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There seemed to be no love lost between her and her son. Kaia wondered if she’d ever learn that story.
Doesn’t matter.
She did learn more about Mare Halena’s timeline for the wedding. After expressing appropriate gratitude about the training Mare Halena “offered,” Kaia prodded a bit into the timeframe of things. Things like the dreaded wedding.
“I estimate six Old Earth months will be long enough to get you up to speed. This is also when we plan to embark on the next expedition. It will give the residents hope to have their future commander be wed and begin his reproductive duties in conjunction with that event.”
Kaia had resisted squirming in her seat, but she did instinctively pry her hand away from Orion’s, where he’d been holding it in her lap for the previous ten minutes. Stuck between Orion and his mother, Kaia had to give a little to maintain the delicate balance between the man who was her ticket to Upload and the woman who had the power to ruin it all for her.
So she had tolerated this one bit of physical contact, and after a while even appreciated the heat radiating off his skin in the otherwise chilly space.
Would six months be long enough for her to get Loran an in on the ship? She’d need to do it beforeColossalmade its jump to the edge of known space and embarked out into unexplored territory, well out of Loran’s reach.
Kaia would need to use her time wisely. She’d need to research power dynamics on the ship, resource providers Loran might be able to infiltrate, how instance traversal worked to ensure she'd end up near Ahton, and other practicalities. She hoped six months would be plenty of time to figure it out without setting off alarm bells in the ship’s access monitoring systems, which she was sure were in place.
Kaia still hadn’t heard from Loran since her ping, but something in her bones told her he’d received it and was biding his time. Loran’s machinery was always in motion. She wondered whathisexpected timeline was for the whole operation.
There were so many balls to juggle, but Kaia was closer than ever to her goal of reuniting with the brother she’d killed. If she could just keep this house of cards from collapsing, she’d be Heaven free. But when Kaia was in bed and her thoughts veered away from planning and calculations, there were no more distractions to keep her mind off the other thing that happened.
She couldn’t call it a kiss. That wasn’t what it was. It was more like an angry, belligerent possession. A crushing of bodies that saidI’ll show you that I own you.
It wasn’t designed to make something under her ribs swell, goading her to lean into the fire of it, but that was what happened—the sudden urge to poke and prod, to see how far she could push it before the fire lost control.
She may have wanted to die, but Kaia wasn’t suicidal. Not inthatway. The dangerous impulse was idiotic. She may have been able to begrudgingly play those games with Loran, but this wasn’t just an asshole warlord she was dealing with. She needed to keep her shit under control. And that meant keeping things moving.
She pulled her tablet from under her mattress and sent her second ping to Riker 109, willing Loran to guide her next steps.
RECIPIENT ID: A35R109-*
FROM: CCLSL-25109
DATA: NONE
She felt a little better right after the message was sent. At least things were happening. At least she wasdoingsomething. Kaia twisted to her side and tucked her knees into her chest, thinking about anything but what just happened, forcing the flashes of it out of her head. But no matter how much she focused on Ahton, on her plans, even on Loran and memories of her life on Riker 109, a pair of ice blue eyes and mean, hard lips were the last thing in her head before she slept.
* * *
Pilot training took place adjacent to a rookie dock in the ship’s bow. The bow, being the command hub of the colony, teemed with officers and senior staff too big for their breeches. She had expected it to be at least a little fun. Kaia knew how to fly already, and now she’d get to do it for real.
Except it had been two weeks and they hadn’t even left the classroom yet, much less seen the inside of a cockpit. With each day spent in the confined space with another half-dozen trainees, Kaia felt more and more like she might crawl out of her skin.
Orion found himself in the same part of the ship for his own “handover” duties, whatever those were. Thankfully, his mother seemed to be driving him hard enough. Though Kaia had a feeling, from the glimpses of him she’d caught throughout her days, that he’d cut to the pilot’s bar at every opportunity to get shitfaced.
He hadn't bothered her in her cabin in the evenings since dinner with Mare Halena. Kaia was relieved when the pattern continued, but she did ruminate on the cause. Was his mother having him work nights? Was he just too exhausted at the end of each day to bother her? Or—and this is the thought Kaia had been resolutely trying to squash—was he bored and done with her already? How long would it take for him to discard her, and what would happen to her when that happened?
The anxiety of it was what stopped Kaia from fucking off to the pilot's bar for a drink of her own. She didn’t have the luxury of screwing around. She had to get her bearings, figure shit out, and start siphoning intel to Loran before the fear of Orion’s boredom turned into a cold, hard fact.
So she got the intel. Intel like how nobody knew whichexactgenes poweredColossal, only that they were all within Orion’s family. She learned that this obfuscation of how the ship worked was by design, the original architects thousands of years ago designing the system to minimize chances of someone replicating the gene set in the future. Whoever builtColossalwanted the power to stay in the family.
“But isn’t that a little fucked up?” Kaia interrupted the instructor, a wiry old man who went by Sutton, in the middle of his lecture on the topic.
“How so, Kaia?”
“You got seven thousand people living on this ship.” Kaia had learned the approximate population ofColossalin an earlier lesson. “And all their lives depend on this one family, who was apparently so power hungry that they’d keep anyone else from controlling their precious spaceship? Putting thousands of people at risk should they die off. How is thatnotfucked up?”
“Most colony ships work this way for sound historical reasons. Old Earth fell because of the squabbles of men vying for power at the expense of all else. It is why they ran out of resources, and why they eventually bowed to external influences—”
“The uhyre, you mean.” Kaia raised a brow, knowing the irony wouldn’t be lost on him.
