Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) (13 page)

Nothing to it.

Starteller displayed the maneuver for me, and Jenna had already told me everything she knew. She made it sound easy. But for Jenna, killing paw-cats was easy.

“Relax, Joseph.”

I glanced up and caught her deepening frown. “You’ve worked through the simulation with Starteller,” she said, her voice as stern as her expression. “You have performed equally complex tasks before. If
you don’t relax, you won’t be able to maintain optimal contact with
New Making
.”

“I’m okay.” She was right. I could do this. I had to control my nerves. Had to prove to her I could do it.

Had to prove it to myself.

I took another breath, closed my eyes, and started counting down slowly from ten to one as I let it out.
Ten … nine … eight
… My heartbeat slowed. The pillows and Jenna and even the coat slowly faded to background…
seven … six
… Time shifted. The friendly background noises slowed, deepening with my breath…
three … two … one
.

Like water through an open flood gate, data from
New Making
’s
main engines poured into me, filling me, seeping into my mind, my blood, my muscles, my bones. My body became larger, heavier; I was the ship, my skin proof against the icy vacuum of the empty space I sped through, a flash of light and heat. I was the engines, thrusting against my own speed; my muscles bunched as I dug in, braced against it to slow my own headlong momentum.

The part of me that hummed and sang with the big ship fought hard to stay on course. I locked my shoulders, holding my vast, metal body along my trajectory. I was the ship, turning, and I was the small, surging engines fighting myself.

This was piloting. Managing the feel and balance, searching for anything going wrong. Like knowing by the feel of the reins when a hebra smells a predator. The fear that overcorrecting will drive you spinning into a trap.

My human body sweated, water pouring down the sides of my face. I felt Jenna bathing my forehead and chest in cool water.

Dissonance.

Dissonance. The ship fighting itself and me the balance, tiny adjustments one way and then the next. Breath and water and Jenna stretching my arms, massaging my shoulders. Dissonance dropping away, gradual silencing of the roaring engines. A long, slow last turn through space.

Sweat pouring down the sides of my face, sticky and salty. Momentum and math taking over, running the consequences, everything falling together, just right.

Jenna’s calloused palm on my forehead.

Turned, back in a good trajectory, the growling main engines themselves fighting our forward momentum like a goat butting us, legs splayed, stubborn. Winning, slowing us. Our trajectory felt fine and fragile; I stayed immersed in the delicate sweetness of balance and direction, checking and adjusting and re-checking.

“That’s enough, Joseph. We’re stable. Come out of it.”

Jenna’s words tumbled into my ears, tangling in a jumble of noise before clattering into place and acquiring meaning. Time to let go, to be just Joseph again. The ship receded from my body, my mind. Gleaming blue swam in my vision as I pried my eyelids up.

Jenna’s face wavered into focus above me. “Four hours is long enough, Joseph. You’ve done it. Now, get some rest.”

I grunted and sank back, my body an unwelcome place, full of aches and twinges that kept me hovering at the edge of sleep. The clicks and chirps of the computers and readers, Jenna’s muted footfalls, the whoosh of the air circulation—all of it unnaturally loud. I tossed fretfully for a time before finally passing into deep dreams of the ship and the open space we flew through. Starlight kissed my skin, my fingers tingling with the cold.

Four days passed, then five, then six. Flight had been easy, but now we felt the thrust of slowing. Moving around the ship was harder. It crossed my mind that Jenna knew enough about the ship and however its gravity and cabin were set up to free us from feeling the steady pressure of the engines, now in front of us. I asked, and she looked at me as if I were a puppy or toddler. “It reminds us we’re in the hardest part. Ships rarely come to harm on long steady runs. It’s the stress of slowing and landing that costs lives. You need to feel the ship without insulation.” Her look softened, but only a little. “There is nothing to do unless something fails, but if it does, there will be seconds to react. Maybe.”

Jenna sent messages saying we were coming home.

