Rift (21 page)

In the ensuing silence, Mitya remembered Stepan’s cautions, so he asked as casually as he could, “You changed your mind then? That it could save us?”

“Yes. When another possibility presented itself.”

The Captain left a lot of silences, and somebody had to fill them. “The ship,” Mitya said.

“Yes, Mitya, the ship.” He walked over to the bunk and sat down, leaving Mitya in the Captain’s chair, which made Mitya extremely uncomfortable. He rose, but the Captain waved him to sit back down, as though where people sat was the least of his worries. “They contacted us a year ago. They’d been homing in on enclaver radio transmissions, and found us, probably decades ago. They don’t tell us all they know, believe me.” This he said with some heat, and Mitya
realized there was a lot more to the situation than he was likely to be told. “But they did … express
interest
in Lithia. As a potential colony planet. We told them the situation here, that it was a poor choice, that it was a better option to stop by to pick up survivors and continue their journey in search of a decent home world. We did ask for rescue, in return for specific fuel resources they needed. The ship agreed, with the proviso that they would look over the Reversion process themselves and judge how serious it was, with a view to colonizing Lithia if they thought it could be brought under control.”

“Whose ship is it? From Earth? Somebody said it wasn’t.”

“Well now, that’s an important question. What is this ship doing here?”

It wasn’t exactly what Mitya asked, but he’d settle for the answer to this new question.

The Captain went on: “This Terran ship has been traveling for eight hundred years, Mitya, a generation ship. In all their travel they’ve found nothing habitable—not even a prospect for terraforming. They’ve had bad luck, but in some respects their fortunes have been better than ours. Their ship was launched four hundred years after our mother ship, with superior technology. Their ability to survey for planets is leagues ahead of what Cyrus Calder used. They’ll find a planet eventually, I’m convinced they will. In any case, it’s our only hope.”

“People on Station didn’t know about this?” Mitya found that the question just couldn’t be suppressed.

The Captain frowned quickly. “Some did. I shared the information with my lieutenants, the ones I felt had the most maturity. Because you see, Mitya, there was a catch. The ship agreed to rescue, all right—to rescue a hundred of us.” He snorted at this pitiful offer. “They didn’t have
room
, they said, for all of us.
They’re overpopulated, resource problems.… that sort of thing. So you see, I had a dilemma.”

He flicked his eyes up to Mitya, to see if he was following. Mitya nodded. He was—and almost wished he weren’t.

“The dilemma was how to choose one hundred survivors. The pressures on Station were already overwhelming, what with Cyrus Calder’s cockamamie starship schemes and the devotion of other factions to the prospects of reterraforming. I knew some of our people would have trouble letting go of the hopes we’d had for generations, to reclaim Lithia. I myself used to support reterraforming. When the ship contacted us, all that changed.

“How to choose one hundred survivors,” he went on. “Can you imagine the upheaval it would have caused to try to choose who could go?” Captain Bonhert looked long at Mitya, until that weighty thought had time to sink in. Actually, to Mitya, it seemed a lottery system might work, or—

But the Captain continued: “The dilemma was compounded because some of my officers felt that we were placing everyone at risk, that none of us would make it. Because the ship would choose to stay, and that would doom us all.”

“But if they have new technology, maybe they
could
reterraform.” This seemed like a terrific idea to Mitya, but the Captain’s face betrayed another viewpoint.

“No, Mitya. Nothing like that is in their power. You see, it’s thinking like yours that sets the fools to hoping for the impossible.” He stood up and began pacing, while Mitya absorbed the sting of the criticism. Here was the Captain making him out to be a fool. But wasn’t it so that they might at last find a way to fix Lithia?

“Someday, yes, Mitya, humanity will have the galaxy at its fingertips. It will harness the power of suns, calm the seething mantles of planets, travel faster than the
speed of light and command the universe like gods. But for now we have limits. That ship has limits. Never doubt it.” He stopped pacing and looked down at Mitya, perched in the great chair. “Here’s what we are capable of doing. Here’s what we
are
doing: We are building a cannon, all right. Not to implant nanotech, but to put an end to ship’s hopes for this place. We will blast the planet out of existence. We will trade the damned ship its uranium ores, and in exchange they will take our crew onboard. If the orthong attack hadn’t occurred when it did, we would have taken a full one hundred, not just the forty-five in this dome. And we will, by the Lord of Worlds, be rid of this hellhole forever.” The Captain was staring at the screen, with its representation of the deep magma plume. He continued in barely a whisper: “I’m not going to rot on this sulfurous heap of slag for the rest of my life. Not when the stars beckon. Not on your life.”

Hearing this, a chill lurched over Mitya’s arms, as though it
was
on his life.

The Captain was gazing down at him. He was supposed to say something, but he was struck dumb. The Captain was not quite everything he’d thought, not quite the wise man he’d imagined.

“You’re not one of those fools that wants to play God with this planet, are you?”

But what was Captain doing if not destroying like the Lord of Worlds could destroy? Mitya wondered. Then Stepan’s voice came clearly to mind:
Your life’s not worth a damn, if you have opinions
. And Mitya said, “No, I’m not one of those.”

Captain Bonhert was looking at him with an assessing gaze. “Good. I know I can count on you to pitch in. You work with Lieutenant Cody if you have any more questions. She’ll fill in the details.” He waited long enough that Mitya realized he was dismissed. He jumped up from the chair and faced the Captain.

