Dark Space - Marianne de Pierres [12]
Mira thought wistfully of her grandfather. The archivolos showed him dressed in a matt black fellala that made him seem extraordinarily tall and thin. His skin had been deathly pale from the time he had spent in vein-sink.
All the early Cipriano settlers had acquired milky space-farers’ skin by the time they had reached their destination, yet as they began melanin treatments their colouring turned to the lustrous crimson of the modern, acclimatised Araldisian.
Not everyone had fared well with the augmentations. Melanin allergy was not uncommon and sometimes developed after the boosters had accumulated in a person’s system. It had claimed Mira’s own father and when her mother died from birth complications Mira’s older sister Faja was left to bring up her younger sibling.
The Principe had kept them on a modest gratuity, enough to maintain a villa on Mount Pell. Later, after their parents’ deaths, he had the girls shifted to one of the plainland towns and had decreed that only one of them would be educated at the Studium. Faja had given up her own chance at that for Mira.
Faja, what will you think of Franco’s diktat? Mira wondered.
Near the foot of the mountain the TerV changed direction to circumvent the large, flat, functional catoplasma edifice of Carabinere Centrale, and descended further.
Dockside had its own dome, a modest crimson-tinged field that married into the floor beneath the purple and red rock mountains. The Fleet hangars adjoined the docking stations, sharing the same launch infrastructure but with separate entrance and exit portals for the maintenance staff and pilots. The Assailants were taken up into space on rotation twice a year to blow out the dust.
Mira raked through her memories of the hangar layout. During the first year of her Studium course she had concocted a research rationale to visit the Fleet—the history of Latino warship poetry or something similarly esoteric. To her disappointment the biozoon had been hidden from view by a large X-ray-resistant canopy. Her guide had explained that biozoons were always a target for bandits and that although Insignia had not been flown in twenty-odd years—since Mira’s father had died—the Principe kept his premier ship closely guarded.
Insignia had felt her presence, though. I sense one of you. It spoke in her mind.
Mira had clapped her hands to her head in shock.
‘Baronessa?’ Her guide had looked at her with concern.
‘A sudden headache, signor, nothing m-more,’ she had replied.
The murmurs had started soon after, like a small babbling stream of half-formed words. If she concentrated she could make sense of some but for the most part it was like a language she had learned once and then forgotten.
Mira believed it was Insignia. Yet other possibilities haunted her and there was no one to speak to about it, no one to reassure her.
Occasionally clear meaning would break through the babble, as it had this evening. Now all she longed for was to see Insignia without covers, to know that it was real, to understand the forgotten language, to know she was sane.
Mira’s ears popped and the TerV wallowed a little as she entered the Dockside preserv-field. Within a few seconds a Carabinere automon made contact.
She muted the shortcast transmission, ignoring it, and peered through the windows. There was no sign of the curious Carabinere, only the pandemonium of Dockside.
The launch and arrival docks were unsightly masterpieces of adaptation, reassembled from the gigantic vieships that had transported the larger part of the Cipriano clan from Latino Crux to the new world of Araldis. Scattered randomly around them were the grown catoplasma buildings that were so common on Araldis. Only the Palazzo and the Studium were built with traditional stone materials, mined at great cost from the bluestone deposits on the far side of the range.
An AiV swooped low over Mira without apparent care for its safety and her TerV adopted a stop-start pattern to avoid colliding with the traffic that crowded the piazzas.
Mira stared out with