Ironheart Read online

  The woman looked at Fehd with a glimmer of what Madaku thought might have been surprise, if she’d deigned to be interested enough to feel anything as strong as surprise. “Ah,” she said. “It was thy boarding of the vessel that awakened me.”

  “Yes,” said Fehd, then kept opening his mouth to say something else, but let each syllable die unborn on his lips, unable to come up with the appropriate words. The expected thing would have been gratitude, but the woman sounded almost reproachful. “I ... I hope you don’t mind?...” said Fehd, at last.

  “Of course I do not. One must sleep. But then, one must awaken.” She again surveyed them all, and said, “You may remove your helmets. The air of Ironheart shall not corrupt the lungs.”

  When they didn’t obey right away, the woman raised an eyebrow. For some reason, that was enough to get them reaching for their release toggles. Even Burran, though he made a show of first double-checking the readings on the atmosphere.

  The woman turned back to Fehd. “Is this thy crew entire?”

  “Three-fourths. The pilot’s back on our own ship. I’m Fehd. This is Burran—he does security, mainly. And that’s Madaku. He’s engineering, for the most part.”

  “Have you no other names?” she said. “No ranks?”

  The three men exchanged looks. There were still a few human societies that used surnames, but galaxy-wide they had been rare a hell of a long time. No matter how long she’d been asleep, it was bizarre for this woman to be surprised that they didn’t use them.

  Fehd explained the custom that had been popular for the last couple thousand years: “We all come from cultures that don’t particularly care about genetic kinship, so there’s no need for family surnames. As for rank, I mean, if someone wants to refer to me in some specific capacity, they just call me Fehd Captain. Or Fehd Ship-Proprietor. Or Fehd Prospector.”

  Burran put in, “And if there’s a bigger ship with a large crew divided into sections with hierarchies, you just specify their place in the hierarchy. Like if Madaku here was part of a big ship with forty engineering personnel, you could call him Madaku Engineer Thirty-five, or something like that.”

  “Or Madaku Engineer One, possibly,” said Madaku.

  The woman took them all in, her gaze on them but simultaneously on some other distant point, perhaps somewhere deep within, perhaps someplace out in the empty vastness. “I see,” she said, as if putting aside something that had briefly seemed interesting but had proven easily classifiable, after all. “There has been a leveling.”

  “What’s your name, by the way?” said Burran.

  “I am Anya Molina Escobar de Bucchio Pendergast-Fallon.”

  “Quite a name,” said Burran wryly. As a matter of course he’d fed the name into his tablet while she spoke. “Pretty unusual to boot. There’s no record in the Registry of anyone having used that exact name in six thousand years—congrats. How about your Registry code?”

  “I have no code in the Registry.”

  They stared at her even more intensely. She seemed unfazed by the attention. Madaku said, “Ma’am, with all due respect. Anyone who’s had any dealings with government or commerce in the last five thousand years, on anything but a strictly local scale, has been assigned a code in the Galactic Registry.”

  “I’ve had no such dealings,” she said, her eyes roaming over the chamber’s interior, as if she’d gleaned everything of interest from the intruders and was now interested only in making sure her ship was in proper shape.

  Fehd pressed the point: “You haven’t bought anything at anyplace bigger than a planetside or intra-system market? You haven’t dealt with a government agency at anything greater than the planetary level?”

  “My needs are few,” she said.

  The men kept silent. None of them quite believed her, but they saw no reason to contradict her yet.

  And, as they listened to the old-fashioned Galactic roll from her mouth, they couldn’t help but think, Who knows?...

  Turning to Fehd, she said, “I should like to visit thy ship. I assume thy instruments may confirm I carry no weapons or diseases?”

  “Sure,” said Fehd. From his eagerness, his two companions could predict what he was going to say next: “And perhaps later we could explore your ship, as well. I’d love to learn Ironheart’s secrets.” He was practically drooling over the prospect of getting his hands on that suspended animation technology.

  Anya said, “Some of her secrets I may share, perhaps. And some I must keep.”

