The Dark Reaches (23 page)

Esayeh looked away. “I can tell you this much. You need to understand it, anyway, before you learn more about us. I was one of Triton’s leaders, years ago. I rose at last to be First Pilot, where Hiso Kimura stands now. And so Perrin Tereu became my wife—she had just ascended to the presidency, you see, after her mother’s death.” His voice was tight, and for a while he was silent.

Linnea waited patiently. His reluctance to continue was obvious.

“The day I took office,” he said, “I entered into the secrets of the First Pilot. And I discovered that our safety was built on a foundation of—of death. Of lies. Of a bargain with demons, worse than demons.” He looked at her. “With the Cold Minds.”

Linnea flinched.
Impossible.

“An old bargain,” Esayeh said. She saw the memory of pain in his pale eyes. “Linnea—the reason they don’t eradicate us—the only reason—is because we’re their breeding stock for pilots. Tritoners are selling deepsider children to the Cold Minds.”

She gathered the shreds of her breath. “How?”

“Tritoner pilots scout out deepsider habitats, find ones that are vulnerable—and the First Pilot transmits the coordinates.” He looked grim.

Linnea studied him in the dappled green shade. “That’s sickening,” she said. “But what can I do? Without even a ship of my own?”

“You’ll learn what you can do,” he said. “If you’re the one we need, if we can trust you—” He broke off, then said, “Seven days. Please?”

Linnea looked away. So there had never been any secret weapon, any miraculous defense against the Cold Minds; only this horror. Which meant she had failed, wasted the journey. Bitter regret crowded tight in her throat.

But she would salvage something from the journey. She would learn what she could—take that, at least, back to her people.

Resolved again, calm again, she raised her head and nodded firmly at Esayeh. “Seven days.”

 

 

 

Sometimes during the week that followed, Linnea had the dizzy feeling that deepsiders did not themselves know what they might do next. She remembered the ordered, careful existence on Triton, with its day cycle and night cycle and perfectly regulated temperature. But the deepsiders liked edge in their lives. Or perhaps necessity had led to a custom of chaos.

A deepsider, Linnea came to understand, kept her own days and nights. Outside of the park, which had a twenty-four-hour cycle of “sunlight” and “moonlight,” the passages of the deepsider city were always lit—though the light shifted almost randomly in color and intensity over the course of hours. In some stretches, the light panels had been painted in bursts of abstract color or bright pictures of people, animals, chemically blue seas, oddly perfect clouds and sky. Music drifted on the air, none of it public, leaking from private rooms and work spaces. All sorts of music, some deliriously propulsive, some thin and soft and contemplative, some austere and solemn. And people sang while they worked, or while they drank after work, sipping the fiery white whiskey from shared bulbs. No one seemed to expect silence, ever. Not even in her tiny borrowed sleeping space off Esayeh’s permanent quarters did Linnea ever find it.

The temperature varied like the light, and sometimes, with a hiss and a roar, a strong breeze would swirl down the passageways, carrying scraps of leaves and other waste to be caught in the clean-screens between sections, where it would be gathered up and composted or otherwise reused.

Linnea took easily to dressing like a deepsider, the first day in clothes she borrowed from Hana and Pilang, then in some she traded for herself with the goods she earned from her work. Bread from a bakery; dried fish after her work cleaning tanks; and after a filthy day spent cleaning the grease from a centrifugal broiler, its owner gave her half the grease—which, she found, was worth more than anything else she’d earned.

Still, after the cool, floral-scented sterility of Triton, she found herself liking the smells of the habitat: steam of cooking rice, brown smell of hot oil, luscious scent of garlic and onion. Smells of people who bathed when it was convenient, which was rare in zero gee, and who washed their few clothes even more rarely. Smells of the green plants tucked in near every light panel, flowers, ripening fruit in the farms, the sharp tang of hydroponics, and the strange acrid smell of tomato leaves—a smell that meant home to her, her home back on Terranova, tiny tomatoes growing in a pot on the porch beside the front door of the little flat she shared with Iain. Again she pushed away the thought of him, her throat aching.

