The Dark Reaches (26 page)

When Linnea reached the clinic, the white-painted pressure hatch stood closed and sealed tight. She rapped on it with her knuckles. “Pilang! Hana!” But the reception comm next to the hatch stayed stubbornly silent.

A gaunt, pale, long-boned man in greasy mechanic’s coveralls, his head shaved, caught himself near her and asked kindly, “Need the doctor? There’s another clinic over on Ring Seven.”

“I need Pilang,” Linnea said. “Shouldn’t she be here?”

“They’re jumping out,” the man said. “Left in a hurry, I heard down by Control. Some emergency.”

“Perfect,” Linnea muttered. Then said to the man, “Have they launched yet? Do you know?”

“No way I could know that, sorry.” He shrugged.

She looked up and down the passageway—a little wildly, maybe, because the man smiled kindly and pointed. “South, second left, first inboard, and you’re in the park. Docking ring’s equatorial, halfway down the park. Right on Ring Five.”

Inboard.
Over the years, most of the intersections had been painted to mark inboard, outboard, north, south—she’d find it. “Right. Thanks.” She pushed off.

 

 

 

When she reached the docking-ring hatch nearest to where Esayeh always docked, she found several other people waiting to pass through, all of them medical personnel. “What’s happening?” she asked.

“Some kind of rescue run,” the woman nearest her said. “They’re sending all the jumpships they’ve got, need medtechs to help. That’s all I know.”

“Sleepers, I heard,” a tall man said, and at that moment the lock popped open. Linnea wedged herself in last, and the lock cycled, controlling the slight pressure difference between the docking bay and the park. Another
chuff
of hastily released pressure, and the four of them spilled out.

But to her dismay, she found the docking tube to Esayeh’s ship sealed tight, the vacuum warning light steady red. He had already jumped away.

She gripped the handhold by the hatch, rested her forehead against her hands for a moment, trying not to swear. She could try to talk her way onto one of the other ships, but it was Esayeh who had promised to return her to Triton; she could not risk not being here when he returned. She turned to the woman she’d spoken to earlier, who was scribbling on a hand-sized commscreen held by a tall young girl in clinic scrubs. “
Allecto
, crew complete, go!” the girl called out, and turned instantly to Linnea. “That was the last spot,” she said. “Sorry.”

“What can I do here?” As she asked, another couple of stragglers arrived. The young girl looked them over, then told Linnea, “It’s sleepers they’ll be bringing in. You can all fill ice bags.”

Sleepers.
They were expecting people who’d been taken straight from cold sleep. She’d heard Hana mention thermal shock, the dangerous condition that could be brought on by warming people too quickly, letting their metabolic needs increase faster than the slow return of normal circulatory function.

The girl was already leading the way along the docking ring, to a hatch marked COLD STORES. “Work fast,” she was saying. “We’ll need a lot if we’re lucky. If they get there in time.”

“What do you mean, in time?” Linnea asked, as the little group swung to a halt and the girl opened the hatch.

“If they get there before the Cold Minds do,” the girl said.

Fear slid chilly fingers along Linnea’s spine. “They know the Cold Minds are coming? How?”

“Got word. Don’t know how. Okay, look here, ice in this big bin, you fill these little bags from the locker here. Not too full, keep them flexible, they’ve got to bend around the patients, keep good contact with the skin. When they’re done, collect them under the net on that bulkhead. We’ll come get ’em as soon as the sleepers start coming in.”

Linnea spent a blurred hour working, in zero gee, to scoop small chunks of ice from the bin and get them into the bags. The full bags were slippery and hard to keep hold of, and ice kept flying loose. Linnea was shivering cold, wet through, by the time the first crew came to pick up some of the bags she and her two companions had filled.

She looked up when the medtech entered, his expression grim. She took a breath. “How did it go?”

“We got in and out, didn’t see anything,” the man said. “No telling how many trips we’ll get to make. I’ve got to get this ice out there.” He was stuffing full bags into a carry-sack.

Linnea bit back her question about Esayeh and got back to work. Eventually, their stores of bags ran out, and Linnea went out in search of the girl with the clipboard. The space was full of medtechs hustling limp bodies in stretcher bags stuffed with ice. A lot of them were children, eyes taped shut, limply unconscious.

Linnea turned to look the other way along the bay—and found herself almost face-to-face with Esayeh. He was crouched against a bulkhead, one arm stuck through an anchor loop, his hands wrapped tightly around a hot bulb of coffee. They were trembling. His eyes looked into nothingness.

Linnea turned herself to match his orientation. “Esayeh,” she said quietly.

He looked up and saw her, but did not seem to recognize her. “Eh?”

“It’s Linnea,” she said. “What happened?”

“We’re done,” he said, teeth clenched to control his shivering. “We got twenty-four of them out.”

Twenty-four out of forty.
Oh, no.
“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” He shuddered. “Right when we were jumping out with our second load, three Cold Minds ships jumped in. Two of ours were still docked. One’s back now, didn’t get anyone out, had to recall the techs. I don’t know—” His voice broke. “I don’t know if the other ship made it.”

“I’m so sorry.” She set her hand on his shoulder. “Pilang’s safe?”

“She went with her patients,” he said. “Down to the clinic, they’ll warm them there. We tried for all the children, I think maybe we got them. But the rest, some of the families—they’re dead by now.” He dragged the back of his hand across his eyes.

“Come on,” she said quietly. “Let’s get you home, get some whiskey into you. Put you to sleep.”

“We tried,” he said. “We really tried, Lin.”

“I know,” she said. “Shhh. Come along.”

