Kimberlin spoke quietly.
“Quentin, I know you hoped the Hypatia would be here. Since she’s not, I must ask if you understand the impossibility of what we now face.”
“We’re not leaving, Mike.”
The HeavyG nodded. “I would expect you to say nothing less. Of course, we must make at least a cursory search of this sector, especially since we’ve encountered no hostility. Yet. But to find a ship in an area where scanners barely work, it’s—”
“She’s lost because of me” Quentin snapped. “So is Fred. If Jeanine weren’t my sister, Gredok or Anna Villani or whoever caused this wouldn’t have been hunting her. She’s my only family, Mike — I’m not leaving until I find her.”
Kimberlin took a slow breath, chose his words carefully.
“Jeanine is not your only family,” he said. “The people that came with you, they came because they love you. All of us knowingly risked our lives to help you find your sister, but the truth is you barely know Jeanine. She is family, true, but your real family is here with you on this ship. The longer we stay in the Cloud, the more likely that some — or all — of that real family will die. Just think about that, will you?”
Quentin again looked out into the purple-tinged void. Part of making the hard choice was hearing, and accepting, the hard truth. Kimberlin had delivered it. If there was no hope of finding Jeanine, was it right to ask these people — and this living ship — to stay here any longer?
“All right, Mike. I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you,” Kimberlin said. “I know how hard this is for you.”
Quentin closed his eyes for a moment. Kimberlin knew how hard it was to lose the only family member he had left? Quentin doubted that. He doubted it very much.
A long beep sounded from the walls: the familiar tone of a proximity alarm. Quentin’s heart raced and his hope surged, but that hope shifted to fear when Rosalind spoke.
“We have contact,” the ship said, her tone sharp and urgent “We’ve got company, and it’s not the Hypatia.”
11
Company
“BEARING, TWENTY DEGREES STARBOARD,” Rosalind said. “Range, ten kilometers.”
Kimberlin leaned against the clear bubble, looking for the incoming ship. “Ten kilometers? That’s right on top of us. Where is ... there it is!”
The big lineman pointed to his right.
Out there, Quentin saw a flash of metal, coming fast. As it approached, he made out the shape of a lean, silvery ship. Bumberpuff’s body bristled, his bits rattling audibly. “Now we find out if we die.”
Rosalind spoke, her passive tone gone.
“Everyone off the bridge,” she said. “Get back to the room I made for you.”
Quentin shook his head. “I’m staying.”
Kimberlin crossed his arms and nodded. “As am I.”
“We all are, don’t ya know,” Becca said from the entryway. “Just take care of your business, Rosalind.”
“Fine,” the ship said. “I don’t have time to argue. I’m activating point-defense systems and a perimeter beacon to establish a no-approach boundary.”
“Negative,” Bumberpuff said, his body rattling louder. “No defensive measures of any kind. Full stand-down. We can’t look like a threat.”
The silvery ship closed in, a flashing needle of danger. A hologram of it appeared in the center of the bridge, showing its dimensions. It was about the same size as Rosalind, tapered on both ends, widest in the middle.
Rosalind’s voice echoed through the bridge.
“I’m not going to wind up as just another missing ship,” she said. “I’m powering up point defenses — I need to show I can fight back if attacked.”
“No,” Bumberpuff said. “Rosalind, my orders are a full standdown.”
“I don’t take orders from you” Her volume vibrated the walls, made Quentin wince.
“I am my own captain,” Rosalind said. “If that tiny spec of a vessel starts firing at me, Bumberpuff, it won’t be you that feels the pain.”
“Rosalind, think” Bumberpuff said. “There’s a reason it has been a century since a ship escaped the Cloud, and that reason can’t be some little corvette.”
“Then I’ll withdraw to a safer distance. The bogey’s too close.”
Bumberpuff stood to his full two-legged height. His body rattled. “Full stand-down! I gave my orders!”