She worked for two days on a farm, arranged through Mick, who had indeed found her old place waiting for her. The morning of the first day, when Linnea finally found the right corridor junction, it was long past seven, the appointed time. She swung in from the tube and caught herself with a hand and a foot in the loops spaced along the walls of the cylindrical room. At first she thought she was alone, that she’d missed everyone. Then she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. There was Mick—small and thin, barefoot and barehanded in a brown denim coverall and knitted gray sweater, both mottled with chemical stains, a bright blue rag tied around her head. “Eh, Mick,” Linnea said cheerfully.

“You’re late, Lin,” the girl said scornfully. “You still don’t get around so good.”

Linnea grinned. “Merciful of you to wait for me.”

“Suuuure.” Then Mick broke into an answering grin. “C’mon. We’re late.” She held out a thin dark hand. “Want me to pull you?”

“I can manage,” Linnea said, stung a bit. And regretted her words when the girl nodded, flipped neatly 180 degrees, and shot across the big shadowy space into another passageway. By the time Linnea had made it across and crawled along the wall to the right opening, she could hear Mick shouting her name derisively. “Heyah, Lin! Hey, Pilot! How’d you find your way out here, moving like that?”

By the end of the second day, Linnea could move around fast enough even for Mick—though she was still too slow at the work they were doing. Plants for the farms grew not from seeds but from cell cultures, thawed and warmed and tended until a thick callus of tangled plant tissue had formed inside the clear jars. Mick’s job, and hers, was to pick out the tiny plantlets from the tangle, pinch each one into a little plastic bag covering its roots, squeeze water and nutrients into the bag from a syringe, and clip the bag into a rack under the growth lights. It was tedious, meticulous work, and, Mick had told her, important; all the tomatoes for the whole habitat came from what grew in those bags, so the next time she ate fish in red garlic sauce, she should be proud.

At the end of a ten-hour shift the first day, Linnea’s fingers ached, her eyes burned, and she was soaked in sweat. This part of the farms was in the flow of the used-air intakes concentrator for this end of the habitat—hot, humid, and a little too high in CO
₂
to be pleasant. She was glad of the quick rinse they were allowed in the farm refresher at end of shift—water that went right back into the hydroponics system.

Even after the rinse, she smelled of tomato leaves. The scent filled her sleeping sack that night. She dreamed of Terranova, and the pale blue pot of tomatoes sitting out on the worn bricks, and Iain coming in late, bringing her a warm handful of the grape-sized red fruits—how his fingers had smelled of those leaves when she took his hands later, and kissed them. . . .

 

 

 

The sixth day. In Esayeh’s ship, Linnea hung in the darkness of normal space, far from any planet, near to danger. She could feel her heart beating hard, pure terror.

“Listen,” Esayeh said, then again, “Listen.”

He, too, is afraid.
“Yes,” she said.

“We can stay only thirty seconds. Their pickets will spot us, and respond, within thirty-three seconds. So, we see what there is to see, and we get out.”

“I don’t want to do this,” she said frankly.

“I know,” he said. “But until you see this—you don’t know. You don’t really know.”

So this was to be another part of the test. She was silent for a while, in the darkness of Esayeh’s jumpship, her eyes on the viewscreen that would show her what he saw. “I’m ready,” she said.

Esayeh settled back in his piloting chair, the leads connecting him to the ship floating snakily in the shadowy air. “Ready, then. Jump.”

A flicker of nothingness, and—

A dark planet hung before her, almost filling her vision. Dark gray like graphite, shining dully in the light of the sun. Her people’s true home: Earth.

But there was no home here. Her wide eyes took it in—the brown-gray seas, the featureless gray-black of the land, the thick, dull haze of the air. But the continents—familiar; the seas, familiar. She closed her eyes, and bright before them was the home of her childhood in flames. It was the same grief.

“No human can live there now, or ever will again,” Esayeh said. “Two breaths, and you would die. Now. Three quick jumps.”

Flick
,
flick
,
flick
, and they were safe, hidden in deep space far from Earth, untraceable—but Linnea’s heart still beat hard. In silence, in the darkness between worlds, she floated, looking at the stars that would have been familiar if Earth had been her world—if her birthright had been hers. Those three stars close together—those were almost familiar already.

