Arriving on the Alké, Ada innocently requested a Raven. The request went up the chain to Aseem, a ship captain with a hard gaze and thick hands who wasn't one to be swayed easily."I'm Gorylkin!" she declared, and he raised his voice in turn, barking that the war against the League was no longer relevant, and that every ship was precious.
Ada had already grabbed her transient FAM, fire in her eyes, when Ravzan came running-summoned by other officers. He listened to Ada's complaint with a grave expression, then declared that she would be entrusted with a Raven called Mission II.
Aseem turned a stunned look toward the admiral, who explained:
"Gorylkin has just saved the Alecto mission. She is under the protection of the Wau order. Ship Captain Aseem, try to see further than your nose.""She wants to go to Caliban. It's a lost ship.""Then it will be a lost ship. Gorylkin, it's yours."
Ada solemnly shook Ravzan's hand and took her place in the cockpit with Alpha and Kukth. She was given Dérive coordinates for Antioch-a direct gate to Caliban. After a rough takeoff, the Dérive brought her in two seconds to Antioch, which appeared vast before her.
Antioch was indeed a planet as large as three mythical Earths, but it maintained a bearable gravity thanks to a mysteriously low internal density. Its magnetosphere was weak as a result, and once a solar-protection process had been deployed around the planet, vegetation thrived, making it perfectly habitable in less than a century. Its immense surface now hosted hundreds of billions of humans, remarkably few Xenos, and all lived in often autonomous communities. That was the Antioch spirit: independence, self-reliance, endurance, distrust of outsiders, extreme solidarity with allies, few laws to obey but merciless punishment for those who broke them.
The League requested identification from Ada, and she replied, "Gorylkin."
"Gorylkin from Orion Prime?" answered a young voice on the other end. "No kidding!""The very same," she said, showing her face on the screen."Come on down, we'll buy you a drink, Gorylkin."
It's a long story that Ada preferred to forget, but she landed on Antioch, in a small town called Astroport Ijudije, which seemed lost in the middle of a green steppe where enormous woolly ruminants grazed freely. Two friends, Jochem and Wynonna, cheerfully took Ada to a bar made of two welded shipping containers, called The North Star, haunted by farmers and idle citizens.
A Xeno resembling an ant was cleaning the floor and walls with its tongue, and was being mistreated both by the patrons and the bartender. Ada caused an uproar, rifle in hand. A man approached to punch her-Alpha cut off his hand. A deafening siren went off. She fled in her Raven, but already a Snagship crossed her orbit, and two Alexandrites were on her tail-especially since her piloting skills were mediocre at best.
She crashed into a mangrove forest and owed her life only to Alpha's ability to hide beings from the eyes of others, and to her FAM, which had slain a crocodile-serpent native creature intent on devouring her.
Then came survival under the open sky for who knows how many days-meals of larvae and puddle water, hitching a ride on a timber transport vehicle, and stealing an Alexandrite in the middle of the night from an authority center, all under Alpha's camouflage. Drif to Caliban.
When Caliban suddenly appeared through the cockpit bay, Ada's heart clenched: the planet of her childhood-her only landscape-its familiar storms, all of it hurled her back into an almost forgotten past. The subtle scents and calibrated temperature of the Shareplace rose up in her memory.
Why had she almost forgotten? Why, even back then, had she looked at those clouds and peaks without truly seeing them? Why, today, does she find it hard to look at the planet at all-as if a void flickered intermittently before her eyes?
This planet is alive, she's sure of it. It's sacred. "Every planet holds a secret," said the hero of The Crew of Captain Wau. Caliban shelters the Gates of Empyrean, and she's going to open them.
She instructs the Alexandrite's autopilot to dive toward the planet. It calculates the safest route and swings around to fight gravity by grappling onto a dormant Shareplace-hers? Her heart tightens again, but her mind seems to empty. She feels good, light. The weight of past violence seems to fade away.
She passes through the cloud layer-briefly spotting some kind of base nestled in a green pass between two peaks sharp as knife blades-and then the autopilot simply shuts down. She bangs on it; nothing happens. No system seems to work anymore.
She blacks out. For two full seconds, she forgets everything. But the speed, the thermal glow, and the terrible noise bring her back to the horror of the moment. She fumbles for a lever to switch to manual and braces herself as best she can.
The Alexandrite ricochets off the still surface of a lake-or a sea of oil-seems even to rise again, before carving a path through an endless stretch of sand, perhaps an island, though a wild coastline of young rock crowned with tall trees looms to one side. The grapple had protected Ada from the shocks, but the Alexandrite is half-submerged, and when she opens the airlock she can't fight the pressure. Alpha somehow pulls her out-her eyes are open but she sees nothing.
She takes two steps on the sand. She breathes. Alpha may be at her side; she doesn't know. There is no sound except the faint crunch of sand beneath her weight.
Her eyes see nothing-not even blackness. Her mind gradually empties. She forgets where she is, what she's doing, where she came from. She forgets her life. She forgets Alpha's name. She forgets her own.
And she falls to her knees, then face-down on the ground, her mouth half-buried in the sand, as inert as a stone.
She is in a living coma, destined to die here without even thinking of it.