The community maintained some hoverers in case someone wanted to go for a jaunt outside the dome, or needed to transport heavy objects. Cheris signed one out and took the driver’s seat. Jedao got in without questioning her, which she appreciated. The Shuos would count on being able to track the vehicle, but Cheris had asked one of the settlement’s servitors to plant an override into the system. She activated it now, hoping the Shuos hadn’t discovered it in the interim.
The hoverer smelled displeasingly of meat pasties, a smell that she liked when the pasties in question were fresh and much less when it mingled with a lingering mixture of people’s clashing perfumes and bodies. Civilian life had softened her. She’d once trained regularly in Kel body armor that reeked of sour sweat and off-gassing plastic and, occasionally, vomit or other effluvia. There was no forgetting the stomach-turning stink of the battlefield, blood curdled or crystallized, the occasional startling sweetness of crushed flowers or aromatics. How much of that did this other, younger Jedao remember?
“It’s beautiful,” Jedao said, almost in a whisper, as the hoverer lifted up and sped toward the boundary of the settlement’s dome. Cheris was reminded of his presence, and the fact that they were, despite their shared history, strangers to each other. She would not have expected any incarnation of Jedao to be sentimental about landscape. But he was leaning toward the window, one hand pressed against it in yearning.
“First time planetside?” she asked, because it might be useful to know. She couldn’t imagine Mikodez allowing Jedao to wander around on a planet, even if the Citadel of Eyes occupied a geosynchronous orbit above one. Depending on how patchy Jedao’s memories were, this might be his first experience with sky, sun, dirt.
“Yes,” he said without elaborating.
She appreciated that he wasn’t distracting her from the more important task of driving. The hoverer was capable of handling itself if you punched in the destination, but she preferred to do it manually in case the Shuos had the vehicle bugged. She didn’t want to drive them into an ambush.
“I had a way off-planet, but I assume you prefer yours,” Jedao added as they reached the dome. It glimmered with a soap bubble’s rainbow colors, a flickering in the air. Exotic technology, which Cheris didn’t trust, but it hadn’t failed since she’d moved here. And really, the calendar in use here was her calendar, which the servitors of Pyrehawk Enclave had helped her distribute eleven years ago, after the destruction of Kel Command. It was laughable, if not actively hypocritical, for her to be nervous about her own work.
Cheris braced herself for the lightheaded sensation that always accompanied a dome transition. If it bothered Jedao, he didn’t show it. In all fairness, if she’d survived a hole in her chest that size, a mere tickle in her brain wouldn’t slow her down either.
The settlement, with its modest clusters of buildings and walkways and humble rows of flowers, receded behind them. Cheris guided the hoverer toward the mountains with their woods, heading toward a particular dead tree, its limbs split like lightning tongues, that made for a useful landmark. She wasn’t sure how the local flora survived in atmosphere that wasn’t yet fit for humans to breathe; she’d never been motivated enough to read about the transitional forests that the early terraforming team had planted. The details would have gone over her head anyway; she was no scientist.
Cheris didn’t speak again until they had flown some distance beneath the cover of the blue-leaved trees. Driving was not her best skill, and she was relying on the hoverer’s simple intelligence to help her avoid crashing into some unexpected boulder or ledge. They whooshed past the trees and their whipsaw branches at a stomach-churning speed, as she didn’t dare slow down. Every moment might make a difference.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “The version with details.”
Jedao opened his mouth. Just then there was a loud crack as a low branch smacked into the hoverer, and they tilted alarmingly to one side and almost bounced off another tree entirely. Cheris had a brief, dazzling, and unwanted vision of a cloud of scintillant insects flurrying up from their hiding places and toward the canopy. She swore in a muddled mixture of Mwen-dal and the high language as she fought to bring the vehicle back under control.
By the time she’d achieved that, they were off-course. She then had to focus on navigation, which wasn’t hard so much as irritating, when there were so many damn trees everywhere. Deeper in the forest, they grew closer together, along with a bewilderment of low-growing shrubs, vines, and thorny things that glistened with poisonous sap.
They touched down at last in something that the servitors’ maps had described as a “clearing,” and which barely merited the name. She had to tilt the hoverer’s nose up to get it to fit at all. This is why no one tracked me as a vehicle specialist, Cheris thought ruefully. At least the unnaturally quick reflexes she had inherited from the original Jedao’s ghost had kept them from meeting a fiery death in the forest. It would be ignominious to survive bullets and battlefields, a carrion bomb, and a crash landing on the world of Terebeg only to be felled by a hoverer crash.
Cheris rechecked the integrity of her suit, old habit, before retrieving her bag, popping the door open, and clambering out. Jedao exited right after she did, landing agilely in the loam and decaying leaves. He wrinkled his nose, although Cheris couldn’t smell anything but the cleaner she used to maintain the suit. Fortunately, the atmosphere wasn’t so deadly that she needed an independent air supply, although she’d brought a couple of canisters in case of emergency. The filters in the suit would suffice.
Cheris wasted no time pulling out a transmitter and sending a single signal. “Can you hear me through this?” Cheris asked. She also knew the Shuos sign language, thanks to the original Jedao, but who knew if this Jedao did?
Jedao nodded. “What was that?” he asked, gesturing toward the transmitter.
She pocketed it. “I called for pickup. You may have gotten this far, but we’re going to need allies to get off-planet.” She was curious as to how Jedao had engineered his escape; she’d get that information out of him later. “You never told me what exactly you’re here for.”
Jedao regarded her with a blank face. A split second before he spoke, she remembered, viscerally, from the inside-out, what that particular lack of expression meant. He was angry with her.
“You lied to me,” Jedao said.
He clearly expected her to figure out what he meant. “We haven’t talked in two years,” Cheris said.
“I was locked up,” Jedao said. “I found out how Ruo died.” His eyes glittered; he was trying not to cry. It made him look paradoxically young.
Cheris was bombarded by unwanted memories of Vestenya Ruo, who’d been her lover; whose death the original Jedao had caused. The way he’d started to laugh after picking a fight with her in a party, the first time they’d met, and the cocktail they’d shared afterward. Their endless rivalry to see who’d get the better marksmanship scores. The first time they’d slept together, out in the gardens, and the bug bites she’d wound up with. She missed him terribly; the longing was and wasn’t hers.
Carefully, Cheris said, “It’s been 437 years. I don’t see what difference it makes.”