Forgotten Suns (28 page)

She couldn’t feel him watching her. He was preoccupied; he’d
already forgotten her.

She gave it a few minutes, to be sure. Then she slipped
around the back and down toward the street.

A cubby of a room opened just off the outer door, where a
guard might sit, watching who came and went. The screens were mostly dead, but
Aisha patched together one in the direction that mattered.

The transport was exactly on time, which surprised her a
bit. It was a weird hybrid of a thing, half land vehicle, half aircraft, and
she suspected it had armor in places where a legal transport wouldn’t have any.

The person who emerged from it was perfectly ordinary and
perfectly casual. Nothing furtive about her. She walked past the room Aisha was
hiding in, up toward the entry screen and the inner door.

Aisha darted out behind her. The rover had a security lock
on it, but Aisha was ready for that. She hit it with Rama’s ident code and a
spurt of his voice off the web.

The door opened. Aisha started toward it.

~~~

The world slid sideways. Everything—the air, the buildings
around her, the planet underfoot—melted in a deep and singing roar of absolute
pain and despair.

It was agony. And she couldn’t die of it. That was the worst
part, the part that almost snapped her mind in two. That she had to keep on living,
and feeling, and
being
…

The sun exploded around her. The voice in it was familiar
beyond memory of names. “Focus. Focus on me.”

She didn’t have a choice, any more than she’d had to
feel—that—

“Focus,” he said.

She fixed her eyes on a single dark point in all the
blinding light. Little by little it grew, until she recognized Rama’s face.
There was no mistaking that blade of nose.

She was back in her body again, and it ached. Something or
someone had thrown her over the edge of a passenger cradle in a vehicle that
was mostly a blur. She crawled down into it.

Someone outside was flapping and squawking. The pilot, she
thought. She was proud of herself for being able to think that clearly.

Rama slid into the pilot’s cradle, already linked in to the rover’s
systems. A shimmer of schematics played across the part of his cheek that she
could see.

She must be imagining that. Her insides were still shaking
from the awfulness of the mindsong.

The rover took to the air with its pilot flailing and
screaming below. The web should have been screaming, too, but Rama had a grip
on that.

He didn’t say a word to Aisha. He didn’t throw her out,
either. She’d won that round, though she could have done with a little less
agony.

The flight plan for the Ara Celi shimmered on the screens,
but Rama veered away from it. Aisha could feel the pull in herself, the song
that would not stop calling and calling.

He could fight it. He was strong enough. He was flying
toward it instead, as straight as time and traffic would let him.

Some of that traffic started howling at them with official
rage. He did something—Aisha was too fuzzled to be sure exactly what. Made the rover
invisible, maybe. The howling trailed off.

She never had been afraid of Rama, but this made her blink.
He honestly didn’t care for laws or rules or anything that existed in this
time. It was a nightmare to him, that was all. Nothing about it was real.

She had to make it real to him. Somehow. He was awake
because of her. He had to wake the rest of the way.

First she had to wake up herself, and get her body under
control, while the singing went on and on on the other side of the sun that
shielded her. Out there it was getting louder, and strong enough to hum in the rover’s
hull.

She clawed up out of the cradle and staggered to the nearest
viewport. They flew in a long arc over the city, angling toward the actual
port, where the shuttles landed, and where spaceships built for planetary
atmosphere could come and go.

Nobody came in now, though ships and shuttles went out at
scattered intervals. It looked as if they were running away from the planet.

Rama brought the rover in low, in between surface traffic
and actual, official airspace. He barely cleared the tops of buildings, or
