Tides of Light Read online

  Besen arrived, a young woman of hard eyes and soft, sensuous mouth. She had a strict crewlike bearing and came to attention immediately after entering the control vault. “Sir, I—”

  Killeen’s son, Toby, dashed in through the hatchway before she could finish. He was gangly, a full head taller than Besen, and panted heavily. “I—I heard there’s some hullwork needs done.”

  Killeen blinked. His son was flushed with excitement, eyes dancing. But no Cap’n could allow such intrusions.

  “Midshipman! You were not ordered here. I—”

  “I heard Besen’s call. Just lemme—”

  “You will stand at attention and shut up!”

  “Dad, I just want—”

  “Stand fast and belay your tongue-wagging. You are crew here, not my son—got that?”

  “Uh…yeah…I…”

  “Stand on your toes,” Killeen said firmly. He clasped his hands behind him and jutted his chin out at the undisciplined young man his own boy had become.

  “Wh-what?”

  “Deaf, are you? You will stand on your toes until I am finished giving orders for Midshipwoman Besen. Then we will discuss the proper punishment for you.”

  Toby blinked, opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. He swallowed and rose on his toes, hands at his side.

  “Now,” Killeen said slowly to Besen, who had all this time remained standing at attention, eyes ahead—though at the word tongue-wagging a quick grin had flashed across her face. “I believe Officer Shibo has instructions for your task. Perform it with all good speed.”

  SIX

  Besen proved equal to the demands of finding and extruding from the ancient ship’s hull the needed opticals. They followed her progress on the main monitor. Killeen gave Toby a dressing-down in front of Cermo and Shibo, knowing that through Cermo the story would get through the ship faster than if he had played it over full comm. All the while Toby had to remain on his toes, even after the ache began to twist his face with grimaces and sweat beaded on his brow. In this contest between father and son there could be only one winner—Family legacy and the demands of the ship itself required that—but Toby held out as long as he could. Finally, in the middle of a deliberately protracted lecture by Killeen on the necessity of following orders exactly, Toby toppled over, crashing to the deck.

  “Very good. Lesson finished,” Killeen said, and turned back to the main display screen.

  Besen had adroitly arranged the fibery, translucent opticals, which were too delicate to be permanently exposed. She tilted their platform so they could find the tiny glimmering planet that lay swaddled in the dusty arms of the star’s ecliptic plane.

  Shibo brought up an image from it quickly. Killeen watched the watery light resolve, while Toby got up and Lieutenant Cermo ordered him back to station. It had been a hard thing to do but Killeen was sure he was right, and his Ling Aspect agreed. The inherent contradictions involved in running a crew that was also a Family demanded that difficult moments not be avoided.

  “What…what’s that?” Cermo asked, forgetting that it was a good rule never to question a Cap’n. Killeen let it pass, because he could well have asked the same question.

  Against a mottled background hung a curious pearly thing, a disk penetrated at its center by a thick rod. Strange extrusions pointed from the rod at odd angles. Instinctively Killeen knew it was no Chandelier. It had none of the legendary majesty and lustrous webbed beauty.

  “Mechwork, could be,” he said.

  Shibo nodded. “It circles above the same spot on the planet.”

  “Is there some way we can approach the planet, keeping this thing always on the other side?” Killeen asked.

  He still had only a dim comprehension of orbital mechanics. His Arthur Aspect had shown him many moving displays of ships and stars, but little of it had stuck. Such matters were far divorced from the experience of a man who had lived by running and maneuvering on scarred plains.

  Once, when Killeen had asked if a ship could orbit permanently over a planet’s pole, Ling had laughed at him—an odd sensation, for the tinny voice seemed to bring forth echoes of other Aspects Killeen had not summoned up. It had taken him a while to see that such an orbit was impossible. Gravity would tug down the unmoving ship.

  “I can try for that in the close approach. But even now this thing could have seen us.”

  “We will avoid it then, Officer Shibo. Give me a canted orbit, so this satellite can’t see us well.”

