CHAPTER TWO
Bechimo
Wyrd Space
The process of mounting the Spiral Dance as a pod went smoothly, the balancing with the pods they already carried made much easier than it might’ve been, given Bechimo’s active assistance.
“Good work,” Theo said, deciding to ignore the fact that Win Ton was looking somewhat pale. He was standing tall and breathing well, and if his heart rate was accelerated, well—so was Kara’s.
“Off-shift, now, Pilots; get some rest. When you come back on duty, we’ll figure out a schedule for sweeping Spiral Dance.”
“Yes,” said Win Ton.
“Yes, Theo,” said Kara.
Neither one dawdled leaving the bridge.
Theo settled into her chair, considering the screens and the flotsam log. Nothing new had appeared since Spiral Dance, which was…interesting.
“Wonder if we broke it?”
“Broke what?” Joyita asked from his screen.
“Whatever it is that’s sending flotsam through,” Theo murmured.
“There have previously been long periods when no flotsam has appeared in this location,” Bechimo said. “It is possible that…manifestations are cyclic.”
“And we just happened to be here at a peak time?”
At a peak time, she added to herself, that included the arrival of a spaceship that had—probably—belonged to her great-great-et-cetera-grandmother, on her father’s side?
On the Clan Korval side, that was; a family that…acknowledged a relationship with what they call “the luck,” which her cousin Anthora had said ran roughly around those of Korval.
And especially around Theo Waitley, Daav yos’Phelium’s daughter.
…which brought to mind another of Spiral Dance’s puzzles.
“Joyita, is the analysis of that tree complete?”
“Theo,” said Joyita, “it is. We have been monitoring the sensors Scout yo’Vala placed during his exploratory boarding of Spiral Dance. The tree appears vigorous—this is in comparison to trees in general, from records. It tests negative for airborne toxins or allergens; in fact, it may be said to be beneficial, as its oxygen exchange rate is quite high.”
“Have to watch we don’t get drunk,” Theo murmured.
“I will, of course, be monitoring all life support systems and continuously testing the environment as I do now,” Bechimo said, sounding a little miffed. “The crew will be in no danger.”
“Of course not,” she said soothingly. “It was a joke.”
“Has there been any sign of the tree doing anything?” she asked Joyita. “Interacting with the ship? Making”—she waved her hands in a deliberately meaningless gesture—“communication efforts?”
“You wonder if the tree is…sentient?” Joyita sounded curious, but not like he was also curious about her mental health.
Of course, Joyita and Bechimo would have records of Clan Korval’s Tree, which Father claimed to be a biochemist. It had, in fact, made her welcome to the family by giving her a seed pod to eat—a seed pod it had specifically developed for her, if she had understood Father correctly.
So. If there was one sentient tree in the universe—how could she, the captain of a sentient spaceship, presume to doubt that there was?—then obviously there could be others.
“I’m thinking it might actually be crew,” she said.
“We have not observed any actions that proclaim sentience,” Joyita said. “There may be many reasons for that. For instance—we may simply not have the correct observation equipment, or we may not have clearly identified ourselves as persons concerned with its well-being.”
Theo nodded. “Have you been able to identify what kind of tree it is?”
“To be certain, we would need to do a match at the cellular level.”
“So, a physical sample.” Theo leaned her head against the back of her chair.
“Okay, next shift, we’ll move the tree over here to one of the unused ’ponics rooms. No sense being inhospitable.”
She braced herself for objection from Bechimo.
None came.
She nodded, carefully.
“All right then,” she said. “Let’s get some work done. Joyita…”
“Yes, Theo?”
She smiled suddenly, filled with a surprising anticipation—or perhaps not so surprising. After all, she was the daughter and the granddaughter of Delgadan scholars. Research was in her blood.
“Joyita, please pull Spiral Dance’s logs—piloting and navigation. One copy each to me, to Bechimo, and to you. First one to find the coords to Galaxy Nowhere wins!”
What they would win, aside from the thrill of the chase, since two of them were self-aware AIs and not in need of anything that she could fathom, was left as an exercise for the student.
But the research might in fact be enough, if the flutter of pleasure along the new nerves she had acquired when she became Bechimo’s bonded captain was any measure. Or the extra lilt in Joyita’s voice as he acknowledged her orders.
“Yes, Theo!”
* * *
They were struggling with the third level of data locks on Spiral Dance’s files when Win Ton, Kara, and Clarence entered the bridge. Theo took a break, leaving Bechimo and Joyita to it, and gave her orders: Kara and Win Ton to do a thorough physical inspection of Spiral Dance; Clarence was on tree transport. Bechimo would assist the inspection team with passcodes and bypasses, as needed.
Theo turned back to her board just as Joyita murmured, “We’re in.”
Theo smiled in anticipation.
“All right; let’s see what was so important.”
* * *
The pilot’s log was empty.
Ship history had been wiped, beyond its own name and the name of Captain-Owner Cantra yos’Phelium. The course history was only one Jump deep—the Jump that had apparently brought it to this strange little pocket of space.
Pilot Cantra had gone to a great deal of trouble to lock…nothing up very tight, indeed.
Theo fuffed her bangs off her face, and sank back in her chair.
“In case the ship was taken,” she said, proposing it as a theory. “She wanted to buy time, so she made it look like there was information—important information—to be had.”
“This would be consistent with the public histories,” Joyita said. Theo glanced at Screen Six and met his eyes. He was frowning; perplexed or annoyed, she wasn’t quite sure.
What they did have—the only thing they had—was the route, and a backup route laid in, the coordinates of which made Theo’s head ache.
