Edge of Dark (13 page)

They had done nothing to deserve this. No one on the High Sweet Home had deserved this. No one did.

She tried to think through what it might mean for the Deep, for Mammot, for Lym, for the hundreds of stations and other places in the Glittering.

Why did the pirates do this? What would they gain?

The machine crawled through the rest of the station. It wove around corners and seemed to become larger and smaller as needed without disturbing the passenger compartment. It moved with an eerie quiet, making only the slightest sounds of flexing as it moved.

The light in the empty station was intermittent at best, often only the dull green of the emergency lighting. Chrystal stared out the window anyway, trying to make sense of what she saw. Reasonably orderly corridors and working spaces gave way to damaged ship's bays and military training areas, to places full of twisted shadows, and holes in the station where Chrystal could see the bright pinpricks of stars. She turned away from the damage and hugged Katherine close. “We were lucky.”

“We don't know that yet,” Katherine said. “We might be better off dead.”

“No,” Chrystal whispered. “As long as we're alive, there's a chance.”

Katherine leaned into Chrystal, her cheek resting on the top of Chrystal's head. Their breathing slowed and matched the same way it sometimes did in the last soft moments before sleep. It comforted Chrystal to breathe with Katherine, to feel one with her.

She woke when the transport stopped, blinking for a moment as if coming up from a bad dream. A deep cold settled over her as she woke to the walls of the transport. “Where are we?” she murmured.

“I was sleeping.” Katherine sounded surprised that it been possible.

Yi spoke from the seat behind her, where he sat next to Jason. “We've docked inside of a bay that's part of something huge. I can't tell if it's a station or a ship, but I'd bet it's a ship.” He sounded awed. Yi, for whom everything was no big deal.

Their captors gave them no useful information. A tunnel grew out from the wall. It attached itself to the door, and immediately looked like it had always been part of the transport. The door opened onto a pressurized environment.

They followed the uniformed woman down the corridor. Since they had been in front, Chrystal and Katherine now walked at the end of the line. Another woman followed them, close enough in looks to the first one to be her sister.

The woman led them to a large room with three hallways radiating in different directions. The gravity felt light enough to unbalance her. Ten more people were already there. “Please wait here,” the first woman said. “There are bathrooms.” She pointed. “And you may shower. We regret there are no clean clothes to give you.”

“What about food and water?” Jason said.

“There is water in the bathrooms.”

Chrystal's stomach complained about the lack of food, which surprised her.

“What's going to happen to us?” a man asked.

Toyo asked, “Are we hostages?”

The woman smiled. “Please wait here and there will be a time for answers. Make yourselves comfortable. We are continuing to scour the station for survivors.”

“Who are you?” a woman called out.

The woman walked down one of the hallways and disappeared.

Yi leaned down between Chrystal and Katherine, and whispered, “That's no woman. She's a robot, too. They're all robots.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

NONA

Nona sat in a big comfortable chair in front of a roaring fire, Cricket on the floor close to her. The tongat had started following her around as if the foolishness of almost drowning had convinced Cricket that the new girl needed watching.

The flames enchanted Nona so completely she had trouble looking at either Charlie or Jean Paul, although she followed their conversation about a herd of some kind of predator well enough to get the gist of what they were saying. Flame amazed her. Living like the planet, breathing and dancing. Warm. Curious. A force that humans controlled so tightly in space that she'd never seen it in the open. She had been taught that it meant death.

It seemed like death dogged her. Her mother, gone now. Her father, gone for longer. Chrystal. Almost certainly.

It wasn't only fire. Everything on the Deep was controlled. Magnificent, some of it. Stunningly beautiful. Inside Satyana's sphere of influence, she'd had access to a lot of the station, including habitat bubbles built by the rich for the rich. There, Chrystal had seen streams and flowers and trees with no purpose in life other than to be an expression of excess.

On Lym, they wilded. They tried to get out of the way instead of trying to manage every detail. She had trouble wrapping her head around such an approach to life.

“Nona!”

She started and turned, wondering if Charlie had called her more than once. “Yes? Sorry, I got lost in the flames.”

“Are you up to telling Jean Paul a story? He wants to hear about the Deep.”

She reluctantly shifted direction so she had a better view of the two men than of the fire. “Sure. What do you want to know?”

Jean Paul watched her closely. “What's the best thing about it?”

An easy question. “It's so big you can get lost in it. No one can see the Deep in a whole lifetime. New habitats grow constantly, as if the station lives. There's food and music everywhere. Costumes. Dances. Travel immersives. Games flow through the whole station at once. Best, everyone is accepted. Everyone. Some stations are all about being or believing one way or another, but the Deep accepts everyone.”

Jean Paul raised an eyebrow. “And the worst thing?”

She raised her glass and took a sip. “That's harder.” She paused, considering. “There's more than one bad thing. Maybe the way we make decisions. It all sounds formal with the ruling council up there—the Historian brings his interpretation, the Futurist brings hers, etc. Everybody talks. But it actually takes years for decisions to be made. All the important discussions happen off stage and then there's this scripted courtroom action. Power's really concentrated.”

Charlie asked, “And another bad thing?”

“The part that isn't about the law. There's a black market for everything. Drugs, sex, questionable cargo, votes. You'd think we'd do better, having all the sophistication of the Deeping Rules and all that.”

“The Deeping Rules?” Charlie asked.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “Let me see if I can get them just right.” She paused, picturing the signs. “You must own yourself. You must harm no one. You must add to the collective.”