  Shibo nodded, but by her quick, glinting eyes he knew she understood his true thoughts. Soon he had to decide whether they would pause in this system at all. The Mantis, that frosty machine intelligence of Snowglade, had set them on this course. But if the planet ahead proved to be mechrun, Killeen would take them out of the system as swiftly as he could. But where was the crucial choice to be made? No experience or Family lore told him how to decide, or even when.

  He left the control vault and walked through the Argo’s tight-wound spiral corridors. Inspections awaited, and he took his time with them. He kept his pace measured, not letting his interior fever of speculation and doubt reveal itself, so that passing crew would see their Cap’n moving with an unconcerned air.

  There was a gathering, humming expectancy in the air as they plunged toward their target star. Soon they would learn whether they came to a paradise or to another mech-run world. The planet’s strange, discolored face had given him no answers, and he would have to deflect questions from Family members who so desperately wanted assurances.

  Walking through a side corridor, he heard a faint scrabbling noise from an air duct. Instantly he sprang up, un-slipped the grille, and peered inside. Nothing.

  The sound, like small feet scrambling away, faded. A micromech, certainly.

  Try as they might, the crew had never destroyed all the small mechs left in the Argo by the Mantis. The remaining machines were almost certainly unimportant, delegated to do small repairs and cleaning. Still, their presence bothered Killeen. He knew how much intelligence could be carried in a fingernail’s width; after all, the chips lodged along his spine held whole personalities. What were even such small mechs capable of doing?

  He had no way of knowing. There had been disturbing incidents during the voyage, when problems mysteriously cleared up. Killeen had never known whether the ship had repaired itself with deep, hidden subsystems, or whether the micromechs were at work, following their own purposes.

  No Cap’n liked to have his ship at the control of anyone but himself, and Killeen could never rest comfortably until all the micromechs were gone. But short of some drastic remedy, he saw no way to rid himself of these nuisances.

  Vexed, he took a moment for himself and stopped at a small side pocket just off the spiral corridor. Here was the only room in Argo devoted solely to honoring their link to antiquity. It was large enough for ceremonies such as marriages or deaths, which Killeen had duly performed in the last two years, and dominated by two iron-dark slabs on two walls.

  These were the Legacies, Argo’s computer memories said. They were inscribed with spidery impressions that glinted in all colors if a light shone upon them. A digital language, clearly, though couched in terms even the Argo programs could not unravel. The ship had severe instructions to preserve these tablets, embedded in the ceramo-walls, against all depredations. Clearly here was some incomprehensible clue to the origin of humans at the Center, and perhaps much else—but Killeen had no idea how to pursue this avenue.

  He came here, instead, to sit on a simple bench and think. The looming, somber presence of the twin-slab Legacies gave him a curiously calming sensation of a firm link to a human past unknown and yet magnificent. In ancient days humans had built ships like this, plied the thin currents between suns, and lived well, free of the grinding presence of vastly superior beings.

  Killeen envied the people of that time. He paused now to run his palms over the smooth surface of the Legacies, as if some fragment of ageold vision and wisd
om could seep into him.

  Now that the problems of Cap’ncy beset him, he thought often of Abraham and all those from times before. They had led the grudging retreat before the mechs. They had given everything.

  To Killeen and the Bishops fate had granted a shred of hope. A fresh world, new visions. He could liberate his people or he could lose their last gamble.

  And this opportunity had come just one bare generation late. Abraham would have known what to do now. Abraham had been a natural leader. His sunbrowned, easy air had commanded without visible effort. Killeen missed his father far more than he had in the days after Abraham’s disappearance at the Calamity when Citadel Bishop fell. Time and again he had wondered what his father would have done….

  He sighed and got to his feet. His hand brushed the Legacies once more. Then he turned and left, the mottled brown face of the nearby planet framed in his right eye, so that he could study new pictures as they arrived.

