Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather

Author:Lina Rather
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

III.: Sic transit gloria mundi

GEMMA LAY UNDER ONE of the hydroponic plant beds, where the air circulated the moisture rising off the water, cooling her face. It almost felt like being in a forest, with the sounds of the leaves rustling in the climate control system’s breeze and the nutrient-rich water pumping over the vegetables’ roots.

Vauca laughed. “Is that what a forest is like? I’ve never been.” She turned over onto her side and bumped her head on one of the crocks fermenting cabbage into kimchi and garlicky sauerkraut. There was a leak in one of the feeder lines and after forty-five minutes in the cool damp they’d finally replaced the tubing. Not that they were rushing.

“Sort of.” Gemma searched for a way to describe the feeling of so many trees. She had only been in forests a few times herself, and years ago. “It’s like . . . there are so many lives. They talk to each other through their roots, you know. They send information back and forth in patterns of nutrients and bioelectricity.”

“Like the shiplings! Well, maybe.”

“I bet we could inject one of the shiplings with magnetic dye and watch how it travels through the others.” Gemma let a curl of Vauca’s hair wrap around her fingers and slip through. She was not so young anymore, not really. On the station where she had grown up, she would be married with three children in the creche by now. But she felt like a blushing, budding teenager, waiting for someone to ask her to dance at an eclipse festival, wondering what it would feel like to have someone else’s skin touch her neck, her cheek, the curve of her back. Vauca’s hair smelled like vanilla. How very strange their lives were, she thought, that their toiletries could smell like a spice she had never seen in real life, that would not grow beyond Earth.

“Interesting. How would we track it? We’d have to set up a CT scan net outside the ship and that would be extraordinarily large.”

“Hmm.” It was a problem. Would it be possible to do a CT scan in sections, with handheld scanners? Surely one of the shipyards had developed a more space-efficient diagnostic tool. Then again, ships produced such large egg clutches and so few were expected to grow to size, most of the time shipyards just disposed of problematic larvae.

The door to the hydroponics bay slid open and Gemma jumped. She still wasn’t used to the sounds of a metal ship, where doors slid and hissed instead of squelching and sucking.

“Gemma?” It was Jared, the comms officer. “There’s a call for you.”

Gemma shimmied out from under the table and Vauca followed after. “Who’s calling me?” She couldn’t think of a single person who would be. Not directly, in real time. It took a lot of power and bandwidth to send a targeted call and keep the channel open for responses.

“A woman named Lucia on your old ship.”

Something was wrong. She ran for the comms room.

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