Children of Zanar 1: The Zanari Inheritance Read online

  Their walk took them through a heavy bulkhead door and then down a flight of stairs, and then down a further corridor which branched off in three directions. They took the left one and soon found themselves walking into a lounge not unlike the one aboard the Sword.

  There, Cassandra stopped, turned around, and indicated the rooms on her right. ‘Sora Trevorny, your room is the one closer to the entrance, Sor Colder, yours is the other on this side. You’ll find the rooms have all the amenities. Food can be prepared in your rooms, or you will find our refectory on deck five alongside the gym and bar.’

  Jay grinned, but one eyebrow rose. ‘Is this ship a smuggler’s vessel of a passenger liner?’

  It did seem a sort of pertinent question to Kaya. The ship looked like a cruise liner, in a way. The walls were smooth white metal in the corridors, darker in the lounge. The builders had gone to the trouble of smoothing most of the edges. It was also obvious that the same designer had built both the Sword and the Oracle: the two matched.

  ‘The Oracle is whatever we need it to be, Sor Colder. Perhaps you should get settled in your rooms. Fay will be joining us shortly to discuss the course to Sadrine’s Drift.’ Cassandra’s attention shifted specifically to Kaya. ‘I believe she wishes to discuss the best location for transition.’

  ‘I’m not sure how much help I’ll be,’ Kaya replied, feeling her cheeks heating. ‘I’m not exactly a seasoned traveller.’

  Cassandra’s full lips curled into a somewhat indulgent smile. ‘Any information you can provide will be a help.’

  ‘They both need some new clothes,’ Jinny said. ‘I said you’d show Kaya some patterns, but it can probably wait for later. I’m gonna grab a shower. You won’t need me for this sync-up, will you?’

  ‘We can manage without you,’ Thea said. ‘If there’s anything tactical to discuss… Well, you’ll just ignore it and improvise anyway.’

  Jinny flashed Kaya an impish-but-knowing grin. ‘She knows me so well…’ And then she was bouncing off the way they had come, presumably toward her own cabin.

  Not waiting to see what Jay would do, Kaya gave Cassandra a quick smile and set off toward her new accommodation. The door opened as she walked up to it, closing behind her after she stepped through. Kaya smiled. Her room aboard the Sword had been better than more or less anywhere she had ever lived on a planet, but it had not quite matched Thea’s room. Here, she had a suite similar to Thea’s, not especially well decorated, but spacious and comfortable, and, she suspected, with the same sort of fresh produce that Thea used in her cooking.

  Since she was expected back in the lounge, she contented herself with a quick check of the suite. There was a lounge area with comfortable chairs set around a coffee table and arranged to allow easy viewing of the entertainment system. It would be interesting to see what was available on that later. Set beside it was a galley area and dining room like the one in Thea’s rooms. Separate doors led off to a bathroom with what looked very like a real shower, unlike the sonic units common on passenger ships, and to a bedroom featuring the same four posts of a gravity bed Kaya had used before. She was still not quite used to the bed, but it had been quite comfortable sleeping in it so she figured she would become accustomed.

  Dumping her pack in the bedroom, she returned to the bathroom and used the sink to freshen up before setting off back to the communal lounge where she found a new, and alien, woman talking to Thea and Cassandra. This had to be Fay and Kaya was not quite sure what to make of her.

  The alien woman was tall, easily two metres, though that was partially because she walked on the balls of three-toed feet with dark, horny nails in a digitigrade posture. Even so, she seemed like someone had taken a human woman and stretched her: elongated legs with noticeable muscle to the thighs, elongated torso with narrow hips and fairly flat breasts, long arms ending in long hands with elongated fingers, and an elongated face with a long squared-off chin. Unlike her feet, where it seemed the four smaller toes had fused into two, her hands had four fingers and an opposable thumb. Her skin was a mottled purple and grey, which was not entirely pleasant and reminded Kaya a little of a corpse. The face was odd, pretty in an unconventional manner, and the purple colour was predominant which made the skin more appealing. In proportion to her long face, her nose was relatively short and quite flat. Her mouth was narrow, but had full, purple-hued lips. Her eyes were a bright green and angled down toward her nose. She had no eyebrows, though there were obvious brow ridges, but she had lush, purple hair combed to fall over her right shoulder down to where her nipples probably were, assuming she had any. On the left side, her hair was braided into a narrow rope which fell to her collarbone. She was dressed more like a mechanic than a navigator: she was wearing a sort of dungaree set in black and white which, Kaya guessed, was held primarily in place by a wide band around her throat. Her shoulders were bare, but there were sleeves which came down to form fingerless gloves, and the trouser legs stopped above her knees, just above a set of knee pads. Her feet and shins were bare. The mechanic look was further complemented by various straps and belts around her hips designed for hanging tools.

