Bael looked up, her eyes strangely empty. I could see that she had grabbed the image and was watching it, apparently over and over. Elibel looked up as well, her conversation with Kli forgotten, curious about this new cousin.
“My mother?” Bael said, finally.
“No,” O’Flaherty said. “Your father. And our friend Melissa Bean here. She’s Yattea’s mother, if that’s what you can call it. Fortunately she hasn’t had too much of a role in the girl’s upbringing. Our dear Melissa abandoned her fascination with manipulating young girls some time ago, going more into power plays and adventures in alien archaeology. But it seems that Melissa still has a yearning for the girl, from somewhere in that twisted little head.”
Bael stood, walked to the bar, and poured two glasses of Berestian brandy. She handed me one and perched herself on the edge of the couch, sipping the soft golden fluid.
“I’m a little confused,” she said finally. “There are a lot of loose threads in this fabric, and I would love to have someone maybe tie them up a little. I have so many questions running around in my head. Is Taes my father? Is Taes a ghost? Is the Duke Bresslaft? Are my father, um, the Duke, and Melissa Bean lovers? Did the Duke go into some other dimension or time-line or universe or whatever you want to call it? What’s Johnny’s role in all this? Is he going to destabilize Forest and the consortium? How does the fudge trade play into all that? And what about that damned monkey? And my aunt Linda? Too many questions.”
“I can…,” Kli said.
“I suppose I should say something,” Melissa Bean said. Then she paused. We all looked over at her. She was seated in the big, ancient, overstuffed chair that Ship and I had salvaged from a deserted farmstead on Korill’s Paradise a long time ago. The chair swallowed her, but with its size and age it also gave her a bit of authority, like a queen on a massive throne from an old pre-encounter romance. She moved with a slow, regal grace, despite the restrictions of her constraints, or maybe because of them.
“You all are fools,” she said, finally. “Events have been set in place now that none of us can control. From what I’ve seen, you are doing nothing but nibbling around the edges. If I were to die tomorrow, that would not affect what has begun to happen. What has begun to happen is irreversible.” She glanced at Johnny. “As for this fellow, he was useful, but he is inconsequential. As is that walking stick you call, most inaccurately, a monkey.”
“Melissa,…” the Captain said.
“You never could mind,” Bean said. “It was best that you left. If I am to tell this story, you need to let me do so. We do not have much time. This ship will be destroyed when the invasion wave hits.”
“What invasion wave?” I said.
“Ship? Kli?”
“We’re looking.” Ship said.
“Look for anything, anything irregular.”
“I assume you are communicating among yourselves,” Bean said. “It does not matter. That’s a futile gesture. You cannot stop what is about to happen.”
“Well,” I said, “I suppose you’d better tell us what you’re going to tell us.”
“I would like to have these constraints….”
“Unfortunately not, Melissa,” the Captain said. “You’d better just continue.”
“Taes was an experiment, nothing more. He has ceased to exist, at least to the extent that he ever existed in the first place. He was not your father,” she said to Bael. “But neither was the Duke, strictly speaking. You and my Yattea are the first in a series of experiments, the first successful products. You are first of a new generation.”
“What are you saying?” Bael said. She stood, her huge eyes focused on Bean. Bael had become restless, not nervous, just coiled and tense, like a cat ready to pounce. I’d seen her like that before. She moved to the bar and leaned on one of the stools.
“You know about the gates, I’m guessing,” Bean said. “The power of the gates is unimaginable. But it’s what’s on the other side that makes them so valuable, and so dangerous.”
She paused. Bael moved in a little closer, hand on the back of the chair where Nancy had fallen asleep.
“Well?” I said.
“I’ve begun to rethink,” Bean replied, “whether or not you should hear this. I think that….”
“Yattea…,” the Captain said. She was watching Bean closely, and given the evident sophistication of her plant, she was probably watching her in ways I could only imagine. She ran her hand back across her elegant shaved skull.
“I’ve been thinking about that, Mani,” Bean said. “You yourself said that your three old witches won’t let you hurt her. I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time to cut her free. She needs new things in her life. I’ll miss her of course, but I have ways. Maybe I can find her, when the time is right. So it looks as though your bit of leverage is gone. It’s your move.”
“You underestimate me,” O’Flaherty said. “That’s a dangerous thing to do. She crossed the room and stood facing Bean. “I said that….”
“Hare, Bael, I see it,” Kli said.
“An ‘invasion wave?’”
“A neutralization wave. Just appeared from nowhere and is heading this way. It will hit Forest in seventeen minutes, give or take a few sec….”
“That’s impossible. Neutralization waves don’t just come out of nowhere. The amount of energy required….”
“Hare,” Bael said.
“Oh yea. Ship, can we outrun…?”
“Maybe, if I can jump at least thirty seconds before the wave hits. But we can’t stay here, no shelter. I’m lifting now.”
“Captain,” I said. I brought her onto the channel and explained the situation.
Bean had been watching us. “The wave is coming,” she said. “You won’t outrun it, you know.”
“Muzzle her,” I said. “And Johnny.”
“Looks like a lot of folks are trying to get away,” Ship said, finally. She brought up a view of the surrounding sky, and the air was filled with ships of all sizes and shapes, from interstellar freighters to tiny flyers for hire.
“What will happen to them all?” It was Nancy, awake now, and standing next to me. “It’s a neutrali…?”
“Yea,” I said. “Those who can jump well ahead of the wave will be all right. Anybody in those little flyers is lost. They’d have been safer if they’d stayed on the ground. If you can find strong shelter, you have a fair chance of weathering the wave. Forest’s infrastructure won’t be destroyed. But it will be heavily damaged, and many who can’t—or don’t—find shelter will die.”
“Why?”
“Why will they die?”
“Why? Who’s doing this?”
“I’m not sure, but she knows,” I said, gesturing to a smiling Bean. “Forest will lose its place as the center of the consortium, and that’s bound to cause huge ripples across a thousand worlds. I think that’s what they’re after, more instability, more opportunities. Ship? How close are we to a valid jump point?”
“Three minutes twenty-four seconds.”
“And the wave, Kli?”
“Two minutes, forty-five.”
“Close,” the Captain said, calmly.
I felt an arm in mine, and looked into Bael’s eyes. I grinned, and she gently touched my face.
“Thirty-seven seconds,” Kli said. “Then we’ll begin feeling the front of the wave.”
“Jumping,” Ship said, betraying little if any excitement, as though she did this every day. Largo’s fields masked the effects of the jump, but even then, I could feel that this was no ordinary jump. Something was being stretched.
It was late, deep into Largo’s night and Ship’s refresh cycle. We’d adapted a pair of small chambers off Largo’s cargo hold into cells. They’d been used that way before, and they were being used that way again, with Johnny and Melissa in one each. Ship had poured a good amount of power into erecting and reinforcing the blocking screens around each cell; I hoped they would hold.
The rest of us had all sat down to a big meal; I’d contributed my chocolate soup, and everyone ate well and seemed glad to be off Forest. All of Largo’s sleeping rooms had been filled; I figured I would just sleep in the salon. Kral was back in hibernation, and Kli was off in a corner, trying to establish a link with a network that could connect him with his family on Ginga.
Now I sat at the bar, wondering if she’d come. She’d gone off after dinner, and I figured she was sleeping. So I sat there, thinking about everything. I was just about to go into the little library, to maybe doze off in a big chair in front of a fire, when I heard her enter the salon. I stood, and she flew into my arms. We stood that way for a long time.
“I keep thinking of everyone on Forest,” she said quietly. “How many died? And Linda? Where is she? And who, or what, am I?”
“A lot of people would have known to find shelter, and that would have improved their odds greatly. A wave like that is powerful, but spread so far, it’s diffuse; it’s not unbeatable. As for Linda, she’s a survivor. We’ll see her again, I think.”
“Should we go back and help?”
“No. Forest of all places will have the resources for this. And we have things to do.”
“I tried to sleep, and finally I ended up watching something from Ship’s flat screen collection. It was about a man who owns a bar during a war on old Earth. It’s a big, colorful place, full of people fleeing the war. A woman appears with her man. They’re both fleeing the villains. The bar owner hates the woman, because she’d left him long before, but she needs his help in getting away from the villains.”
“Was it good?”
“Yes. But the ending seemed odd. The three of them are at an airfield, in a fog, and the flyer is about to leave, and the bar owner gives a speech about a hill of beans, and it seems like the woman is about to leave with her man. But then she doesn’t, and the man flies off by himself.”
“Bael!” It was Ship.
“Honey, I don’t normally listen in on you two—really I do not. But I was worried about you. That’s not that way that movie ends. Someone has altered my copy, and I think I know why. I think there’s a message hidden in there, somewhere. And if I had to guess, I’d guess it’s from your father.”
End of Part Four
To Be Continued in Part Five, “Into the Heat of Banyan’s Hell.” The series will resume in a couple of weeks. Do come back.