That intensity, that tone of command — it reminded Quentin of his own voice in the locker room or in the huddle on Sunday afternoon. On the playing field, Quentin ran the show, but here, Cormorant Bumberpuff called the plays.
The slim, silvery ship — a corvette, Bumberpuff had called it — drew closer, a thin blade that seemed made for war.
Rosalind didn’t react. Quentin couldn’t see a face to read emotions, but he felt her anxiety ... she didn’t know if she should follow her own instincts or trust i n Bumberpuff.
The approaching ship slowed, then stopped. Quentin looked at the holo in the middle of the bridge. The corvette was less than a kilometer away. The display shifted, zoomed out. As the alien ship shrank smaller and smaller, the representation of Rosalind came into view.
“The bogey is scanning us,” she said. “I can’t wait any longer. I’m getting out of here. We’ll ... hold on, I have a new signal. Contact.”
An orange circle appeared in the holo, joining the miniature Rosalind and needle-ship.
Kimberlin leaned close to Quentin. “The circle is a variable symbol,” Kimberlin said. “It means Rosalind knows something is out there, but doesn’t yet know what or how big.”
“Contact,” she said again.
A second glowing orange circle appeared, marking a third alien ship.
The two orange circles flashed, then morphed. Quentin drew in a surprised breath. Those weren’t tiny corvettes, not at all — each was ten times the length of the Touchback, twenty times as large as Rosalind. Their double-taper shapes were similar to the first bogey, the corvette, only they were much larger and studded with what could only be weapons mounts.
“Now it’s too damn late to run,” Rosalind said. “Bumberpuff, I pray that you haven’t killed us all. You should have ... contact. Contact. Contact.”
More orange circles appeared. Rosalind kept repeating the word contact, and each time she did, another circle flashed into being.
Within seconds, the display showed thirty ships, some so big they had to be over a kilometer long.
Rosalind was surrounded.
12
Hope
“I DIDN’T LIVE TO BE A HUNDRED YEARS OLD so the decisions of an infant could get me killed,” Rosalind said. “I’m taking evasive action and getting us out of here.”
Bumberpuff again reared himself up to his full height.
“You will stand down. I told you—”
“You are NOT in charge. Everyone hold on to something — I’m maxing the impulse drives in six ... five ...”
Bumberpuff reached to the ceiling with his long arms, pulled the rest of his body up; he clung to the uneven surface like a starfish hugging tight to a black coral reef. Quentin stepped to the wall, grabbed two gnarled protrusions and hoped for the best. Depending on how hard Rosalind changed direction, he might fly off this wall and slam into another. He heard his friends scrambling for any handhold they could find.
“... three ... two ...”
Quentin closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.
“... one ... engage!”
Nothing happened.
He opened one eye, looked out the viewport bubble. The alien ships stayed where they were, as unmoving as Rosalind seemed to be.
“I ... I can’t fire my drive,” she said. “Point defense, weapons systems ... nothing will activate.”
Bumberpuff dropped down from the ceiling. He scurried on all-fours to a control panel.
“Let me help you,” he said. “Maybe they landed a signal blocker.”
Quentin felt his weight shift a little.
/>
Bumberpuff stood up quickly. “Rosalind, we’re accelerating. You have control?”
An uncomfortable pause, a frightening pause, long enough to make the skin on Quentin’s arms stand on end.
“No,” she said, her tone heavy with worry, with a sickening sense of despair. “It’s not me. Something else activated the impulse drive. This is impossible — I have the most advanced control system of any ship in the galaxy. Hold on, I’m rerouting my drive signal.”
Quentin, Kimberlin, Bumberpuff and the others silently waited.
Nothing changed.
“I can’t control anything,” Rosalind said. She wasn’t shouting anymore. She sounded stunned ... stunned and horrified. “I can still think, still talk ... but I’m paralyzed.”
Quentin felt that pull again, the sensation that the ship was speeding up. Inertia, he thought it was called.
He let go of the wall. They were accelerating, smoothly and without any abrupt motions. He again stepped into the viewport bubble. Outside, the silvery needle-ships turned and banked, slowly changing direction to follow alongside Rosalind.