While we waited through the long, slow braking, Jenna forced herself through hours of endless running and weight-work sessions, building her one arm and her long, slender legs. At night, in the half-hour before the ship’s lights dimmed, she sat in our common room and squeezed a metal spring to strengthen her fingers. I got off easier, running an hour or so every day and doing pull-ups in the hard-framed
doorways. During free time, always connected to the ship, feeling it as if it were my own subconscious, I wandered the corridors or the remaining threads of the data buttons. I re-read my father’s words, chose alternate formats, listened to the sound of his voice over and over. I searched the button, but my mother apparently never spoke to it directly.

Restlessness drove me back to Jenna regularly, checking for any word from the planet. None.

We turned again, easier and slower, on target for the spaceport on Li, the largest of the twelve continents. This time, Jenna shifted and fidgeted at my head. Nerves, or more trust in me? The closer we came to Silver’s Home, the more distracted Jenna seemed. She muttered at the air.

The turn finished. An hour later, Jenna drove us back to weights and running. Although she didn’t say anything, she often stared forward between sets, toward Silver’s Home, her mouth set in an increasingly tight line. Her speech became shorter and more clipped. She failed to reset a bicep machine correctly and a weight cylinder rolled off and hit the floor with a huge bang.

“What could be wrong?” I asked. “Why hasn’t anyone answered us?”

Jenna didn’t look at me, but bent to pick up the weight. She wore a thin, sleeveless shirt and the muscles in her back stood out like ranges of mountain ridges and valleys. Sweat formed rivers in the valleys. Scars crossed it all: a diagonal web from the twisted shoulder of her missing arm almost to her hip. She didn’t answer.

“We’ll hear soon,” I said.

She looked over her shoulder at me as if it wasn’t my place to reassure her, but instead of rebuking me she simply said, “We’d better.”

An hour later, Starteller dinged. I reached for the data, but the message was scrambled to Jenna. That left me watching in silence from across the room as she sat on a bench and communed with Starteller. Her back was to me, so I couldn’t see her face, but she slumped a bit as she listened. Just as she turned to talk to me, a second ping indicated another response.

There was nothing to do but watch mutely as she heard the second
message and spoke a subliminal response to at least one of them. She would have spoken up if she wanted me to hear her.

I waited, foot tapping, struggling not to show my impatience.

When she turned, her eye was so wide and her mouth so tight she might have been slapped. Her voice flat, she said, “The Port Authority is demanding that we dock outside the system, at Koni V station, and turn the ship over to them.”

I blinked at her. It took a moment to find my voice. “Does that mean we’re in trouble?”

“It means the Family of Exploration is in trouble.”

“Isn’t that us?”

She stepped closer to me and sat down on a bench. Her fingers swept through her hair, a gesture of futility. “Good answer. Yes, that’s us.”

She’d only told me a little about the Port Authority, but I knew they managed all interstellar travel, most of which was between Silver’s Home and four other planets that were close to it—less than a year’s flight for the furthest away. Which was much closer than Fremont, which was three years away, but with room for faster flight. “Do we have to obey them?”

“A good answer, and now a good question.” The corner of her mouth quirked up, turning her scars into a fan. “We have much in the hold of value, maybe enough to help the Family. I haven’t answered the Port Authority yet.”

“So who did you answer?”

“My sister, Tiala.”

I had never imagined Jenna with family. Except us. Was the call good, or not? Her expression remained blank, almost too blank.

“What did she say?” It would’ve been nice if Jenna offered information without making me dig it out of her.

“She says there is only money trouble, and that the Port Authority is making too much of the problem.” She paused, her finger rubbing the twisted edge of her mouth. “I trust my sister’s heart. Defying the Port Authority may be a dangerous choice, though, so we will wake up Alicia and Bryan. And then we will decide together.

“We had better hurry.

“In the meantime, I will ignore the Port Authority until we are too far along to easily turn for Koni station.” She arched her single eyebrow. “If we get stranded there without resources it could take a year to work our way planetside.”

It didn’t surprise me that Jenna didn’t accept orders.

“We should wake both Alicia and Bryan at once to save time,” she said. “You might wait for Bryan in his waking room.”

“I’d rather wait for Alicia.”

She laughed, a rare expression from her, but more common on the ship than it had ever been on Fremont. “I know. But she knows me, and he does not.”

