Summerhill (23 page)

Twenty-Two

Reorientation

Summerhill’s last conscious thoughts from before the dream came rushing back to him.
Katherine is on the ship. She needs my help. The Consortium is coming for her.

He snapped awake and snapped into existence all at once, the sensation making his whiskers tingle. The rest of his body followed suit as his pulse picked back up, his breathing restarted, and he regained his sense of place.

Wherever he was, though, it wasn’t anyplace familiar, and that bothered him. He’d been expecting to show up somewhere aboard the
Nusquam
, either in the Security Chief’s office, or in one of the hallways, or even in an access stairwell with Katherine right after he’d run off to try to shut the power down, only to be sidelined by... well, he couldn’t remember what had cut his attempt short, only that he hadn’t succeeded.

But Summerhill was none of those places. He was in a small, sparsely decorated bedroom. The lights were all off, and his eyes were still adjusting to the darkness, so it was difficult to make out details. There was definitely a bed, neatly made, along with a nightstand free of clutter. What little light there was came from a digital chronometer set into the wall and an electronic panel next to one of the doors. A faint ambient humming sound resonated in the dog’s ears.

He then took stock of himself. Already he could tell that he didn’t feel nearly as weak or weary as he had when he’d woken up with Shoön. Patting himself down, he found that he was at least fully clothed, and not in the ragged, shabby garb he’d picked up back in the mountains, either. It felt nice, in a simple pleasure way, to be wearing normal pants and a nice shirt again.

A quick flash of memory hit him, his ears going up as he grew instantly more alert. He patted at his shirt and pants, trying to find where the pocket watch was. His pockets were all empty, though. Even so, he double-checked. He distinctly remembered Shoön giving the watch back to him. Had he already been dreaming at that point?

Unlike how he’d felt back inside the nevereef, however, he wasn’t filled with a sense of overwhelming anxiety at it not being there. Something told him that it was okay and that he shouldn’t worry about it. Whether that meant that it was already someplace safe, or—

One of the doors—the one with the electronic panel—slid open with a pneumatic hiss, and light from the outside came pouring in. Summerhill yelped in alarm and surprise, shielding his eyes on reflex, barely catching the silhouette in the doorway. It reached over toward the panel just inside the door, and then the bedroom lights switched on.

“Mr. Summerhill?”

“Katherine?”

For a long moment, Katherine stood there, slack-jawed. In place of her familiar black hostess’ garb, she now instead wore a crisp, navy blue military uniform with gray and silver accents and insignia patches on her chest and shoulders. Also, where she’d reached in to turn on the lights with one hand, her other had gone to the large pistol at her hip.

That hand fell away, though, as she stepped into the room and hurriedly keyed the wall panel to shut the door behind her. She then turned to face Summerhill again, her stare still just as wide, mouth still open in disbelief.

“Mr. Summerhill?” she repeated. “Is that really you?”

“It’s me,” Summerhill assured her. “I’m guessing that’s really you?”

Katherine paced around, the fingers of one hand combing through the curls of her blonde hair. Yet again she sized Summerhill up, then finally stood still and asked, “What the bloody hell are you doing in my cabin?”

“I’m really sorry,” Summerhill said. “I know I shouldn’t have run off on you like that. I was just so sure that it was the right thing to do, and... well, anyway, I came back to help you, like I promised.”

“Came back to help me?” Katherine wandered over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. “Help me with what?”

Summerhill bit his lip and fidgeted with his hands. “You know. With the Security Chief and the Consortium coming after you and all.”

Katherine let out a familiar, sharp laugh. “Mr. Summerhill, that was almost five years ago. I haven’t been in trouble for a long time.” Her lips curled up into a quizzical smile. “Not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment; you’re just showing up a little late, is all.”

Five years. After weeks and months spent hiking through the mountains, time had almost lost any semblance of meaning to Summerhill, but after having been rescued by Shoön, he’d expected that he would show up at the point in time he wanted, like it should have been a given. “So you don’t need me?” His tail drooped and his ears laid out to either side.

“You’re probably the last person I ever expected to see again, I’ll say that much.” Katherine pulled her side arm out from its holster and set it on her nightstand, then undid the top button of her shirt. “I don’t suppose it’s even worth me asking you how you even got here, eh?”

“I...” Summerhill looked into Katherine’s face, and remembered her reluctance to believe anything he said back when they’d first met. Had she already lost her appreciation for the sense of wonder they’d found together inside the nevereef, where they’d bent reality with their minds and even gone back in time? “No, probably not.”

“Oh, hey, don’t be like that,” Katherine said, and she patted the spot next to her on the edge of the bed. “I’m just saying, if you only came here to bail me out, it may have been a wasted trip.” She smiled again, this time more honest. “It
is
a real trip to see you again, though, mate.”

Taking a look around the room, Summerhill frowned. It was so spartan, devoid of any real touch of personalization or even personality. Lost sense of wonder, indeed. “So, you’re military now, is that it?” the dog asked as he sat next to Katherine on the bed. “That’s a bit of a change from cruise hostess.”

“I wasn’t always a hostess, remember,” Katherine pointed out. “Though, all right, I’ll grant you that military life isn’t where I ever saw myself ending up, either. Still, it was the simplest way to ease myself back into a normal life.”

Summerhill turned his head and looked at Katherine again, really searching her expression this time. She didn’t look distant or guarded, but there was a part of her that struck Summerhill as sad—some part of herself that she wasn’t even aware of. “How
did
you get away from the Consortium in the end?” he asked her.

