Catalyst Read online

  “Then we’re going in.” They climbed up over the lip of the crater, revealing a cavernous interior at least six kilometers in diameter. There was room for half a squadron to maneuver, let alone a single craft. Without warning, Ekatya shoved the control stick forward and dropped them in. The sudden change in attitude made even her stomach tingle, and she was the one piloting. Andira should have felt her stomach rise halfway up her throat.

  A whoop rang in her ears, followed by a burble of happy laughter, and Ekatya smiled despite herself. The dignified Lancer of Alsea sounded like a child on a thrill ride.

  The caldera was deep, its bottom still locked in shadows in the early morning light. Ekatya let the fighter’s nose lead them halfway down, then pulled out of the dive and flew nearly straight up, crushing them into their seats. She leveled out and put the fighter into a hover, then looked over to check on her passenger.

  Andira was beaming. “This is the best idea I’ve had in a cycle.”

  “You’d better not tell Salomen that. I get the impression she thinks your bonding rates higher.” Ekatya pushed half of the thrusters forward and the other half aft with a quick flick of forefinger and thumb. By default, the thrusters would always fire with matching force, but she decreased the aft thrusters by a hair. Slowly, the fighter revolved in place, leading with its tail.

  The view was spectacular. The caldera walls filled their vision, looming up into the sky and descending far beneath them. Mats of brilliant green vegetation encrusted almost every square meter, the tropical growth jostling for position in this protected place. Ekatya felt as if she had dropped them into one of her childhood fairy tales, and the waterfall that slid into view a moment later only reinforced the thought.

  “Oh, how beautiful,” she said, bringing their slow turn to a halt.

  “I’ve only seen this in images.” Andira leaned forward, intent on the waterfall. “The rock on the top part of the volcano is porous, so rainwater filters down through it. Then it hits that band of denser rock there—see it?” She pointed unnecessarily; the dark stripe encircling the crater was obvious by its relative lack of vegetation. “And pools up and runs out in several places. But most are ephemeral; this is the only place where it never stops. After a good rainstorm, there are thirty waterfalls in here.”

  “I would love to see that.”

  “As would I. Let’s hope for a rainstorm in the next nineday and a half.”

  Ekatya glanced over. “You might be the only newlywed I ever heard of who hoped for bad weather on her bonding break.”

  “That cannot be true. Trapped indoors by water pouring out of the sky; whatever could a newly bonded couple find to do in such a situation?”

  “If we’re talking about you, I’d probably find you on my porch five ticks after dawn, wanting to spar or something equally ridiculous.”

  “This was a special occasion. If it rains, you’ll see so little of Salomen and me that you might forget what we look like.” Andira’s playful expression became more thoughtful as she looked back at the view. “But afterward, we’ll come out here for the waterfalls.”

  They hovered in place, staring at the sheets of water as they fell in what looked like slow motion, tumbling gracefully down the sheer wall. Bare rock evidenced how wide the waterfall could get; right now it appeared to be at half of its top flow.

  Ekatya activated the ventral sensors and sent them to the virtual screens hovering in front of them. A tap of the control set the sensors to the visual spectrum, and she angled them until they showed the base of the waterfall. It fell all the way to the jumbled rocks on the crater’s floor, where it landed as a seemingly gentle spray of droplets. Based on the enormous circle of bare, smooth boulders, she guessed that spray had enough force to sterilize the area.

  She tapped the groundfinder, sending a pulse straight down. It came back with a reading of six hundred and eighty-two strides to the floor. She remembered that strides were roughly analogous to meters, making this a damned high waterfall.

  “Well, this was worth getting up for,” she said.

  Andira gave her a delighted smile. “It really was. Think you can show me anything else?” An eyebrow quirked as she added, “Such as how fast this can go?”

  “You’ve been waiting for that, haven’t you?”

  “Since the day Candini flew off with Tesseron. I tried to trade places with him then, but he wouldn’t accept my offer.” She settled back into her seat with a sigh. “I’m ready. Make me two-dimensional.”

