Edge of Dark (9 page)

Cricket snorted.

He noticed that he was saying “we” about the stations. “The far side is where they're building things—new ships and even a small new station, I think. I'll have to look that up.” Or not.

One hand roamed Cricket's coarse coat, and she made a contented sound between a whine and a purr.

On the screen, ships streamed away from the High Sweet Home.

One by one, the ships died. They changed shape or imploded or they simply drifted apart, becoming pieces of ships. He tried to see what killed them. Space created different visuals than the bright light of Lym, and this video had been taken by an approaching ship that was still pretty far out.

Something bigger than the station crossed his screen, something so dark he could only make out its outline by what it blocked. “There's the station killer,” he told Cricket. “It's a big, bad thing.” The tiny screen made it look small, but the Next ship must be bigger than any he'd ever seen. It had to be. His chest grew tight and Cricket wriggled closer to him, almost as if she wanted to merge into him. He really did need to get her another tongat.

He paused the playback and glanced down, spotting Nona at the base of the falls. He wished he'd gone with her. Surely it would have been more pleasant than watching the video. She'd be pretty with her face and hair full of spray-diamonds.

“Back to it, Cricket.” He didn't want to tell the machine to play, but he forced himself to give the command. So many things started happening on the screen at once that he could barely follow them all. “There go the lights from the station. Maybe on purpose? And there's a ton of ships coming off the big one, or at least a lot of little lights. And now they're going off and it's all dark but we know people are targeting each other and shooting and dying.”

Cricket leaned into him and put her head on his shoulder.

CHAPTER EIGHT

NONA

Nona stood in front of the waterfall, the noise and rush of it singing in her bones. The air smelled of water, a hundred times more potent and cleaner than working in the greenhouses on the station. Droplets of spray wet her face and hands and clothes. A cool breeze touched her cheeks and fluffed the edges of her hair. She picked out the sweet scent of spring flowers. Even the crushed grass beneath her feet had its own smell. A small white butterfly danced around her for a few moments and moved on.

Life surrounded her, an infinite habitat bubble. She lifted her arms toward the falls and flung them wide.

She stood there forever and a moment, as if the flow of time didn't matter and couldn't matter in the face of such a thing as a waterfall.

The sky had stunned her. The water overtook her, dizzied her, enchanted her. “Thank you, dad,” she whispered.

Climbing back up the hill taxed her thighs so the muscles burned every time she lifted her foot. She stopped from time to time to take photos of plants.

She fell twice on the way back up the water-splashed path. By the time she arrived back at the skimmer she wore mud on one knee and the opposite elbow, and she'd managed to put a streak of it on her cheek, which she left there. It felt like being smeared with the raw power of Lym.

Cricket seemed to think more of her than she had before, the appraisal in her steady gaze a tiny bit less judgmental. But Charlie looked disturbed, his jaw tight and his eyes dark and angry. “Did I take too long?” she asked him.

He blinked and his face changed to a mask of control. “No. I'm sorry. It's something else.”

She wanted to ask, but he seemed like the kind of man who offered himself more easily if you didn't push. “It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen. The falls. Lym.”

He smiled briefly, his mood only partly broken. “I can show you even prettier places here. Some where there won't be so many people.”

“There were hardly any here.”

He gave her a look that disagreed.

“On a station, every public place is so close that people touch on accident. We smell each other's breath and perfume and sweat. Even walking from place to place there's people in front and behind and maybe on either side.”

“I'd hate that,” he said.

“I bet you would.”

“Are you willing to go where there's no one but us?” he asked.

“Of course.” She felt awed by the waterfall and opened by the planet, almost flayed. This might be the perfect time to let Onor and Marcelle's ashes go. “Can you find a place with water above a falls?”

“This falls?”

“Is there a place that's even more empty?” She had never been in a place without other humans, and suddenly she craved it.

“Strap in,” Charlie said. He stood up, still keeping himself between her and Cricket. He felt cold and distant.

They flew in silence for twenty minutes, until she had to say something. “Your mood. It's different.”

“It's not you,” he said. He dropped the skimmer closer to the surface and started pointing out springs and streams and grazing animals, his voice and movements controlled.

She didn't know him well enough to push harder, so she settled for being curious about the things he showed her and trying to draw him out with conversation. It worked a little, because he smiled as he took her up over a ridge near the base of mountains. Thin wisps of clouds lay against the bottom of the cliff like a veil. As they flew closer to it she realized it wasn't fog at all, but the spray from waterfall after waterfall. “You pick,” he said.

She leaned toward the cliff and watched carefully. The falls were a series of thin ribbons of water that sprung out from the top of the ridge and fell through clear air to land hard on a rocky base. She looked up at Charlie. “There's no power like this on the Deep. Nothing.”

He grunted. “Isn't the Diamond Deep the most powerful place in the solar system?”

“It is. But that's a human power, a creation of laws and intent. This is . . . primal.”

He looked approving. “Pick your waterfall.”

She did, and the gently forested meadows toward the top of the falls turned out to be a fresh wonder. She had never imagined so many shades of green or such magical light and shadow.

Charlie hovered to let her out, and she jumped down carefully. She found a flat rock and stood on it, listening to the stream and the birds. Nona took her parents' ashes and held them in her hand, staring at the vials. They seemed to stick there, like glue.

