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Chapter Two

Joseph

Kayleen, too, heard Creator’s message about an intruder. Her eyes widened and the lost look fled as the implications began to clarify. “What’s out here in the middle of nowhere?”

I shivered, but kept my voice calm. “Nothing good.” I reached up on the wall and slammed the all hands to command bell, which sent three high peals of sound throughout the ship.

Alicia came first. She walked straight toward me and planted a proprietary kiss on my forehead before she waved at Kayleen. She might have been a twin of Kayleen’s. She had the same dark hair, long legs, and fine features, minus Kayleen’s prehensile feet. Where Kayleen’s eyes were the blue of a dusky sky, Alicia’s were a shocking violet. The only other contrast was that Alicia never looked lost, even when she was. She took the seat on the other side of me, scooting close enough to put a hand on my knee. “What is it?”

Creator sees something.”

She glanced at the empty walls. “Any ideas?”

“No.”

“Do you know what it looks like?” The salty-sweat smell of her told me she must have been working out when I called. “Or where it’s from?”

Because I knew her base nature as our risk-taker, I understood she was probably hoping for something dangerous.

Creator promised to send pictures.”

She glanced at the still-empty wall. “Soon, I hope. What do you know?”

Chelo and Liam joined us, full of noise and questions, toys and blankets. The toddlers swarmed around their feet. As if Creator had been waiting for all hands, the walls around the square room lit with pictures.

A metal cylinder hung in the air. Man-made. Beautiful, but it made me shiver. The image offered no clue about its size. “How far away is it?” I asked.

Creator answered in my head. “Ten kilometers.”

Wow. Close, in space. Too close, really. But the real problem finally slipped into my thick head. It should have been past us and gone. I closed my eyes and focused down on the data feeds. The object tracked us, matching our speed. That was the only possible explanation for it not being far behind us by now. The data offered up the object’s size. About as big as a real version of the toy aircars that Jherrel and Caro still clutched in their fat fingers. Tiny for this far out. A speck of dust in a starfield, and it tracked us.

I told the group what I’d learned.

Alicia looked over her shoulder, checking all the wall-screens. “Is there another ship around?”

“No.” I wished Jenna or Dianne or one of the other, older people was awake. But there was no time to thaw anyone.

This was mine. Mine and Creator’s.

My breath came fast in my chest, and I clenched Alicia’s hand so hard she leaned over and whispered, “Relax. Trust yourself. You’re the best.”

I waited for Creator to identify the object. We were halfway into an almost two-year trip. This wasn’t something random from one of the Five Worlds; Inter-system space is too vast for random encounters. “It’s looking for us.”

“Correction,” Alicia said. “It’s found us.” Her nails raked my thigh, and Caro squealed and pointed as the object grew bigger in the screens. Surely a trick of the cameras. It looked new, barely blemished by flight. “The Port Authority?” Alicia asked. “Could they find us?”

“Maybe. But why? I’m going home, after all.” I thought about other options. “The Dawnforce isn’t much faster than Creator. The mercenaries can’t have gotten home yet, much less set up an ambush.” Besides, Creator was alert, not alarmed. We weren’t being ordered to strap down and the weapons systems were using a slow warming up.

Chelo tucked Caro under her arm and grabbed Jherrel with her free hand. She took them both into the adjoining galley, murmuring something about snacks.

Creator?” I asked, signaling I wanted a verbal exchange for the benefit of the others. “Is it communicating with you?”

“It’s silent,” the ship answered, its voice silky and genderless.

“Can you tell where it’s from?”

“My owner.”

Marcus!

Alicia’s hand relaxed on my leg, but she didn’t take her eyes from the image floating in front of us. “Send it our identification.”

I frowned. I loved her, but this was my conversation.

Creator answered her. “I have been.”

Maybe it wanted me. “Is there any kind of data link?”

“I’m looking for one.”

A puzzle. Surely this was a message, or carried a message? Did the probe need to know it was me somehow?