  Ekatya found herself laughing as she flew them back out of the caldera, and it occurred to her that she had done more of that this morning than in the previous…two months? Three? Shippers, when had she enjoyed herself this much?

  “It’s a bad sign when you can’t remember,” she mumbled, forgetting about her headset.

  “Speak again?”

  Ekatya shook her head, leveled the craft, and hit the jump control. The fighter leaped forward, compressing them against their seats. She kept her finger on the control and didn’t need to look at the velocity indicator to know that their speed was continually climbing—the increasing pressure on her body did that. The seat flowed up and around the back of her head, anticipating any changes of direction.

  When they hit three times the speed of sound, she rotated the fighter one hundred and eighty degrees, putting the ocean above them and the sky below. Andira let out a whoop of sheer joy, then another when Ekatya brought them closer to the water.

  At four times the speed of sound, Ekatya righted them and flew as low as she dared. Then she put the aft sensors on the virtual screen.

  A long, white track of foaming water marked their passage across the ocean. Under their tail, the water was lifted into the air by the low pressure created from their passage, a continual fountain they pulled along with them.

  “Great Mother, I’ve never seen that before!” Andira whooped again. “I only wish we could fly over the Crooked Ridge port platform. We’d break every window in the place.”

  “I already have the window-breaking reputation. Let’s not make it worse.” Ekatya dropped their speed, and when it was low enough for her to maneuver without killing them, she angled the fighter upward and threw them into a barrel roll. When that failed to elicit anything but happy sounds from Andira, she stopped the roll with one wing pointed to the ocean and the other straight up and proceeded to fly them in a level turn of three hundred and sixty degrees. The seat flowed up around her, and she increased the acceleration, watching the pressure indicator climb.

  “Shekking—” Andira did not complete her sentence, a strained huff the most she could manage under the extreme pressure. Ekatya maintained the turn for three, four, five more seconds, then pulled out.

  “Still conscious over there?” she asked.

  “Goddess above.” Andira wheezed a few times. “I think my shoulders just met my hips. You’ve been wanting to do that since I mentioned your harness.”

  “Yes, I have.” Ekatya was smiling so widely that her cheeks hurt, and she put them into another barrel roll for the fun of it. “Why am I not surprised that it took seven acceleration forces to finally take your voice?”

  “That was seven AFs? No wonder. I did go up with Tesseron a few times; he didn’t dare push me past five. That’s why I wanted to go with you. I knew you wouldn’t treat me like a Filessian orchid.”

  Ekatya was startled by the laugh that exploded out of her chest with no warning. “Do you know why we use Filessian orchids in our ships? Because they’re some of the toughest flowers in the whole damned Protectorate. They’re practically impossible to kill. You are a Filessian orchid, Andira.”

  “If I am, you are as well.”

  “There’s a label I’d wear proudly: as tough as Lancer Tal.” Ekatya leveled out their flight and looked over at her friend as they began to decelerate. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you?”
/>
  “That you would try to flatten me? Yes, but—”

  “No. That if I got out here with no limitations and no rules and no fucking orders, I’d feel free for the first time since I left Alsea.”

  The cocky smile vanished from Andira’s face. “I didn’t know. But I hoped.”

  Ekatya held out her hand and waited for Andira to take it. “You could probably already feel it, but just in case…” She squeezed their hands together. “I want you to feel it through my skin. Thank you, Andira. This was a beautiful gift.”

  “Well, the last one I gave you didn’t work out quite the way I planned.” Andira shrugged. “I’m very glad this one has been better.”

  “I’m not sorry you got me the Phoenix. Don’t blame yourself for Sholokhov.” She let go and in a lighter voice asked, “Did Tesseron let you get your hands on the controls?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” Andira took hold of the control stick on her side. “May I?”

  “Let’s get it under the speed of sound, shall we? I’d like a shot at saving us if you misjudge.”