  He was mulling over this vision so deeply that he didn’t hear the running feet in the spiral corridor. A body slammed into his shoulder and spun him around.

  He fetched up against the wall, the wind knocked out of him. His son peered into his face. “You all right, Dad?”

  “I…didn’t hear…you coming.”

  Besen and three others came running up, their hot pursuit of Toby brought to a halt as they saw the Cap’n.

  “We were just, y’know, playin’ a li’l kickball,” Toby said sheepishly, holding up a small red sphere.

  “It’s lots fun, on the axis,” another boy said.

  “Yeasay, funner with low grav,” Besen put in. Her eyes were zesty and bright.

  Killeen nodded. “Glad you’re keeping your legs in shape,” he said. A meaningful glance at the others prompted them to leave him alone with Toby.

  “You steamed ’bout what happened in the control vault?”

  Toby chewed at his lip, conflict warring in his face. “Don’t see why you had to roust me.”

  “I won’t give you the discipline lecture, but—”

  “Glad ’bout that. Been hearin’ nothin’ but that from you.”

  “You haven’t given me much choice.”

  “And you aren’t givin’ me much chance.”

  “How you figure?”

  Toby shrugged irritably. “Ridin’ me alla time.”

  “Only when you force me.”

  “Look, I’m just tryin’, that’s all.”

  “Trying too hard, maybe.”

  “I’m tired out from just sittin’. Wanna do somethin’.”

  “Only when you’re ordered.”

  “That’s it? No—”

  “And you’ll belay your gab when I give you an order, too.”

  Toby’s lip curled. “That’s your old Ling Aspect talkin’, right? What’s ‘belay’ mean?”

  “Means stop. And my Aspects are—”

  “Ever since you got it, seems like it’s givin’ the orders.”

  “I take advice, certainly—”

  “Seems like some old fart’s runnin’ Argo, not my dad.”

  “I keep my Aspects under control.” Killeen heard his voice, stiff and formal, and made himself say more warmly, “You know what it’s like sometimes, though. You’ve had two Faces now for—what?—a year?”

  Toby nodded. “I got ’em runnin’ okay.”

  “I’m sure you do. They ride easy?”

  “Pretty near. They give me tech stuff, mostly.”

  “But you can see, then, how you look at some things differently.”

  “Get tired, just sittin’ ’round tryin’ to fix stuff.”

  “When the right time comes—”

  Toby’s mouth warped with exasperation. “Me an’ the guys, Besen, all of us—we wanna be in on what happens.”

  “You will be. Just hold back some, yeasay?”

  Toby sighed and the tightness drained slowly from his face. “Dad, it’s like there’s…there’s no time anymore when we’re just…”

  “Just us?”

  Toby nodded, swallowing hard.

  “You better ’member, I’m Cap’n now a lot more often than I’m your father.”

  Toby’s jaw stiffened. “Seems you come down special hard on me lately.”

  Killeen paused, tried to see if this was so. “Might be.”

  “I’m just tryin’, is all.”

  “So’m I,” Killeen said quietly.

  “I don’t want to miss out on anythin’ when we hit ground.”

  “You won’t. We’ll need everybody.”

  “So don’t leave me out, just ’cause I’m…you know.”

  “My son? Well, you won’t stop being that, but sometimes maybe you’ll wish you weren’t.”

  “Never.”

  “Don’t think you’ll get special jobs, now.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Son? None this changes what we are, y’know.”

  “I guess.” Toby’s face seemed strained and flattened in the enameled light. “Only…it’s not like the old times.”

  “When we were runnin’ for our lives? I’d say this is sure as hell better.”

  “Yeah, but…well…”

  “Hard times only look all right when you’re lookin’ back from good times.”

  Toby’s face relaxed a fraction.“I guess.”

  “Between us, time makes no difference.”

  “I guess.”

  SEVEN

  Toby went back to his kickball in the spiral axis. Killeen warned them to be careful and not get in the way of crew-work, but never considered ordering them to stop. As near as he could tell, humanity had come into being on the move, designed to chase small game that bounded around very much like a ball, and he wasn’t about to get in the way of so basic an impulse. It kept the crew in condition and smoothed out antagonisms, too.