When she could speak, she turned her head, and asked, “What is it you think I can do to help you?”

Esayeh looked at her. “You are the pilot of the most powerful jumpship in the Earth system. And—you came here out of compassion. You came so far. That’s why I hoped you would be willing to listen to us. To help us find a way to save our people.”

“You’ve lived here for six hundred years,” she said.

“But we won’t last another ten,” Esayeh said. “Since the Cold Minds’ invasion of your worlds, the raids on our people have stepped up sharply. We are trying to bring everyone in to safety, but some of those families, some of the miners and asteroid prospectors, they don’t want to depend on anyone else. They hide even from us, or they refuse refuge at
Hestia
. And
Hestia
is vulnerable in any case. We need—a better answer.”

“I don’t know one,” she said flatly. “I don’t know how you can be saved. Not with the Cold Minds threatening our worlds, too.”

“I know,” he said. “But at least in the Hidden Worlds you are far from their stronghold. Here we’re helpless.” He looked pale, uncertain, worried. “I had to get you away from Kimura Hiso and his plans, get you out where you can understand the truth. That is why I kidnapped you. You are the key, not your ship.” He reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “Your intelligence and compassion—not your ship, not any device, no matter how powerful.” He looked her in the eyes. “We cannot fight the Cold Minds with power. They
are
power.”

“So you benefit, too, from the Tritoners’ deal,” she said bluntly. “If it ends, the Cold Minds will smash you all, and save a few to breed in captivity—”

“We won’t permit that,” Esayeh said. “Nor will we let our children continue to suffer. We’ve been protecting them as best we can, constantly patrolling with all our jumpships, trying to keep the isolated habitats and family ships in communication—though that’s hard when they want to hide. And all the time we’ve been working on—a different solution.” He looked at her. “But—we’ve always known it could not succeed without the help of your people. It demands that we trust you completely, and that you be worthy of trust. That you understand what’s at stake—everything that’s at stake. The Tritoners showed you the world they’ve made. And now you know the other half.”

She nodded gravely.

“I’ve told you the Tritoners’ greatest secret,” he said. He took a deep breath. “And now I’ll show you the deepsiders’. One more jump.”

Darkness, at the far edge of the solar system. The sun was a star that seemed only a little brighter than the one she had learned was called Sirius. “We must be halfway to the Oort cloud,” she marveled.

“Just about,” Esayeh said.

“What am I looking for?” she asked.

“Wait while I switch to thermal.”

Linnea blinked at what appeared on the viewscreen. Between them and the sun hung a cylinder with a complex surface glowing gray-white with the faintest hint of thermal leakage. After a moment, she noted the scale and gasped. The thing was more than eight kilometers long. “Esayeh,” she said on a thread of breath, “what is that?”

“
Persephone
,” he said quietly. “The deepsiders’ greatest secret. And our hope of life.”

“How did you build it? How did you get it here?”

“Not all the big habitats were destroyed, back when Earth fell,” Esayeh said. “This one was built, essential structure and systems only, in lunar orbit. It was supposed to be called
Poseidon
—it was meant for the helium-3 project at Neptune, a long-term home for workers from Earth, with spin gravity so they could keep their bone strength and return when they liked. It was launched toward Neptune a year before Earth fell. Deepsiders modified its orbit, heading it out away from everything, into the dark. Then worked for a century to complete it, stock it. And colonize it.”

“It’s warm,” she said. “It’s inhabited now? Out here?”

“
Persephone
is our refuge,” Esayeh said. “And more than that. Kimura Hiso and his people talk about preserving the memory of Earth? The deepsiders have done it. All the memories, not just the ones the Tritoners think are important. Long before the rise of the Cold Minds, deepsiders were already building collections of genetic material, specimen gardens stored as cell culture, animal eggs and sperm—and culturally, everything they could collect, from images of Earth to books and reference materials to records of art and architecture and music.”

“Why?”

He hesitated. “They didn’t want their children to forget Earth, even if they could never return there. Zero gee—the bones get weak. Deepsiders were the first permanent exiles from Earth.”