  Well, she was not any kind of human Kaya had ever seen or heard of, but she seemed to be chatting happily with Thea and Cassandra so Kaya set off across the lounge to be introduced.

  And that was when Jay walked out of his room. His eyes lit upon Fay and he stopped dead in his tracks. ‘Cào! That’s a–’

  A lot of things happened at once and it was only really after everyone had stopped moving that Kaya figured out what had transpired. It was an indication of Thea’s level of trust that Jay had been allowed to keep his sidearm, and an indication of Jay’s that he had come out of his room wearing it, and now his hand moved to it, wrapping around the grip and starting to pull it. Fay’s eyes widened as she saw the man for the first time and realised what he was doing. Cassandra began moving, stepping between Jay and Fay.

  But then Jay reeled back as though he had just been struck in the face with a bat. Wavering slightly, he finally collapsed back through the door he had just walked through, and it closed, hiding the fallen man.

  ‘Open the door, would you, Cassy?’ Thea said as she started across the lounge.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Kaya asked, walking up to Cassandra and Fay. ‘Why was he acting like that anyway?’

  ‘My fault, I think,’ Fay said in unaccented Trade.

  ‘It’s not,’ Cassandra stated flatly. ‘It’s his.’ She glared across the room to where Thea was relieving a still-unresponsive Jay of his weapon.

  ‘His reaction was far from unpredictable,’ Fay countered. ‘I am more surprised that Sora Trevorny appears so calm.’

  ‘I, um, don’t recognise your species,’ Kaya admitted. ‘Should I be scared?’

  ‘Not of me, but I am filarax.’ Fay pronounced the last word like ‘veelarix,’ but Kaya recognised it and blanched. ‘Ah, now you are less calm.’

  ‘What the diyou is a filarax doing on this ship?’ Jay asked, apparently recovered but sounding both annoyed and more than a little confused. Part of the confusion and more than a little of the annoyance seemed to stem from the fact that Thea was emptying the shells out of his shotgun.

  ‘She’s an exile,’ Thea replied. ‘Her clan disowned her and tried to kill her. Jinny and I stopped them. She’s the best hyperspace navigator we’ve ever come across. Better than Cassy, which is saying something, and she has a natural flair for fixing hyperspace engines. So, basically, you can live with it or we can dump you on the next rock we find.’ Having emptied the shotgun, she handed it back to Jay and turned to Kaya. ‘As for what happened to Jay, I hit him in the mind with a sledgehammer, figuratively. It doesn’t leave a lasting mark. I prefer a knife for doing that. Now, shall we get down to business?’

  ‘Of course,’ Fay said. ‘If we are to dump Sor Colder on “the next rock,” it is likely that it will be Sadrine’s Drift. I have examined the charts and plotted a course which should have us there in approximate
ly thirty-five hours.’

  ‘Thirty-five hours?’ Kaya squeaked. ‘Why did it take me fifteen days?’

  ‘Because the Oracle has very powerful engines,’ Fay replied, and her mouth twisted into some sort of grin, ‘and because I am a very good navigator. I will wish to examine my terminal routing with you later to ensure optimal arrival positioning. I believe I have the planetary data correct, but a resident might spot an error in the charts. We use the best charts we can find, but on the more obscure worlds, they are not always perfect.’

  ‘I’ll help however I can.’

  ‘Excellent. I shall relieve Sor Colder from the necessity of feeling uncomfortable around me and retire to my engines.’

  ‘And we will discuss our destination,’ Cassandra said, raising a hand to indicate the sofas.

