Children of Zanar 1: The Zanari Inheritance Read online

The bar had a rough, industrial quality to it. It was a little like the bar Kaya had met Thea and Jinny in, which seemed to make sense given the environment. There were tables scattered liberally around the floor and Thea selected one at the back where she could keep her eyes on the door and her back to a wall. However, instead of painted concrete walls, this place had metal panelling, exposed pipes, caged lights hanging from the ceiling, a couple of screens showing the local news channel, and a girl in a skimpy outfit dancing on one end of the bar.

  ‘Try the beer,’ Thea said. ‘It’s brewed on the premises, and it is the only reason we’re here.’

  Wrinkling her nose, Kaya tried the beer. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘That’s actually… quite nice.’ It was a light beer, but she could taste fruit. What fruit was a complete unknown, but it was kind of like drinking a subtly flavoured fruit juice.

  ‘Brewer knows his stuff. And he does a good job of filtering and sterilising the water before he uses it. A lot of people end up with stomach complaints from drinking the water on Harroway. You get over it after a few weeks, but it’s no fun. How was your lesson with Sienna?’

  ‘Oh, uh… There were a lot of walls.’

  Thea almost spat her beer over the table. ‘Not the walls. I haven’t done that exercise since basic training. That’s, uh, too long ago to mention. I must have spent weeks of my life imagining walls.’

  ‘Something to look forward to then,’ Kaya said, grimacing.

  ‘Well, Geo won’t have you imagining walls. We’ll get you in with him tomorrow. Get your lessons started. It’ll at least give you something to work with, even if you decide not to stay with us.’

  ‘I can’t imagine where I’ll go if I don’t stay.’

  ‘That is no reason to stay. There’s always somewhere you can make your home. Home is where you choose to be.’

  ‘Can’t say I agree with that. I’d choose to be on Sadrine’s Drift with my family, and I bet you’d prefer to be living on Zanar Prime.’

  Thea gave a small smile. ‘Very well, sometimes our choices are limited.’

  ‘If I can learn what I wanted to learn anyway, and be safe, then I see no point in being anywhere other than aboard the Oracle. I–’ Kaya stopped abruptly as something on the news stream caught her attention.

  ‘…has been released by BCU Security. A colony event was declared twelve days ago along with a system-wide interdiction, but no reason was given for the actions. A release from BCU Security yesterday indicated that a virulent plague spread through the colony, which has now been sterilised and quarantined under BCU statutes for disease control.’

  The voice was backed by various graphics of the Sadrine’s Drift system, its relation to Harroway and a few other stars, and some stock pictures of Sadrine’s Landing which Kaya knew had been taken before she was born. The delivery was flat, matter-of-fact, just another news story.

  ‘That’s a flat-out lie!’ Kaya hissed. ‘That’s not even pushing the filarax angle. That’s–’

  ‘A lie to cover up a lie,’ Thea said. ‘That seems… alarmingly over-complex.’

  ‘It’s certainly alarming.’

  ‘Yes, but why? Why bother with a cover-up like that? What’s the point?’

  Oracle of Zanar.

  ‘Commerce,’ Jay said flatly. ‘They want an excuse that doesn’t affect commerce.’ They were sitting around the lounge, Jay on one sofa, Kaya and Thea on another, and Cassandra standing beside Thea like a guardian angel.

  Kaya opened her mouth to say something, but Thea got in first. ‘Makes a degree of sense.’

  ‘What?!’ Kaya squeaked.

  ‘The filarax raids at the end of the Solar Empire and on to thirty years ago caused a lot of commercial disruption. BCU Security’s power comes from the fact that they slowly drove the raiders back. We’ve had thirty years of free movement, no attacks on settlements… Piracy is still a problem, but it hasn’t quite got the scare factor of a filarax ship coming out of the black at you. I can believe they’d try to hide the fact that the filarax are back.’

  ‘But they aren’t back!’

  ‘No, but someone put effort into making it look like they are. Someone who knew that the BCU would want that lie hidden behind another one.’

  ‘It’s kind of insane,’ Jay said, ‘but the Bowrains will do anything to keep hold of the power they have. Any of the big families, houses, and corps will.’

  ‘It’s not the Bowrains,’ Thea said.

