Measured, Not Derived

From El Bastión to El Faro Roto is a forty-minute walk, going round by the north of the cordoned zone where the Aurora’s bow came down. Ada did it alone, with no ship, no money and no house, carrying a question nobody in La Cicatriz wanted to answer. She set off at dusk because nobody told her not to set off at dusk.

On Ithera, at dusk, the Ombrask come out.

---

The cordon was a line of posts with red lights and metal signs that said DANGER ZONE and, underneath, by hand, DON’T BE AN IDIOT. Beyond the posts, the ground was still black after forty-six years. Pieces of hull stood on edge, and above them, at the same height as always, the sentinel’s blue light was going slowly round.

Ada was watching the light when she heard the growl.

It wasn’t a roar. It was a low, steady noise that repeated like an engine ticking over, and it reached her through her feet before her ears. She stopped. Thirty metres away, between two of the Aurora’s ribs, something raised its head.

It was enormous. Six metres long, maybe more, and low, pressed to the ground like a dog stalking. Its back was covered in dark plates, its forelegs were as thick as tree trunks and from the nape of its neck hung a fleshy crest that moved when it breathed. The head was broad, earless, with two small eyes set wide apart that were looking at her.

The growl went on. And on. And on.

“Stay still,” said a voice behind her.

It wasn’t a human voice. It was dry, quick, with a hum behind it that came no closer and went no further. Ada didn’t turn round. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a sphere floating at shoulder height, with three red lenses in a cluster.

“One,” said the sphere. “Big. Saw you before I did. That doesn’t happen.”

“What do I do?”

“Nothing. You’re doing it well.”

The beast opened its mouth and roared. It was a long, deep roar that made the cordon signs vibrate and filled Ada’s chest with something cold.

“That’s so you’ll leave,” said another voice, a woman’s, also behind her, further off. “If you don’t leave, it stops roaring.”

A shot rang out. Just one. The bullet threw up a spout of black earth a metre in front of the beast’s forelegs, exactly between it and Ada. The beast went still. It looked at the hole in the ground. It looked towards the shot. It growled once more, lower, like someone getting the last word in an argument they’re losing, and turned and slipped slowly away between the Aurora’s ribs, towards the core.

“Wasn’t needed,” said the red sphere. “Zero.”

---

KESTREL VASKO. “La Loba de la Cicatriz”. Head of the Apex Syndicate, the hunters’ guild, based at El Aguijón. Sixty-eight. Sole survivor of the Aurora’s xenological security unit. What you need to know: she hunts so that the forest still has something to fear that isn’t her, and she calls it controlled cutting.

She was a thin woman with white hair tied back, a long bolt-action rifle on her shoulder, the only one the Vanguard lets into La Cicatriz, for the Ombrask on the cordon, and a scar running down her neck into her vest. She came up to Ada without hurrying.

“What are you doing walking the cordon at dusk?”

“Going to El Faro Roto.”

“By the north.” Vasko pointed with her chin. “Always by the north, and never at this hour. At dusk and dawn they hunt. At midday they sleep in the shade. It’s the first thing a kid in La Cicatriz learns.”

“I’m not from La Cicatriz.”

“So I see.” Vasko looked at the grey transit suit. “You’re the sleeper.”

“Does everyone know?”

“In La Cicatriz everyone knows everything before it happens.” Vasko offered her a canteen. “Know what that was?”

“No.”

“An Ombrask. Crestback, they call it in the outer ring. The biggest animal on Ithera. The first ones were brought aboard the Aurora alive, to the containment bay, to be studied. When the ship came down, the cages opened.” Vasko drank after her. “My unit spent the third night putting them back where they belonged.”

Ada looked at her. The scar on the neck. The white hair. The rifle.

“You’re the one with the seven names.”

Vasko didn’t move.

“Who told you that?”

“Sable Okoye. She said at dawn a girl with a rifle came into the infirmary and said seven names.”

“They were my seven.” Vasko slung the canteen. “That’s it. There’s no more story.”

The red sphere made a slow circuit round Ada’s head, looking at her from every side.

“They call you Nueve,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I say ‘that makes nine’ when something drops.” The hum went up a tone, like a laugh. “You don’t count. You’re standing.”

“That’s AVISPÓN,” said Vasko. “Our compi. Spent thirty years alone at a dig on Kharsis, hunting so as not to switch off. When we found him, he’d stopped calculating: he sensed. We left him the three lenses he’d learnt to see with.”

“Saw you before I did,” AVISPÓN repeated. “That beast. That never happens. Logged.”

“Why didn’t you kill it?” asked Ada.

“Because it wasn’t needed.” Vasko set off northwards, and Ada followed. “The people at El Pináculo pay me per head when they want a valley cleared. They empty it, it fills up with something worse and they call me again. The people at El Fondeadero forbid me to touch anything and then cry when an animal eats a ranger. I kill what’s necessary and leave what’s enough. It’s the only thing I’ve learnt in forty-six years.”