Jherrel flew his aircar into my knee, and then stopped and grinned at me. I waved him away and his little face fell so hard I picked him up and looked him in the eye. “I have to figure something out. And I think I have to be quiet to do it. Can you and Caro and your dad,” I glanced at Liam and waited for his nod, "go and draw that ship so we have a record of it?”

Even though he was only a little over a year old, Jherrel nodded seriously. “Yes, Uncle.” Smart kid.

Liam scooped them both, and I leaned over and kissed Alicia on the cheek. “Can you help him?”

Alicia tensed, still staring at the wall. “If it was meant to hurt us, it would have by now.”

She drummed her fingers on my knee.

“Please?”

She raised an eyebrow, “Well, Liam is rather cute.”

Damn her. Unless it was a joke, and I could never tell with her. I put my hand over hers and whispered, “I love you. I’d keep you here if I could.” We tried to keep one adult per kid. I didn’t tell her I needed Chelo’s steady heart right now, and couldn’t afford Alicia’s high-energy distraction.

Alicia hopped up and balanced Caro on her fabulous hip and grinned at me, and then at Liam. She flipped on the mod she shared with Induan that made her basically reflect her surroundings, and it looked like the empty air was bouncing Caro up and down, only a periodic slight smear of shifting color giving away Alicia’s physical presence. “Call us when you know something,” she said as Caro left the room.

“I will,” I said to the air.

Chelo came to stand behind me, massaging my shoulders. I didn’t need to tell her how steadying her presence was, how the feel of her fingers and her familiar scent helped center me.

I stared at the image of the cylinder. There was no way to get to it physically. Not at this speed. Besides, to find us and match us like this, it had to be all engine and navigation and communications gear. It didn’t take much to maintain any speed you reached in space, but getting speed took an abundance of energy. What message was worth this expense?

Was Marcus okay? It took two years to get to Fremont, we spent about two weeks there, and then almost another year getting this far back. It would have taken the little ship, or probe or whatever, over a year to get here and get aligned in our direction. Maybe a year and a half. A race out, a turn around something—maybe Fremont’s sun—to give the cylinder the acceleration necessary to match our speed. So he’d have sent it no more than a year and a half after we left, and probably sooner than that. I could see its likely trajectory in my head. And the timing—it had reached us before we burned the fuel to start slowing down.

It must have been racing to do that.

What did we need to know that badly? Had the rumored war started?

“Kayleen, please watch over me. Stay linked to Creator in case I’m … gone? Tell the others what’s happening?”

“What do you mean, in case you’re gone? Surely you won’t go far enough I can’t reach you. Besides, I can’t fly Creator yet. I don’t know when I’ll be good enough to fly. Should I use the PA system or call them if something happens?”

If I hadn’t felt that way myself, I’d have laughed at her nervous rambling. I put up a hand to forestall her usual thousand questions. “Trust yourself.”

There was a moment of silence, and I wondered what Chelo thought. She’d never been in space before. I touched her hand with mine, noticing that she trembled slightly. “It will be all right. Marcus is a friend.”

“Go,” she whispered.

I shifted in the chair, looking for a position where I didn’t feel the edges of it. Eyes closed, I clenched and opened my hands, stretched my ankles. What kept me from just knowing what to do?

I talked myself through it. Open. Be the data. Be the maker. Be my blood, the gift of my genetics and the nano that swims in me. To fly the ship I didn’t need to be it, just to feel it in me. The last time I’d let myself be as open as I was trying for this time, I’d lost control. I could say it was in the heat of battle, except I was on a ridge far away from the skimmer and the people inside when I threw them screaming in the sea. Their dying voices still echoed in my head. They hadn’t been trying to harm me. Not that moment. But I had killed them anyway.

Chelo felt my tension, my distance, and worked my shoulders harder. “Focus,” she whispered. “You can do it.”

Don’t think about losing control. Know you can keep it. Fall deeper. Start someplace safe. Creator thrummed through me and in me, and me in it. Data in my blood and bones, until my awareness of the bones and ligaments and veins and cells that made me live began to fade into streams of information. Kayleen rode the same data, higher than me, not so absorbed in it. I felt her register my presence, wish me well.

It helped.