  Kaya walked over to one of the chairs, watching Fay pad lightly out of the room. ‘I was taught that filarax are… Well, they are more or less demons. They attacked ships, colonies, killed everyone they came across. They’re evil. Fay seems… nice.’

  ‘And Jay is probably old enough to remember the last years of the filarax raids into human space,’ Thea said, sitting down beside her, ‘which is why he got the benefit of the doubt. Fay is an atypical member of the culture, but filarax are not evil. They are highly territorial and somewhat xenophobic. The same can be said of many humans. Fay can get a little touchy if someone messes with her engines, but otherwise she is nice. She was ejected from her clan because she found the killing of innocent victims abhorrent. They viewed her as a pacifist.’

  ‘It does not help,’ Cassandra added, ‘that humans took territory from the filarax when they were first contacted. Essentially, the humans started it.’

  Jay frowned. ‘The filarax took over human colonies and they slaughtered all the colonists when they did it.’

  ‘They took back colonies taken from them long ago. It’s largely lost history. This happened during the human expansion before the Solar Empire. The humans slaughtered the filarax colonists, though they would have had no choice since the filarax will never willingly give up land. Now, Sora Trevorny, tell us about Sadrine’s Drift.’

  ‘Kaya,’ Kaya said. ‘I’d really rather you called me Kaya. A-and I’m not really sure where to start.’

  Cassandra nodded her head in acquiescence to the request. ‘Kaya then. Clichéd as it may sound, the beginning is always a good place to start.’

  ‘Okay, well, the colony was founded about sixty-two years ago by a group of people devoted to the Universal Mind. Nothing fanatical, just a group of Minders who felt they wanted to start a colony based around the Minder philosophy. I’m second-generation native. My parents were born on Sadrine’s Drift. My grandfather was one of the original founders; his name’s on the colonisation documents. My grandmother joined the colony about fifteen years in, when we became self-sufficient in food.’

  ‘The navigation documents I read said it was quite a young system,’ Thea said.

  ‘About one and a quarter billion years,’ Kaya agreed. ‘There was enough life developed in the ocean to oxygenate the atmosphere. There was no land-based life until we introduced it, but soil improvement was really the only terraforming needed.’

  ‘So, there’s still the possibility of asteroid strikes.’

  ‘Yes. We had a monitoring programme, but something could have got through. But I don’t see that as a reason to be secretive about the colony event and it would be pretty obvious. They’d know what killed everyone if a big rock had hit the planet. I mean, we had a population of about two hundred thousand, spread over two settlement areas and a lot of farms. It would have taken a big rock to kill everyone.’ Thea nodded acknowledgement of the point and Kaya continued. ‘The colony is primarily agricultural. Right now, it’s mainly producing to feed the population, but we were starting to consider cash crops for export and there were studies underway to look at exploiting our mineral resources.’

  ‘Anything unusual?’ Jay asked. ‘Anything unusually valuable, I mean. Something someone might want more than–’

  He cut off as Kaya shook her head. ‘Unless they discovered it after I left, no. Plenty of things we could use, a few we could probably export, but nothing really out of the ordinary. If there had been anything in the initial surveys, some corporation would have been willing to pay more for the colonisation rights than our church could put together. It’s not on any trade routes either.’

  ‘No,’ Cassandra said. ‘There’s a good reason for that. You’ll probably see it tomorrow. Please continue.’

  ‘Uh… Well, like I said, there are two main population centres. Neither of them are really big. In fact, the orbital station we have can support just about as many people as the smaller of the two. A lot of the population live on farms around the settlement areas. My family does… Did. My family did.’

  Thea put her hand on Kaya’s shoulder as the girl’s eyes fell away toward the floor. ‘You say there’s an orbital facility?’

  ‘Yes. Pretty basic, prefab asteroid station to handle interstellar traffic, not that there’s much, and interstellar comms, and to help with the survey work. They ran the colony office from there and the sky watch programme. It was the main food production facility before we got the soil on the planet ready for farming.’

  Thea glanced across at Cassandra. ‘Disease is a possibility, but less likely with an orbital facility online.’

