We were trapped. Here in a remote galaxy. Three billion light years from civilization. With no way to get home.
2
Ana-Zhi got up without a word and stalked away from the bridge.
“Hey!” I hurried after her. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know—and that’s the fucking problem. I think one of the isolators on the starboard nacelle could be interfering with the helical power weave—or maybe the Braun tube, but this is way above my pay grade.”
I had some amount of starship systems knowledge implanted in my brain, so I followed Ana-Zhi to engineering. Together we spent the next hour or so running diagnostics on the Vostok’s power systems, but couldn’t come up with anything.
“As much as I’m glad that he’s dead, I kind of wish Obarral were here to figure this out,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Yeah, I don’t.”
We restarted the cognitive auditing module for the third time, hoping it would be able to trace the problem. But halfway through we lost power again. It only lasted twenty seconds, but it meant that we needed to start from scratch.
“What about Qualt?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“Maybe he knows something about this problem.”
“I doubt it. I’m sure he’d just say anything to get us to let him out.”
“Still, it might be worth a shot. You never know. Maybe this is kind of a recurring problem with this shit.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t work that way.” But she decided to go pay Qualt a visit anyway.
I headed back down to the infirmary to check on Chiraine. According to the Aura, her treatment was just about done. I was a little concerned that the power outages might have interrupted her MedBed, but it did have a battery back-up, so theoretically it wouldn’t have been affected.
When I arrived Chiraine was awake, but moving pretty slow.
“I can’t feel my shoulder,” she said in a rough voice.
“Probably a good thing.” I looked over the MedBed’s report. “No broken bones. You’re lucky.”
“I don’t feel very lucky. What the hell happened?”
“Near as I can tell, we had a run-in with a cthulian.”
“So they’re real after all?”
“Yeah, and this one messed up the ship pretty badly. We can’t get the power weave stabilized.”
“So we’re stuck down here.”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Ana-Zhi. The other issue is that we can’t revive my dad until we fix this thing. Apparently the procedure is a bit more complicated than I thought, and we’d need the ship’s computer.”
Chiraine stared at me, but didn’t say anything.
I said, “I’m just concerned that if something goes wrong with his suit, all this will be for nothing. I want him alive, well, and awake.”
“I know you do, Jannigan. And we’ll wake him up. I promise. But I think you’re right not to risk it if the power is sketchy.”
I nodded. “But even if we revive him, we’re still kind of screwed. The Mayir are in this system and they are probably scanning Yueld and the moons with a fine-toothed comb, trying to find us. And we don’t have a lot of options for laying low.”
“Yeah.” She closed her eyes for a few moments.
“You want to rest up some more?” I asked. “We can talk later.”
“No, I’m just thinking. You’re sure the Fountain is completely closed?”
“I’m sure. We scanned it down to its last bolt. Reactor is colder than an iceberg. No power. Not even any residual traces.”
“How hard would it be to get it back online?”
Despite the fact that our situation was so grim, a laugh escaped my throat. “Probably very hard, since we’re talking about Rhya tech here. But even if we were able to get the power back on, we’re still screwed.”
“Why?”
“The passage has been closed for eight hours.”
“Unless…” She trailed off, deep in thought.
“Unless what?”
“Well, think about it from the point-of-view of the Rhya.”
That was fairly difficult, given the fact that the Rhya were an advanced race of beings who resembled semi-transparent floating eels.
“I’m not following.”
“Let’s start at the beginning,” she said. “You’re the Rhya, custodians of many different archaeological sites. Yueld happens to be one of them that’s inhabited.”
“By the Obaswoon.”
“And the Batalarians,” she said.
I nodded.
“So you get some rumblings that the natural jump gate is going to open, and you do the lottery thing to limit who gets to go explore this time,” she said. “And everyone knows the rules. One hundred hours then it’s time to come home.”
“Sure. Where are you going with this?”
She smacked my arm. “I’m getting to that! So, let’s think about the Obaswoon. They’re TL-5, at most. Scavengers. Struggling in the ruins of Roan Andessa.”
What Chiraine was saying lined up with the little I knew about the Obaswoon.
“That’s why Roan Andessa was off limits,” I said.
“Exactly. And that’s why there were all those Rhya wardships hanging around. The city was crawling with Rhya. They didn’t want us, the Faiurae, or the Mayir interfering with the Obaswoon.”
“Okay. So what?”
Chiraine slid off the MedBed and came towards me with an intense look on her face. “What if there’s a wardship parked up there—in Roan Andessa?”
A wardship? My head started filling with the possibilities. “That would be nice, but how would we even control it?”
“Maybe we don’t need to,” Chiraine said. “Maybe the ship is smart enough to know what to do.”
We rushed back towards the bridge where we filled Ana-Zhi in on Chiraine’s theory.
Ana-Zhi shook her head. “You’re not thinking straight.”
“Why?” I asked. “Qualt said that they took out the Rhya, but he never said anything about their ships.”
“He mentioned a scidatium,” Chiraine said. “That’s viral.”
“I know what a scidatium is,” Ana-Zhi said.
“If this attack happened while a wardship was parked in the city above, we might be able to—”
“What?” Ana-Zhi scoffed. “You think you can operate Rhya tech?”
I shook my head and turned to Chiraine. “Tell her.”
“The Shima believe that the Rhya wardships are sentient.”
“What?”
“They’ve been studying Rhya craft for over thirty years.”
“Studying how? No one’s ever been on board a Rhya ship.”
“Interaction monitoring,” Chiraine said. “Pathing, control mapping, and a lot of stuff I don’t quite understand. Suffice it to