  Madaku noted the very, very antiquated affectation of giving a vessel the female pronoun. He had never heard anyone do that in real life, and knew the custom only from classical literature he’d had to study in school.

  Anya said, “Let us depart for thy vessel,” and began leading the way out of the room.

  Without thinking, Fehd and Madaku fell in step behind her. When Burran exclaimed, “Wait!” they were startled. Anya, on the other hand, merely stopped and turned a mild, questioning gaze on him.

  Burran said, “You mind telling us what happened to your ship, before we go traipsing over to ours? Mind telling us whether you had any other crew in here, and if so what happened to them?”

  “I’ve no objection to telling thee whatever thou may wish,” she said, perfectly reasonable. “When the last sleep came, I was alone. It is a very long time since Ironheart has held crew, as such, though I have at times had companions. As to what happened to her, I know not exactly.” At first Madaku wondered who “her” referred to, and assumed it was one of those companions. Then he realized she meant the ship itself. “I came upon this system, and when I wanted to leave, the engines would not go. Being only myself, and having no engineer with me, I could not repair it. So I settled in to sleep, trusting that ones such as you would come awake me, in time.”

  “Who intuited you out here? Are you the intuiter?”

  “The person who was with me took her life. The frame of her spirit buckled under the weight of the void.”

  Shit, a ship really would be in trouble if its intuiter up and killed herself. And if that subspace antenna had been knocked out before the accident, that would explain why Anya hadn’t called for help. There were still a lot of questions, but the sadness in Anya’s voice made the men shy, and they dropped the subject for now. “Madaku here will be happy to look over your thrusters, see if he can get them running again,” said Fehd. Another chance to pick up some marketable titbits, naturally.

  Burran said, “What did you come here for, anyway? Were you mining?”

  For the first time Anya showed something like amusement in the lightness of her lips. “Nay,” she said. “Ironheart contains riches enough.”

  Madaku would have liked a moment alone with Burran to discuss things before carting the stranger over to the Canary. If Ironheart had such fabulous riches, how come Anya hadn’t had an engineer on the payroll, way back when? Or a killer diagnostic system? And what the hell had she been doing way the hell out here at XB-79853-D7-4, anyway, if she hadn’t been here to mine? Not counting its mineral wealth, the place was so desolate that not even zyblots wanted to live here, as they had so amply and needlessly proven.

  But Fehd seemed only to have heard, firstly, Anya confirming that she had registered no rival prospecting claims that would precede his, and, secondly, that her ship contained a large amount of wealth. After that, he couldn’t get her back to the shuttle and then the Canary fast enough.

  Madaku was hoping she might lead them on some circuitous route back to the docking bay, perhaps leave this chamber by a different door, and so give them a chance to see another part of the ship. He was curious to try to gauge how big the habitable area might be, and to see if the rest of the craft’s interior was designed in such a seemingly haphazard fashion. But she led them back the way they’d come. It took less than a minute, now that they were briskly walking instead of cautiously air-swimming.

  “This ship has an interesting design, Anya,” he said to her as they walked. “Ha
s it been modified much since you took possession?”

  She didn’t slow her pace as she answered, but she did turn her head to speak over her shoulder. “Modifications have been made, here and there. Over the years, I trust that every part hath been replaced, except the outer central hull.”

  Every part? More exaggeration. “Where did you first acquire it? If I may ask. Is it a human design, at least originally?”

  Anya kept walking. For a moment, he didn’t think she was going to answer. But then she said, uncertainly, “I don’t remember.”

  Madaku and Burran exchanged a look. Not remember where you bought your starship? Bullshit. But bullshit so flagrant as to give one pause. Madaku began to ask himself if this Anya might not be clinically insane, and what they would do about it if she were. No sane person should be able to nonchalantly claim such a lapse in memory.

  They boarded the shuttle; the craft undocked itself and began the quiet trip back to the Canary. Anya cast her black eyes around its interior, taking stock. But she showed only a lukewarm interest. Madaku didn’t blame her much. Even if she had gone to sleep millennia before this particular model was ever produced, still, a shuttle is a shuttle.