  ‘How can you–’

  ‘If it was the Bowrains,’ Cassandra said, ‘they would have simply used their contacts within the union to make the colony go away. A young colony like that? They might have simply been able to vanish it. It’s likely no one would have known everyone was dead for years.’

  ‘I’d have known,’ Kaya pointed out. ‘And Security was chasing me.’

  ‘Except that they didn’t freeze your account or flag your ID,’ Thea said. She looked up at Cassandra. ‘There’s a Security station here, do you think you could dig out any details from their system?’

  ‘Of course,’ Cassandra replied.

  ‘Right. Jay, what did your contacts say?’

  ‘They didn’t confirm that the Kraggans attacked Sadrine’s Drift, but they did tell me about two Kraggan heavy cruisers that came through Harroway around the nineteenth. Dropped in from hyperspace, picked up some supplies of some kind, and then jumped out without waiting. No one saw them come back this way, but they could’ve gone straight back to Teladish.’

  Thea nodded and turned her head to look out toward the entrance corridor. She nodded again. ‘Fay is plotting us a course to Teladish. We’ll leave as soon as you’ve got that data, Cassy.’

  Cassandra nodded and started out of the room. ‘If it’s there, I’ll find it.’

  57/1/483.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’

  Kaya looked around to find Jay standing over her, smiling. She returned the smile. ‘Not even tired. I’m not really sure what time I’m on. All the oversleeping and working to Drift time…’ She shook her head. ‘What calendar do they use on Harroway Alpha?’

  Jay walked around her and sat down beside her on the sofa. ‘Bowrain Commercial. They don’t adjust for the local year.’

  ‘They don’t?’

  ‘No point. Harroway Prime has a year, sure, but you’d get the weird kinks from adding in Alpha’s rotation around Prime on top of Prime’s rotation around the sun, and everyone lives underground anyway. There aren’t really any seasons and the daylight comes from overhead lamps, which are always on. So, to make it simple, they run everything on the BCC. Twenty-four-hour days, seven-day weeks, three-sixty-five-day years.’ He gave a shrug. ‘It works. Not sure I could get used to eighteen-hour days. I’d go nuts trying to get everything done.’

  Kaya grinned. ‘You get used to it. I mean, it was all I was ever used to, and then I went to Abertine and the days were so long. Worse, the nights seemed to go on forever.’

  ‘Where I grew up, the days were twenty-one hours. It’s a nice middle ground, you know? You could get things done in a day like that. The years… The years were crazy. Over two thousand local days to the year. I mean, we had seasons, but it was like a standard year per season. Not the warmest place in the galaxy either, but we managed.’

  ‘It was always hot on Sadrine’s Drift. Great growing weather, of course.’ Kaya giggled. ‘And then I decided to go to school on Abertine.’

  ‘Huh, my home wasn’t as cold as Abertine. Abertine’s just short of an ice block. Tell me about Sadrine’s Drift. What was it like?’

  Kaya raised her eyebrows and puffed out her cheeks. ‘Oh… Well, it was an agricultural world, but you know that.’

  ‘What did your family grow?’

  ‘Corn. We ran five fields a year, one for seed, the rest for us and trade. Fibre trees. We always had a small plantation of them growing and we were expanding it. One of our neighbours had the machinery to make it into cloth and thread. We had a pretty good thing going there. And we grew cabbag
e, but well away from the house. If you’ve ever been near a cabbage field, you’d know why.’

  Jay laughed with her, and soon she was describing her walk to school and playing in the fields with her brother and sister. Somehow it did not seem to hurt as much to think about them when all she was doing was describing the good times, and there had been a lot of good times. So Kaya just kept talking, and Jay just kept listening.

  Oracle of Zanar, Hyperspace.

  Kaya was beginning to wonder whether she would ever get her body clock straight again when she walked down the corridor to Geogracus’s habitat. She had missed the transition to hyperspace entirely having gone to bed at three, and that made her wonder when Cassandra slept because the omnipresent mistress of the Oracle seemed to be around whenever you needed her. Not that Kaya regretted getting to bed so late: her talk with Jay had been nice, and it had made the ache in her chest fade a little more.