She got up, went to the galley, brewed herself a cup of tea and returned to the bridge. Slotting the cup at her station, she danced a few steps of a focusing exercise, and slid back into her chair, sitting forward and glaring at the coord string, willing it to make sense.
Which worked about as well as could be expected.
She sipped tea, and glanced again at Screen Six. Joyita was studying…something…out of her line of sight.
“Those coords make any sense to you?” she asked.
He shook his head without looking up.
“There is an anomaly in the coord set,” Bechimo said, from behind her left shoulder.
“An anomaly other than the fact that they don’t describe any place possible?”
“Any place possible in the local universe,” Joyita murmured, still not looking up. He shifted a little, as if reaching for something just out of convenient range.
“So, we are still assuming that this flotsam is coming in from another universe?” Theo asked. The math…
But Bechimo would have done the math as a side thought. Joyita, too, for that matter—and it was Joyita who answered her.
“Yes, Theo. That assumption does bring the coord set into sense. Pilots are not prone to feeding their ships nonsense coords. Even in the most desperate situations, pilots will try to go somewhere. If that somewhere no longer exists, or there is a strong repulsive field between where the ship was, and where it was attempting to go…”
“Or there was an anomaly in the coord set,” Theo said. “Bechimo? What about that?”
“Assuming that the structure of coordinate sets is a constant, across our system and that utilized by Spiral Dance, I note that there are two extra pairings in the string,” Bechimo said.
Theo frowned at her screen, where the coord set under discussion was displayed in all of its lopsided glory.
“Why are we assuming that the structure is the same?”
“Because those ships involved in the Great Migration would have brought the math and the structure with them,” Bechimo said. “There are no records of a completely new math of piloting being developed, whereas there are many documents recording the efforts to map the geography of the new universe and establish stable coords.”
There was a small silence while she considered…as many of the ramifications of that statement as her head could hold.
The Great Migration had seen a mass crossing of ships from one universe to another—their own, expanding universe. Given the lines of the ship, and that stupid coord set, she supposed it made the most sense, as a working theory, that Spiral Dance was just…late crossing in.
Hundreds and hundreds of years late.
Still, if there had been a temporal flux, created by so many ships working the same course at the exact same time, or—
“Clan Korval,” Joyita said, looking up and meeting her eyes with a straight gaze, “has extensive records of this nature, as the pilots who led the Migration were of that clan.”
Theo took a hard breath.
“Right. But, according to what we were taught in school, Pilots yos’Phelium and yos’Galan were on Quick Passage. Where does this ship—Spiral Dance—even come into the picture?”
“Decoy,” Clarence said, entering the bridge.
“That is a shrewd guess,” Joyita said. “Yes. I think it more than likely that Spiral Dance was sent out to draw the attention of the enemy away from the exodus.”
“And the extra pairs?” Theo asked. “Evasive action?”
“Possibly.” That was Bechimo. “Or a protocol preset. Pilot down, perhaps.”
“Check sums,” said Joyita, suddenly. “The extra pairs. We know that the old universe was…stable. There was a steady-state center and there was an edge. The center would provide positive orientation at all times. The follow-up course—perhaps there was a trigger, to entice the enemy to follow one more time.”
“So you’re thinking there never was a pilot on that ship,” Clarence said, settling into the copilot’s chair and spinning so he could see his screens and the rest of the bridge, too. “I mean, no pilot for the Jump that brought it here.”
“I believe there was not, Clarence,” Joyita said.
“All right,” Theo said. “I can understand sending a decoy out. But what’s the point of the tree? Was the enemy allergic to plants?”
“Could be they were,” Clarence said. He turned his chair slightly, so that he faced Theo directly.
“Daav told me once that Korval’s big Tree wasn’t just a tree. He talked about it like it was a unique intelligence—a person.”
She nodded. “He told me it was a biochemist,” she said. “But—”
“I ain’t a botanist, but it seems to me that the tree I just brought over from Spiral Dance and the tree growing outta the middle of Jelaza Kazone—are the same tree.”
“The same—”
“A child,” Clarence said. “Or a grandparent. Not the same individual. Maybe Bechimo has a match program…”
“Leaf,” Theo said, touching a fingertip to her temple. “They need a leaf for a cellular match. Where’d you put the tree?”
“It’s in Forcing Room Three,” Clarence said. “Thought it best to keep it outta Hevelin’s orbit.”
“Good idea. We don’t want him eating alien leaves.”
Theo stood, and turned smoothly toward the door just as it slid open to admit Kara.
“Ship scan find anything interesting?” Clarence asked.
She shook her head. “Win Ton is locking up his section, but no—we found nothing. Nothing! It is as if the ship had been deliberately cleaned, all codes stripped, before it was sent out. I had hope that the logs would prove to be fruitful, but I see that Theo is not smiling.”
“Empty files, empty logs, all locked up nice and tight,” Theo said. “There was a course laid in, but the coords don’t mean anything in our space. Log’s been wiped; history, too. The prevailing theory is that she’d been sent out as a decoy, to keep the enemy’s eyes off of the Migration.”
Kara nodded.
“But this does not explain the tree in the copilot’s chair,” she said.
“I was just going down to ’ponics, to see if we can’t explain the tree in the copilot’s chair,” Theo said. “Want to come along?”
“Certainly,” Kara said.
Theo looked ’round the bridge.
“Anybody else?”
Clarence shook his head.
“I’ll sit watch, if that suits,” he said. “I’m kinda curious to see what’s next to come through.”
Theo glared at him balefully. “This isn’t exciting enough for you?”
He grinned. “You know me, Captain; thrill a minute’s hardly exciting enough.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“I shall observe from area sensors,” Bechimo said; Joyita nodded agreement.
Theo took Kara’s arm, and the two of them exited the bridge.