Mac licked her lips, tasting salt. “I lost you once.”
A heavy sigh from the dark. “You haven’t found me yet.”
The words were half accusation, half challenge. Mac rubbed her eyes with her real hand, feeling abruptly weary.
Hadn’t found her?
Nonsense. Her friend was standing right there.
Or—was she?
Wasn’t that the root of Mac’s reluctance to know more about Emily and her past?
That she didn’t know this woman at all?
“Give me a minute,” she pleaded. “I need to think.”
“That would be a nice change.”
“Shut up, Em,” Mac muttered distractedly. She focused on one thing at a time, did her best to keep her thoughts free of emotion.
A brilliant, ambitious mind . . . a seemingly intractable puzzle. Emily and the mystery of the Chasm. A good fit, attracting the support of Sencor.
Perhaps good enough to attract the Ro as well.
There was irony for you.
Mac flinched, circled back to Emily’s obsession. Why switch to fish biology? Why that particular field . . .
unless
. . . She crowed: “You believed the Survivors were aquatic! You built the Tracer to find them!”
“Must you shout?” Emily complained.
“The sheep won’t care,” Mac observed dryly. “I thought you wanted me to react.”
“React. Just no shouting.” From her tone, Emily was making a face. “Humor me. It’s not easy giving up my ace, even to you.”
Ace?
Mac shifted restlessly.
More old news.
The real Survivors had been found. “It’s not easy sitting on this rock.”
“I’m trying to unburden my soul here.”
Wasn’t her idea.
Mac made her own face, but settled again. “What made you so sure the Survivors existed in the first place?”
“There was evidence from the Chasm itself, if you knew where to look. I did. You have to realize, Mac, at that time research was devoted to planets with ruins or potential for mining. Interest was sporadic at best; support, the same. It’s not as if the IU lacks living worlds to explore, thanks to the Sinzi. And the Chasm—it’s not a comfortable place.”
Neither was a rock.
“What evidence did you find?” Mac prodded, thinking wistfully of the warm, crowded pub. Not to mention barstools.
Easier to stop that hint of rain in the air than Emily on a roll.
Especially when that roll was for Mac’s enlightenment.
“The anomaly,” Emily said with relish. “The only system connected with the rest of no interest to archaeologists or miners. Chasm System 232. Oh, it had a world capable of supporting life. Once. It became so much orbiting rubble—by my dating, three thousand years ago, give or take a decade.” She paused as if this was significant.
“One of us,” Mac hinted, “didn’t take astrophysics.”
“Think about it, Mac. We know the Chasm worlds were destroyed by the Dhryn three thousand years ago; by your Brymn’s estimate, that’s the Moment, when the Ro locked his kind in the Haven System.” Emily’s voice held unusual patience. “Here we have a planet destroyed at the same time, in a completely different way.”
“And no else one noticed?” Mac pursued. “C’mon, Emily.”
“The team who originally mapped Chasm 232 pegged it as a natural disaster. There was no reason to look at it more closely—not with all those planets with ruins waiting to be explored. But we both know the Dhryn aren’t
Their
only weapon.”
Oh, they knew.
The Ro had toppled a mountainside to cover their tracks. Sing-li Jones, chief among the Ministry personnel still assigned to her, admitted they didn’t know how the aliens had done it. Mac shifted to another rock. She was no more at ease talking out loud about their invisible enemy than Emily was.
She always listened.
The wind ruffling the grass. The scurry of something small and careful. The cheerful babble of water over stone. Nothing unusual.
Nothing unusual now.
Mac didn’t quite shiver.
What she didn’t understand was where Emily was going with this. “Say I accept your dating,” Mac suggested. “I don’t follow what this has to do with aquatic aliens.”
“Not so fast, Mac. This one world wasn’t destroyed by the Dhryn. Think what that means.”
“You think the inhabitants of Chasm 232 had some way to protect themselves. There’s an easier explanation, Em,” she frowned. “That world could have been home to—to
Them
—and discarded when they were finished with it.”
“
They
abandoned orbiting rock before humanity stood up.” As if uneasy, Emily moved at last, to pull her shawl tighter as the breeze lifted its edge. “It couldn’t have been
Theirs
. But it was a world that somehow evaded the Chasm catastrophe. So I studied long-range scans of the rubble, looking for anything to set this place apart from the others. Insufficient. I had Sencor divert a salvage ship to collect samples for their experts to analyze. You should have been there when the first results came in, confirming my remote dating, showing refined materials. It was quite a thrill.”