“They should be blowing us up,” he said. “Shouldn’t they? We’re defenseless ... why wait to kill us?”
No one answered.
Kimberlin joined Quentin in the bubble. The lineman scratched at his temple, thinking.
“This must be how they did it,” he said. “This is how they beat a thousand warships over the centuries. The Portath have a technology that allows them to seize control of other vessels.”
Quentin had assumed that if things went wrong, it would end with Rosalind’s parts — and the parts of everyone aboard her — scattered all over the vacuum of space.
But the Hypatia was lost, and no one detected a destruction signal...
That could be due to the interference zone, sure, but destruction beacons were like miniature rockets with their own built-in punch drives. If a ship took too much damage, if its systems started to fail, the beacons launched automatically, setting a course for the nearest civilized area where their message could be received. Could the Portath have taken over the Hypatia’s destruction beacon the same way they’d taken over Rosalind? Probably. But what if ...
Quentin’s heart hammered in his chest, his head swam at this strange and untimely source of hope.
“Rosalind,” he said, “do you have distress beacons?”
“I already tried to launch one. Whatever the Portath are doing, they’ve completely cut off my control to all systems.”
Over a thousand ships lost, most of them warships, yet not one had sent a destruction or distress beacon. Distress beacons had to be fired manually, something the Portath could obviously block. But the destruction beacons were automatic — what if the reason none had been found was because none of those missing ships had actually been destroyed?
“Everyone, stay calm,” Quentin said. “I don’t think they’re going to blow us up. They’re taking us somewhere.”
Kimberlin rubbed a big hand across his big face. “Wherever that is, Quentin, nothing says they won’t kill us when we get there. And even if they don’t, history tells us quite clearly that we’ll never leave.”
Quentin hadn’t thought of that; some of his hope dwindled away, but not all — Jeanine and Fred might still be alive.
13
Bumps
QUENTIN AND THE OTHERS PACKED INTO the viewport bubble. Maybe Rosalind could have made more room for them, but nobody wanted to bother her with such a triviality. Everyone wedged in uncomfortably, except for Doc Patah, who floated above them all.
They stared out at what might be their fate: a green and purple planet, the size of a beach ball but quickly growing larger, three-quarters illuminated by the light of the closest star.
“It could be Thew,” Kimberlin said. “Or Faskah. Those are the only Portath planets anyone has ever heard of.”
“No lights,” Crazy George said. “Perhaps their culture turns in when the sun goes down.”
“That would suck,” John said as he chewed. Rosalind’s supply of Human food apparently included popcorn. John had cooked up a bag from which he now ate, cramming handfuls into his mouth and slapping Ju’s hand when his brother tried to get some.
If John knew he had flecks of greasy white stuck on his lips and chin, even a small bit on his cheek, he didn’t make any effort to clean them off.
“A whole planet that goes to bed at night?” He shoved a fresh handful into his mouth. “That’s a whole planet that doesn’t know how to party. Maybe we are dead, and this is hell.”
Quentin didn’t know what to make of it. The dark side of the planet was just that: dark. It seemed odd. He’d traveled to many worlds; the buildings, vehicles and streetlights of densely packed urban sprawls always combined to create a bright glow.
But not here.
“Hard to imagine all the sentients on a planet turning off the lights when night falls,” he said.
Kimberlin let out a dismissive grunt. “With religion, all manner of behavior is possible. But the more obvious answer is likely — there are no lights to turn on in the first place. Rosalind, are your sensors still functional?”
“They are,” the ship said. “At least I can still control something. I detect no civilization on that planet. No cities, no towns, no buildings ... bupkis. There are some ships in low orbit, but we’re too far away to make out any details.”
Kimberlin scratched at his temple. “That doesn’t make sense. It looks like a viable planet, covered in plant life. What’s the atmospheric composition?”
“H-Class mesoplanet,” Rosalind said. “Mostly nitrogen, oxygen, argon — roughly the same percentages as Earth.”