“That should be simple,” Jean Paul mused.

She laughed. “They're so simple they can be interpreted a million ways. Is adding to the collective a real job like a teacher or is it just coming up with an idea? Is it okay to be a militant or do you need to obey the rules?”

“So what do you do? To add?” Charlie asked.

“I teach. I told you that.”

His eyes sparkled with mischief. “And do you ever break the rules?”

Was he flirting? The idea startled her. “Your turn. What do you like about Lym?”

Charlie's answer came as quick as hers had been. “That it's so open. I've never been to the stations, but I can't imagine being closed into a place where everything smells of humans.” He blushed for a second, maybe regretting saying bad things about her world. “Here, there's hundreds of thousands of species. As much as we study Lym, we still find new things. We get surprised.”

“I love how open it is, too.” She glanced at Jean Paul. “You?”

“I like the sense of space. I almost never go to the cities.”

She could believe that. Jean Paul looked clean but unkempt. Like Charlie, he didn't have any visible augmentation. His long brown hair looked tangled and his clothes had been patched. Not exactly uncivilized, but he wouldn't fit in very well. Probably not in Manna Springs, and certainly not on the Deep. “So what do you hate?”

Jean Paul walked over by the fire, the light dancing on his face. “That after all of this time, people still don't get how important it is to protect Lym. The spacers ignore it—like it's just the past, like it's something your Historian might talk about in a class or something.” He fell silent for a long moment and then spoke softly, his words slightly slurred by alcohol. “I hate it that Charlie here has to go dig up smugglers from time to time. That people think they can just come here and not do damage. People almost killed this place. It will never be really wild again. You know that, right?”

She was trying to decide how to answer when he just kept going. “So many of the animals have been killed or tinkered with, created, that there's no balance that doesn't need some human intervention. But humans are dangerous and stupid.”

She frowned. “Not all of us.”

“Yes. Well. Maybe not us three. But even some of the Lym natives get caught stealing animals and exporting them. We caught two a year ago.”

She put her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Okay. I get it.” She glanced at Charlie. “What do you hate?”

“What he said.”

“That's all?”

He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again. “I hate it that we have so little power. The big stations decide everything.”

She raised her glass. “So here's to a way to figure out how to get more power. For all of us.”

Charlie looked startled at that. But he clinked his glass with hers and Jean Paul's and they drank.

She must be a little drunk herself. Satyana was always telling her to get more power, and she was always refusing.

The wine tasted earthy and full of life, like wine that could only come from a place where the soil was more than a foot deep.

When Nona woke the next morning, the wine still muzzed her head, but she remembered her toast to power. She went into the living room and poked at the ashes of last night's fire. She had no idea how to rekindle them. She pulled on her coat and went outside. The air felt so cold that she crossed her arms and stamped her booted feet on the pavement.

The sun had just started pushing up a faded grey bit of light to eat the stars. She watched it blossom into the hello-gold of actual morning. She looked at the pale sun, shading her eyes with her fingers, and whispered, “I promise to watch you rise and set every day I'm here. Not to miss a one.”

It felt good, if silly. At least no one could hear her.

She checked the time and the orbital location of the Diamond Deep. Only a few hours later. Close enough. She called Satyana and talked to her for a long time in spite of the slight irritating delay.

Afterward, she basked in the morning sun. A flock of black and orange birds wheeled and danced in the great blue sky. Puffy white clouds floated over her. She drank in the odd wonderment of them, swearing that she would remember the clouds and the birds and the incredible open space, and the horizon.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHARLIE

Charlie sat beside Jean Paul in the kitchen. Each warmed their hands on a cup of Jean Paul's favorite morning tea, a concoction made from stinging rock-grass, py-berry leaves, and dried gern. It wasn't Charlie's favorite, but Jean Paul made it for him every time he thought there might be danger, which was almost every time Charlie left. Jean Paul was convinced it made Charlie's reflexes faster. Charlie himself wasn't convinced it didn't.

Cricket lay curled in a ball of fur by the door, which was a polite request to go outside and sit with Nona. Charlie ignored the tongat and watched Nona through the window. Quiet time became her.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Jean Paul asked.

“You're the one who said I should take the job. You practically made me do it.”

“I meant take her out to Neville?”

“It's fitting.”

Jean Paul sipped his tea. “I thought you'd hate her. Now I'm worried I'll lose my roommate.”

“To what?” Jean Paul only sounded a little like he was teasing, which bothered Charlie enough that Cricket lumbered over and sat beside him and rested her big head in his lap. “I'm not leaving Lym, and she's unlikely to stay. Besides, don't forget I'm a hired hand.” He stroked the tongat's head, grateful for her company. His rocks, these two. His strength.

“You could use a lover,” Jean Paul whispered.

Charlie went quiet. If it were anyone else suggesting it, he'd be offended at the familiarity. But Jean Paul had once wanted more than the friendship they shared. Charlie had thought that was over, maybe a decade ago. “No,” he mused quietly. “She's probably exactly what I don't need.”

As if on cue, Nona pushed the door open, looking slightly surprised to see them awake. “Good morning.”

Charlie made breakfast for all of them, managing two pans and thus keeping himself too busy to talk to Nona or Jean Paul. Even Cricket stayed out of his way, preferring to wrap herself around Nona's legs the way she treated Charlie when he was sick or tired. Come to think of it, Nona was almost as subdued as he was. Maybe her dreams had been no better than his had been, full of threats he couldn't outrun or see.