“Yes, of course. When we began to suspect your true identity, Undercommandant Voyou made certain inquiries on Darit. While many people were understandably reluctant to talk to a member of the Letnev military, he managed to glean some information about you through diligent efforts.”

  Bianca felt a chill. “Did he threaten people?”

  “I believe his chief motivational tool was bribery, actually. Don’t worry, we didn’t learn anything embarrassing or salacious. Several people he interviewed did mention your, ah – ‘yearning’?”

  Bianca couldn’t help it: she blushed to her roots. She’d stopped talking about her obsession with the sky when she got older, of course, but as a child she hadn’t realized her fixation was strange, or that other people didn’t feel the way she did. In a small community, hungry for any gossip, people remembered, and they talked. “Yearning. It sounds like something from a love story when you put it that way.”

  Archambelle looked at her, alert and attentive. “Could you describe the experience to me?”

  Bianca looked down at her hands, twisting the edge of her blanket. “Oh, it’s just, ever since I was little, I sometimes find myself looking at the sky. Day or night, it doesn’t matter, and my eye is drawn to different parts of the sky at different times. I feel this… well, ‘yearning’ is a good enough way to put it. Like I was supposed to go to the place where I was looking. Like I belonged there. My parents said I just had wanderlust, itchy feet, things like that. But when I got old enough, I realized I wasn’t looking at different parts of the sky. I was looking at one particular spot in the sky – it just moved around throughout the year. It was easiest to point out on summer nights, because there’s a triangle of three stars, not especially bright or useful for navigation, and as far as I know we don’t even have special names for them. When I see those stars, I just feel this need to go there.” Some nights she would stand and stare so intently that she lost track of time, only blinking herself back to true consciousness when dawn arrived. She wasn’t even looking at the stars, exactly, but at the center of the triangle they formed, where there was nothing to see at all… but that sounded too ridiculous to admit. “Do you think that yearning means something?”

  “We’ll do a neurological workup,” Archambelle said. “Sometimes compulsions to go to a particular place are caused by parasites.”

  “Parasites?” Bianca was aghast.

  She nodded enthusiastically. “On Darit there is a parasite that lives inside small insects. It gives those insects an overpowering desire to climb up, and so the insects trundle up a blade of grass, to the very tip.” She made a little walking motion with her fingers. “Of course, once they’re on the end of a blade of grass, your caprids come along to munch the grass, and eat the insect along the way. That suits the parasite fine, because it needs to continue its life cycle in the belly of a caprid. The parasite lays its eggs inside the animal, and when the caprid defecates, those eggs are evacuated as well. Insects crawl through the fecal matter, and in so doing, they pick up the parasites, which infect the insects, and compel them to climb, and so the cycle continues.”

  Bianca made a gagging face. “You think I’m drawn to those stars because there’s some kind of parasite inside me? What kind of parasite needs to complete its life cycle in a distant star system?”

  “Do you have a better theory?” Archambelle snapped. Bianca narrowed her eyes, and the doctor winced. “Apologies, Lady Maladroit.”

  “It’s Malladoc,” Bianca said frostily.

  Archambelle blinked. “Isn’t that what I said? We’ll do a few more tests, just to rule out anything dangerous, and if we do find a parasite, we’ll deal with it. You’re in good hands.” The doctor hurried out, and Bianca flopped down on her bunk again.

  Then she stared at a spot on the bulkhead, beyond which, she knew – she just knew – those three stars shone. They were getting closer. She knew that, too.

  •••

  “There you have it,” Severyne said. “Find out where those stars are and set a course for them. I’m sure you’ll find your wormhole gate there.”

  “I will investigate the issue,” the doctor said. “Perhaps this yearning of hers is relevant, though more likely it’s a meaningless epiphenomenon. Even if she is being guided to those stars, there’s nothing to say they’re our actual destination – they may be merely signposts or markers.”

  Severyne shrugged. “At least now you’re fully informed.” She chuckled. “I did like the bit about the parasite.”

  Archambelle grinned back, and for a moment Severyne very nearly liked her. Then the doctor remembered herself and scowled. “I did see something new in the girl’s medical records.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “As I said, there was no cipher in her genome that we could detect. One part of her genetic code is particularly rife with incomprehensible data, though, and while perusing her latest scans, the sequencing looked wrong to me. Still baffling, but in a different way than I remembered. I assumed I was simply mistaken, but that’s rarely the case, so I compared her newest genetic sample to the first one we collected.” Archambelle clenched her fists. “The code was different.”

  “Your latest sample was corrupted, then?”

  “No! I double-checked, and triple-checked, I octuple-checked, and the sample was fine. The girl’s genetic code is actually changing.”

  “By the endless dark, what does that even mean?”

  “I have no idea what it means,” Archambelle said. “But it makes me think, perhaps the secret hidden in her genes is not a static message, but something dynamic. Maybe it’s a timer, or a counter. Or the secret could be hidden in the nature of the change – a message being revealed only gradually.”

  “I see. Does this insight bring you any closer to deciphering that message?”

  Archambelle opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, then sighed. “No. I hate to admit no, but I think we need to contact an outside consultant.”

