The Ghost Sister

by L. Williams

Chapter 7

The nanobiotics that the biologist Sylvian had given Bel took a while to work, longer than expected. Shu spent the better part of the next day torn between frustration and worry, but she did not want to suggest that they return to the ruins without Bel Zhur. Shu herself had basic piloting skills, but the twists and turns of the entrance into the caldera did not inspire her with confidence. Besides, despite the injury to her leg, Bel was as desperate as Shu to return to the ruined city, and it seemed ungenerous to insist on leaving her behind. So Shu waited and fidgeted and wrote up her notes in exhaustive detail until Bel limped back into the tent with a protesting Sylvian close behind her and announced that she felt well enough to fly the aircar back.

“Are you sure?” Dia asked, frowning. The Ship’s Guardian looked particularly austere today, Shu thought, her brow pale between the drawn-back wings of iron-gray hair. Seen in profile, Dia could be a statue from an ancient tomb, not a living woman at all. Yet Shu suspected that her remote manner concealed nothing more sinister than a fundamental shyness.
A certain lost, vulnerable look had begun to appear in Dia’s large, light eyes ever since their arrival on Monde D’Isle. Shu couldn’t blame her. For someone whose life hitherto had consisted of running a seminary, Dia had perhaps taken a greater risk than anyone in coming here.

“I’m fine,” Bel protested. “Just a bit stiff, that’s all, and it’ll soon wear off.”

“I don’t know,” Dia said doubtfully. “That was a nasty injury. And we don’t know what it was that attacked you; there could be more of them.”

Shu took a deep, careful breath, and asked the question that had been preoccupying her ever since they’d landed. “Might I suggest,” she said “that in that case, we try to rig up some sort of defense?”

As she had expected, her words fell into a chilly silence. Dia said, “Are you suggesting we take up arms?”

“No, certainly not, but it would be simple enough to attach a modified biotics spray to one of the bolt projectile devices. They use something similar on Narrandera. They're called stun guns, but that’s just a name. You wouldn’t actually hurt whatever you shot, just put it out of action for a while.” She took care to sound reasonable, but she was not really anticipating anything other than disagreement. However, Shu told herself, she owed it to reason to try, and this was the first time she had tested whatever waters might lie between herself and Dia. Dia’s pale eyes blinked oncelikean owl, as if in incomprehension. “Narrandera,” the Guardian said icily “is a world of heretics. I do not expect a member of this mission to invoke such action.”

“Maybe I should remind you that I’m not really a member of the mission. I’m just along to do some research. But I don’t want to argue with you, Dia, and I recognize that you are Ship’s Guardian. If you forbid weapons of any description, I'll go along with that.”

“Then I thank you for your conciliation,” Dia said, and smiled to show that Shu was forgiven. Shu inclined her head, making private plans to sneak away one of the bolt projectile devices as soon as she could manage it.
As the most elderly member of the party, she thought, she had some right
to feel insecure.

“Look,” Bel said hastily. “Now that we know there’s something there, we’ll just have to be more careful. We’ve got the lifescanners, after all – they’re able to show us if there’s anything within a fairly wide radius. We’ll just have to avoid it if there is.”

Dia frowned. “And why didn’t the scanner work last time?”

“Because whatever it was that attacked me came in so fast,” Bel said defensively. “The scanner did pick it up, but I wasn’t quick enough.”

Dia sighed and said, “Bel, this isn’t Irie St Syre, where nothing will harm you. We don’t know what might be out there. Your basic training should have made you aware of that before we ever set foot on the ship.”

“It did. I made a mistake; I’m sorry.”

“I’m as much to blame as Bel,” Shu said quickly, but Dia interrupted.

“Bel has to learn to take responsibility for her own actions, Shu Gho.” Dia sat up straighter and her expression became even more austere. “All our lives depend on one another, now.”

“Guardian, I’m sorry,” Bel said, again. “But you know we’ve no choice but to go back to the ruins, whatever’s in there.”

Dia looked at her acolyte, at Bel’s wide, eager eyes, and Shu saw her face soften. She said, more gently, “I know. I’m simply telling you to be careful.”

Shu checked and rechecked the aircar, making sure that everything was sound. She possessed basic engineering skills, but her understanding of the vehicle was not advanced and she did not likehaving to rely on the delazheni. She watched uneasily as the digits of the biodevice glided across the control panels. The delazhen turned to her and said in its smooth, neutral voice, “Safety precautions have been successfully undertaken. Flight may proceed.”

“Thank you,” Shu said, wondering for the thousandth time how much the delazheni really understood, how great their self-awareness might be. Dia had compromised her principles in bringing them; they were perceived by the stricter Gaian sects as unnatural, the sad creations of an earlier age, but nobody denied their usefulness. The delazhen stepped back on its jointed legs.

This time, the journey into the caldera was not quite so alarming, and Shu managed to keep her eyes open most of the way. After some argument, the biologist, Sylvian, had remained at camp with Dia; she had put up a good case for coming along, Shu thought, but Dia had insisted. Shu wondered, somewhat cynically, if the reason might simply be that Dia regarded Shu herself as rather more expendable, but if that was the reasoning, then she could hardly blame the Guardian. Even in a culture where art was so highly valued, when it came to the crunch, biologists were more useful than writers.

The aircar glided into the caldera itself, and Shu could see the patch of dust disturbed by their previous landing. Bel took them down and, once outside, they walked cautiously back toward the ruins. This time, both wrist scanners were on full wide-radius audio alert, but Shu was taking no chances. The bolt projectile device, retrieved from the aircar’s resource pack while Bel was concentrating on the coordinates, rested comfortingly in the folds of Shu’s jacket. But the only signs of recent life were their own footprints patterning through the dust.

