Sam. It was Sam.
The honey brown hair, the giggly blue eyes, the spatter of freckles across her nose… twenty years and she’d hardly aged a day. Heaven knows how she managed to get hold of YouthBoost on a planet at war; but if anyone could manage, it would be Sam.
My twin sister was alive. And that picture of her in my memory, with her gold uniform soaked scarlet… the jagged hole punched through her rib cage, gushing out blood…
"Tricks," I said aloud. Something was a trick. Either Sam’s death long ago, or the picture I was looking at now. Experts could play games with computer images, everybody knew that. I couldn’t trust what I was seeing. But who would be cruel enough to send such a thing if it wasn’t real? And who had the authority to deliver the message with eyes-only status?
"Ship-soul," I said, "identify message’s sender."
"No identification."
"No name? No transmission information? Nothing?"
"Negative. The recording itself is dated by the Troyenese calendar, 23 Katshin."
Which meant Sam had made the recording the day after Willow picked me up from the moonbase… unless the date was a trick too. Gritting my teeth, I told the ship-soul, "Resume play."
Sam’s picture came back to life. "Poor Edward," she said, "I hope you’re not having a heart attack or something. This must be an awful shock for you, but you’ve handled worse stuff than this."
She was talking the way she always did to me, kind of imitating the way I spoke. When she was playing diplomat, Sam could toss off flowery phrases with the best of them, but behind closed doors with me… well, I guess a really good diplomat always suits her words to her audience.
If this really was Sam. I had to remind myself it could be fake. But a fake by someone who knew exactly how Sam talked to me in private.
"The thing is, Edward," she went on, "I’m still alive. As you can see. It’s way too complicated for me to explain right now, but I will someday, I promise. In the meantime, I want to make sure you’re all right… and that means you have to join me on Troyen."
She reached toward the camera lens and turned it to one side. It swung around to show a golden summer afternoon in a place I knew well — the Park of the Silent God, on the outskirts of Unshummin city: no more than fifteen kilometers from Verity’s palace. Sam and I used to go there for walks all the time, especially during the redfish migrations each spring; the park’s creek would turn scarlet with thousands of new hatchlings, and the air would fill with the strong smell of sugar-sap, as Mandasars heated cauldrons on the shore. Redfish boiled in sugar-sap… we ate that every year, sitting on the creek bank under the diamond-wood trees.
The trees were still there — I could see them in the camera shot. Twenty years taller and thick with green leaves. I always liked those leaves: they were the same color of green as the oaks on my father’s estate.
"Not much sign of the war, is there?" Sam said in a soft voice. "That’s because it’s almost over. One queen has come out on top, and I’m her favorite advisor. By the time you get here, there’ll be peace; and I can protect you from those bastards on the High Council of Admirals."
She swiveled the camera lens back and looked straight at me. "If you want the honest truth, Edward, I know everything that’s happened to you. I found out about Willow, and how they sneaked in to get a queen. The idiots took Queen Temperance, Edward — the last queen who was standing in the way of peace. She’s one of the outlaw queens and nearly the most vicious tyrant on the whole planet, even if she has a placid-sounding name.
"So I know what’s going to happen," Samantha went on. "Willow will pick you up, then head for Celestia. Dumb idea — the moment Willow crosses the line, the League of Peoples will execute Temperance and most of the ship’s crew. Maybe all of them. You’re safe, brother, because there isn’t a more innocent person in the entire universe… but when Willow coasts into Starbase Iris and the navy sees all the corpses, the High Council will have a grade A large conniption.
"Next thing you know, they’ll try to get rid of you, Edward. That’s how admirals think — when they screw up big-time, their first reaction is to lose the witnesses down some deep hole. And I don’t want to let you get lost."
She smiled again: a big bright smile that made me want to smile back… even though a dozen worrying thoughts were nibbling at the back of my mind. If Sam didn’t want me getting lost, why had she let me sit on the moonbase for twenty years and never once tried to contact me? If she was the top queen’s closest advisor, couldn’t Sam have found a way to send a message? But no word at all — no hint she was alive — till suddenly I left the Troyen system, and that’s when she got in touch.
Like she was happy to ignore me, right up to the point when I headed home.
But the message kept playing, and Sam kept smiling: my smart and pretty sister who taught me everything I knew. "I didn’t find out about Willow right away," she was saying. "Not till they’d taken you with them. But I’m sending people after you, Edward, to get you back. It turns out I have a starship: a nice black one, run by Mandasar friends. If you want the honest truth, it used to belong to the navy — a sweet little frigate named Cottonwood. But, umm…" She leaned toward the camera and said in a loud whisper, "I stole the ship, Edward. Just before the war started. I knew the navy would stop all traffic to and from Troyen, and I wanted an escape route in case things got really bad."
"Hold!" I snapped. My sister froze in the middle of a blink, her eyes half-closed and clumsy-looking, the way people always come across in blink-pictures. It was a pretty unflattering shot, but I wasn’t so interested in Sam’s appearance at the moment.
Not when I knew she had a ship — the black ship that had stolen Willow. The ship’s crew must have hoped I was still aboard; they’d taken Willow in tow so they could drag me back to Troyen.
So: Sam had left me alone on the moonbase for twenty years, but the second she heard I was gone from Troyen airspace, she sent her starship to get me.
And how had Sam stolen a starship? I guess it wouldn’t be hard; my sister was a high-ranking diplomat, and an admiral’s daughter. She could get herself invited on board, maybe with some helpers, then drug people, gas people, mop up with stunners… but that wasn’t the tricky part. What had she done with the crew members after she’d taken the ship? A frigate carried a crew of a hundred. If you only had to deal with one or two sailors, you might bully or bribe them into silence; but not a hundred people. Someone would refuse to cooperate. Where could Sam put them so they’d never tell the navy what she’d done?
I hoped there was some brilliant answer I was just too dim to figure out — the most obvious possibilities made me go all queasy. Sam! I thought, what did you do? And why was she cheerily telling me this stuff? Did she think I was so stupid I wouldn’t ask questions?
For the tiniest of moments, a thought flicked through my mind: Yes — there was a time when these questions wouldn’t have occurred to me. But that was scary too and not something to dwell on. I snapped at the ship-soul, "Resume play."
Sam’s eyes smoothly finished their blink as she said, "So I’m sending my ship after you. With a bit of luck, you’ll still be on Willow when Cottonwood reaches Celestia — that’ll make it easy to bring you back. If not, my crew has to assume you’ve been transferred elsewhere; so Cottonwood will squirt this message to every navy vessel in the Celestia system… eyes-only." She gave a girlish grin. "Dad showed me a sort of a kind of a back door into the navy computer system: how to pretend I’m an admiral. The High Council would barbecue him if they found out, but they probably do the same for their kids. In case of dire emergencies."