  “Outside, doctor? As in, not Letnev? But we are the best, the brightest, the greatest, without equal–”

  “All true,” Archambelle said. “But there are certain individuals outside the Barony with highly specific skill sets that could prove useful.”

  “Who are we consulting, then?”

  “His name is Brother Errin.”

  “Ah. One of the Yin Brotherhood, I assume?”

  Archambelle nodded.

  “Why do they call themselves ‘Brother This’ and ‘Brother That’?” Severyne complained. “They’re all male anyway, and I never heard of one who claimed a gender other than ‘man’, I assume because of their odd religion. You’d think the ‘Brother’ bit could just be taken as read.”

  “Every culture has its oddities,” the doctor said. “Except for the Letnev, of course. Brother Errin is something of an outcast among his people – a brother exiled from the brotherhood, as it were. You are aware of the Yin’s deep preoccupation with genetic matters, I assume?”

  Severyne nodded. The Yin Brotherhood were all clones of the founder of their order, a human named Darien Van Hauge. Cloning was frowned upon even now, and in that scientist’s time, under the Lazax empire, it had been outright illegal. That hadn’t stopped his research, and he became a master of the forbidden craft. When his family died, Van Hauge went mad with grief and made a child from his own seed and one of his dead wife’s eggs, and then proceeded to clone that egg. The cloning process had two flaws, though: one caused a genetic predisposition to Greyfire, a disease that disfigured the flesh before killing the victim, and the other resulted in a total inability to create female clones. Over the centuries, the clones in what became the Brotherhood of Yin had continued tinkering with their own genome, but so far they’d failed to solve either problem, though they’d managed to make the Greyfire less lethal, if no less disfiguring. These days the Brothers most grotesquely altered by the disease were considered “blessed,” and formed the ruling councils of their people, while the “untouched” went out to deal with the other races of the galaxy, since their presence was considered slightly less off-putting.

  Severyne didn’t have any issues with the disfigured – that sort of thing couldn’t be helped, and a physical infirmity reflected nothing meaningful about the affected individual. Ideals of “beauty” or “normality” were culture-bound and subjective anyway. Severyne found zealotry off-putting, however, and every time she’d met a member of the Brotherhood they’d gone on about the wonders of their founder and the majesty of the egg they called “Yin” and considered the embodiment of some kind of “feminine principle,” and that was tiresome and repulsive.

  “This Errin knows more about genetics than you do?” Severyne asked.

  “Oh, yes. Does it surprise you to hear me admit that? There are only half a dozen people in the galaxy who can rival my expertise in these matters. Errin happens to be one of them, and he’s the one who’s easiest to reach. His quest to remove the flaws in the Brotherhood’s cloning process led him to study ancient accounts of the gene-sorcery of the Mahact.” She leaned forward, clearly fascinated by her own knowledge. “One story says the Lazax forbade cloning under their rule because the Mahact made such extensive use of the technology. Others say that propensity for clones led to the downfall of the Mahact. They were so jealous and selfish they didn’t like to have children, but instead made cloned thralls of themselves. Some legends say the Mahact could even move their minds into the bodies of their clones, though that strikes me as an actual fairy tale. Errin’s studies strayed into areas the Brotherhood found unsavory, his experiments were denounced, and he was cast out… which didn’t stop him from doing his research. He continued his studies, just more unfettered than before. He still wants to help his people, whether they want that help or not.”

  “That’s zealots for you,” Severyne said.

  “Errin’s work may give him a special insight into the nature of the girl’s changing genetic code. Perhaps he can decipher what I cannot.”

  “Fine. Give me the details, and I’ll have Richeline set a course for his doubtless horrifying bio-lab. You can meet with him by yourself, though. The last time I encountered one of the Brotherhood, he wouldn’t stop talking about how ‘ineluctably feminine’ I was, and I don’t need any more of that.”

  Chapter 16

  The direction of Bianca’s yearning changed, suddenly and dramatically, which meant the ship was charting a new course. She wondered where they were going, and why they were going somewhere other than wherever they’d been going before, but her guards were uncommunicative, Archambelle wasn’t answering her messages, and Ayla had no insight, of course.

  Bianca passed the morning doing years five and six of the Letnev language study. Apparently, she’d attained fluency. Languages weren’t that hard, really. It was all just sounds paired with meanings. Now she was learning to read the Letnev language, which was even simpler, despite the unfamiliar alphabet, since there were far fewer characters than phonemes. The sound each character represented changed according to the context of the characters around it, that was all, just like the language she’d grown up speaking. Maybe next time she’d learn the written and spoken versions of a language (or two) at the same time, just to give herself a bit of a challenge–

  Ayla spoke up, unprompted: “I have received permission to share the star charts you inquired about,” she said.

  That made Bianca sit up. She’d asked for the charts ages ago, and been refused, because “navigational data is classified,” which was baffling – how could a simple map of the sky be a secret, when anyone could look up and see it? She’d tried and failed to hack into the navigation system herself, though she thought in another day or two she’d get in – now it wasn’t necessary.