  A few minutes later, Ekatya lifted her hands off the controls and watched Andira, who beamed as she nudged the control stick from side to side. The fighter’s left wing came up; then it leveled out and the right wing came up.

  “That’s roll, yes, and this is pitch…”

  Ekatya watched the horizon go up, then down.

  “And here’s yaw…”

  The nose went right, then left.

  “Ha, I remembered. And this is…acceleration.”

  The last word had hardly left Andira’s mouth when the fighter leaped forward, shoving Ekatya in her seat with tremendous force.

  “Andira.” She was rather proud that her voice remained so calm. “That’s a bit fast; pull back on the speed and—”

  Her sentence ended in a gasp when Andira rolled the fighter a perfect ninety degrees. A second roll had them flying upside down, the ocean ripping past the cockpit bubble at speeds Ekatya did not want to contemplate. Especially this close and with an untrained pilot at the controls. She made a grab for the control stick, but it was unresponsive.

  “You locked me out?” There was no semblance of calm in her voice now. Lockouts were only used in the event of systems failures, usually battle-induced, when the controls of either the pilot or copilot were malfunctioning in a way that could affect the fighter’s integrity.

  “Must have touched something I didn’t mean to. Sorry, I’ll get us to a safer position.”

  The horizon rolled around them, and they were right side up again. The ocean receded as Andira put them into a steep climb, but she wasn’t controlling the airspeed properly. The climb was taking too much power. It was very difficult to stall a craft meant to fly into orbit, but Andira was dangerously close to it. And while stall recovery was easy when they had plenty of altitude to lose, they were still too close to the ocean.

  Ekatya’s worst fears materialized when the wings began to rock, the airspeed no longer sufficient to hold them up.

  “Andira! Push it forward, you have to reduce the angle of attack!”

  The next thing she knew, her stomach tried to exit her mouth as she became momentarily weightless. It would not have affected her under normal circumstances, but she was not in control of this craft. That changed everything.

  The fighter fell onto its left wing, dropping them straight toward the ocean.

  In her panic, Ekatya grabbed the control stick again, her mind refusing to accept that she could not stop this disaster. They didn’t even have time to eject the cockpit pod.

  “Level it out, level it out!” she shouted as the ocean rushed up toward her.

  At the last second, the water shifted away as Andira somehow regained control and leveled the fighter. A welcome rumble of engines hummed through the soles of Ekatya’s feet, and she watched with a dry mouth as the velocity indicator once again climbed to reasonable numbers.

  “Stars and Shippers!” she blurted. “What in all the purple planets did you think—”

  “Relax. I told you I went up with Tesseron a few times.”

  “A few times!” Ekatya was about to instruct her on how to deactivate the control lockout when she paused and took a closer look. Andira was handling the controls with too much confidence. Come to think of it, that little maneuver she had pulled was far too difficult for an untrained pilot.

  “Andira?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you just play me?”

  The full grin Andira turned on her answered that question. “I’m checked out on both the single-seater and this one. Salomen arranged it as a bonding gift last moon.”

  “You lying, scheming, underhanded—”

  Andira burst into laughter. “I’ll admit to the last two, but I never lied.”

  “By omission! Fuck!” Ekatya slapped the heels of her hands against her forehead. “Why do I never learn with you?”

  Andira was laughing so hard now that she had to slow their flight.

  After a few seconds, Ekatya gave up and laughed as well. It bubbled out of her, growing louder and more intense until she was gasping with it. She couldn’t stop. Her lungs spasmed, wrenching what sounded like a sob from her throat, and then she laughed again. Every time she thought she had herself in hand, she remembered the panic in her voice as she had shouted at Andira. That set her off all over again, because she had started this flight with the intention of playing Andira. She had been beaten at her own game.

  When her laughter finally fizzled out, she felt more relaxed than she had in a very long time. Her body was limp, and her shoulders seemed strangely loose.