  Willa had been following their adventures remotely. Now Burran inclined his head as a mild buzzing in his earpiece threaded through the cabin of the shuttle, on the edge of the audible. Of course it could be no one except Willa, but Madaku nevertheless imagined he could have identified the sound of Willa’s voice just from that faint thin buzz, that he would have recognized it even without knowing already who it was; of course that probably wasn’t true.

  To Fehd, Burran said, “Willa wants to know if she should do anything special to welcome our guest.”

  Fehd turned to Anya. “Um, if there’s something you’d like?....”

  She didn’t take her eyes from the viewport, and from the quickly swelling Canary. “I want only to be surprised,” she said.

  While Fehd was trying to think of what to do with that cryptic answer, Burran said, “Willa? Don’t worry—no need to do anything.”

  Madaku watched him, annoyed. Really, it should be the captain who stayed in touch with the pilot, but because of their special relationship Fehd let Burran do it. Madaku didn’t think it was wise to indulge their romance to the point that it encouraged unprofessional behavior.

  The Canary was above them now, as they went under its belly in order to get to the docking area on its other side. Anya craned her neck to look up at it, as it passed overhead. “’Tis a fat ship,” she said; disapprovingly, as if it were a beast bred for display, instead of a machine designed to certain specifications for certain reasons.

  “It’s not a fat ship,” Fehd said defensively. “It’s a mining ship. That’s the hold you’re looking at.”

  “Mm,” said Anya, as if Fehd’s mitigating circumstances left her unimpressed. “So thou shalt fill that great hold with crushed moonlets?”

  “Yeah,” said Fehd. “Pretty much.”

  “Like a swollen tick,” Anya murmured, possibly to herself. None of the men knew what a tick was, and they let the comment go. It didn’t sound like a compliment.

  Madaku cleared his throat. He didn’t know why it should make him a little nervous to address the newcomer. “I’ll have to research the pronoun usage, Anya,” he said. “I can’t remember when to use words like ‘thou’ and ‘thy’ instead of ‘you.’ It’s a long time since school. I think the ‘you’ is for plurals, and to show respect to individuals?...” He blushed after having said the last bit, as he realized that Anya had not been calling any of them “you” individually.

  Madaku didn’t really care about the pronouns, he was just trying to get a conversation started, to see what else he could pick up about her. But at first, it once again seemed that she might not say anything; when she did speak, it was to say, “Nay, it is not for you to learn my dead speech. That task is mine. Always, when one awakens, there is a new tongue to learn. On the one side, one regrets making such effort for such a paltry, quickly-’scaping end. To learn a speech that will be less than a memory to those one must speak to upon the next awakening! But on the other side, ’tis good to have a little task, and one is always grateful, upon awakening, to discover there is at least one thing one must do.”

  Fehd asked, “Um, are you saying that it’s happened to you multiple times that you’ve gone into suspended animation for so long that, when you awoke, the lingua franca had shifted significantly? How many times have you used the suspension chamber? How old is it? What kind of maintenance do you do?”

  They were coming up the other side of the Canary now. Its hull scrolled by, illuminated by the shuttle’s running lights and the faint reflected aquamarine light of XB-79853-D7-4. Anya said, “The change this time is not so great; I shall be able to ape thy speech in short order. A difference in accent, in a few words. But so little has changed in so long—thy technology looks much as it looked when last I went to sleep. There has been a leveling, true. But I have seen levelings afore.”

  Fehd wasn’t sure what to say to all of that. “Well,” he tried, “if it’s a concern, I’m sure we can coach you on how to speak more like, you know, us.”

  “You should let Willa be in charge of that,” said Burran. “She’s good at that stuff. Teaching. Explaining.”

  Anya turned away from the Canary’s constantly-tumbling hull, to look at Fehd. “Thou hast asked many questions about my suspended animation unit. Doth my technology interest thee?”

  Fehd’s mouth opened and closed several times, without finding an answer he liked. A better businessman would have downplayed his interest in the newcomer’s goods. But despite Fehd’s pretensions and daydreams, it had been many centuries since anyone in Galactic society had truly had to make a living from haggling, so it was no surprise he wasn’t better at it.