“And if it had jumped?”

“Then it would have been needed.” Vasko shrugged. “I’ll walk you to the Faro. It’s on my way, and Sarn owes me a bet.”

---

El Faro Roto was the Aurora’s navigation and sensor tower, which had come down upright and ended up taller than everything else. From below you could see the old Flota aerials, patched with new parts, turning slowly against the purple sky.

Inside there were stairs, lots of them, and a corridor with one wall covered in names. They weren’t the names of the dead. They were the names of people who had gone out to explore and never come back. Some had a date. Others, a question mark.

“The Muro de los No Vueltos,” said Vasko. “The Wall of the Unreturned. The first ones went out during the Forty Days, looking for water and rescue. That’s how the Pathfinders started: looking outwards while the rest of us looked in.”

At the top, in the dome room, there was an enormous table with a map that moved by itself, and a man standing in front of it with his head tilted like someone listening.

QUILL SARN. “El Ojo Ciego”, the Blind Eye. Head of The Pathfinders, the cartographers’ guild. He lost his sight mapping something the rest of the guild refuses to describe. He sees with a sensory rig from the Cátedra that picks up light no eye can. What you need to know: he is incapable of finishing a conversation without ending up talking about coordinates.

Over his eyes he wore a band of dark metal with small lenses that moved on their own. He turned his head towards the door before they came in.

“Kestrel. You’re late.”

“I’m here when I’m here. You owe me forty credits.”

“I owe you thirty. Last week’s Ombrask weighed less than you said.”

“Last week’s Ombrask ate the scales.”

Sarn smiled. Then he turned his head towards Ada and the small lenses on his band whirred, focusing.

“You’re the one from the seven. You’ve got the temperature of someone not long thawed and the posture of a tanda pilot. The Flota taught pilots to sit in a very particular way. It shows even standing up.”

“You can see that?”

“I can see almost everything that doesn’t matter. What matters, people have to tell me.” Sarn pointed to a chair. “Sit. Ask. I can see it on your face.”

---

Ada didn’t ask about the Aurora first. She asked about the moon.

“Melvara rises in the west,” she said. “And crosses the sky in twenty minutes. I was taught orbital mechanics with numbers on a wall. For a moon that size, at that distance from Ithera, an orbit ought to take days. A week.”

“Seven days and nine hours,” said Sarn. “That’s what the Flota’s ephemeris says. We’ve got it downstairs, in the basement: an orbital clock brought from Solmera, beautiful thing, all brass. It’s been wrong for forty-six years. Melvara takes half an hour.”

“That can’t be right.”

“It is. And not just Melvara. All of Ithera’s moons run about three hundred and fifty-five times faster than they should. Kharsis’s, twenty-two times. Kaldrek’s, nearly three. Within each family the ratio is exact, as if someone had tuned each planet to its own clock.”

“And why?”

“Nobody knows.” Sarn leant on the table. “Up here there are three schools. The mass people say there’s something heavy we can’t see. The clock people say Aurin’s time doesn’t run the way the manuals say. And the Tabla people say there’s nothing to explain: you measure it. Measured, not derived. We’ve got a table, the Tabla de Fases, of what every moon does, second by second, and every ship in the system flies by it. Nobody works out an orbit from the masses. Nobody dares.”

“Which school are you?”

“I’m one of the ones who get it wrong.” Sarn smiled. “A few months ago we found out the rings of Kaldrek weren’t war scrap, as we’d said for forty-six years, but the remains of a moon that died millions of years ago. We’d measured it wrong. We measured what shone, not what was there. I’ve written it on my office door so I remember every morning.”

Ada looked at the map on the table, moving by itself. In one corner, figures changed every second.

“In the Registro Aura,” she said, “when we arrived, they marked two planets as hostile. Ormek and Kaldrek. Gave them the ‘no landing’ suffix. I went to sleep thinking there were only two good worlds.”

“They landed anyway,” said Vasko from the door. “Turns out you can breathe on all four. The Registro got nearly everything wrong.”

“Estimated from afar and measured on arrival,” said Sarn. “That’s the story of this system. Everything we brought from the Flota is good for something, and nothing is good for everything.”

---

The sphere came down from the top of the dome without a sound, the way things come down that have had centuries to practise. He was the same size as the others, but his plates were polished and he had a violet lens that didn’t look like a light so much as an instrument.

“Good evening,” he said. The voice was precise and old, with a courtesy nobody used any more. “CUADRANTE, navigation section. At your service.”

“He keeps the Tabla,” said Sarn. “He doesn’t calculate it. He remembers it, compares it and sings out the answer. It’s the first thing a pilot learns and the last thing an engineer accepts.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Ada. “CUADRANTE, I’ve got a question.”

“With great pleasure.”

