Shonjir By C.J. Cherryh

Warmth spread through him, a sense of tranquillity, ability to cope with the unnatural wrench of jump, ability to function until there should be leisure to rest. His mind cleared, but kept its distance from stresses.

He reckoned clearly what he had done: that Saber would track them; they had identical records: everything had been duplicated. The warships would come. There would be court martial, if ever humanity recovered him; his direct defiance of Koch had made that a certainty. But the mri, when they learned what had been done, might themselves care for that matter, so that human justice was a very remote threat indeed.

He was calm in thinking of these things, whether the exhaustion of days without rest he wondered distantly if that was to blame for what he had done, or whether the trigger had been pulled much earlier, much earlier, when he had sought the mri’s freedom. He tried to draw information from the tape: it would tell him nothing, neither running time to go, nor number of jumps, nor any indication where they were. He looked at the star in scan. Mri base, possibly. In that case, his time could be measured in days.

He pushed himself away from controls, his senses still sending him frantic signals even through the calming effects of the drug. It was worse than he had ever felt it: fatigue made it so. He thought that if things would remain stable only for an hour, he would go to his quarters and wash and lie down, now that it was too late to worry about anything.

And a dus ambled in the door, and the second dus after him; and behind them came the mri. He drew back. Melein came, unveiled as was her wont, her fingers laced with Niun’s, who supported her. She entered the control room as Duncan stepped back, and her golden eyes swept the place, centered on the object that rested beside controls: on the artifact in its cradle. She went to it, ignoring all else, and touched the silver ovoid with her fingertips, bending with Niun to provide her balance, felt it as if to assure herself that it was real.

Then she straightened. Her amber eyes sought Duncan’s, shadowed and piercingly direct.

“I will sit,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper; and Niun carefully settled her on the edge of the reclined comstation cushion as if it were a throne. She sat straight, her hand pressed to her ribs where she had been injured, and for a moment she was short of breath; but it seemed to pass, and the hand dropped. The two dusei came to crowd at her feet, giving her a living wall at her knees; and she held out her left and to Niun, who settled on the deck beside her, elbow against the larger dus.

Duncan looked on them both: in his hazed senses he saw the modern control center become a hall for a priestess-queen, himself the stranger there. Melein gazed at him directly: behind her the starscreens showed a dust of light, and the colored telltales flashed in lazy sequence, hypnotically regular.

“Duncan,” Melein said softly, “where is this ship going?”

He remembered that it was not always permitted to speak to her directly, though once he had been permitted: things were different now. He looked at Niun’s veiled and uncommunicative face. “Tell the she’pan that that guides us,” he answered, with a shrug toward the ovoid that rested beside them.

“I will speak to him,” Melein said, and an anxious frown came over her face. “Explain. Explain, kel Duncan.”

“Do you know,” he asked her, “what it holds?”

“Do you?” ” He shook his head. “No. Records. Navigational records. But not where we are going. Do you know?”

Her lovely face became like a mask, unreadable as Niun’s, though unveiled. “Why are you alone with us? Might you not be wiser to have kept us apart from controls, kel Duncan?”

She trod the edges of questions with him. He fought his mind clear, gathered explanations, but she held out her hand to him, insisting, and there was nothing gracious but to take her long, slender fingers in his. The alien touch disturbed him, and he found himself against the dusei, a position of danger. “Sit, sit down,” she bade him, for she must look up at him as he stood; and there was no place but the deck, against the bodies of the dusei, as Niun rested. “Are you too strange to us now?” she asked, taunting him.

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