She had a point. Jenna had interacted with Bryan very little on Fremont. During the weeks she showed us the cave and helped me understand how to heal the channels that had burned closed with my adoptive parents’ death screams, he had been Town Council’s captive. One look at his injuries and Jenna had ordered him frozen before we even left Fremont. “All right. How will he feel?”

“Cold sleep doesn’t heal or harm. He’ll still feel like someone beat him up.”

“Great.”

She hesitated, as if reconsidering her decision. Then she said, “After Bryan wakes, take him down to the hospital. I’ll work on him. If he can’t walk, let me know and I’ll come for him. After I chat with Alicia, we’ll meet you at the hospital. And don’t forget Bryan won’t have any context for landing on Silver’s Home.” Her voice took on a note of irony. “At least Alicia stayed awake until after we took off.”

Jenna had fought us both to get Alicia to accept being frozen two weeks after we left. “You might have to be more careful than me,” I said.

She laughed, her second laugh in a short period of time. Maybe she enjoyed ignoring the Port Authority.

T
wo hours later, I paced quietly beside Bryan’s warming body. He breathed, softly and shallowly His usually bronze skin looked pale against his dark brown hair. Unlike mine, Bryan’s body clearly displayed his core genemods—he was wider and taller and stronger than the rest of us. Always the strongest person in Artistos, he had
been the victim of Artistos’ prejudices. A gang of young men our age in Artistos, led by Garmin, had shown him their fists.

The skin around one eye and all down the cheek below had lost its swelling to the cold, but purple and yellow bruises made a strange map across his features. Medi-tape from the Artistos hospital closed slashes in his skull and along one arm. A taped tear decorated one bicep, bruises blushed his hands, and cracks highlighted his knuckles. A dirty gray cast enclosed his right leg, and a long jagged cut, barely scabbed, snaked up from somewhere inside the cast, rode across the top of his knee, and ended halfway up the inside of his thigh.

He had always been the strong one who protected us in Artistos.

Now, he lay pale and inert, vulnerable.

I fidgeted, waiting for him to move and speak and become himself.

His skin slowly took on color. It warmed his cheeks, crept up his chest, and seeped into the hollows of his neck and face. Twenty minutes passed before he finally groaned and licked his lips.

“Bryan?” I whispered.

At first, nothing. Then he sat bolt upright, surely an act of will more than strength at this point in the process, and looked around. “Joseph.” His voice was hoarse, nearly a croak. He rubbed his eyes and groaned, then shook his head. He must’ve been thinking clearly, since he immediately asked, “When and where are we?”

I couldn’t remember what he knew. We’d learned so much while he was imprisoned, then hospitalized, then beaten again. “We’re going to Silver’s Home, where our first parents came from. We’ll land in about two weeks. We left Fremont three years ago.”

“Chelo?” His voice trembled. “Did Chelo come with us? Is she here?”

“No.” I reached a hand out to steady him, then dropped it, uncertain.

He sighed at the unwelcome news. I handed him a glass of water I’d set by the bed, and stood silently as he sucked it down like a breath of air. He blinked. “Do we know she’s all right?”

I shook my head as I refilled the glass. “Jenna says there are no facilities left on Fremont for that kind of communication, not without the
New Making
. She thinks they
can’t
send us a message. I bet they wouldn’t even if they could.” I handed him the second glass. He drank
slowly and carefully as I continued. “We probably won’t know anything until we return.”

His eyes lit up. “When are we going back?”

“I don’t know.” I reached out and put a hand gently on his cast, noting that it felt mushy now, maybe a side effect of freezing. “But we are. How do you feel?”

He laughed softly. “I wish you hadn’t asked.” He touched his face, wincing. “If I think about it, everything hurts.”

“I’m supposed to take you to Medical when you’re ready to walk.”

He slowly stretched his least-injured leg. As he lifted the other leg a few inches and set it back down, pain flashed across his face. “Not yet, I think. I’ll have to lean on you.”

He’d come in to the
New Making
leaning on Alicia, her slight form twisting under his weight.

He licked his lips. “Kayleen and Liam stayed behind with Chelo?”

I refilled his glass and watched him take this one more slowly. He knew Liam and Chelo had become close. “Yes.”