“You don’t mind flying with me?” I asked as we boarded the little boat from the island to the mainland, a small bag of belongings bundled in my arms, Hadja floating politely in the prow.
“I think it is an excellent learning opportunity,” Hadja answered. “If you do go mad during the flight and transform into a creature of the unknown dark, it will be incredibly informative.”
“Thank you for your ringing endorsement.”
“You are afraid. Afraid of the mission, afraid of yourself. You will find it overall better for your blood pressure and psychological well-being to honestly engage with your fear, rather than hide from it.”
“Hadja,” I mused, “I am leaving my garden to fly into the black. I believe that I am engaging with my fear.”
“Yes, I suppose you are. How interesting.”
The ship the Xi assigned for our mission was called thePride of Emniand was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Off-worlders, those unused to the ways of Xihana, struggle at first to recognise him as a ship at all, and indeed his capacity to blend into landscapes ranging from coastal cliffs to blackened moons has come in handy on more than a few occasions. He began his life as a single core set into a volcanic vent some six thousand kils beneath the ocean waves, growing one ragged module at a time in a weave of bio-basalt and magma-scarred, salt-blasted crystal. It had taken two years to raise him to the surface, pausing every few hundred kils in the changing swoosh of the waters to implant another system here, carve out another nook there. By the time he left the ocean, the algae plates and bio-pools of his life-support systems were already close to fully developed, and the first fibres of his circuitry were beginning to interconnect through the deep tissue of his hull. When the first flower bloomed in the weaving corridors of his interior, it was found to be a crimson skald, and so in Xi tradition the ship was dubbed a “he” and his first captain named him thePride of Emni.
Officially, Emni was the name of a small moon around a local ringed ice planet, associated with an ancient legend concerning rebirth and a sacred calf. Unofficially everyone knew that he was named Emni after a popular romantic drama that had been running for eighteen years, featuring a character the captain clearly had a crush on. However, since no one could prove that this was an act of profound self-indulgence rather than a reverent reference to ancient myth, thePride of Emniit was. He was built as a bio-hauler, his generous interior holds able to adapt to the optimal needs of almost any cargo, and his first forty years of service were spent couriering lab samples from bioactive but understudied new worlds to orbital laboratories, punctuated by the occasional secondment to terraforming projects in the plankton/bloom phase.
He would not contribute much to the Exodus of Adjumir, but sending him made the Xi feel better about the imminent death ofa neighbour world, and sending me meant they didn’t have to risk any of their Pilots, and so altogether everyone felt very satisfied, except perhaps Hadja and Phrawon, who’d have to clean up the mess if it all went wrong.
Every ship feels slightly different, when I interface with it.
Most Pilots do not have this experience – they fly with the same ship a half-dozen times, and then they are done.
They have not tasted the fat-bellied heat of a battleship, dry-skinned and heavy-lidded, as it crawls up to arc speed.
They have not tasted the citrus bite of a courier as it blasts from atmospheric escape velocity to FTL insertion in a few skipping hours, snatching an ear-churning slug of gravity off the nearest gas giant as it powers towards the dark.
Nor do they know how it feels to be the only soul walking through the corridors of a ship all others have accounted dead, the darkness in every corner, a lingering, slithering thing that should have been left behind in arcspace. How it feels to rest your mind into that system, to feel the black slip over your skin like silk, to taste berries and ash, to whisper to the dark:shall we againand almost – almost – hear its reply.
The first time I Piloted a ship after theMyrmida, after I had died and come back again, I was a thief, stealing a thing that did not belong to me. That ship was a little military corvette, all fire and impatience. Interfacing with theEmniwas like inhaling the smell of leaves after rain, sinking your fingers into warm, rich soil, then your arms, shoulders, face, your whole being. I have been many ships, felt their bodies as mine, but in theEmniI was the underwater mountain against whose skin the world was merely passing by.
As we reached arcspace velocity and the engines cranked open the rip in reality that would slip us through to the waiting dark, I reached out for it, and it reached back, a warm, familiar nothing.
Hello, I said, and the darkness did not reply.
Chapter 10
We were carrying a small team of biologists with us on that first trip to Adjumir.
They huddled together in their quarters as we entered arcspace, teeth gritted and backs braced. They were waiting – waiting for the sounds of scuttling on the hull, the whispers of unknown voices, the clatter of something moving in the hall, the deepening of the shadows, the bending in and back upon itself of blackened corners and creeping time.
Instead: nothing.
We entered arcspace, and a little while later – it was always hard to judge these things – we left, arriving at our destination precisely on schedule and where planned.
No minds were broken, no horrors glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.
Were it not for the slight shift in gravitational forces on the slip from one world to another, there was not a sign that we had travelled at all.
It is always this way when I fly. It is one of the first things I learned about myself, after they pulled me from the bloody halls of the MSVMyrmida, and none of my passengers would look at me as we began our descent into the atmosphere of Adjumir.
The biologists were on Adjumir to collect bio-samples for the terraforming of Adjapar.
Even before the arrival of the Slow, Adjumiri planners had not been oblivious to the danger Lhonoja posed to their planet and had begun terraforming Adjapar centuries prior. The onset of Exodus had stepped up the urgency of the project, but even with the Slow’s advice, you could only work so fast. Cyanobacteria needed time to divide and die; great blooms of algae had to swell and perish across Adjapar’s young oceans. After that, the ecologists would really get going, coaxing the newborn ecosystem into something if not identical to then near enough to Adjumir for her displaced people to flourish.
“Cave moulds,” declared the short, herb-chewing dock command in aer grubby apron and boots. “That one there is a bacterial shit. Don’t ask me anything more about it – all I know is that some bacteria did a shit in a cave, and now it’s my problem.”
First impressions of Adjumir:
