“Come back for me? Of course not. She left me for koah tree.” I nodded, feigning comprehension. “And you like it here, living with Hawk?”
“Hawk, he is a kind, good man.”
“He looks after you well?”
She stared at me, then said, “No. I look after him. I make his life worth living. He tells me this.”
“You don’t miss your people?”
“Miss my people?” she repeated, then shook her head. “My hive mother,” she explained with what might have been infinite patience, “she give me to koah tree.”
“Right,” I said. “I see.”
She looked at me, and then asked her first question. “You are David Conway, yes? Hawk’s new friend?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Hawk says you are a good man.”
I smiled. “I’m pleased he thinks so. I think Hawk’s a good man, too.”
As if on cue, to put an end to the vicarious compliment session, the hatch cracked with a pressurised sigh and Hawk ducked from the simulator and straightened in the sunlight, stretching as if to ease aches from his tall frame.
Then he saw me and smiled—a little uncomfortably, I thought. The girl pushed herself from the flank of the tug and danced across to Hawk, standing on tip-toe and whispering something in his ear. He smiled, then limped across to where I sat, the girl beside him.
“She wants me to tell you her name,” he said. “You see, it’s impolite for the Ashentay to tell a stranger their name, until the stranger asks. Only then can they become friends.” He shrugged and smiled. “When in Rome… David, this is Kee. Kee, David Conway.”
She smiled and inclined her head.
Hawk pulled her to him, kissed her forehead and said, “We’d love a couple of beers.”
She hurried off and Hawk hitched himself onto the fin beside me. I watched her go. “Strange child,” I said.
“She’s alien,” he said. “What do you expect? And don’t be deceived by appearances. Kee’s no child.”
I glanced at him. “No? I had her down as around twelve.”
“She’s thirty Earth years old,” Hawk said. “A mature Ashentay adult. What do you think I am, Conway?” he laughed.
“Kee said you found her. Something about her hive mother giving her away to a koah tree?”
“Many humans would call the Ashentay primitive.” He shook his head. “I’d rather say they’re just very different. Alien. They live in hive tribes, with a single mother spawning as many as twenty children in a litter. They have a ritual—the twentieth child of every birthing, when they reach maturity, is left with the koah tree. A kind of gift to the gods of the jungle.”
“But they die?”
“Well, that depends what you believe. The Ashentay believe the spirit of the twentieth child is special, and blessed. It’s an honour to be left with the koah tree. Their spirit is absorbed into the tree, and they enjoy extended life.”
“So your finding her and bringing her back here…?”
Hawk smiled. “The koah tree was dying. I effectively saved her life.”
“She wouldn’t have left the dying tree, sought her people?”
“Her destiny was with the tree. I had to show her that it was dying. Only then would she come with me—she couldn’t return to her people, according to ritual. Her destiny is with me, now.”
“Some responsibility, Hawk,” I said.
He shrugged. “I love her, Conway.”
Kee came back a minute later, carrying three beers. She passed two to Hawk, then climbed onto the fin and stretched herself out behind us, the bottle resting on her chest. She closed her eyes and basked in the sun.
Hawk passed me a beer. “Social visit?”
“The ship you sold me,” I said. “It’s haunted.”
He gave me a look. “Haunted?”
I told him about the apparitions. “I went through the ship yesterday, looking for what might be causing it. I found nothing, no projectors, nothing like that.”
“It’s an alien ship. They might have had different systems we don’t recognise.”
“That’s another thing,” I said. “As far as I could tell, the ship didn’t belong to any of the known space-faring races.”
“That’s impossible.”
I shrugged. “So maybe I’m wrong. But the projection didn’t resemble any of the known races, and the dimensions of the ship don’t correspond with the sizes of the space-faring aliens, as far as I could tell.”
Hawk thought about this. “Let’s go over to the office. I have a com system there, records that might tell us something.”
We slipped from the fin and left Kee sleeping in the sun, the beer still standing on her chest. As I glanced back at her, I was reminded, fleetingly and with a sudden pang, of my daughter sun-bathing on the beach at Vancouver.
It was cool in the dim interior of the scoutship where Hawk had his office. The room was big, but he had managed to stuff it full of com-terminals and unidentifiable chunks of machinery, and the walls were hung with plasma graphics of starscapes and alien vistas.
We sat in comfortable swivel chairs before a big screen and Hawk tapped a series of commands into the touchpad.
“These are the specs of all the types of alien ships in existence,” he said, “belonging to the Qlax, the Mathan and the Zexu.”
The screen filled with glowing columns. “I did wonder if it might have been a Zexu exploration vessel,” he said.
I handed Hawk a sheet of paper scribbled with measurements I’d made yesterday. “It’s not Zexu,” I said. “They’re way too tall for the ship.”
“And the Mathan and Qlax are too small,” he said.
“So… maybe it belonged to a race so far undiscovered?”
He stared at me. “And I gave it away for five grand!” he laughed, shutting down the screen.
“Hey, I wouldn’t claim all the glory. We’ll split everything fiftyfifty.”
Hawk finished his beer and said, “Look, the best thing would be for me to come over to the ship and go through it inch by inch. If it’s projecting alien images, then there’s some mechanism doing that, maybe some data system we can access.”
“Come over tomorrow afternoon, before dinner with Matt and Maddie.”
“How about another beer?” He fetched two ice-cold bottles from a cooler and we moved out onto the observation deck and sat on the command couches.
I stared across the yard, towards the blue flight simulation pod. Nearby, Kee was still flat out on the fin, soaking up the light of Delta Pavonis.
“Kee said you used the pod every day.”
Hawk smiled. “We all have our vices, David.”
“I thought your jacks were sealed?”
He looked uncomfortable. “My spinal ports are well and truly,” he said. “But the left bicep and occipitals are fine. I use these and go spinning round the Expansion.” He smiled like a schoolboy. “Got to get my kicks someplace.”
I refrained from asking him how his spinal jacks had become unusable, and changed the subject. “Maddie called round yesterday.”
“How is she?”
I shrugged. “She seemed fine. Hard to tell. She always seems so buoyant, considering her condition.”
He looked across at me. “She told you?”
“We had a few beers and she told me all about it.” I shook my head. “What can you say? I can’t imagine the hell she must live through.”
“She’s a remarkable woman, Conway.” He paused, then said, “Did she tell you we had an affair a few years ago?”
“No, but she did say that you were close.”
He smiled. “Close? I loved the woman. Still do, if I’m honest with myself.”
I took a drink of beer. “What happened?”
I thought at first he wasn’t going to reply, but after a few seconds he said, “Maddie came to Chalcedony about ten years ago. She lived at the sanatorium just north of Magenta. At the time I had an apartment in the settlement, before I moved here.” He smiled to himself. “We both took walks along the beach, and I managed it so that I just happened to be out when Maddie passed by. She’s such an out-going person that it wasn’t long before we were meeting in the Jackeral.