Children of Zanar 1: The Zanari Inheritance Read online

  ‘What’s the other one doing?’ Jinny asked. She was undoubtedly shifting her attention to the forward gun systems to check for herself, but Thea had already been checking anyway.

  ‘It noticed our ECM, but it’s going out of range… Registering heat output from the main gun, but we’re not getting any impact. It doesn’t have the targeting software to hit us.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Let it go, Jin. We’ll be light hours away before it can even slow down.’

  There was a sigh from the girl in fire control. ‘Yeah, okay. You know we’re going to have to burn that ship registration, right?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not really what bothers me about that engagement.’

  ‘What does?’ Jay asked.

  ‘They didn’t even make an attempt to order us to stop. They wanted us dead and that’s not even standard practice for BCU Security. Somebody really doesn’t want this girl to get home.’

  Sword of Zanar, Hyperspace.

  Kaya had learned the basics of hyperspace travel in science classes, and even if she had not, she would have made some effort to find out about it before making the trip to Abertine. Viable faster-than-light travel, and communications, relied on hyperspace, which was an extra dimension tagged onto spacetime in some way Kaya had never quite grasped. However, hyperspace was somehow the ‘home dimension’ of the Hepps–Montague field which was somehow responsible for psi abilities, among other things, and if you could translate a physical object into hyperspace, you could take advantage of its somewhat odd correspondence to spacetime to take shortcuts from one real place to another. Basically, if you went between two points in spacetime by hopping into hyperspace and taking the right route, you could, apparently, get to your destination at superluminal velocities.

  Which was great, but it didn’t prepare you for seeing hyperspace from the inside. Kaya watched the view from the forward sensor array being displayed on the big wall screen in the lounge with a feeling of disquiet bubbling up from the pit of her stomach. On her previous trips, she had been aboard the cheapest transport she could find and they had never bothered with making their passengers feel particularly at home. And, when it came right down to it, there was nothing to see out there: hyperspace was, technically, boring.

  Except that boring did not quite describe the feeling the display image evoked in Kaya. It was black out there. Space was black, sure, but there was light everywhere. All you had to do was look up at the sky at night to know that space was far from being entirely dark. Get above the atmosphere and you could see more stars than you would have ever thought possible. There was none of that in hyperspace. Hyperspace was pitch-black, unending nothingness. Absolute void. The blackest of abysses. Look into it for long enough and you could start imagining all sorts of things. You could imagine that something was looking back…

  ‘Kind of boring,’ Jinny stated, stepping up beside the sofa Kaya was sitting on, her eyes on the screen.

  ‘Then why have it up there?’ Kaya asked.

  ‘In case there’s anything interesting. It’s not always like that. Thing is, when it stops being like that, it usually means you’re in trouble.’

  ‘O-oh.’

  ‘You can see the hyper limit on a star from far enough away to be safe. That’s kind of pretty.’ Jinny turned, her eyes flicking over Kaya. ‘So, that’s the kind of thing you wore around town on Sadrine’s Drift, huh?’

  Automatically, Kaya looked down at her clothes. There was a string-strapped tank top in pink, a pair of denim shorts which covered far more of her than Jinny’s did but which had seen far better days judging from the various rips in them, and a pair of flip-flops with a blue-flower motif on the top. ‘It’s what I had that didn’t take up much space when I was packing. It’s usually pretty warm at home. Average temperature is three hundred and sixteen kelvin.’

  Jinny giggled. ‘My kind of planet. That’s warmer than where I grew up.’

  ‘Oh. Where do you come from?’

  There was a dismissive wave of a hand. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t’ve heard of it. When we get to the Oracle, you should check with Cassandra. I’m sure we can handle making you up some more clothes. Cassandra can show you the fabricator patterns.’

  ‘Cassandra. Okay.’

  ‘You’ll meet her tomorrow. Can’t really avoid her.’

  Kaya frowned. ‘Do you and Thea practise being cryptic?’

  ‘I do. It’s all just natural talent with Thea. I think we’re going through to her cabin for some breakfast in a few minutes. She has all the best stuff in there.’