“You have the last entry of the Aurora’s navigation core.”

“Navigation cores shared a logbook,” said CUADRANTE. “Did you see Melvara rise this evening? The six-twelve. It’s especially elegant: it comes up with its limb lit just over the western range. I recommend it.”

“I want to know where the Aurora was when it was shot.”

“La Cicatriz is to the south,” said CUADRANTE. “Let us talk about something else, if you don’t mind.”

“He’s been doing that for twenty years,” said Sarn quietly. “He hasn’t told anyone. Not even me.”

Ada stood up. She went up to the violet sphere until he was a hand’s breadth from her face.

“I was inside,” she said.

The violet lens went still.

“A passenger?”

“Tanda pilot. Lys. Pod nine, section seven. I went to sleep in Year 0 for four months. I woke up the day before yesterday.”

CUADRANTE said nothing for a long moment. The lenses on Sarn’s band whirred, focusing on the sphere, as if they had never seen him fall silent like that.

“Navigation logbooks belonged to those who travelled,” said CUADRANTE at last. “So say the Flota regulations, which nobody reads any more. You are entitled to one reading.” He paused. “I beg you not to repeat it in La Cicatriz.”

---

“Year 1, day 236,” said CUADRANTE. “At ten forty-one, first impact. At that moment, the Arca Aurora was not in its descent corridor to Tirane.”

“Where was it?”

“Between the two fleets.”

Nobody spoke. Vasko, in the doorway, folded her arms.

“It had fired its engines twelve minutes earlier,” CUADRANTE went on, “at ten twenty-nine. It left the corridor and turned towards the line of fire. With all its lights on. Exterior lights, deck lights, dock lights. Running lights at maximum.”

“That’s a lie,” said Vasko, very quietly.

“It is a line of position,” said CUADRANTE. “It does not lie. Nor does it explain.”

Ada realised her hands were clenched.

“Why would an ark full of sleepers put itself in the middle of a battle?”

“The line tells you where. It doesn’t tell you why.” The violet lens dipped a little. “The why belongs to the hull core. He was in the wall. He heard what was said inside.”

“Mamparo.”

“I don’t know that name. I know his section.”

“And where were you?”

“On Tirane. At dock seven, in the module next to the welcome container. They left me there to guide you in to berth.” CUADRANTE stopped, and for the first time his voice didn’t sound entirely precise. “I saw you switch on the lights. You never arrived.”

Ada didn’t know what to say. Nobody did.

“There was a cadet on the Aurora’s bridge,” said CUADRANTE, after a while. “He called me every day on the navigation channel to ask how long it was to the seven. I gave him the figure in hours, minutes and seconds. He liked figures.”

“His name was Aurelio,” said Ada. “Lelo.”

“I don’t know that name. I know his voice.”

And CUADRANTE rose slowly to the top of the dome, without saying goodbye, and stayed there, looking at the sky through which, at that moment, Melvara was rising in the west, its limb lit just over the range, especially elegant.

---

Sarn said nothing for a long while. Then he sat down, which, according to Vasko, he almost never did.

“Twenty years asking him,” he said. “Twenty years. And he tells you in two minutes.”

“I was inside.”

“Yes.” Sarn ran his hand over the band across his eyes. “Know what the worst thing about my trade is? I make maps for everyone. The Zenith buy them to know where to extract. The Nadir buy the same ones to know what to defend. And lately my maps of Kaldrek have been turning up in skirmish reports as targets.” He turned his head to Ada. “Is it still neutral science, a map someone uses to aim?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nor do I. That’s why I’m asking.” Sarn pointed up, at the violet sphere. “What he’s given you is a map. What your hull core has is the explanation. And an explanation, girl, can be aimed a lot better than a map.”

“I don’t want to aim at anyone. I want to know why we were there.”

“That’s what they all say at the start,” said Vasko from the door.

---

Corporal Osk turned up at the third melvara of the night, in his hover, with the face of someone who hadn’t slept and a card in his hand tied with a red ribbon.

“Came for you at El Bastión,” he said. “A dock kid from El Fondeadero, on the last transport. He ate two pastries while he waited.”

Ada untied the ribbon. The handwriting was very round.

Private auction in Los Talares, El Fondeadero, tomorrow at ten in the evening, fleet time. Single lot: an auxiliary hull core of the Flota, in original crate. Punctuality appreciated. The Tejedora.

And underneath, in the same hand, smaller:

An auction without the owner of the goods is a robbery.

Ada looked up.

“I haven’t got a ship.”

“The Vanguard doesn’t bid,” said Osk. “Never. But the Colonel wants someone watching. I fly at dawn.”

“And does the Colonel know I’m coming?”

“She hasn’t asked.”

“Why are you helping me?”

Osk thought about it, as if it were the first time he’d considered it.

“Because I signed a report that said ‘holding’,” he said. “And I don’t like people stealing my words.”