  Finally, Fehd gave up. “Yes,” he said. “I’d like a chance to look it over.” Anya slowly turned to look back out at the Canary.

  Instead of holding firm in the face of her silence, Fehd quavered. “I’m sure we can find a way to make any disclosures worth your while.”

  Anya was still looking at the ship. Madaku was getting used to her stately pace in answering. Her pauses made her eventual replies something to look forward to, somehow.

  When she did reply, she said, “Yes, we shall see—thou mayest have something I desire.”

  Five

  When they boarded the Canary, they got to see a new side of Anya. Willa was waiting in the docking bay to meet them. She eyed the stranger with friendly curiosity—but whatever friendliness she might display was more than outdone by the almost gushy way Anya stepped forward, took both her hands, and said, “But thou art charming!”

  “Well, thanks!” said Willa, laughing in delight.

  Anya turned her body in the men’s direction, without actually tearing her eyes from Willa. “This is the one you said shouldst teach me your speech, yes?” Fehd nodded, and Burran merely grunted in reply—they’d already told Anya the Canary had a complement of only four, so who else would it be? Anya went on: “She must teach me in matters of speech, and also in all things else.”

  Fehd said, “Well, sure. Willa, you don’t mind, do you?”

  Willa glanced at Burran; Madaku intercepted the look. At first he took it for a silent request for permission, and his blood began to boil; but then he recognized it for what it was, a reassurance. That struck him as even odder. He looked at Burran to see what expression he gave Willa in return, but it was unreadably stoic.

  For the next couple days Willa mainly just hung out with Anya. There wasn’t a lot else for her to do—normally, she would have helped the others out in getting the extraction and exploitation-chains set up, but those activities were so far outside her area of expertise that she would only have been good for odd jobs here and there, and the guys were able to pick up the slack. Besides, Fehd liked it that Willa was keeping Anya distracted from all the profitable activities going on in this system that
Anya had, after all, visited first.

  It was a lot of work for three people, getting a mining operation set up for a whole solar system, even if their main focus was only XB-79853-D7-4 and its cloud of satellites. So they had to leave Willa and Anya on their own most of the time. At the end of the day or the beginning, before or after work, whenever Madaku walked into a room occupied only by Anya and Willa, he was amazed at the vast difference between the face she showed the intuiter and the one she gave the rest of the crew. With Willa she was like an adoring sister, usually older but sometimes seeming younger, like a child gazing up at Willa in worshipful admiration. There was something a little extreme about it, actually.

  With the other three, Anya continued to comport herself almost as a queen. But Willa’s influence did soften her. Sometimes, if Willa was also in the room, the men might find turned upon them the still-warm remnants of a smile originally ignited for Willa’s sake. And Willa seemed to like Anya too, albeit with far less intensity.

  One day while they were working side-by-side, Madaku said to Burran, “So—what do you think of the relationship developing between Willa and Anya?” He asked partly out of spite, because he could see that Burran didn’t like it. Presumably that was because it occupied time Willa would normally devote to him.

  But Burran gave no hint of any personal jealousy when he replied. Predictably, he was concerned with security. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to have Willa answering any questions our mysterious stranger can think of to ask about us, sixteen hours a day.”

  Madaku was certain that, however Burran might dress it up in his own mind, the truth was he was jealous. No one could be as paranoid as he seemed to be. “You’re the one who suggested Anya be assigned to Willa.”

  “For language lessons. How long does it take to teach her to say ‘you’ instead of ‘thou’?”

  Madaku had to admit that Burran made a good point, even if he only admitted it to himself. Fortunately, Anya would be at least somewhat separated from Willa soon. After the fourth day of setting up asteroid stations for the extraction chains, and getting the preliminary infrastructure set up for the exploitation chain, Fehd figured he could let Madaku coast a while. There would be some time for Madaku to go over to Ironheart and try to help Anya get it up and running again (and, incidentally, see if he could pick up on any valuable tech quirks or innovations it might harbor). Burran’s workload was lighter now, too, and Fehd told Madaku that getting Anya away from Willa would also be a nice way for the couple to have some time alone.