“We’ve been trying for so many years,” he said brokenly. “I’ve been building up the patrols, trying to make sure no one was ever left like that, asleep in the dark—but we never could find them all, not in time. And this time we
knew
, we knew they were coming, we even knew when, and we still couldn’t—” His face twisted, and he could not speak.

“You saved a lot of them,” she said as she guided him into a new passageway.

“Not enough,” he said, and sobbed.

In his quarters, as she helped Esayeh into dry, warm clothes, he told her what remained: A message had reached Pilang that morning—a message from her cousin Cleopa on Triton. It gave a time, and the name of a deepsider family vessel, a remote one exploring the thin, icy pickings at the fringes of the solar system. The only other words:
They’re coming.

“It’s Tereu,” Esayeh said thickly, as Linnea helped him slide into his sleeping sack. “She’s the only one who could have gotten that information, the only one who could have decided to send it. I don’t know why she would. Why now.”

“I know why,” Linnea said. “Iain’s there.” She dimmed the lights to a faint, warm glow, and said, “You’ll be all right? Good. I’m going to go help Pilang for a while.”

“I’m sorry,” Esayeh said, his voice already blurred with sleep. “About your trip home.”

“Time enough for all that later,” she said. “Quiet now.” She changed quickly out of her sodden travel clothes into the clean but stained set of coveralls she’d worn for her farm work, and let herself silently out into the passageway.
I’m sorry, Iain—I didn’t make it after all.

But it’s your fault.
Half-smiling, she launched herself down the passageway toward the work that was waiting for her.

Kimura Hiso strode into Triton Port Control at mid-morning, straight from a successful three-day patrol. Pilot Timmon’s Gold Wing had verified a nice, plump target on the first day—fine work, given that there seemed to be fewer of them these days. And essential, at this delicate moment. But really, there was no reason to rejoice yet. He frowned at a young female clerk, who jumped and huddled more closely over her work. The cryptic, symbol-encoded messages Hiso had been receiving from the Cold Minds were getting both more frequent and more peremptory.

Another, more efficient, clerk handed Hiso the activity report from Nearspace Scanning. As Hiso checked it over, hiding his apprehension, he wondered again whether the Cold Minds knew anything like anger, or fear, or whether they chose their courses of action merely by calculation, like the machines they were descended from.

Soon they would be satisfied again, and all would be in train.

No doubt the Cold Minds’ calculations had been upset by the mysterious new jumpship that had successfully disabled one of their ships, and by the missing pilot. . . .
Best keep them satisfied, for now.
His plans were on the move at last. The Hidden Worlds ship would be his own in a matter of days. And as for the woman who was its pilot—she and sen Paolo would make a perfect compensatory gift to the Cold Minds. A breeding pair of pilots—with that, and the whole population of deepsiders to exploit, they would hardly care that Hiso’s people had escaped them at last.

Passing through his outer office, Hiso noted that Perrin Gareth’s workstation was still unmanned. No doubt the boy had taken advantage of Hiso’s absence to slack off on his duties. A true son of privilege, never challenged as Hiso had been in his long, upward struggle—a son of the Maintenance Guild who had gained the rare, coveted chance to prove himself as a pilot. He stalked into his inner office and sealed the door behind him.

As always, the silence and privacy of the room enfolded him, easing his taut nerves. Its richness comforted him, too, after three days in his cramped jumpship; the walls gleamed darkly, paneled in real wood, and the ancient but vibrantly colored carpet had come from Earth itself. He touched his commscreen and woke it to life, then dropped lightly into his work chair.

The message queue held nothing that looked important. But he should check for another sort of message, to see if there was confirmation of the success of the Cold Minds’ raid today. Not thanks, of course, but acknowledgment of his efficiency.

He touched a blank corner of his commscreen in one precise spot, then pressed his thumb to the wordless window that appeared. The deep files faded into view and opened like flowers, showing him a carefully selected array of monitoring data. But as always he focused on the one readout for which the rest of the data were only a distraction.

The stealthed monitors in far orbit around Neptune were ostensibly for research, and they did collect data that he supposed the Scientists’ Guild found some use for. But for Hiso, as First Pilot, the monitors had only one purpose: to receive, without decoding, the brief bursts of staticky communication that were his signals from the Cold Minds.

The past thirty-six hours scrolled past. A few faint contacts had registered earlier this morning; at that level they were usually noise, which was why the Cold Minds hid their signals among them. Hiso ran his finger along the range in question, then waited a moment for the data to stream in.

He slid the data file to the center of his screen, then pressed all four fingers against the icon. There was a burst of light as the commscreen recognized him, then a shimmering pool of color that resolved itself into a set of symbols. Symbols only the First Pilot knew how to read.

Hiso examined them carefully. Then again, his heart pounding.

Interference.
Modified by the symbol that meant
deepsiders
.

Explain.
Modified by the symbol that meant
comply immediately
.

Hiso swore. It was bad luck, that was all, it had to be—that damned Esayeh and his defensive patrols, they found too many targets before Hiso’s men did. Well, now Esayeh had gotten lucky, stumbled in just as the Cold Minds arrived.

Then Hiso noticed the time code attached to
failure
. Almost immediately after he had sent them the coordinates. They must have had a ship hovering in Neptune nearspace, probably one of their tiny scouts, waiting for his signal to give them their next target.
Can they possibly be that hungry?

And then he saw that the symbol for
deepsiders
had two further, inner modifiers. Frowning, he unfolded them and pieced the concepts together.

Five jumpships—that was about as many as that damned traitor Esayeh could ever bring together at once. And apparently those five ships had gotten there first.