  But not all. As he passed a maintenance pocket he came upon a dozen Family huddled around a small fire of corn-husks and dried cobs. Killeen disliked the sooty stains this practice left on the ship’s walls, but he understood the reassurance of a communal fire. In dimmed light the crackling yellow tongues forked up like wild spirits, casting fluttering shadows among faces intent with their discussion.

  He expected a lot of earnest talk now; the ship echoed with chatter and hot-eyed gossip. To his surprise, this knot of idlers included First Mate Jocelyn.

  “Cap’n!” she hailed. She was a stringy, middle-aged woman with quick, canny eyes. She wore the coverall appropriate for shipwork, free of snags and covered with zippered pockets. The sewing and metal-shaping skills of the Family had come to the fore during the two years of voyaging from Snowglade, giving every Family member a sturdy wardrobe fashioned from organiweave and from the fiber of plants from the lifezone bubbles.

  Killeen made a clipped half-salute, a gesture he had perfected. It carried greeting and acknowledgment, but also reminded that he was in his official Cap’n capacity, not functioning as simply another member of the Family. He was about to move on when Jocelyn said loudly, “We’re figurin’ on takin’ that station, yeasay?”

  Killeen was stunned. “How—” he began, then stopped himself. He must not betray surprise that word of the station had gotten around so fast. Shiptalk was legendary. ”—you mean?” he finished.

  He knew that the old formalisms of Family speech dictated that he should say “do you mean”—long hours spent with his Aspects had made the ancient, smoother speech patterns almost second nature to him, and he customarily used them to distance himself. But casual crewtalk might be the right approach now.

  “Heard there’s a big mech place up ahead,” one of the men said slowly.

  “Word gets ’round,” Killeen admitted, settling onto his haunches. This was the ageold posture the Family had adopted while on the move, always ready to jump and move in case of surprise. Here it was meaningless, of course, but it underlined their common past and equality. Everyone in the circle was also squatting, some clutching small bottles of flavored water. A mi
dshipman offered Killeen one and he took a swig: rich aromatic apricot, the fruit now flowering in the lifezones.

  “Yeasay,” Jocelyn said. “We’ll be having a gathering?”

  “Don’t see why,” Killeen answered carefully.

  “Battle plans!” a burly crewman exclaimed loudly.

  “And what battle’s that?” Killeen countered quietly.

  “Why, ’gainst that mechplex,” the man said. Several grunts of agreement came from the knot.

  “You sure it’s a mechplex?” Killeen asked mildly.

  “What else’s it?” a deckwoman demanded.

  Killeen shrugged, eyeing them closely. They seemed worked up by the prospect of an attack, faces pinched and drawn. “We’ll see.”

  “Can’t be anythin’ but human or mech,” Jocelyn said, “and it’s sure as hell not human.”

  “We’ll attack no mechplex without getting its measure first,” Killeen said.

  “Surprise it!” the burly man said hoarsely. Killeen suspected the man had been drinking something beyond flavored water. Indeed, in several faces here there was a glow, a certain careless droop of lip and eye, that told him much. A clear violation of regs. But he reckoned that this was not the best moment to challenge them. Something more was going on and he needed to find out what.

  “Coming at it from an empty sky—that’s a surprise?” He chuckled.

  “We killed the mechs aboard here!” the man countered.

  “We had real surprise then. They weren’t ready for an assault at liftoff. We had that one chance, sweep the ship clean, and we took it.” Killeen shook his head. “Won’t get that chance again.”

  This seemed to silence most of them; there had been restless mutterings around the circle for the last few moments. Killeen still could not see where these ideas had come from. For some time now he had watched the Family acquire the usual bad habits of an outdoor folk forced to live too long in cramped quarters: drinking, stimwires, gambling, random pointless quarrels.