Given her intense lack of interest toward anything off-Earth in those days, Mac sincerely doubted that, but made a noncommittal noise to be polite.
Emily continued. “We found abundant evidence the world in Chasm 232 had supported a technologically advanced civilization during the same time span as the others. Perhaps they’d died with their world. But what if they hadn’t? There was legend, other hints. So if these were the Survivors, the question became: how could they have escaped?
They
controlled the transects; the Dhryn attacked through the gates.” Her hand lifted skyward. “Leaving sub-light. Maybe they had ships from a time of exploration before the transects; maybe they were warned to build them. What matters, Mac, is where they could have gone. Chasm 232 doesn’t have many neighbors. At one-tenth light, we’re talking almost a thousand years to the nearest world suited to you or me. Multigeneration ship—or stasis.”
A raindrop hit her nose. Mac looked up in reflex and another hit her in the eye. She pulled her sweater over her head, feeling nostalgic.
“Long trip,” she commented.
“If you need our kind of planet. But there’s something closer. Much closer. Within a couple of centuries. A system with a similar star, a planet of the right mass. But with no signs of civilization or technology. On land, that is. But it has oceans. Lovely, deep, wide oceans.”
“You don’t have to be aquatic to live underwater,” Mac observed. “We do it.”
“For three thousand years?”
“There’s that.” As hypotheses went, Mac had heard flimsier ones.
Not much flimsier.
Meanwhile, she discovered she could tuck a remarkable amount of herself inside her sweater.
Human Becomes Sheep—had to be in some brochure.
“I take it your buddies at Sencor checked it out?”
“Mac, were you not listening to a—”
“Using a scan from their ship in the Chasm,” Mac interrupted. “What did you think I meant?” she asked innocently. “That they’d closed their eyes and clicked their heels? ‘Poof’ go the light-years?”
“Nothing,” Emily said with exasperation, “from you would surprise me.”
The familiar complaint was oddly comforting. Mac grinned to herself. “I presume your next step is to ask Anchen for a transect-initiating probe.”
“
Aie!
Mackenzie Connor. Okay, that surprised me. When did you start caring about transect technology?”
The night you disappeared from Base,
Mac almost said. She settled for: “When I started using it.”
“You’re right. We need to send a probe. Assuming there’s a civilization there, and it’s still space-capable, they can use the probe’s instructions to build a transect gate on their end. When they do, we’ll be connected. They’ll know what happened. Just think of the possibilities.” The satisfied warmth in Emily’s voice only made what Mac had to say harder.
“I know how I’d react to a transect opening in my system,” she began cautiously. “Not well.”
“Bah. The Sinzi have made successful first contact with thousands of species. They’ll be able to reassure the Survivors.”
So much for caution.
Mac bristled. “Reassure them about what? It’s not as if we can stop the Dhryn from using the transects.”
“It’s worth the risk. If there’s a chance the Survivors can help us—”
“Then the Ro will destroy their new home, too. Do you want to find more victims for them to slaughter?” Mac regretted the words the moment they left her lips, but didn’t apologize.
The truth didn’t come in an easier format.
“The Ro don’t need gates. If your Survivors exist and have been left in peace until now, it’s only because the Ro haven’t considered them a threat.”
Unless they were discovered—by someone or something else first.
“That’s why the Ro noticed you in the first place, isn’t it, Emily?” Mac breathed. “You were looking for what they didn’t want found.”
Instead of answering, Emily said, very quietly, “It began with fear. It became obsession.”
The rain chose that moment to go from teasing random drops to a steady, if light downpour. “Emily—” Mac’s fingers tightened their hold on her sweater, “—you said that already.”
“I know. It’s the truth, Mac. You see, the day came when I received data from a new, unnamed source. Out of the blue. Wonderful, fresh information. Different from anything I’d seen before—than anyone had seen—about the technologies of that world in Chasm 232, about the planet itself. And because of my obsession, I kept it to myself.”
The trap the Ro had set for her.
“Why, Em?” Mac asked, frustrated. “You must have realized something was wrong.”
“It didn’t matter. What mattered—” a swift, indrawn breath before Emily rushed on: “Mac, it wasn’t enough to find the answer. I had to find it first. Do you understand? I’d worked on this all my adult life. To see the end—a discovery of such magnitude, just waiting? Oh, Mac, I could taste it. It was mine. My work, my life, my family—my friends? Nothing compared to being the one to do it—to solve the greatest riddle of our time.”