  Geogracus was in his cabin when Kaya found him, dressed in a tent-like robe rather than the kilt he had been wearing on their first meeting. Kaya could only be thankful for that. His cabin was… somehow what Kaya would have expected if she had thought about it. The lounge had one chair in it, a large one designed for Geogracus’s bulk, and a sofa for more normally proportioned people. There were few ornaments, presumably to give plenty of space for the big man to move in, but there were pictures on the walls which looked old and were of nowhere Kaya recognised. The doors into the bedroom and bathroom were extra wide.

  ‘Jinny will be here in about thirty minutes,’ Geogracus said as soon as Kaya walked in the door. ‘I want to assess your current skills and she can be your test subject.’

  ‘Uh, okay,’ Kaya said. ‘And good morning, Geogracus.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Good morning. Now, take a seat. I wish to discuss a few things before we get down to the core of the task. First, you can analyse a patient for signs of ill health, correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how long does it take you to get a full picture?’

  Kaya shifted a little in her seat, hoping it looked like she was getting comfortable. ‘I’ve never done it in under ten minutes.’

  ‘That’s quite reasonable. Some people never manage to reduce the time below an hour. There’s no need to study, you seem to grasp the concept well enough, but you should practise. Any of the crew should be able to spare you a quarter of an hour to sit still and be looked at. Try to get the human to participate. You may notice the differences in physiology.’

  ‘Okay. I can do that.’

  ‘Good. You’re nervous.’

  Kaya frowned. Clearly, Geogracus could run a scan a lot faster than she could. More or less instantaneously in fact. There was no point in denying her state of mind; she always received some basic indication of a subject’s emotional state when she did her scans so he almost certainly did too. ‘First lesson with a new teacher, and…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You’re kind of intimidating.’

  Kaya was not sure what reaction she was expecting after an admission like that, but the roar of laughter she got was not it. ‘Intimidating?’ Geogracus said after a bout of hearty laughter. ‘Never been called that before. Fat, bulbous, acerbic. I like “acerbic,” though my favourite was “obese clown with the personality of a dried fish.”’

  ‘The person who said that must’ve been a powerful psi.’

  ‘It was Sienna. She’s warmed to me since, though from absolute zero, there’s only really warmer. However, our talent for biological analysis gives us insight, deep insight if we wish to dig, into another person’s emotions.’ Which was somewhat amusing given that Geogracus appeared to care little about anyone else’s emotions. ‘And we need to be careful of how we use that insight. Another example: we can learn to treat the ailments we discover, destroying bacteria and viruses, mending torn muscles and broken bones, extending life, even regrowing severed limbs.’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to be able to do.’

  ‘Of course, but what can be mended can be torn apart. You may learn to start a heart which has ceased beating. You can also learn to stop a heart.’

  ‘I’d never–’

  ‘Even if you were face-to-face with the man who killed your mother, your father? Someone who stood over your brother and sister and burned them alive?!’

  The flare of anger came unbidden. Kaya’s fists and jaw clenched, and the nervousness was gone, replaced by a rage unlike anything she had ever felt before.

  And Geogracus simply said, ‘Precisely. More, I would not blame you for tearing that person’s heart from their chest. Everyone has their limit, Kaya. To have the capabilities we have is to see to it that such a limit is rarely reached. Power corrupts. Psi power can be insidious since it is of the mind and the mind is something we do not always have control over.’

  Kaya unclenched her fists. Her palms stung where her nails had dug into them. ‘Maybe it’s a good thing I can’t do anything like that yet.’

  ‘Perhaps. Killing someone, even out of what we feel is righteous anger, is a life-changing experience. Another example.’

  When he just stopped, Kaya wondered what the example was. She was about to ask when she realised that she could not move. Nothing worked. Her voice was silent. Even her eyes refused to move.

  ‘I’ve taken control of your body,’ Geogracus said. ‘I can, with just a small exertion of will, make you do anything I wish.’ Unbidden, Kaya’s arms crossed in front of her and she felt her fingers grip the hem of her T-shirt. They began to lift and she could not even let out a squeal of protest. Her eyes refused to widen in shock. ‘But I won’t and wouldn’t.’