Becca nodded. “It would support Humans, Ki, Sklorno, Quyth and Harrah. A planet like that is something any of those governments would go to war to possess. Even if the Portath can’t survive in that type of atmosphere, how come there’s no self-contained installations for mining and other resource gathering?”
George pointed out the viewport window, not at the planet — which looked larger by the second — but to the left of it.
“Another Portath ship,” he said. “And it looks like a monster.”
Quentin saw it, too: a flash of metal gleaming in the sun’s light: Rosalind was headed straight for it. As they drew closer, he could make out more detail. The ship looked bumpy, coated with little metallic flecks reflecting the light at different angles.
“Rosalind, how big is that ship out there?”
The walls sighed. “What is this, twenty questions? I don’t really care how big it is. We’ll see soon enough. We’re going where we’re going. Do we have to keep talking about it?”
John shook his head. “Q, this ship needs a good smack in the mouth.”
Ju finally got past his brother’s blocks and grabbed a handful of popcorn.
“Ships don’t have mouths,” Ju said, then shoved the popcorn in his own before John could try and take it away.
As Rosalind drew closer to the ship, Quentin made out more details. The sparkling flecks ... they had regular shapes, familiar shapes.
“High One,” he said. “Those bumps on the hull ... are those other ships?”
Everyone watched in silence as the answer soon became obvious. The long, bumpy ship wasn’t bumpy at all; smaller vessels clung to a smooth hull.
“It’s massive,” Bumberpuff said. “I’m afraid to say, I think that ship is bigger than the Grieve.”
There was no mistaking the disappointment in his voice. The civilized galaxy hated and feared the Prawatt, spoke of the race as if they were barbaric monsters, but Bumberpuff’s people took pride in the fact that they built the largest vessels in history. That was obviously no longer the case; it had probably never been the case to begin with.
The walls let out the longest sigh yet, a sound of utter exhaustion and exasperation.
“Before you ask, it’s eight kilometers long,” Rosalind said. “That’s twice the length of the Grie
ve, around five times its mass. Not only have I been kidnapped, but now we find out the biggest ship in the galaxy isn’t one of ours. Fantastic.”
The sheer scope of the huge vessel started to hit home, particularly as the ships on its hull became recognizable forms. Military cruisers and battleships — considered large in their own regard — were like ants on a log.
Kimberlin pointed to the right.
“I think that’s the Chan Cheng,” he said. “I saw it in a documentary about the first League of Planets flotilla to enter Portath space. Those ships entered the Cloud a hundred and fifty years ago and were never heard from again.”
The others started to call out names of ships they recognized from movies, documentaries and famous images. So many ships had gone missing in the Cloud — finally, those ships were found.
Quentin tried to hide his excitement. All of the ships on that massive hull, every last one of them, looked perfectly intact. Still and unmoving, sure, but he saw no superficial damage on any of them.
He looked up and down the impossibly long hull, hoping to see the tiny Hypatia. The lines of a ship caught his focus: a Purist Nation destroyer, the Israfil. He’d learned about it back in the third grade, one of the few lessons that he’d found interesting. A hundred and forty-five years ago, the Israfil had been lost along with seventy-seven other ships that had pursued fleeing Tower vessels into the Cloud.
Bumberpuff pointed a long-fingered arm, down and to the left, at a Prawatt vessel that seemed more giant snake than spaceship.
“That’s Mister Muttonchops,” he said. “I’m sure of it. Muttonchops was a famed adventurer that set out to explore the Portath Cloud around sixty years ago.”
“It can’t be,” Rosalind said. She sounded surprised, delighted and terrified all at the same time. “Mister Muttonchops? Oh, Yahweh, it is him.”
Quentin saw John rolling his eyes at Ju. John mouthed the words Mister Muttonchops, then circled a finger near his temple: what a crazy name. Ju nodded, then quickly snagged a spilling handful of popcorn and shoved it in his mouth.