I let myself fill the ship, take the feeds from the cameras and sensors outside. I worked my way into the communication stream from Creator. At this speed, small packets. I tried sending my name.

Nothing.

Marcus’s name.

Nothing.

My father’s. Maybe Marcus was expecting him to be piloting.

Nothing.

I curled back about and watched Creator ping the ship, which responded to every question with its speed and location.

There must be another thread. “Send it our speed and location,” I told Creator.

This time it responded, but only with an opening … machine talk for the way Alicia could ask me a question with her eyes.

If Marcus were me, what would he do?

What had he always wanted me to do?

I sent it a challenge. Marcus constantly teased me for being too naive. “Who are you and why are you in our space? Prove yourself!”

A burst of data leapt across the void, flooding the Creator, captured by its sensors.

“Let it in?” Creator queried.

Who else would have known where to find us? “Yes.”

While the data flowed into the Creator, I held my breath.

After Creator accepted the data from the strange little message ship, I slid back up into the slower, normal world. Chelo held one hand and Kayleen the other, my fingers cold in their warm ones. Their eyes held questions, but they waited, letting me adjust. Creator still hummed inside me in all the usual ways, status and speed, atmosphere and temperature, all the little facts that keep a fragile ship safe. “Water,” I whispered.

Chelo slipped into the galley.

Kayleen’s hand trembled slightly. “What did you see?” I asked her. “What data came in?”

“It was too fast to read. Not meant for me anyway.”

Chelo came back in with water and I drank, feeling the water fill empty places deep inside me. “Creator? Is it a threat?”

“No.”

“Can you tell us what it wants yet?”

“Yes.”

I triggered the all hands bell again and waited for the room to fill up before shifting us to the galley. I filled everyone in quickly while Kayleen served up col she flavored with redberries so that it smelled like Fremont.

Finally, everyone sat looking at me with expectant faces. “Okay, Creator, what’s the message?”

Even the children quieted as the screen showed Marcus seated in his garden. I recognized the light-link butterflies caught like prisms in the purple flowers behind his head. The video was just a frozen image at first, giving me long enough to drink in the sight of him. My savior, my teacher, the man who bankrolled my trip to save my sister. As always, he looked like power. Sunlight poured down on his brown hair, touching the ends with red almost as deep as fire, a contrast to his green eyes.

If only I could reach through the air and touch him.

“He looks so young,” Chelo said. “Like he’s our age.”

The slight condescending tone in Alicia’s voice made me squirm as she said, “They all do.”

I sipped my col, hungry for a rush of clarity from the stimulant. Colors sharpened. The video sprang to life, the butterflies and small birds moving, and Marcus’s face still showing no hint of a smile. “Joseph … or David, whichever of you gets this message”—Alicia squeezed my hand at the mention of my dead father’s name—“do not return to Silver’s Home. Joseph has been declared ‘wanted’ by the Port Authority and the Planetary Police. If you’re seeing this message, I’m uploading a new destination. You must have trusted this ship but, Joseph, don’t be so naive.”

He paused and smiled. Damn the man to hell. “I love you, too,” I whispered almost silently, although Alicia, Chelo, and Kayleen all gave me quick, odd looks.

The video Marcus continued. “I trust we found you before you slowed. If so, do nothing—the new coordinates will be in Creator’s nav subsystem. If not, work with Creator to get as close as you can with your remaining fuel, and we’ll figure it out from there.”

His smile faded again. “Don’t try to communicate with me. I’ll reach you.” He looked directly into the camera. “Trust me. I’ll find you. I found you now, didn’t I?”

And that was it.

I shivered. Alicia looked both angry and excited. “He must be sending us to one of the other Five Worlds,” she whispered.

“I want to go home,” I said. There were things I wanted to do on Silver’s Home. Swimmers mods. Go back to Pilo Island. Meet the other people in our affinity group. That’s what Marcus had been preparing me for—to take my place there.

Alicia’s eyes shone with excitement. Our risk taker. “Lopali. Maybe we can go to Lopali. Where the fliers live.”

But as always, it was Chelo who saw the real truth and spoke it. “That means we have no home.”


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