  “That was…astonishing,” Andira said. “How have you been holding all of that inside?”

  She should have been embarrassed, knowing that Andira had literally felt her break. The prank wasn’t that funny, but she had needed something to crack the hard shell she had grown around herself. Somehow, Andira had managed to provide it.

  Or perhaps she had simply provided the environment where Ekatya could allow the shell to crack.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want to. When I left Alsea, I thought things would be so different. And they were, between me and Lhyn. But everything else…” She lifted her hands, then dropped them back into her lap. “I hated who I turned into.”

  After a long silence, Andira said, “There’s one more thing I’d like to see, but I’m not checked out for orbital flight. Will you show me the Phoenix?”

  “With pleasure.” Ekatya was not surprised to find that the controls had already been returned to her. A quick ping with the locator and she had the Phoenix on her nav screen. She turned the fighter, pulled it into the best angle for gaining altitude while conserving energy, and locked in the route.

  The sky was shading from blue to black when Andira spoke again. “I did lie by omission about my flight training. But that was for fun. And I didn’t tell you about our bond because…” She blew out a breath, keeping her gaze firmly ahead. “No one was ever supposed to know. And there was nothing you could have done about it. But I have never lied to you about anything else since we became friends. Fahla knows I haven’t much practice at the kind of friendship we have, but I don’t keep things from Micah and I don’t keep them from you.”

  “But I kept so much from you.” Ekatya sighed. “You don’t have to say it.”

  “Why did you?”

  She knew she would have to face this question. She had known it for nearly two years, the guilt and dread growing every time she spoke with Andira on the quantum com and said nothing about what was really happening.

  “Would you believe it was to protect you?”

  For a very long moment, there was no sound but the throbbing hum of the engines and the faint hiss of wind noise that penetrated her headset.

  “I believe you belie
ve it,” Andira said. “What I don’t understand is why you thought I needed protection. And from what?”

  “Do you know how I felt, hearing that I couldn’t talk to you because you were burned and unconscious in the healing center? You nearly died, and I was sixteen days away even if I could have gotten orders within the hantick. I wouldn’t wish that kind of helplessness on anyone, least of all someone I care about.”

  Andira turned to face her. “No, I don’t know how you felt. Because I can’t sense you over a quantum com and you didn’t tell me.” Her voice rose. “Do you know how I feel when I can’t sense you? Blind. Blind and halfway deaf and completely dependent on you to tell me what I cannot know any other way, but you chose not to.”

  She waited for an answer Ekatya didn’t know how to give, then shook her head and faced forward again.

  They were well past the last wisps of atmosphere and had the Phoenix in visual range before Ekatya could get her thoughts together.

  “I’ve never had a friend like you. But we’re not just friends, are we? That bond…” She took another breath and said what she had been afraid to. “I missed you every day, Andira. Every damned day. And I’d look back on the time I spent here, with you, and it felt like a fairy tale—”

  “A what?”

  “Er…a story we tell children. Full of magic and happy endings.”

  “Ah. I understand.” Andira made an odd sound. “You thought the Battle of Alsea was full of magic and happy endings?”

  “You know what I mean.” Now that she had started this, she was impatient at the interruptions. “We accomplished so much. We changed the course of history! We were magnificent, and we won, and then there were all of those Sharings, and I know you don’t see it that way, but to me? Those were the very definition of magic. And then I lost it all. I went home to an inquisition, and spent over sixteen months—almost one of your cycles—doing shitty little jobs for a man I hated, and every day I asked myself why. Why did I leave? Why didn’t I throw it all in the air and come back? Lhyn would have come with me in a heartbeat. We both missed you, but it was easier for her because she was doing what she loved…” She stopped herself. “Andira, you were rebuilding your planet and holding your people together with glue and a few frayed strings. And when I finally got out from under Sholokhov, you were in the healing center and then you were dealing with betrayal and murder and losing half of your High Council. I didn’t want to be one more burden on you.”