  ‘Oh, okay. What’s special about her cabin?’

  Jinny grinned. ‘She’s the boss.’

  ~~~

  Thea had always enjoyed a good breakfast. She did not always get to have one, but she preferred it when she did, and enjoyed it whenever she could. Now was a good time for a good breakfast and she had decided she could handle fixing the full thing for everyone while she was at it. So, she grilled small steaks, made hash browns, toasted bread, and topped it off with her favourite: beans in a thick tomato sauce. There was also coffee and fruit juice already on the table when her guests arrived.

  Jinny was clapping her hands in anticipatory glee when Thea brought plates out for her and Kaya. Kaya was looking a little perplexed at the mass of food on her plate and Thea wondered what the girl normally ate at the start of the day.

  As she returned for her own plate and Jay’s, Thea reflected upon the somewhat timid yet determined girl she had agreed to help. Out of the winter clothes Abertine had forced on her, Kaya was more obviously a pretty, fit young woman. Her legs were long and a little thin, but there was a hint of musculature about them. The muscles showed more in her abdomen. Thea had taken a quick look at the data for Sadrine’s Drift and discovered that the world had gravity eight percent above standard, which tended to produce people with higher muscle mass than normal, just to compensate for everything weighing that much more. Her shorts barely managed to cling to slim hips, but her waist was narrower still. She had breasts which seemed to be small ones trying to be bigger: they were noticeably pointed, a rather pleasing shape on her thin frame. Again, her arms were thin but carried more muscle than might be expected. Her face was… sweet, a sort of narrow heart shape, high in the cheekbones, but carrying a little youthful flesh around the cheeks. She had a moderately long but perky nose above a small mouth with full lips, and her eyes were a golden-brown colour. Her hair fell down from a high parting to the left of her crown, curling slightly under her jaw, and it was a soft, pinkish-rose colour. Her only unattractive feature seemed to be her lack of confidence.

  ‘This is quite some meal,’ Jay said as Thea put his plate down before him.

  Thea gave a slight shrug and settled into her seat. ‘These are my main living quarters and the ship was designed for long-term occupancy. There’s a full array of life-support systems behind these rooms. Even a hydroponics system.’

  Kaya sipped her glass of juice. ‘That’s where the fruit comes from? This is almost as good as the stuff we make at home.’

  ‘It is, and thank you. I make the blend myself. However, further discussion of where the food comes from should wait until we’ve eaten. Down through the ages, people have discovered that it’s better not to know how their food is produced.’

  ‘I prefer never to ask,’ Jinny said, grinning. ‘It’s food. It’s good for you.’ And she began digging into the food on her plate with gusto.

  ‘Quite,’ Thea agreed. ‘I’ve contacted the Oracle and asked Fay to organise a course to Sadrine’s Drift. As soon as we dock, we can get underway. I’d imagine we can be there in under a week.’

  Kaya’s eyes widened. ‘It’s fifteen days by–’

  ‘Fay is a very good navigator and we won’t be going the commercial route. I’ll want to go over as much as you can tell me about your planet on the trip. I would like to try to get some idea of why someone would wish to go to so much trouble to isolate it.’

  Kaya gave a
shrug and picked up her fork. ‘I have no idea. We’re an agricultural colony. We’ve got minerals we were starting to mine, but that was mostly for our own use. We don’t have anything valuable.’

  ‘Let me decide on that. Now, try the beans. They’re my favourite.’

  ~~~

  ‘What do you think of her?’ Thea asked. She was alone with Jinny now. Jay had gone off to his cabin, and Kaya was sitting in the lounge watching the black world of hyperspace fly by.

  ‘Kaya?’ Jinny asked. ‘She’s… cute. If you want more than that, you’re going to have to figure it out yourself. You’re the telepath.’