  Suddenly free, Kaya pushed her shirt back down and glowered at her tutor. Coming so soon after the rage he had invoked, he was clearly trying to provoke her. ‘That was–’ she began, anger tinging her voice.

  ‘Insensitive? Cruel? Entirely inappropriate? The act of a depraved fiend? Immoral?’

  ‘Immoral?! Immoral barely covers it.’

  Geogracus nodded solemnly. ‘Morality, young lady. You are learning from Sienna and Thea as well as me. You have a talent for telepathy I believe I cannot match. You can learn to uncover a person’s weaknesses, mental and physical, and you can exploit them. And the question in every case is, should you?’

  Kaya bit her lips to keep back the first thing that came to mind. The fat man had an annoying way of presenting lessons in ethics. ‘Don’t ever do that to me again,’ she said after a couple of seconds.

  ‘My word as a zanari,’ Geogracus replied. ‘In case you’re wondering, I generally use it for restraining conscious patients and moving unconscious ones. In the former case, it is kinder than physical restraints; in the latter, it’s easier than lifting them.’

  ‘Okay, well… Point taken. I think you could’ve used… alternative methods of making it.’

  ‘Probably. As has been pointed out, I have the personality of a dried fish. Now, all we need is a test subject so that you can invade their privacy. Ah, good morning, Jinny.’

  Kaya looked around to see Jinny bouncing into the room in her customary outfit of shorts and bikini top. There was a huge revolver strapped to her thigh. ‘Awesome!’ Jinny said, grinning like a maniac. ‘Do I have to take my clothes off?’

  ‘I think,’ Kaya said before Geogracus could get in, ‘that there’s quite enough bare skin available for me to work with. You don’t mind if I touch you, do you? It helps.’

  ‘Aww, Kaya, if there’s touching involved, you can practise on me any time you like.’

  Kaya grimaced and tried to settle her mind for what she had to do. At least the nervousness and the anger were gone. Now if she could just deal with the embarrassment…

  ~~~

  Kaya made her way forward to the Sword and Thea’s cabin feeling rather pleased. After her lesson, which seemed to have gone quite well, she had studied some zanari culture documents Cassandra had provided, and then gone out to the communal lounge and had lunch with Jay. There had been more c
hatting: Kaya had talked about her teacher and his suggestion that she should go to Abertine to study, and what travelling to another world to learn had been like. Just having the man there, nodding and listening, put Kaya in a happy mood and seemed to wipe away the fatigue of the lesson.

  Now she was on her way to her first lesson with Thea which she had a feeling would be a little more fun, even if she was not really sure she had any telekinetic talent. All the cabin doors had a panel outside them allowing someone outside to signal to the occupant that someone was seeking entry, but when Kaya pressed the button outside Thea’s cabin, the door opened immediately. Well, Thea was expecting her, so…

  Thea was walking out of the bedroom as Kaya walked into the lounge, and she was dressed in a short, steel-grey robe which did not really do a whole lot to conceal her figure. Kaya felt her cheeks heating and tried to push back on yet more embarrassment. At least she thought it was embarrassment. The tall warrior woman in the robe smiled and indicated the seating area.

  ‘Good afternoon, Kaya,’ Thea said. ‘Geo gave something of a glowing report on your first lesson. Glowing for Geo anyway. He said you clearly had “undeveloped potential and a strong, ethical personality.” Did he make you do something embarrassing?’ Kaya’s cheeks decided to heat up even more at that. ‘Ah, I see he did. Well, I won’t be making you do anything you don’t want to.’

  Kaya was just about to say something along the lines of ‘I should hope not’ or maybe even ‘I’d be happier doing what he made me do in front of you’ when Cassandra walked out of Thea’s bedroom, straightening her tunic.

  ‘Good afternoon, Kaya,’ Cassandra said as she set off toward the door. ‘Enjoy your lesson.’

  ‘Uh, thanks,’ Kaya said. ‘I’m sure I will.’ And then she waited for Cassandra to leave and for the door to close before looking back at Thea. ‘I didn’t know you and Cassandra were, um…’

  ‘Friends with benefits,’ Thea said. ‘We’ve known each other a long time and… It’s a little complicated.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’ Kaya made a mental note that, no matter how much Geogracus might tease, Thea was with Cassandra and so was off the fantasy list.