  Why had the Letnev changed their minds? She wondered if her odd conversation with Archambelle about her “yearning” had something to do with the sudden reversal of policy. “Show me.”

  One wall became a screen, depicting a night sky that was at first just a profusion of stars but that she soon recognized as the view from her own farm. “Those stars.” She pointed to the trio of lights that always drew her attention when she looked up – and to the space between them, where she so desperately wanted to go. “What are those?”

  The screen zoomed in closer, though they just remained points of light. “Those stars are known as Burgis-A, Burgis-B, and Eekhout.”

  “What’s out there?”

  “Nothing of note,” Ayla said. “The Burgis star systems include no habitable planets, and the gas giants there were deemed poor candidates for resource extraction. Eekhout has never been formally surveyed, but imaging indicates no planets of any kind in its orbit, only asteroids.”

  “What about right there?” She pressed her finger into the center of the triangle. “What’s in that empty space?”

  “Only more empty space, Lady Malladoc.”

  Bianca shook her head. “There has to be something!”

  “There are no objects noted in my database, though there are presumably uncharted areas.”

  “That’s not very helpful, Ayla.”

  “I always try to be helpful, my lady.”

  “Try harder.” Bianca slumped on the bunk, frustrated. For all her yearning, she still didn’t know what she was yearning for, and it troubled her that the ship was no longer moving in the direction of those stars.

  She was tired of all this “Lady Malladoc” business too – she’d gone from “wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were true” to accepting the whole thing was total nonsense. The Barony doctor had done so many medical tests on her it was clear they were trying to figure something out, not just assess her health, but what? She hadn’t left her family, her planet, and everything she knew just to be kept in the dark and fed shit, like one of the Letnev’s beloved mushrooms. If they needed her for something, they could at least tell her what, if they expected her cooperation.

  “Message Doctor Archambelle, Ayla. Tell her I want to know what all these tests are really for. Tell her, if she isn’t honest with me, I won’t help her anymore.”

  “Message sent, my lady.”

  “Let’s see what she has to say to that,” Bianca said.

  •••

  “The girl has grown suspicious,” Archambelle said. “She no longer believes your space-princess story.”

  Severyne yawned. She didn’t require much sleep, but she needed some, and the doctor had interrupted her scheduled downtime with an urgent request for a meeting. “So? The story was only meant to entice her on board and into our control anyway.”

  “You don’t understand. She has threatened to stop cooperating. If I just needed access to her blood and tissue her cooperation would be irrelevant, but we don’t know what reaching Ixth will require from her. If she refuses to help us, she could make our mission difficult or impossible. She is demanding answers, captain.”

  Severyne yawned again, more widely. “Then give her answers.”

  “You want me to tell her the truth? That her genetic code contains a treasure map hidden by ancient alien gene-sorcerers?”

  The captain rolled her eyes. “I didn’t say give her correct answers. Or complete ones. She’s seen through our lie. Admit to that, and tell her a new lie, and she’ll believe that’s the truth, because of course we wouldn’t try to deceive her twice. The names Ixth and Mahact won’t mean anything to her, but you can tell her… oh, tell her that Darit was never really Letnev territory at all. Hide the lie inside as much truth as possible. Tell her… Darit was a Federation of Sol territory, and the humans hid the location of some great treasure cache in her genetic code. Say we need her to lead us there and breathe on a biometric lock or something, and that we’ll split the treasure with her. Do I have to think of everything?”

  “That might work,” Archambelle said. “I don’t think the girl considers me trustworthy, though.”

  “Send Voyou. He’s the closest thing she has to a friend here, and he’s excellent at lying to humans. He did an admirable job of that on Darit.”

  •••

  “So there you have it.” Voyou spread his hands. “I know my superiors misled you, Bianca. That was wrong, and now the captain knows it was wrong. They were afraid you’d be unwilling to travel with us if you knew the truth, and concocted a story to gain your trust. They tricked me too. I can only offer my sincere apologies on their behalf, and convey their promise to be truthful with you in the future. While you aren’t, technically, a princess of the Letnev, once you take possession of your share of the Federation treasure we hope to recover you might as well be – you will possess wealth beyond imagining.”

  “I’m going to need something in writing.” Bianca crossed her arms and glared. “The Letnev are great believers in law and rules and order, aren’t they? That’s what my language-and-culture bot tells me. So, I’ll require a contract, specifying the terms of this split, and the rights and responsibilities of both parties.” She wanted to say all that in Voyou’s native language – Letnev was almost poetic when it came to the subject of binding agreements – but she’d decided to keep her degree of fluency a secret, just in case. Sometimes the Letnev spoke in their own tongue within her hearing, and they might be more discreet if they knew she understood them.

  “I’ll take your request to the captain,” Voyou said.

  He rose and departed, and Bianca made her way to the gym. She’d started working out recently, using the weights and resistance machines, and she could feel herself getting stronger and more flexible. This time, in her frustration, annoyance, and anger, she piled more and more weight on the bar as she did deadlifts. She grunted, lowering the bar, and noticed a gargantuan Letnev staring at her. “How someone so small lift thing so big?” he sputtered in the trading tongue, accent heavy and diction broken.