  ‘There’s something about her. She’s got more power in her than she thinks, more than a human generally has. She has talents she hasn’t consciously tapped.’ Absently, Thea reached up to the spot over her breastbone where her pendant hung. The blue stone held on a silver chain was hidden beneath her tank top now, but she could feel the shape of it under her fingers…

  ‘You only ever play with that when you’re concerned about something,’ Jinny stated flatly. ‘What? She’s got more power than you expect a human to have so…’ The young face crinkled, a furrow developing over her nose. ‘No. She can’t be one of us. How can she be?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ Irritated at having a habit pointed out, Thea moved her hand and picked up her coffee cup. ‘I know she’s not what she seems and she was born on a backwater colony out of the way of prying eyes. She’s a Minder.’

  ‘Huh, hardly any of us have followed that religion since… Well, before you were born.’

  ‘Because we “disproved” it. Science can’t really deny faith; it can only come up with alternate explanations for things and then say they’re more reasonable. That’s basically what faith is: belief in the face of evidence to the contrary.’

  Jinny sniffed. ‘She does seem to like staring out into hyperspace… Look, easy solution. All we need to do is get a tissue sample and Geo can run some tests. I still can’t see how she could possibly be one of us. I mean, we know where all of us are. There are no more.’

  ‘We think,’ Thea replied. ‘We believe we know. One might say that it’s a matter of faith.’

  ‘Oh, ha ha. Wait… We can’t interbreed with them, right? I mean, I’ve been basing a lot of my sex life on that principle so–’

  ‘No, we can’t. Too much difference in the genome. There are some rare instances of pregnancy recorded, but they always miscarry. So, Kaya’s parents would have to be zanari too. So would her sister and brother.’

  ‘But one family and just the one family in a colony like that?’

  ‘It’s possible. Perhaps unlikely, but possible. It’s certainly another reason why we need to check out Sadrine’s Drift. If there are really more of us alive, after all this time…’

  ‘And that,’ Jinny stated, ‘is why I don’t believe it. After all this time, if there were a big enough group to make a colony somewhere, we’d know.’

  Thea gave a shrug. ‘Perhaps. But we’re still going to go look.’

  51/1/483.

  Kaya was in the lounge, watching the wall, when the Sword transitioned into normal space. It was, in many ways, a rather uneventful event. Thea’s voice came over the speakers announcing it and there was a slight hum, a subtle vibration, as the power to the hyperspace engines increased. The image on the screen distorted somehow, almost as though the blackness was contracting around them, but how could you possibly tell that a lot of nothing was getting smaller? And then there were stars. Stars and something large blocking the view of the stars.

  ‘Welcome to normal space,’ Thea said. ‘We are, as predicted, approximately nine hundred kilometres from the Oracle. We should be docking in… roughly eleven minutes.’

  Kaya felt the push of a gravity or so and saw the shift in their orientation as Thea turned the ship onto a new vector. There was nothing really visible on the screen aside from the distant points of light. They could have been pretty much anywhere in deep space, except that there had been something big, planet big, out there.

  ‘Where are we?’ Jay asked as he walked into the lounge from his cabin. ‘There’s nothing out there but black.’

  ‘There was a planet,’ Kaya said. ‘I saw something blocking the stars.’

  ‘That,’ Thea replied, ‘was a gas giant, a fairly big one, actually. It’s in orbit around a brown dwarf, outside the star’s hyper limit. We find that these systems are generally pretty useful for hiding out in. They’re not really charted, even though there are a lot of them, and no one bothers with them.’

  ‘Well, no,’ Jay responded. ‘Who would want to? There’s usually nothing in them worth bothering with.’

  It was, as far as Kaya remembered, true. Brown dwarfs were stars, as in they were massive enough to ignite a fusion reaction within them but they were so small that the reaction was weak and relatively short-lived, producing little luminance. In other ways, they were no different from other star systems, but the worlds in them were in for a long, cold existence as the fuel ran out and the star cooled slowly over billions of years. Even compared to the multitudes of red dwarf stars, brown dwarf systems were no place to look for a home, and even a visit appeared to be something of a boring experience.

  ‘So, we’ll meet the rest of your crew soon?’ Kaya asked the air.

