“We should make sure the crew have swapped out the fermentation vats.”
“I’ll check.”
“No,” Rencki piped. “You check the chair. I’ll handle bio-processing.”
“If you’re sure.”
Qe trilled qis reply, tails raised high as qe tripped off down the corridor.
The Pilot’s chair was a little more scuffed than I remembered it.
Or perhaps no – perhaps in my memory I’d buffed up its black fabric folds, sewn up the odd loose seam, padded the armrests and polished the interface cap. Perhaps it had always looked chewed around the edges, and I’d just got so used to it that, like a dirty corner in a well-loved house, I’d stopped seeing it for what it was.
Little white flowers were blooming in the ceiling, like a constellation of stars. In a secret corner of my garden, these same white flowers plucked from theEmni’s quarters still grew, a memory of my time upon this ship. I had not thought I’d see him again.
Launch clearance was unusually fast, bureaucracy bypassed with brisk resentment by the Major. Rencki handled the initial flight, the fingers of one paw opening up where qe laid it upon the interface, micro-tendrils of connection running directly from qim to the ship computer. I sat in the captain’s chair, off to one side of the Pilot’s seat, breathing slow and steady from the pit of my stomach against the changing g-forces that even the ship’s internal fields couldn’t keep down.
There were no windows on the flight deck, but a screen showed the fading of sky from blue to purple, purple to black. When theEmnicleared atmos, there was a sudden smell, like dry soil opening up after rain.
Rencki said: “Nine hours until arcspace velocity. You should get your immunisations and some sleep.”
“Right.”
“TheEmniis raising gravity to match Adjumiri-standard, but you’ll find support skeletons in airlock storage.”
“I remember.”
I have had enough needles stabbed into me to be utterly oblivious to being stabbed with any more. I administered the legal necessity for Adjumiri orbit – a shot against the usual panoply of pathogens that an Adjumiri would be born and live with their whole lives, and that could kill an off-worlder in an hour; a shot against the usual allergens and pollens; and an immuno-blocker against any fresh germs I might be carrying that could rip through Adjumir’s biome with unchallenged biological glee.
This last one was always the worst, and the nine hours in which I should have been sleeping was instead divided between restless tossing on a sweat-soaked bed and trying and failing to read a paper on blackship diplomacy while on the toilet.
Not that the immuno-protocols really mattered any more. Adjumir would be dead long before any plague I carried could wreck it. But rules were rules and had to be obeyed.
Then Rencki’s voice was drifting over shipwide comms.
“We’re at velocity,” qe called, and I could feel it too, the soft hum of arcspace engines beginning to gear up beneath the warm thrum of the ship.
I pulled myself from the sheet-churned mess of my sticky bed, crawled down the hall, fingers sinking into occasional soft patches of moss flourishing in little nooks of polished bio-formed amber, flopped into the Pilot’s chair.
Rencki spared me a brief glance as qe disconnected from navcomm, before turning to face me directly, all three tails up, primed. I could see the fur standing up on the ends of one of them – the one I suspected of being the lethal shot – smell the static. Qis voice, however, was soothing, pleasant – the same tones in which we might sometimes have discussed the best place to go fishing of a morning, or how well the soil had regenerated in a parched spot of the garden.
“Whenever you’re ready, Pilot,” qe declared.
“You are not nervous,” I replied, a proclamation of a thing that needed to be true.
“I am not nervous,” qe intoned. “It is my firm belief that you are an excellent, safe Pilot with a flawless flying record. It is my belief that you wish to go to Adjumir. It is my belief that you wish to see Gebre.”
I sighed, and reached for the interface, let the ship sink into me and I into it.
Of all the ships I’ve flown, I’ve always enjoyed being theEmnimost. We feel like sap and branch. We feel like leaves moving in the autumn wind. We feel like summer.
Then I looked up, and I saw the waiting dark, and it too was home.
Chapter 15
Seventeen years since I had last set foot on Adjumir, twenty-six days before the arrival of the Edge, that shock wave of radiation from the collapse of the Lovers, we began our deceleration towards the planet’s surface.
Even from space it was clear that the world had changed. Where before the elevators dotted around the equator had served only the greatest ships – the fat-bellied motherships that could carry millions at a time – now they swarmed with dozens of smaller vessels, evacuation craft from across the Accord that had come in these final days to rescue some of those the motherships had left behind: ten thousand here, fifty thousand there, a tiny blip, a meaningless nothing, an enormous, vital undertaking. Two of the elevators had snapped, as the thin finger of their cores had frayed under the constant push-pull between ground and sky. Now little spikes remained, poking up into the upper atmosphere, bending like seaweed caught in the tide in their untethered state, their orbital counterweights free to float off into the dark. Everyone knew that elevators were a terrible choice for orbital transport; sometimes, however, it was the only choice you could make.