skimmed around them, smooth and so fast Aisha had to remind herself to breathe.

The rover shouldn’t have been that fast, even if Rama hadn’t
flown it that way. Which told her it really was illegal and probably
undocumented, and now stolen. Which made them pirates. Or criminals at least,
if anybody caught them.

The port opened up just below them, a sudden stretch of open
air and clouded light. Rain spattered the viewports. Whole swaths of landing
pads were empty, and those that were occupied had many more ships loading than
unloading.

“End times,” Rama said, so sudden after so long a silence
that Aisha jumped.

He seemed to be talking to himself, but she could feel his
attention on her, wanting her to hear. “Psycorps’ war comes to a head. Culling
pirates out of the city; sending the quicker-witted offworld before the cull
reaches them. Forcing the enemy’s hand. Hoping they’ll be the first to blink.”

“But they won’t,” Aisha said. “Will they? Not that I
understand much at all, but I heard Aunt talking sometimes, and we hacked her
files once. The other side can’t give up. It’s at the wall. There’s nowhere to
run.”

“Except up and out,” Rama said, “leaving devastation behind.”

“How long?” Aisha asked.

“Days,” he answered.

He sounded calm, but Aisha could feel how tightly he was
holding himself in. Whatever he needed to do or see at the Ara Celi, he had to
get there before it all went away. And then get away himself, but she couldn’t
think about that. Because then she’d have to think about what they were getting
away from.

Not to mention that they weren’t heading toward the Ara at
all, but toward something somewhere on this hemisphere of Araceli that was
screaming and screaming. Something huge; something completely and utterly
alien.

“No,” Rama said. His voice was terribly mild.

The song was gone completely. Shut out. Pushed to the other
side of a wall so wide and high there was no measuring it.

The rover bucked as if whatever was calling had tried to get
hold of it. Rama snapped the controls, first sharply up, then in a steep
banking turn.

The screens showed the original flight plan, and a modified
one that included the port, and a map of the planet’s surface between the port
and the Ara. Rama’s shoulders didn’t relax, but he let out a breath, and so did
Aisha.

She wasn’t sure how she felt. Not glad, no. Relieved, maybe.
Scared. That more than anything.

And guilty. Because whatever had tried to pull them off
course had hurt so much, and been so desperate. She didn’t know what any of
them could do, or how, or even why, but still. Something thought it needed
them, and they were running away from it.

The Ara might be on the same continent, but there was a
great deal of land between it and the port, and most of that had various forms
of restricted airspace. Though Rama might not care, whatever he was doing to
cloak the rover took energy, and even he had to think about conserving that.

Aisha helped him plot a course that wouldn’t trigger any
alarms—she hoped—but that would get them where they needed to go in as little
time and with as little power usage as possible. They’d have to fly through the
night; he wasn’t going to stop, still less find a place to sleep.

She was wide awake, though she knew she should rest as much
as she could. She foraged in the rover’s galley, fed herself and bullied Rama
into eating with her. Then she noodled through the web, not really knowing what
she was looking for—news, she supposed. Warrants out on a pair of rover
thieves.

She didn’t find any warrants, but the web was humming.
Sweeps had started in the port. Whoever was in charge of the planet was purging
pirates, rounding them up or chasing them offworld.

Which explained what Aisha had seen and what she hadn’t.
Probably no one would have time to run after two nobodies who’d stolen a rover,
if they were going for much bigger criminals.

Probably. She kept the stream going, with flags on anything
that might have to do with them or the Ara, and curled up in the cradle and let
herself doze.

~~~

They flew through the night and the rain. Cities came and
went below, with larger and larger stretches of open country in between. The
maps said they were leaving neutral territory and getting closer to land that,
officially or not, belonged to Psycorps. On the map it was labeled
Castellanos Maior.
Greater Castellanos,
that meant.

The warning came out of nowhere, sometime before dawn. “Ten
minutes. Ten minutes to power shutdown.”

Aisha snapped awake. “What— There’s no way! We have more
than enough power to get where we’re going.”

“Not if we’re shut off from the grid.” Rama was as calm as
ever.

“But we’re not supposed to be
on
the grid.”

“Evidently we are,” he said under the blare of the rover’s
system listing available landing places.

There weren’t many. The nearest didn’t even try to pretend
it wasn’t a Corps station.

Aisha’s mind wanted to spin and spin in hopeless panic. She’d
tried to think of everything. The course she’d helped to set, the hacks she’d
used, how could they have—

Didn’t matter. They were going down, and the Corps would
have them. Again. Rama wouldn’t make it to the Ara, and the worldwrecker would
get triggered, and it would be all over for Araceli, and Nevermore, too.

Rama muttered something to himself. It sounded like
swearing, but not in any language she knew. He sat back away from the screens,
as if he’d let them go. Aisha felt the grid lock on and start to take control.

The rover bucked once, and the system shut off. Voice,
screens, everything. They sat in the dark, with rain rattling on the hull.

Light grew very slowly. Aisha braced for impact, but the rover
was still in the air, and still moving.

The light came from Rama. It was low, no more than a
shimmer. It made the small hairs of her body prickle, and there was a faint hum
in her ears.

That came from him, too. He was singing softly, hardly more
than a whisper.

It felt as if the song was holding the rover up and keeping
it on course. Which wasn’t exactly true, or couldn’t be. He was focusing his
psi. Letting the music and the words carry them toward the Ara.

Calling the sun into the sky, too, with long shafts of light
under the shield of cloud. In the middle of the song he sighed, and the rover
speeded up.

~~~

They left the clouds behind and flew into a bright and
rain-washed morning. The country they’d flown into was stark and rugged, broken
into deep rifts and crevices, with sudden sharp uprisings of naked stone.

One of those uprisings stood at the top of a deeper valley
than the rest, carved out by a ribbon of river. Aisha recognized it from its
virtual image, and the trail of petroglyphs winding up the column, with the
deep slot at the top.

It was bigger than she had imagined, and higher. There was
room in the grotto for the rover to land, with space left over to get out and
walk the circle and peer at the carvings in the old, old stone.

The niche in the deepest part was big enough to pose a
statue in. Its edge carried an arch of ancient writing, but the rest was plain,
rough and barely worked, like an afterthought.

Rama traced the faded carvings, moving slowly around the
grotto. Sometimes he paused.

The carvings weren’t in any of the styles of writing that
Aisha had seen on Nevermore. That didn’t seem to be stopping him. He frowned as
he went; his lips moved, as if he had to work out what the letters or
characters said.

The ones that framed the arch were different than the rest,
to Aisha’s eye. They looked more like pictures. Dots and circles, and small
spiky things in patterns that made her think of—

“Star systems,” she said aloud. “It’s a map.”

“Yes.” Rama had been across the grotto, but now he stood
beside her.

Aisha traced the shape of one, and then the one above it.
There was a dot between, though when she peered closer, it looked like a tiny
spiral. Like a galaxy, but not exactly.

“Subspace route?” she wondered.

“Something like that.”

She frowned at him. He was even more than usually hard to
read. As best she could tell, he wasn’t happy. Disappointed, maybe. He hadn’t
found what he’d hoped to find. Or not quite what he’d hoped for.

“This is the way,” he said, following the star systems up
and over and down the arch. “It’s as clear as it dares to be. But I can’t—there
is no way—”

“You need a ship,” Aisha said.

“These aren’t paths for ships,” he said.

“Then what are they?”

“Gates,” he said. “Strings of pearls across infinity, each
pearl a world, but how the gates were made, or by whom, or for what, no one
ever knew.” He let out a sharp breath. “It’s all here. All the signs. The
promise—but there’s no gate. It’s gone, if it ever was at all.”

This was enormous. Aisha couldn’t even measure how huge it
was. “Is there one on Nevermore?” she asked.

“Not any more,” he said. “I fear they’re all gone. All
broken. No gates left anywhere.”

“There has to be one,” Aisha said. “Somewhere, one must
exist. Or what is all this for? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It must,” he said. “I’m missing data. Misreading the
messages. Not understanding some crucial thing, some key—or it’s somewhere
else. Another system. Another world. A new message, a clue—”

Aisha was still trying to get her mind around it. Gates—like
in old stories. Portals from world to world. No need for a ship or a subspace
drive. Just step forward and be lightyears away from where you started.