  ‘And the reports said the alarm was raised when the colony office didn’t check in with their usual report,’ Jay said. ‘They wouldn’t have dispatched a ship so fast if the automated response system was working, so something took out the interstellar comms. Could the station have been knocked out of orbit?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cassandra said, ‘but the basic prefab stations used on colonies are, perhaps, ten kilotonnes. That’s smaller than the Oracle. Such a fall could not produce a colony event.’

  ‘And we’d need to wonder what caused it to fall,’ Thea added. ‘Something could have knocked it out of orbit, but it’s not especially likely. Unless someone sabotaged the station, of course. Can you think of anything else which might have made someone else interested in Sadrine’s Drift, Kaya?’

  ‘I… No.’ Kaya’s brow furrowed as she tried to think of anything that might help. ‘I love my home dearly, but it’s a rock in the middle of nowhere, not that different from a lot of other rocks in better places. Why would someone take an interest in that?’

  Thea shrugged slightly. ‘Sometimes, being in the middle of nowhere can be an advantage, but… Well, there are plenty of rocks around where you don’t need to remove an existing colony to use them.’

  ‘Uh, I know this isn’t exactly a polite thing to say with one on the ship,’ Jay said, ‘but what about the filarax? Sadrine’s Drift isn’t that far from some of their territories, is it?’

  Cassandra smiled at him. ‘Fay would be the first to suggest that as a possibility if she were here, Sor Colder. She has no illusions regarding her fellows. However, while it might seem that Sadrine’s Drift is relatively close to filarax territories, there is actually more space in the way than you might think.’

  ‘There is?’

  ‘Yes. Believe me, when we get closer to the system tomorrow, you’ll understand. The filarax are unlikely to have come looking for trouble out this way.’

  Oracle of Zanar, Hyperspace, 52/1/483.

  Hyperspace was not empty. Kaya sat in the communal lounge outside her cabin and watched the view on the big screen with interest because it was not showing the eternal blackness she had come to expect: there was something out there and she was really not sure what it was.

  Whatever she was looking at, it was big. The Oracle was moving on a tangential course, but still the whatever-it-was filled one side of the screen. In the distance, it was barely visible as some sort of distortion on the display, but that resolved into a dark plane which grew progressively paler as it neared the ship and became almost silver just before it vanished out of sight. It was a…
Kaya wanted to say ‘wall.’ It was a wall in extradimensional space where there could not possibly be a wall, and it was huge.

  ‘It’s a rift,’ Fay said and Kaya jumped in her seat, looking around to find the filarax standing behind her.

  Jay had been sitting nearby, not really paying attention to the screen or Kaya, but now he looked up, glanced at the screen, and then around at Fay. ‘Are you crazy? What are we doing that close to a rift?’

  ‘We are quite safe,’ Fay replied. ‘There is nothing to fear from a rift unless you stray over its border. Knowing how to avoid them is part of being a good navigator. Knowing that spatial dilation is stronger near the edge of them, giving a relatively faster transit, is part of being an excellent navigator.’

  ‘Uh, what’s a rift?’ Kaya asked.

  ‘No one knows,’ Jay replied. ‘We know entering them is a death sentence. Normal hyperspace shipping routes are planned out to avoid them. No ship that’s entered a rift has ever come back to tell anyone what’s inside.’

  ‘That is… partially true,’ Fay said. She moved around Kaya’s sofa and sat down, stretching out her long legs. The furniture was not designed with a filarax in mind. ‘We know that rifts are discontinuities in hyperspace, similar to those at the hyperspace limit, but far more severe. We know that some of them are caused by black holes. We know, from tests, that many vessels cannot survive passing through the edge of a rift because the stresses would tear them apart, but even vessels strong enough to pass through do not usually come out. There are rare examples of ships passing through a rift relatively unharmed, however.’

  ‘Who’s this “we” you’re talking about?’

  ‘The filarax, but the crew here knew everything I did before I was taken aboard. This rift is a large one, and it is the reason that it is unlikely that filarax attacked your world, Sora Trevorny. Detouring around this rift would put many worlds in a raiding party’s line of fire before Sadrine’s Drift.’

  ‘Oh,’ Kaya said. ‘Uh, could we get some sort of shipwide announcement? I’m Kaya. None of you have given me a family name so that I can be formal back.’