Human to Human by Rebecca Ore Page B

We were all fringe people. Why should we leak secrets to Earth? Contact would bring in officials. American officials would put me back in jail. Chinese officials might extradite Yangchenla and her people for their ancestors’ crime of helping alien warriors.
    The elevator took Karriaagzh away. As soon as Hrif relaxed, Chi’ursemisa began pacing.
     
    Marianne, Karl, and I had to take the high-wire car out from Karst to the shuttle, like an elevator cable doing the Indian rope trick, with us riding the cable up in a sealed cabin. The high wires had been raised only recently—all the surface gates were closed now, the gate-space dimensions around Karst mechanically distorted to block Sharwani gates. Yangchenla’s brother, Kagyu, who’d become an officer, and two Barcons went with us to crew the intrasystem shuttle.
    The cabin stopped at an airlock. We scrambled through into a freight-sized transfer pod that had been refitted with about five hours’ worth of life support, a viewport, and some peroxide steering jets. I dogged down the hatch bolts extra tight as though hard vacuum was more dangerous than the extradimensional spaces we usually gated through. A magnetic accelerator pushed us off toward an intersystem shuttle, which was mostly huge tanks of helium-3 with a tiny crew space dangling below the tanks, too fragile to land on a planet.
    I asked Kagyu, “Let me see if I remember how to steer the pod to it.”
    It was like pedaling an aerial bicycle to bring the pod inside the shuttle. We keyed the airlock doors closed from inside and checked the gauges through the viewport.
    As we climbed out and wriggled up into the living quarters, Karl asked, “How long?”
    “In a little bit, honey. A few days.”
    “I’m bored already,” he said.
    The shuttle living space felt cramped and distorted, round floors fitted with furniture for acceleration and braking, the wall surface a cylinder with free-fall slings and handholds.
    “Primitive, isn’t it?” Kagyu said.
    I said, “Yes, but I don’t think Earth does this well.”
    “I’m sorry I can’t go with you. I’m due for observation time. Did they make you go to bed after sixteen hours awake?”
    “Yes.”
    “When we’re only watching, that rule doesn’t make sense.”
    “Maybe we irritate other people?” I also resented the rule when I did watches.
    The shuttle’s helium drives and fuel storage accelerated us to a constant one G. We held that for a day, then the warning horns beeped, and we moved from one floor up the handholds to prepare for retrothrust, braking.
    “What’s happening?” Karl asked.
    I said, “We’re going to start slowing down.”
    “How long?”
    “As long as we’ve been moving.”
    “This is stupid.”
    “No friction in space,” Kagyu said as we settled down against the new floor.
    “Space is stupid,” Karl said. He glared at us and added, “When are we going to get there?”
    “I used to ask when we would arrive when we rode in yak carts,” Yangchenla’s brother said.
    “I bet it wasn’t so boring,” Karl said. We were flying above the ecliptic, and except for the slowly drifting star clusters, the space around us was empty. The trip was faster than the time I came in from an outstation with Black Amber, back when I was only twenty, twenty-one, but definitely more boring. Maybe we should have brought a Gwyng or three?
    The gravity slacked off. Karl ran up to a wall, jumped, and hitting his feet against it did a flip. The male Barcon of our pair asked, “Is he too young for beers?”
    “Yes,” Marianne said.
    “Sedation?”
    “Do you want to be sedated, Karl?” I said, trying to put as much menace in the words as could.
    “Like what they did to Chi’ursemisa and Hurdai? Drugged? No.” He stopped popping off the wall and found a book chip, began reading it, flicking the screen on and off at first, then really reading.
    Kagyu said, “One couldn’t read in a yak cart.” Surely Karl was going to get lost in