“It's processing,” Vikka said, squinting at the handheld. “Ura… the first one, it's giving me 'food near' at forty percent, and the response, um, 'happiness' at seventy‑five percent correlation.”
“We're nowhere near a nutrient source. Give me that,” Cardin said, and yanked the unit out of her hand. He stared at it, shook it, stared at it some more. “Food near,” he repeated, scowling.
“Could it be a statement of a more general anticipation?” Bari spoke up from the back. From the look Vikka shot her, it was an unwelcome interruption. Cardin's gray eyebrows knit together, then he made a slight tsk sound. “A surprisingly good suggestion,” he said, turning to look one at a time at both Ceen and Vikka as if to reprimand them for not having been the ones to voice it. “Although the common understanding is that the Rooan aren't sufficiently intelligent for such an indirect concept.”
Vikka had just started to flash a sneer at Bari when he added, “Of course, common understanding is often wrong. If I can prove the Rooan have a rudimentary grasp of abstract thinking, that would be an enormous coup.”
“And if you could prove Northies have a rudimentary grasp — ”
“Bigotry doesn't become you, Vikka.” Cardin cut her off. “Nor jealousy. You're the professional — act like one.”
[Ha! Face stomp!] came over Bari's link. [Turquoise asks how much longer you expect to be. I know you can't answer, so I told him you take your job very seriously and he'll just have to wait.]
She did take it seriously — seriously enough to have hiked thirty‑seven miles of barren no‑man's‑land to the isthmus border between North and South nations on Haudernelle, everything she owned on her back and a verichip with a personal recommendation from the Northern Institute's Director of Xenobiologic Field Studies tucked in a pocket against her breast like a ticket home. Even that had only been enough to get her five minutes of Cardin's time. If she hadn't had the experience with zero‑grav and the full set of untethered spacewalk certifications, that would have been as far as she'd gotten. He'd told her as much when she signed on, and told her if she didn't appreciate that he'd given her a job at all she could “go back to the woods and scratch in the dirt for food like the rest of your people,” or something like that; the exact words had fastened less in her memory than the tone of them.
As it turned out, she'd displaced another of Cardin's students who didn't have the certs, and Vikka had been trying to drive her out ever since. Bari suspected that they'd been lovers, but didn't care enough to find out.
Cardin stood up. “On the off chance that Ms. Park is on to something, I should be able to get the system to give us a double translation simultaneously, one of explicit meaning, and one of running extrapolation. But I need to access the primary console to make programming changes. Ceen, keep us steady relative to the herd.”
The professor threw the floor hatch and disappeared down into the tiny hold where the mishmash of tech he'd spent decades putting together nestled like a canker in the ship's belly. As soon as the hatch closed behind him, Vikka whirled on Bari. “You fucking bitch,” she said. “Are you trying to make me look stupid? Haven't I warned you to keep your damn Northie mouth shut?”
“You have,” Bari said. She checked her tether, got out of her seat, then popped open her locker and began sorting out her personal gear.
Ahead of them the gigantic shapes of the Rooan flashed light back and forth, yellows and blues, reds and purples, a lone beacon of blue. “Will you two shut up?” Ceen snarled. “It's bad enough trying to fly this piece of shit as it is, and Cardin will kill us all if we miss anything important out there or spook the herd.”
Ah, my jacket, Bari thought, unfolding the garment and shaking it out.
“Oh, very nice,” Vikka said, reaching a new high pitch. “Did your mommy sew that for you back home? What do you Northies call home, anyway? Palm‑fern huts in the woods? Dirt burrows?”
Bari slipped into the jacket. She flexed her arms, shrugged her shoulders, pleased again that even after all these years the fit didn't impair her physical movement. The jacket was comfortable, almost too much so. She walked forward toward Vikka, the weight of her mag boots on the metal decking and the faint tension of her safety tether a reassurance. “Would you like to see?”
“Why the hell would I want to be anywhere near anything of yours?” Vikka said, as Bari extended one hand, palm up, to show off the workmanship of the embroidered sleeve. As the woman opened her mouth to say more, Bari reached around with her other hand and slammed Vikka's head into the console in front of her.
“What the fuck!?” Ceen shouted, half‑rising out of his seat, as Bari reached over and punched the emergency off for the ship's gravity field. Untethered, Ceen's motion propelled him into the back of his seat and into a bulkhead. He managed to get a grip on the seat foam and was trying to swing himself within reach of the end of his free tether when
Bari kicked him just hard enough to send him careening around the cabin. Then she bent down and snapped tight the lock on the hatch Cardin had just gone through.
Vikka was struggling up in her seat, one side of her face a brutal red and already beginning to swell, her eyes tearing up with hatred. Bari put a hand on the back of her neck and forced her face back down against the console. “Vikka,” she said. “Please understand. First of all, you make yourself look stupid all on your own. Second, my mother is dead, so I'm not really inclined to listen to you talk about her. Third, while I came to Haudernelle Academy from the North, I wasn't born there. Still, during my time in the North, nearly everyone I met was intelligent, hard‑working, and generous, entirely unlike you. It's something you might consider if you find yourself face to face with a real 'Northie.' ”
“I am so going to kick your ass,” Vikka hissed. “Cardin will — ”
“Cardin can't do anything, and neither can you.” Bari took the small dermal patch she'd palmed while sorting through her stuff and slapped it — harder than necessary, she had to admit — onto Vikka's forehead. Almost immediately the woman's eyes rolled up into the back of her head and she went limp. “Nighty night.”
“Are you mad?” Ceen shouted from where he drifted mid‑cabin. “You're jeopardizing the entire project!”
At least he cares about the science, if nothing else, Bari thought. She peeled the backing off another patch. He watched her do it, flailing his arms hopelessly trying to reach something to grab onto. “If it's any consolation, Ceen, the project was already failing,” she said. “The herd is going to turn early toward Aurora space, coming dangerously close to their outpost in this sector. You'd only have had another thirty minutes, possibly less, to try to accumulate the material needed to demonstrate the validity of Cardin's translation program. We both know that's not nearly enough time. And after this, the herd is going to slingshot off Beserai and head back into deep space for the centuries‑long trip to Beenjai. They'll go dormant and silent, leaving you with nothing left to study.”
“How can you know this?”
Bari sighed. “The Rooan use gravity wells to modulate their velocity, right? If you simply look at the alignment of the planets in this system and their current heading, their trajectory is obvious — and gives them no more options in‑system. This has to be the last pass.”
Ceen was silent a moment. “I suggested that to Cardin six months ago and he said I was wrong. He said I was an idiot.”
“Well, when you get out of here, be sure to remind him.”
“Am I going to get out of here?” he asked.