They moved deeper into the settlement, following the sound. The humming note seemed louder here, perhaps amplified by the cliff walls. Soon, they found themselves in an unfamiliar set of rooms: a sequence of chambered halls with a colonnaded view out across the caldera. If the tall, arched windows had ever contained flexglass however, it was long gone. Granules of red dust skittered across the floor, and something about the movement did not seem natural. After a puzzled moment, Shu realized that the wind had dropped. A regular flutter of interference passed across the curved surface of Bel’s scanner, as if mimicking the passage of the dust, and the girl stared at it, evidently bewildered.

“Is that the field signature we picked up yesterday?” Shu asked.

“I don’t know,” Bel murmured, frowning. “I think it might be the same, but it seems to be fluctuating. When we got back yesterday,
I patched through the field signature to the ship after Sylvian had fixed up my leg.” She paused, gazing out at the shafts of sunlight illuminating the walls of the caldera.

“And?” Shu prompted gently.

“It hasn’t come back with anything yet. I gave it instructions to relay any results to the aircar console.”

“There’s no sign of anything in here. Maybe we should see what’s through those doors at the end of the chamber.”

In silence, they walked the length of the room to the tall doors. The catches had rusted together, but after a moment, Bel managed to wrench them open. A further long passage lay beyond, linedon one side by panels of lacy metal. Dispersed by the frets, the afternoon light was scattered across the floor like grain.

Shu paused. “Bel? Look at this.” Some of the panels were less intricately carved than the rest, with only a few openings to let the light through. But that light fell infamiliar patterns upon the opposite wall.

“Stars,” Bel murmured, following Shu’s pointing hand. “They’re the stars of Irie. Look, you can see the Maiden... and the Cat.”

“Maybe they wanted reminders of home,” Shu whispered. “Come on. Let’s see what's at the end of the corridor.”

At the end of the passage a final door led down onto a Spiral staircase, which made its way down into the earth like a screw.

“Scanner picking up anything?” Shu asked.

Bel shook her head. “Nothing’s showing.”

They listened for a moment, but the only sound was, as ever, that faint, disquieting hum which echoed up through the well of the stair. The light of the flashlight showed nothing but more steps, seeming to lead into infinity. Bel went first, moving cautiously. To Shu, it felt as though they descended for hours, but at last they came out onto a narrow platform. The humming was louder here, reverberating all around them as though they stood in a cave of the sea.

“Whatever’s making that field of yours,” Shu said, raising her voice above the great singing, “I think we’ve found it.”

At the far end of the platform lay yet another door, but this one was different. Instead of the etched metal, it was a single slab of some glossy, pale substance which, because it was so familiar, Shu initially failed to recognize. The door was made from grown-bone, like many of the early structures on Irie before all genetically engineered and vat-grown substances were restricted. Stepping up to it, she put her hand to its smooth surface. It felt cool and hard, almost brittle, but she knew that it was impervious to almost anything except a direct explosive blast. Whatever lay behind this door was intended to be protected. Bel peered at the red palm print beside the door: a deliberately archaic symbol of an advanced technology.

“Gene-reading?”

“Yes, but I doubt whether it’s still active after all this time. We can probably force it.”

She held up the scanner, and Shu watched as the patterns of light flickered across the surface of the palm print, scanning for DNA traces and reflecting them back in mimicry of whoever had last used the mechanism. The bone door glided open with barely a sound. Bel and Shu found themselves gazing into a chamber.

This place was a world away from the style of the rooms above, the delicate, curling carvings and etched metal. This room was of Irie St Syre, using forms that had remained unchanged for thousands of years. It was molded, organic, a flowing sequence of curves which made it difficult to see where the walls ended and the floor began. Everything was a familiar dark, mottled green, like water in a deep pool, and at the far end of the room a long console was set into the wall. Its surfaces were a glistening green-black, and slick as oil beneath nanomolecular filters. It flowed outward like a wave, and light flickered across its surface as though under water. It was humming. As Shu watched, it seemed to shift and change, reconfiguring itself beneath her gaze as though she were making it uncomfortable. The air smelled of something familiar, which Shu was nonetheless initially unable to place. Then she recognized it: it was the smell of technology, of order. Irie St Syre had smelled like this, balanced and harmonious and controlled, with nothing to revolt the senses. Wholly artificial.

Used by now to fresher, wilder air, Shu wrinkled her nose. She turned to find that Bel was standing in front of a second row of equipment: more ancient, organic technology with that strange smell of grass and home. This too did not look like a machine. It looked like many things, and it changed as Shu watched. The only constant element was a flowscreen set into the wall. Data marched in spiky green symbols across the flowscreen, like a flight of dragonflies.

“What is it?” Shu mouthed.

“I think it’s generating some kind of biomagnetic field,” Bel shouted back.

“Is it dangerous?”

“I don’t know.” Bel glanced uncertainly toward the console. Shu peered over her shoulder, trying with limited technical knowledge to make sense of the spiky patterns that strode across the littlescreen, thus she was unprepared for the hand that snaked out and grasped her by the wrist. She was so startled that she stumbled against Bel, only to find that the girl had become rigid and that it was Bel’s own hand that was holding her.

“Look!”

Someone was coming out of the shadows. It was much taller than a human being. It had a long, pointed jaw, open to display sharp teeth.
A dark mane concealed its shoulders, and the hands which it held out before it were tipped with talons. It was entirely transparent, and in the lightning glimpse that Shu had of it before she hauled Bel backward and slammed the bone door shut, she saw that its great, star-filled eyes were intelligent and aware.