He felt more reckless, suddenly. It didn’t matter so
much what the Captain thought of him. “Sir, won’t the ship be mad if we decide
for
them? About Lithia?”

The Captain said wearily, “We’re not
telling
them, boy. What we will tell them is that the nanotech project went awry. Anyway, nothing they can do about it, if they want their ore. You don’t need to do any thinking, Mitya. You leave that up to me.”

He was surprised the Captain told him that part, but then why wouldn’t he? Everyone else in this dome knew.

As Mitya turned to go, the Captain’s voice stopped him. “Just one more thing, Mitya.”

He turned to face the Captain.

He was looking at Mitya with a friendly but flat expression. “You haven’t been reporting to me, the way we agreed.”

Reporting? Oh. Their conversation before the expedition to the Rift. Mitya had hardly thought about that. And anyway, he didn’t have anything to report.

“You remember our agreement? You would do the work of regular crew, and in return, you’d keep me personally apprised of any trouble?”

“Yes sir, I remember, only there hasn’t been any trouble, not that I’ve noticed.”

“Well, you pay attention, Mitya. You
notice
, from now on.” His voice mellowed. “This isn’t a minor assignment, lad. Can I count on you?”

Feeling hot and dizzy, Mitya squeaked out, “Yes sir.” Then, in a better voice, the voice of someone without opinions, he said, “You can count on me, sir.” And the lie felt awful, as awful as everything else on this day had been.

“Good lad.”

Mitya stumbled out of the cabin, his mind a kaleidoscope of half thoughts. There were questions the Captain hadn’t answered. Like, if the ship stayed to reterraform, and if it didn’t work, then in later years they could leave. But on a second’s contemplation,
Mitya realized he
had
heard the answer:
I’m not going to rot on this sulfurous heap of slag for the rest of my life. Not when the stars beckon. Not on your life
. And then an even nastier question floated to the top of his mind, one he had forgotten to ask.
If the orthong hadn’t blown up Station, how were you going to choose the one hundred?

It seemed the orthong had conveniently solved the Captain’s dilemma. And, Mitya knew, the Captain didn’t like dilemmas.

3

Kalid gouged out another cut from the small block of wood. The knife flicked with quick, needle-sharp incisions. They sat in the same places as yesterday: Reeve on the straw bed, Kalid leaning back in his chair, feet up, careless of the fact that Reeve could lunge at him and topple him in a hurry. His captor seemed content to whittle in silence, perhaps making some point about the knife, and fingers. The man’s own fingers were edged in blue, the mark of a claver as surely as the coughing.

After many minutes, Kalid finally spoke. “It’s not often I have leisure to sculpt.” He swung his feet off the pallet to the floor, examining the palm-sized carving now taking shape as a female form. His eyes snapped up to capture Reeve’s. “But I’ve had my leisure. Now, as it happens, I’m in a hurry.” He tucked the carving into his vest pocket and wiped the blade on his pants, rather more elaborately than was necessary. “We will have, unfortunately, no time for detours. You’ll give me truthful answers to my questions.” He smiled. “Strive for believability, Reeve Calder.”

Something about that smile made Reeve smile too, though Kalid’s smile was in no way friendly. It seemed instead to say,
We understand each other, and that is good
.

The barque was making fast headway under full sail, piercing the low chop of the waters with a rhythmic slap and dip. West, Reeve knew, from the reports of those emptying the slop buckets. They were headed west, by the grace of the Lord of Worlds. Whatever awaited him among these outlaws, he was at least in some measure still making progress. It was little enough to hold on to, but it put him in a mood to smile back at Kalid.

Kalid nodded, once, knife resting on his thigh. This man savored subtlety, apparently, over torture. Reeve resolved to withhold nothing except for what he had learned from Grame Lauterbach.

“To begin,” Kalid said, “I would know by what transport you arrived among us.”

Reeve hesitated. “Do you mean at the Inland Sea or … from Station?”

His voice came with a deep musicality. “Station.”

“A shuttle. We came on an airplane we call a shuttle.”

“Where is this shuttle now?”

It was dismaying to think how easily he might give the wrong answer, while trying to be truthful. Despite Kalid’s veneer of courtesy, Reeve didn’t doubt the captain could be ruthless. He responded: “We crashed in an area unfamiliar to us. It was a thick swamp about three days’ walk from the sea. We were on the raft for two days. So by that reckoning, it might be about seventy miles from here.”

While he spoke the other man regarded him with calm intensity. His nostrils flared slightly as though smelling for the truth. “What was your rank among your crew?”

“I was … that is, on Station I was an electrician. I worked on electrical systems. It was an unimportant job. My father was a chief, of sorts, an officer. My mother died in a Station accident when I was young. I
was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.”

Kalid probed his teeth with his tongue. “What does one do with one’s life?”

Reeve tried to process this question. The knife turned in Kalid’s grasp now and then, scraping against his pants with a soft static. “I could choose to learn science better. I could choose to help my father. Or I could do the easy work, like electrical.”

“You could rise among your people, or remain lazy.” When Reeve hesitated at this summation, Kalid raised an eyebrow almost imperceptibly.

Reeve hurried to answer: “Yes. That’s how my father saw it.”

A knowing smirk tugged at Kalid’s lips. “And why did your Station send a shuttle to our world?”

“I was afraid to tell you yesterday. But it’s true, the Station was destroyed. We escaped.”