Mac stood, stretched, and walked to the river’s edge, cautious of the footing in her tied-together sandals, leaving Emily behind.
“Mac? Don’t you understand?”
That word again.
She didn’t turn, instead stooped to feel for a pebble to throw at the dark water, adding its sound to the faint drone of the rain.
Plonk.
“No,” she said at last. “I don’t. Discovery is a process, Emily. Looking for questions that can be answered; using those answers to choose new questions.” Another pebble. She thought of Little Misty Lake and put muscle into the throw.
Plink PLONK.
“There’s no end to it. There’s no first. And certainly no ‘mine.’ You forgot that.”
“And look what it got me?” Soft, bitter.
“I didn’t say that—”
“You don’t have to—I’m reminded every time I look in a mirror. Or at you. So is everyone else.” Footsteps, then another rock followed hers into the dark.
Plonk
.
Was that what this was about?
“No one doubts you, Em,” Mac said firmly.
“You do. And we’re staying here, rain or no rain, until you hear me.”
“I’ve been listening,” Mac pointed out.
Plonk
went her next toss. “You were hunting the Survivors, you received information from a mysterious source . . . then what?”
“Then a man—a Human—approached me. Gordon Stanislaus. He claimed to have sent me the data, to have more to offer. You know him as Otto Rkeia.”
“The man killed under Pod Six,” Mac breathed, turning to try and see Emily’s face. But all she could discern was a darker shadow, taller and still. “Glued thirty meters down to a pod anchor. Ministry called it ‘death by misadventure. ’ ”
“They told me at the consulate,” Emily said. “No surprise.
They
don’t like to leave loose ends. Poor Gord—Otto. He was . . . within any field, Mac, there are those who warn of the consequences of success. You know the type. Whistle-blowers. Cassandras. That was Otto.”
“Rkeia was a criminal,” Mac objected. “Nik told me.”
“Was he?” She could make out Emily’s shrug. “We didn’t talk about our day jobs.”
“Emily Mamani!”
“It’s raining, Mac. Can we move past your irrelevant morals?”
When Mac didn’t bother to reply, Emily went on: “Otto told me he feared the Survivors were responsible for the Chasm. He wanted to find them, all right, but in order to prevent the same thing happening to us.”
“Smart man,” Mac muttered under her breath.
For a crook.
Louder, to be heard over rain and river: “But you didn’t buy it.”
“Not at first,” Emily admitted. “The technology in Chasm 232 was no more advanced than the rest; there was no reason to assume they could have devastated the other worlds. Now we know it was the Dhryn. But then—what evidence Otto could offer was compelling. Details about the order in which the destruction had advanced across other systems, how quickly it had occurred. I checked everything I could—the data was solid, Mac. I still didn’t believe the inhabitants of Chasm 232 were anything more than fugitives, but Otto did convince me whatever—or whoever—had destroyed the Chasm worlds so long ago might still exist.”
Emily spoke more slowly, deliberately, as if this was something Mac had to hear, but hard to say. “That’s when my obsession became—it became my mission. I was in a position to track down that threat; I would. Suddenly, secrecy wasn’t about being first with a discovery, Mac. It was about staying out of sight of an enemy I couldn’t be sure existed. About protecting those around me. And,” a low humorless laugh, “there remained the very real possibility I was chasing my own imagination in steadily decreasing circles.”
“But you weren’t,” Mac acknowledged, heart in her throat. “Emily, the Ro might have killed you then and there!”
“
They
prefer to manipulate.” For a wonder, Emily sounded calm, as if they now discussed lab results. “And I made it easy, Mac. Once convinced I could be trusted, Otto revealed his secret. Far from fearing the Survivors, he claimed to be working with their descendants, that they’d been guarding against the true threat from their hiding place. Oh, I swallowed every word. After all, poor Otto believed it, too. I insisted on meeting them. He told me it was impossible—but they could communicate directly with me, if I was willing. The first . . . the first implant . . . Otto told me it was a translator. From the moment I let it be put under my sk-skin—” At the break in Emily’s otherwise controlled voice, Mac’s fingers clenched around the cold pebbles in her hand. “From that moment, I felt part of something important, something critical to the survival of every living thing I knew. I gave myself to
Them,
Mac, body and soul. There wasn’t room for doubt. There wasn’t room for anything but the mission. I was so . . . sure.” A long pause.