Moire Cameron stared at the jewel-like planet on her viewscreen. Sequoyah looked so peaceful and serene; the countless islands scattered over the brilliant blue oceans, the three moons playing tag. And here she was, bringing it war. She sighed, and slumped in Frankenstein's pilot’s chair.
“Nothing but trouble from start to finish,” she muttered to herself. “Better if we’d never found it.” Better for her, at least. Better for the rest of the exploration team, the ones who hadn’t made it back.
She rubbed her face, willing the dark memories and her fatigue away, and glanced at the viewscreen again. The cave–no, New Houston, it had a name now–was well into the night side. Everyone should be asleep except for the night duty folks. Maybe she could get some time to herself. So she could think about Ennis and be miserable.
Moire reached for the comm switch, but before her fingers touched it a pinlight glowed on the board. The display claimed it was a direct, external signal. Someone was on the ball.
“Captain! Did everything go as planned? We were starting to worry.” Kilberton did sound agitated, which wasn’t like him.
“Yeah, dumped off the ship and the commander just like we planned, no problems. Why, is something wrong?”
“Well, you did have difficulties with Frankenstein before,” he said, apologetically. “Understandable, since Gren removed half the superstructure and tied the gravitics in knots. How was it in webspace?”
Moire grinned. He loved his pilot-talk. “Like trying to walk with three feet. It helps if you don’t think about it too much. Strange thing was it was worse without the crab ship in tow. Gren did what he could, but–” Another pinlight lit up, then two more. “Oh great. I’m becoming popular. I should probably head dirtside–can you scramble up a watch crew? I don’t want to leave Radersent with just Perwaty up here.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Same number of tentacles as when we found him, so I guess he’s OK. Hard to tell. Oh, and he’ll want someone to talk to. Gets agitated if he’s alone too long.” And crab sleep cycles were much longer than human ones, so that had taken a good bit of explaining before he caught on that the crew needed it more frequently than he did.
She locked in the orbit and set the auto for the shuttle, then did a shipwide comm to announce it. Moire got out of her chair stiffly, and stretched. She should probably go and tell Radersent herself what was going on. He never questioned or argued with her. A model crewmember. Pity he couldn’t breathe their air.
If her only impression of crabs had been from Radersent she would have never believed they would fight a vicious, unrelenting war with humans. Yet they did–and here was Radersent, who had never lifted a pseduolimb against any of them. It didn’t make any sense.
She followed the ladder-infested route to the crab’s quarters. Nothing was easy to get to on Frankenstein, since they had gutted most of the ship. Quarters were bad but storage was even worse, and Radersent’s “quarters” were actually a huge sealed cargo container.
Moire peered in the viewport of the door–another custom fitting–and entered the security code. They were still taking precautions with the crab. Trust was one thing, crew morale was another. She wasn’t sure if he knew why they were doing it, but he’d never asked any questions about it–which told her, from her experience with the crab, that he’d noticed.
The Created were, as usual, in the human section with Perwaty, the human they had rescued from the sargasso along with Radersent. Ash was asleep, being held by Hideo. She was still recovering from getting shot on Kulvar. The Created were tough but she had lost a lot of blood. Too much. George and Alan were at the communication console, arguing.
“No there doesn’t have to be a star! There wasn’t one at the Place, and we went there. To get you,” Alan added, pointedly.
“There does so! Gren said there has to be a...a mass point to make the line or the drive won’t work.”
Moire came up behind them, grinning. “What’s up?”
Alan spun his chair around. “Does there have to be a star where the ship goes?”
“Is Radersent asking about web travel?” Moire asked, raising an eyebrow. Maybe they should be recording all the conversations through the translator, just to make sure. The kids spent a lot of time with the crab, sometimes unsupervised by an adult.
Radersent was just visible in the gloom and murk of his quarters, seen through the large, formerly exterior viewport that now functioned as his window to the human side of the room. He was doing the slow, gentle motion that indicated he was in a good mood. She could tell when he recognized her, because he tilted back his long bony head so his throat-opening was clearly visible and the tendrils to either side radiated out, then back. He never did that for anyone else.
“Small-she,” said the synthetic voice of the translator. His name for her.
Alan was still looking at her, expectantly. “You are both right. You have to have a star in the direction you want to go–that gives you your lineup–but you can stop any time along the way.” George and Alan digested this information in thoughtful silence. “Tell Radersent that I’m leaving the ship for a while.”
“Okay!” George turned back to the cobbled-together crab-human communication and translation device. They really should make a better one, or at least have a spare. Right now it was the only one in the galaxy.
“Where are you going?” Alan asked. Worried, like he always was when he thought she might leave him.
“Just down to the planet. You can come with me if you like, but it’s local-night down at D’Accord. The rest of the kids won’t be awake.”
“We want to go down there!” Hideo blurted. Ash stirred in her sleep and made a small noise.
“You can catch a shuttle later, when it’s day,” Moire said. “We’re going to be here for a while.” At least she would be, trying to figure out what to do next with all the different projects.
All the kids, even the now-awake Ash, wanted to come with her. Moire acquiesced. The skeleton crew would be much more willing if they knew the Created weren’t on the ship to cause trouble.
She got them all herded into the dropship and fastened in. The problem was they were children, with all that implied, but without the physical restrictions that usually applied to children and that could be exploited to keep them from doing things they shouldn’t. They were the same size as a fully-grown adult, stronger, intelligent, and curious. It was a miracle they hadn’t blown anything up yet.
