart.”
“Why would we get separated?”
“Things happen,” she shrugged, her eyes misting again.
“I’m not leaving you,” he said without needing to even think about it.
“Okay.” She pushed out to the center of the pool and they both gently treaded water.
“Are we married now?” he asked.
“Of course not, you big asshole. You have to get me a diamond ring.”
“What?”
“Yeah, and it better be huge too.”
He took her in his arms, this person from another world who he never should have met, and hardly ever understood, and he couldn’t believe he could love anyone more.
9
The sleep that night had gotten off to a good start…until her queasy bitch of a stomach had other ideas. Rather than hit the bar again, Sarah decided to distract herself with the fighter jets and their ongoing tag team vigil of the ship. She chose the Command Center for this particular watch for no reason more technical than the proximity and relative luxury of its toilets. She’d barfed in a public trash receptacle the day before and wasn’t looking forward to a repeat performance.
The CC greeted her with its dependable hue of absolute whiteness brought about by a source of illumination unknown to her. The ceiling of the CC looked as if there was no ceiling at all, like a hole in the ship with a view of the Elysium sky. There were no hanging fixtures, seams, or visible structures that might suggest the secret to the seemingly infinite expanse overhead. There was just light, calibrated to the perfect brightness and color for the tasks performed in the CC.
She had no official workspace on the ship, let alone in the CC. Even though the room was mostly empty and she could have taken a proper station, she set up shop at one of the visitor chairs that ringed the outer circle of the center. An implant in her right hand had given her fingers the magical power to call up files and feeds from anywhere on the ship, and a chair in the CC counted as “anywhere” more than most. She gestured into the space above and to the right of her face. A small, square hole in the air opened and less than a full second later unfolded into a fully functional view float. From there she was able to quickly connect to the cameras chasing the planes.
Out in the concourse, the sim skies still showed the constellations of The Watcher and The Tiller’s Blade, the first celestial dots that every Origen child in its southern hemisphere learned to connect. They were the only ones she’d ever been able to consistently spot in the dark of that alien space. But through the magic of her float and the eyes of her bots flying at jet speed, she was able to transport lightyears and hours away, to a sun already applying the first painterly colors of an Earthly day, at times throwing the fast-moving planes in dark silhouette against soft pinks, oranges, and whites. When the jets turned toward the south, or when the cameras flew between them and the rising sun, they’d come out of the blinding effect of back light and Sarah could easily identify each plane’s nationality and the pilots who controlled it. She had not seen Elouise since the day the French pilot had turned to the cameras and broken her long, stubborn silence.
Actually, she hadn’t seen even the slightest shred of evidence that Elouise’s strange message hadn’t been anything other than a fantasy, a shimmering mirage of fatigue and guilt. Sarah had shuffled backward in the record of that day a dozen times, searching for the video that matched the pictures in her mind. That haunting moment when Elouise turned and spoke, not of the concerns of pilots, but of Sarah’s sister. Unless Sarah was going mad—a possibility she hadn’t completely ruled out—the imagery looping in her mind felt completely real. Everything in Sarah’s head and heart told her it was real, and yet every time she’d gone back to look, it had been the same indifferent Elouise. A person so oblivious to Sarah’s pleading attempts at connection as to be in another world entirely.
Maybe, Sarah thought, that’s how it was.
Perhaps Sarah was in one reality and the pilots in their planes were in another.
She looked around the space of the CC. It was still in that transition between the mostly skeleton crew of the overnight shift and the more serious staffing of the day hours. In either case, the CC no longer needed the full complement of crew it did before its mission abruptly ended. The ship wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and there were no Guide Teams out to be monitored. Guiding, thanks to Laird’s handiwork, had stopped before it had even had a chance to start. There were no alerts to address, and the Code managed all the basic systems of the ship and most of the requests of the early waking crew. For the most part, a small staff was really all the CC needed anymore.
The analysts’ station, in fact, had only one person in attendance. After a few moments, the analyst rose from her chair and made her way toward Sarah. She was tall, wearing the light purple-gray jumpsuit of a second lieutenant, her long, dark hair a luminous contrast upon her slender shoulders. The woman was looking directly at Sarah, a smile on her face like the one an old friend gives to another after a long absence apart. Sarah didn’t recognize her, so she looked briefly behind to the second row of chairs to see if someone else might be the woman’s true target. The chairs were empty. Sarah smiled weakly back and tried to return her attention to the planes.
