Read Online Forgotten Suns by Judith Tarr - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Judith Tarr
Tags: Science-Fiction, Space Opera, women writing space opera, archaeological science fiction, LGBT science fiction, science fiction with female protagonists
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said.
10
The expedition came in on the usual tradeship from Marduk:
one of Mother’s family connections. Rashid had done a little trading of his
own; the ship would stay in orbit for a tenday, and a flock of tourists would
flutter and flap its way around the planet, escorted by genuine
xenoarchaeologists.
That was not the first time Rashid had paid his passage in
that particular way. It explained the range and apparent excess of Vikram’s
preparations. Khalida should have known, but she had had too many other things
on her mind.
One of those things proved not to be nearly as fragile as
she had expected. When the shuttle came down on the plain outside the city,
Rama was there with the rest of them. He watched the ship descend with open
fascination and no perceptible fear. He lent a hand with the unloading and the
sorting out of people, and helped set up the tents for the guests.
She did not know why she should have expected him to hide in
a corner with his arms over his head, babbling about metal birds and fire from
the sky. Maybe because she was tempted to do just that. A world occupied by
four other humans and an assortment of animals, she could handle. This
onslaught taxed her narrow limits.
She had to expand them, and fast. The shuttle offered an
opportunity she could not afford to waste.
It came with a pilot and a handful of crew, all of whom were
taking a few days’ leave planetside. That first day, in the confusion of
unloading, she calculated would be her best chance.
She wandered onto the bridge on the pretext of looking for lost
luggage. The pilot was young, bored, and desperate for someone intelligent to
talk to—by which she meant, able to talk about ships and flying and the yacht
races around Earth system.
The old skills came back fast. So did the sense of
familiarity when Khalida sat at the console, leaning back in the chair, arguing
the relative merits of solar sails and cosmic-dust propulsion. Well inside of
an hour, she had Meichan convinced to take a well-earned break under an actual
sky. Meichan set the security locks before she went, but she made the mistake
of letting Khalida see what she was doing.
It was blissfully quiet after she left. There were still
voices and banging and rumbling of machinery elsewhere on the ship, but those
were muted here.
Khalida took a deep breath. There was nothing quite like the
taste of ship’s air, with its faintly canned, faintly stale undertone. It made
her surprisingly homesick.
The security locks were standard models, childishly easy to
hack if one was MI and trained to memorize keycodes on sight.
It all came back in a rush. She would pay later, but not
until she had what she came for. The shuttle’s system lay wide open. Through
that, she got into the main ship’s system—and that was connected to the
worldsweb.
The sheer, overwhelming rightness of being open to the universe again was as much as she could stand. She let it
roar on past her while she found her balance. That took a while, but she had
allowed for it.
Her MI codes still worked. That had not been a sure thing.
She still had her clearances. She set up a flock of proxies and sent them off
in carefully random directions while she aimed for the target.
Psycorps was hell to hack. She had had tendays to plot a
strategy. The codes she fed in, with search strings embedded in them, were designed
to mimic Psycorps’ own internal systems.
Subspace relay was fast, but it was not instantaneous. She
filled the time by calling up the flight simulator and running the latest
pilots’ testing module.
Both sets of results came up at the same time. She had
renewed and upgraded her license, and there was no reference anywhere in
Psycorps’ accessible system to a humanoid entity of Rama’s genetic description.
Something else had come up, too. Something that pinged a
dummy string, or so she had thought when she coded it—just before the hacker
alarms went off.
That ping nearly laid her open to
10
The expedition came in on the usual tradeship from Marduk:
one of Mother’s family connections. Rashid had done a little trading of his
own; the ship would stay in orbit for a tenday, and a flock of tourists would
flutter and flap its way around the planet, escorted by genuine
xenoarchaeologists.
That was not the first time Rashid had paid his passage in
that particular way. It explained the range and apparent excess of Vikram’s
preparations. Khalida should have known, but she had had too many other things
on her mind.
One of those things proved not to be nearly as fragile as
she had expected. When the shuttle came down on the plain outside the city,
Rama was there with the rest of them. He watched the ship descend with open
fascination and no perceptible fear. He lent a hand with the unloading and the
sorting out of people, and helped set up the tents for the guests.
She did not know why she should have expected him to hide in
a corner with his arms over his head, babbling about metal birds and fire from
the sky. Maybe because she was tempted to do just that. A world occupied by
four other humans and an assortment of animals, she could handle. This
onslaught taxed her narrow limits.
She had to expand them, and fast. The shuttle offered an
opportunity she could not afford to waste.
It came with a pilot and a handful of crew, all of whom were
taking a few days’ leave planetside. That first day, in the confusion of
unloading, she calculated would be her best chance.
She wandered onto the bridge on the pretext of looking for lost
luggage. The pilot was young, bored, and desperate for someone intelligent to
talk to—by which she meant, able to talk about ships and flying and the yacht
races around Earth system.
The old skills came back fast. So did the sense of
familiarity when Khalida sat at the console, leaning back in the chair, arguing
the relative merits of solar sails and cosmic-dust propulsion. Well inside of
an hour, she had Meichan convinced to take a well-earned break under an actual
sky. Meichan set the security locks before she went, but she made the mistake
of letting Khalida see what she was doing.
It was blissfully quiet after she left. There were still
voices and banging and rumbling of machinery elsewhere on the ship, but those
were muted here.
Khalida took a deep breath. There was nothing quite like the
taste of ship’s air, with its faintly canned, faintly stale undertone. It made
her surprisingly homesick.
The security locks were standard models, childishly easy to
hack if one was MI and trained to memorize keycodes on sight.
It all came back in a rush. She would pay later, but not
until she had what she came for. The shuttle’s system lay wide open. Through
that, she got into the main ship’s system—and that was connected to the
worldsweb.
The sheer, overwhelming rightness of being open to the universe again was as much as she could stand. She let it
roar on past her while she found her balance. That took a while, but she had
allowed for it.
Her MI codes still worked. That had not been a sure thing.
She still had her clearances. She set up a flock of proxies and sent them off
in carefully random directions while she aimed for the target.
Psycorps was hell to hack. She had had tendays to plot a
strategy. The codes she fed in, with search strings embedded in them, were designed
to mimic Psycorps’ own internal systems.
Subspace relay was fast, but it was not instantaneous. She
filled the time by calling up the flight simulator and running the latest
pilots’ testing module.
Both sets of results came up at the same time. She had
renewed and upgraded her license, and there was no reference anywhere in
Psycorps’ accessible system to a humanoid entity of Rama’s genetic description.
Something else had come up, too. Something that pinged a
dummy string, or so she had thought when she coded it—just before the hacker
alarms went off.
That ping nearly laid her open to
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