“Come on,” she whispered to herself. “You can do this.” But suddenly the place didn't feel right. She turned and walked a little further away, being careful not to slip. She knelt and used her free hand to touch the water, which felt so cool that it sent shivers up her spine. If she put her parents here, they'd be cold.

She'd thought she could do this.

Maybe she wasn't ready yet. She had another month down here. She could bury them on any day. At least her father's ashes were warm here next to her skin; in real life Onor had hated the cold.

She didn't like hesitating. She should just do this.

Charlie had brought the skimmer down close to her. “Ready?” he asked, his voice just under a shout to get over the steady engine noise.

She bit her lip.

“Do you need more time?” He seemed to be working to keep the skimmer close.

“Is there someplace warmer?” she called. “With warmer water?”

“Warmer?”

She nodded, unwilling to explain just yet. He looked slightly annoyed, and glanced up at the sun which had started angling down already. But he dipped the skimmer slightly lower. She climbed on and sat down.

“Strap in.”

She did.

He turned so that they flew between the two ridges, with the green and silver ribbons of waterfalls on their right side and rockier terrain on the left. They tended downward, coming out of the mountains they'd climbed into this morning on their way to Ollicle Falls. He stayed silent for a while, but then he asked, “Why do you need warmth?”

“I'll trade you. What changed between when we left this morning and now? Why are you so different?”

By now the long wait for an answer seemed normal. He eventually said, “Okay. But you go first, so I can take you to the kind of place you want.”

She swallowed. He was a stranger, but he was also the only human she knew at all here. She took a deep breath and started in. “My dad dreamed of Lym. He grew up inside a ship, and then lived on a station, but he dreamed of a sky. He always wanted to come here, but he and mom were always doing something else, and he died before he could get here. I brought some of his ashes.

“The last year of his life, he constantly complained about being cold, so cold I piled three or four blankets on him. I don't want to leave him in a cold place.”

“Is an ocean okay? Taken as a whole it will be warm and cold, but here the current is warm enough to swim in.”

“My dad wanted to see an ocean almost as much as he wanted to see a sky. His ashes will go everywhere, and touch every continent, won't they?”

He smiled. “They will.”

“Your turn.”

His lips twitched and he looked out over the horizon and fiddled with the skimmer some before he said, “Have you looked at the news today?”

“No. I just barely woke up in time to eat and get ready.”

“You don't have a feed?”

“It's off.” It seemed like he was trying to put her on the defensive and she bristled at that. “Do I need to turn it on, or are you going to tell me?”

He had the grace to apologize. “Sorry. You know about the High Sweet Home?”

She froze. Chrystal lived there! “What happened?”

“It's gone. Just gone. The ice pirates came in and took it.”

“Took it?”

“Took it.”

“I don't understand.”

“They took it away.”

“They didn't blow it up?”

“I don't think so.”

She felt like she'd been hit. “Do you know anything?”

“Every one of the military ships on the station got blown up, and the ship's bays took a lot of damage.”

“But the people? The ones inside? The ordinary people?”

His mouth was a thin line, his eyes hard. “The pirates took the station with them.”

“That's . . . not possible.” It wasn't. Possible. Stations didn't change orbits.

The valley they flew over began to open out and meadows appeared, dotted with shaggy, grazing animals. “I can show you the news story.”

She understood his mood now. “It happened while I was at the waterfall?”

“Before. I watched the news while you were there. I heard about it last night, but I saw the footage today.”

“What do they want? They have to want something. Satyana talked about this before I came down, saying they were getting restless. I just . . . I don't know. I didn't believe her. She's a worrier.” Nona stopped. She was babbling and afraid, even though the distances between them and the ice pirates were huge. She should tell him about Chrystal, watch the footage herself. But she didn't want to cry in front of him. “Do you want to go back?” she asked.

“And do what?” For just a moment, he looked tender instead of angry. “You should do what you need to do. Go bury your dead.”

Suddenly she wanted to hang on to the ashes. Silly. “Okay.”

Rough sand warmed Nona's bare toes. In front of her, a flat expanse of it extended all the way to kiss the horizon, the colors of blue and green and grey blending where sea touched sky. The sun hung low enough that its reflection made a fat bright line in the water. Near the shore, waves bunched, curled, and crashed. Birds hung in the tangy air, occasionally falling to the water and pulling wriggling fish from it.

All of it looked so foreign. Water, birds, air, sky. So much water cowed her, such a vast horizon made her feel tiny, and the myriad miniature specks of sand made her feel big, as if she were the center of an infinity symbol.

She shuffled close enough for the edge of the water to touch her feet. It seemed slightly warmer than the afternoon air. She felt some urgency now, as if Charlie's news about the High Sweet Home made getting past her own losses more important. Here, her parents could join the myriad others who had died across all time like grains of sand, including the very first settlers.

She took the vials of ashes out her pocket yet again, and held them up.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and straightened her spine. She took three more steps, and then another, so the water washed in and out over her ankles but didn't touch the bottom of her rolled-up pants. She opened her eyes and looked out over the waves, remembering that Charlie had told her not to turn her back to the ocean, but to watch it. She shuffled carefully, the waves slapping her knees and the sand pulling away from under her feet.

That should be good enough.

“Here you go, dad,” she whispered. “Here's your sky. It's really beautiful. There are birds outside of cages, and they're beautiful, too. Stay warm.” She stopped for a breath. “Mom, I'll miss you forever. I will. I'll think of you both a lot, and try to keep you with me.”