“Yes. Deal.” She saluted her mother, and Mom saluted her back.
Around them, the twilight forest bloomed.
CHAPTER FOUR
Forces
Menasha, you shouldn’t have brought them here.”
“So, tell me, Respected Commander, what should she have done with us?”
Commander Beleraja Poulos looked down at the speaker. Malnutrition had stunted him during childhood. Infection had taken his right arm up to the elbow. Thanks to Menasha, she also knew the man had once had three children, all of whom had been left behind, their ashes scattered on the winds of a world called Koh-i-Noor.
Beleraja saluted the withered headman. “Forgive me, Father. I spoke without thinking.” She grasped Menasha’s elbow and propelled her fellow shipper up the battered access corridor and out the airlock into Athena’s tarnished docking bay. Menasha, wisely, kept her mouth shut until the ship’s outer hatch slammed shut behind them and they both saw they stood alone among the angled lighting panels and jigsaw of colored sound-dampening squares.
“Where was I supposed to take them?” Menasha demanded, pulling her elbow free. “You were closest. Their jump engines are fried. They were trying to make it through normal space.” Menasha’s people had found the ships puttering along, barely two kilometers from each other, making a long slow creep through the real-space vacuum. The vessels themselves were five hundred years old if they were a day. The founders of Koh-i-Noor had hung on to them in case of emergency, instead of scavenging them for parts or selling them to the Authority, which was what most of the Called had done.
That emergency finally came.
“Their ancestors thought they were so lucky,” Menasha had told Beleraja when they first got in. They stood on the silent, battered bridge staring at the screens, half of which were not working, the other half of which were showing dubious readouts. “They’d found an unclaimed world that was a full seven on the compatibility scale. Earth-sized, one big moon for stimulating winds and tides, more water than land, sugars and proteins in the local biosphere that humans could digest, and a microsphere that could handle human wastes and assist human crops.”
Their original thousand settlers had spread out, claiming acre after acre of land for their families. Feuds split the group into fragments, which scattered as far from each other as they could. Storms took some, winter took others. Crop and mine failures forced those who failed into the service of those who succeeded. While all this was going on, the microsphere ate what it was given and started on its own campaign of divide and conquer. When the local diseases were ready to begin their major assault, the storms, the winter, and the droughts didn’t think to stop so the settlers could deal with the new disasters.
The skilled died too fast to be replaced. Machinery broke down and could not be repaired. The survivors decided that the freedom their ancestors had sought was not worth any more lives. They reboarded their ships before they lost all ability to fly them.
Sympathy and frustration pulled Beleraja’s thoughts back to the present and to Menasha calmly facing her in the empty docking bay.
“It’s another four hundred people!” Beleraja flung out her hands. “We have a deal going with Pandora that we will keep the refugees away from them.…” Beleraja let the sentence trail off as she watched Menasha’s gaze shift sideways.
Beleraja had not seen Menasha Denshyar since she had apprenticed with the Denshyar family’s fleet. They’d kept in touch when they could, leaving each other notes at various communication stations. Like Beleraja, Menasha had risen to be the matriarch of her family, as well as commander of their fleet. She’d done well by them, even though she had decided they would spend their time trading information and goods between the Authority cities rather than between the Called worlds.
More time trading between the cities—the thought repeated itself to Beleraja. What were they even doing out this way? Pandora was a long detour if the Denshyar fleet was heading between Atlantis and El Dorado, which were the two closest cities.
Oh, no Mena. What have you gotten us into? “What were you thinking?” she asked again.
“I was thinking of saving lives,” snapped Menasha, but Beleraja heard the hollowness under the conviction.
Beleraja gave a short, sharp sigh, a sound her children had learned to be wary of when they were young.
“How about this, then: What’s the Council of Cities thinking?” she demanded, folding her arms.
Menasha shrugged, but still wouldn’t look at her. “It’s been ten years.”
“By the burning name of god.” Beleraja hung her head. “You’re here to put pressure on Pandora.”