Inevitably this had only made her more isolated, which was when she’d bought the Mercedes SUV and become like thousands of others who liked the wandering life. She could park up and stay for a day, a week or a year. Personal relationships could be intense but never lasted long enough to become awkward. Her first great love had sacrificed himself for her on the battlefield, unaware that she was also screwing someone else. Kara did not like guilt. It was easier to be unattached.
* * *
She and Marc were extremely close but still not lovers. Kara and Tatia had been lovers, briefly, on the trip back from the Cancri homeworld. Much more to the point, they had both become her family. More than comrades in the military sense, they gave her the emotional home lost first when her parents died... and again when her older sister was taken by the Gliese as the standard fee to replace a broken star drive. Now Marc was gone to netherspace, his choice, and while she felt him still alive – connected somehow by a strip of wood from her childhood home – Kara couldn’t know where he was or when he’d return. The strip came from a doorframe where her sister had once measured Kara’s height. Kara had taken it the last time she visited the long-abandoned house, cut on a whim and later thrust on impulse into Marc’s hand just before he stepped naked into netherspace. The type of emotional, pointless gesture that Kara would once have dismissed. What possible use would a small piece of notched pine be in a dimension that no human understood? At the time it had been desperately important for Marc to take with him something of her, something of home. He had no idea what the strip of wood was, of course, and had most likely dropped it early on, to be puzzled over and probably eaten by a boojum. Yet she felt linked to him – not wishful thinking, no – and knew that he was still alive. Weren’t all psychic phenomena merely unexplained quantum effects? Why shouldn’t a physical memory of childhood link two people? Or if nothing else, be a mundane, silly good luck charm. Kara decided that all the same, it wasn’t something she’d discuss with Greenaway, who would, should, be more concerned about his daughter.
Tatia had gone with the Originators, the alien precog civilisation who spread shiny tech throughout the galaxy. Tatia had believed it was her fate... propelled by a compulsion, a geas that Kara couldn’t understand, only that it was necessary. It probably was, according to the plan Tse had once developed. And how long ago was that? Ten, twenty years? So many people still dancing to a dead man’s tune.
* * *
There’d been two isolated weeks to think over the past. Was she in love with Marc? They shared a bond that went beyond the simulity – the alien tech that enabled people to learn complex procedures in tandem or in groups while also bonding them together. My mind is your mind, yours is mine. The bond usually wore off, but the conditioning had been reinforced to last longer than normal. And perhaps for another reason? She had no evidence, only intuition. It would do.
I will come home, Marc had said. And later, You have to trust people sometime. Trust me. Not bad from a man who’d been a self-obsessed artist and borderline psychopath when they first met. Netherspace had changed him, as had the nature entity that possessed him in Scotland. The science of it defeated Kara. She suspected it always would. A couple of days ago she’d asked Ishmael to explain. The result was a series of mathematical formulae, an algebra she’d never seen before, a sense of "something" she wasn’t equipped to understand. If it’s any consolation, Ishmael had told her, I’ve also got problems with it. Actually, no consolation at all.
Decide, Kara, she told herself. Marc and me, a future? Probably not. If there was they’d have slept together at least once. The excuse that commanders don’t have sex with the commanded made stupid by her sleeping with Tatia... something else not to be mentioned to Greenaway.
Kara had a plan. Not much of one but you had to start somewhere.
This one would start with Jeff’s house. She didn’t know why, only that it involved Marc. Intuition, she decided. So much better than compulsion.
* * *
The jitney whine grew louder as it landed next to Marc’s house. Greenaway got out and walked towards Kara. She stood waiting for him, hands in her pockets. Greenaway stopped two metres away, next to the grey bones of a boat whose name and use had been mislaid a hundred years ago. He was still the commanding officer, tall and straight, severely good-looking, double-collared business suit barely creased by the journey.
“Great view,” he finally said.
The Severn was high, placid and as always brown with sediment. But there was menace in its very size, while sinewy eddies suggested hidden violence. On the far side the Black Mountains rose up in a soft purple haze that mocked their name. Yet every year three or four walkers died because the weather changed. Or they fell from a rock face they should never have tried to climb. Last year a man had died in a mini avalanche caused by a sheep higher up the mountainside. A single rock had spun through the air to crash against his left temple. An accident in a million but all in a day’s work for the Black Mountains and their killer sheep.
“Yes,” Kara agreed. “And