Katherine’s lips curled into a mischievous grin. “Oh, it was great. Turns out that the Chief was quite familiar with them, actually. When they showed up to apprehend me, citing their rules and regulations and whatnot, he interceded on my behalf.” She looked almost proud, now. “He reckoned—and laid it out pretty firmly, I might add—that since the
Nusquam
was not actually
in
any defined reality at the time, the Consortium had no true jurisdiction while the ship was underway.”

“So why didn’t they just come after you again once the ship reached its destination?” Summerhill asked.

“Oh, I’m assuming they did,” Katherine said. “As a fugitive from Consortium justice, I was to be subjected to ‘any and all reasonable attempts at detainment’ until I could be properly apprehended.” She stretched back a little on the bed, her arms reaching behind her to keep herself propped up. “So, once their thugs left, the Chief decided that confining me to quarters counted as ‘reasonable enough’ in his book.”

Summerhill felt a bit of admiration for the Security Chief, recalling Shoön’s comment about ‘selective interpretation’ of the rules; he thought it an even further shame that the shapeshifting entity wasn’t really the same type of dog-creature as himself. “And you got off the ship before it reached its next port of call.”

“Precisely,” Katherine replied. “And hey, one of the lifeboats had already been ejected under mysterious circumstances. What was one more to add to that?”

The convoluted loop of a timeline involving their original escape from the Consortium played itself out in Summerhill’s head, up to the point where they were separated from one another. “So, then, how did I get out of my cell in the brig? Did you have the Chief shut down the power after all?”

The look on Katherine’s face suggested that the memory Summerhill had just dug up was one that she’d either buried or simply forgotten. “Oh, right, that,” she said. “Yeah, it looks like
something
caused an unscheduled reality breach over on the port side of the ship in the passenger section.” Her nostrils twitched with a snort. “Knocked out power to a huge chunk of the ship. Full functionality didn’t get restored for days.”

Summerhill recalled his mad dash to reach the engineering section, hoping to be in time to cause the proper sequence of events to unfold as they were supposed to. He knew that he’d gotten distracted, but trying to recall details caused him to bump against a hole he had in his memory. “So... So you didn’t need my help,” he said, verbalizing his thoughts as he tracked back through them, “and then I left the ship, you left the ship, and five years went by and we never saw each other again?”

A crease appeared in Katherine’s forehead as she looked at him. “Well, there was more to the five years than that,” she said. “Compared to the impossible things that you see and do, though, I don’t know if you’d find most of it all that interesting.”

Ears back and tail limp, Summerhill wanted to say,
“You should know me better than that,”
but then he thought about the five years Katherine had been through since she’d last seen him. Even if her travels hadn’t been impossible, and even if she’d lost that spark of adventure, she had to have gone through a lot, had to have experienced so much in the interim that the short time she’d spent with Summerhill had hardly amounted to anything at all.

Instead, Summerhill said, “I’m glad that you’re all right. I was really worried about you.”

The cabin was silent save for the ambient hum of technology. Katherine leaned forward and folded her hands together in her lap. The curls of her hair fell over one ear. Her body heaved with a long, slow breath that ended with a sigh. “You’re like the weirdest guardian angel ever,” she said at last.

“Well, I’m not an angel. I’m just a dog.”

Katherine cracked a smile at that, which made Summerhill smile as well. “You know, I always used to dream that my life could be more like my granddad’s stories.” She sat back up, brushing her hair back behind her ear. “Now I think it’s a bit too much like them.”

There, for a fleeting moment, was that spark, that sense of wonder again.

The moment ended, however, as the intercom inside the cabin came on.
“Bridge to all hands. Prepare for FTL transition in one minute.”

Summerhill’s ears pricked up. “Katherine,” he asked, realizing now his oversight in not finding out earlier, “where are we, exactly?”

“Roughly four light-years out from Alnilam.”

“No, I mean like, this room, right here. Where are we?”

A familiar look of confusion came over Katherine’s face. “This is the star cruiser
Ajax
. Science vessel serving with the Fifth Fleet.” When Summerhill didn’t respond right away, she added, “Are you saying you didn’t know that?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Summerhill asked. “I just showed up in your bedroom.”

“Well, how are you here if you don’t even know where you are?”

“I don’t know! It doesn’t work that way. I’m not sure how it works.”

“Well, if you don’t know, how am I supposed to know?”

Summerhill shook his head. “I never said you had to. I just came here to find you because I wanted to help you, but apparently I missed by a few years.”

“God, everything about you makes my head hurt, sometimes.” Katherine sighed, rubbed her temples with her thumb and middle finger, and then said, “And I also just realized that you’re an alien creature intruding aboard a military vessel. That’s going to be fun to explain.”

“Does this mean you’re going to throw me to Security again?”

“Technically, I
am
Security, this time.”

“Oh, great. You get to cut out the middleman.”

Now Katherine rubbed at her temples with both hands. “Mr. Summerhill, please, give me some more credit than that. It’s not like I—”

Katherine froze. Not just Katherine, though, Summerhill realized a moment later, but everything: the flow of air through the cabin, the blinking of the lights on the wall console, even Summerhill’s own heartbeat. No, not quite frozen—just slowed, so much that the world was moving at an infinitesimal, barely perceptible degree.

Then the room and everything in it took on a distinct shade of blue. It was a bright blue, a very familiar blue. Something tickled at the edge of the dog’s mind, something playful and prodding, but also unnerving.

He could have sworn he’d heard a voice say his name.

“—forgot everything you did for me.”

Summerhill stared back at Katherine, who had snapped back into full motion. “What was that?” he asked.