“Did you really have shuttles that rolled on the ground long ago?”
And of course, trips were never dull. Or silent.
“Yes. We called them cars.”
“Why did they roll on the ground? They would run into things, wouldn’t they? Why didn’t you have flying ones then?” Ash wanted to know.
“We had to learn how to make flying ones,” Moire said. “Remember, this was over eighty years ago. We only just had figured out how to build ships that could travel web space.”
“You mean nobody could go anywhere? They were stuck on Yerth?” George was horrified.
Moire grinned. He’d come a long way from not even knowing what a planet was. “Earth, George. It’s not a bad place to be stuck. It’s a big planet, like Sequoyah.”
“Were the crabs stuck too, where they were?” Ash asked.
“That’s a good question. I don’t know.” The kids were silent for a while, pondering the implications of Moire not knowing something.
“You got unstuck though. But...but you got lost, so you couldn’t find the right time to go back in,” Hideo said. “Is that why you know about the old times so much?”
Couldn’t find the right time. That was a pretty good approximation of Einstein’s Revenge, from a child’s point of view. Couldn’t go home, ever. Because home had floated down the river of time and would never come back again. “Something like that.”
The cave was still full of gear and shuttles, so she landed the dropship on the cliff top. Two of the moons were up so handlights weren’t strictly necessary to see the path to the cave, but she handed them out anyway. “And watch out for splatterplants!” she called after the kids as they raced down the path. “Get any of that goop on you, I’ll leave you here!”
The threat was bad enough they at least slowed down. Splatterplant essence was worse than skunk.
Kilberton was waiting for her at the cave, as she knew he would be. He had a seemingly endless supply of questions, about the dropoff, about the salvage plans, but after the first hour she cut him off. “Are there any other emergencies? Anything that can’t wait until morning?”
“Well no, but–”
“Then unless there are things I need to know ahead of time, I’m going to get some sleep. Anything that comes up, wake me. And go get some sleep yourself, got that?”
He grinned, tiredly, and waved goodbye. Moire scrounged a pad and a blanket and found a secluded cargo crate to collapse on. She fell asleep in the middle of wondering if she was too tired to sleep.
She was wakened by someone shaking her shoulder and talking rapidly in her ear. Harvey Felden, the old ship steward and now general planetary commissar, by default.
“We gotta do something. They’ve been patient and all but the construction folk can’t cut rock fast enough.”
Moire rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and stretched. “What are you talking about, Harvey?”
“Them folks off Bone. It was crowded enough with the Created and all our people, but we don’t even have enough shelters. Not unless you want to take the ones we gave the prisoners,” he added, looking as if that was a good idea.
“Right. Accommodation for the new people. I’ll talk to Kostas about it. Wasn’t in the original plan, but maybe he can come up with something.” It would take more money that she really couldn’t spare, but she owed the Bone people. Waylands had only gotten blown up because Toren had been chasing her. People had been killed. The least she could do was give them shelter before Toren chased them here.
“Prisoners doing all right?”
Harvey shrugged. “Lost a few. One suicide, and one tried to jump Grimaldi when she went to drop supplies.”
“I’d count that as suicide too, myself,” said Moire.
“Woulda been more, if Kilberton hadn’t stopped it. One of the crew that was with us on the rescue–got drunk, snagged a scooter and a rifle and was going down to do some target shooting.”
They would have to do something about the prisoners, but shooting them out of hand wasn’t what she had in mind. She could understand the motivation of the would-be shooter, and if she could avoid official knowledge of the incident–and it didn’t happen again–she’d let it drop. The prisoners were some of the cargo they had taken from the hidden site where Toren had been manufacturing the Created. They’d saved some of the Created still there, but not all. The Toren employees had tried to destroy the evidence of what they had done by destroying the Created still being grown.
Moire unclenched her hands with an effort. The Toren prisoners would get what was coming to them, one way or another. A bullet was too kind. On the other hand, they were using up valuable supplies. She had to figure out a way to stop that.
While she was getting some breakfast Kostas, the big, barrel-chested construction boss found her and greeted her with a crushing hug.
“Hey! Thought you got lost out there or somethin’.”
“Nope, just busy,” Moire gasped when he let go. “How’s the site?”
“Excellent!” he boomed. “I gotta tell you, working without suits or pressure locks–it’s hardly work at all! Crew loves it. Hell, they love this place. When ya gonna open it up for colonization?”
“Ten minutes after the war ends, if we win. Toren’s going to do its damnedest to take it away as soon as they can find it, remember?”
Kostas looked hurt. “We ain’t gonna tell anyone!”
Moire sighed. “Somebody will say something, or send a message that gets intercepted. These guys play for keeps, and they know how to hack too.”
“What?”
Oh great, another anachronism. “They can get into comm networks, data nodes, that kind of thing. Eventually your people are going to want to go home, aren’t they?”
Kostas gave her the kind of evaluating, sideways glance she’d learned to be suspicious of. His beefy exterior hid a Machiavellian mind. “Maybe. We travel a lot–wherever the work is, ya know? Guess it depends on where home is.”
Perhaps she was getting used to the way his devious mind worked, but it only took a moment before the blinding flash of insight hit.
“Say, there’s something I wanted to ask you,” Moire said, trying for the same level of deviousness. “You know all those people from Waylands we picked up? From Bone?” He nodded. “They need housing, workshops, stuff like that. I know it isn’t in the original contract, but I was wondering...maybe we could work something out with your crew? Like, say, a stakehold on the planet?”
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