  ‘Some of them,’ Thea replied. ‘We’ve got a lot of space and some of them… are shy. Cassandra will want to meet you both, and Fay will be joining us to discuss the travel arrangements. You’ll probably meet the others when they decide to make themselves known.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  Maybe ten minutes later, their destination became visible. It appeared out of nowhere as external lights were turned on, turning the hull from black to a uniform grey. At first, it was hard to make out exactly what they were looking at, but as they got closer, the image in the view screen resolved into a more identifiable shape. The Oracle did not have the smooth lines of the Sword. This was a vessel meant for deep space and planetary orbit, and it looked to be around ten times the size of the vessel they were in. There was a tapering forward section, vaguely conical, but more rounded than pointed, and with two large turrets mounted under its ‘chin.’ This was connected to a spherical section which looked as though some heat effect had pushed a long bubble out the rear, presumably holding the drives. As they watched the upper part of the nose ‘cone’ open up, two very large doors swung out to reveal some sort of docking bay with strobe lights indicating where the Sword was supposed to join it.

  ‘That is like no ship I have ever seen,’ Jay commented. ‘I thought this one looked strange, but that is… Where were these things built, Thea?’

  ‘She could tell you,’ Jinny said as she walked in from her cabin, ‘but then I’d have to shoot you.’

  Jay frowned at her. ‘I’m never sure whether you’re joking or not.’

  Jinny looked at him, eyes wide. ‘Oh, I never joke about shooting people.’

  ‘Okay, people,’ Thea said, ‘prepare for docking. Please keep your arms and heads inside the spaceship at all times, and try not to shoot anyone, because it’ll be you cleaning up the mess if you do.’

  Jinny rolled her eyes. ‘You spoil all my fun.’

  Oracle of Zanar, Unnamed Star System.

  Through the window in the airlock’s outer door, the exterior hull plate which covered the door was visible as it slid back and then up. The Sword mated perfectly with its mothership, it seemed, and the two vessels were obviously matched for air quality since the inner door of the airlock remained open as the outer door slid upward to allow them access to the Oracle. The stairs which had allowed them to climb up from the ground on Abertine now formed a bridge across the gap between the ships.

  And waiting on the far side of that bridge was a woman. She was tall and more narrow than slim. Attractive in a severe way. Her eyes had the same icy quality as Thea’s, but they were housed in a narrower, sharper face; Thea had a hint of softness about her, but this woman w
as all hard edges. Her hair, a cool blonde with just a hint of red in it, added to the severity. It was shaved back at the sides, leaving a downy cap at the back and a wedge over the top which came to a point over her forehead. From that point, a pattern like a herringbone tattoo in faint purple descended down to the bridge of her long, pert nose. Long legs and a reasonably full, firm bust were displayed well by clothes unlike anything Kaya or Jay had ever seen. They seemed to be made of a thick, plastic material in white and grey with metal reinforcements over the chest. There was a tunic, of sorts, open at the front, shorts, bracers which came up past the elbow, and boots which rose to mid-thigh. Through the opening in the tunic, another bone-like tattoo could be seen rising from her navel to the top of her breasts, spreading wider as it went. The boots seemed a little odd to Kaya and it was not until the woman moved that she realised that the soles were a wedge design, but without the wedge: the soles extended out, lifting the woman’s heels up without any apparent support below the heels themselves. The entire image before them was… a little strange.

  ‘Thea and Jinny,’ the woman said, ‘I am pleased to have you back.’

  Thea smiled and glanced at Kaya. ‘This is Cassandra. She… runs things aboard the Oracle.’

  ‘Sora Trevorny, Sor Colder, welcome to our home. I will show you to your cabins and then we will discuss the task ahead of us.’

  ‘You know who we are?’ Jay asked, frowning.

  ‘Yes, Sor Colder,’ Cassandra replied flatly. ‘Thea communicated all the information she had on both of you before your arrival.’ One of Cassandra’s pale eyebrows rose. ‘We are not trying to trick you. We do, however, talk to each other. Please, follow me.’ And, turning, she set off down the corridor and further into the ship.