Starship Fall (Starship Seasons, #2)(5)

He glared at his beer, and something in his eyes indicated that it was not his first of the day.

Maddie embraced him. “Kee...?” she whispered.

He gestured with his bottle to the ship’s entrance behind him. “Help yourself to beers,” he said.

Matt said, “This is hardly the time to drink – what’s happening?”

Hawk pushed himself away from the rail and strode into the ship. “Come in.”

We followed him through the cramped coms-room he used as an office and into the lounge, an amphitheatre that had once been the ship’s bridge. The sunken sofas were strewn with clothing – Kee’s flimsy wraps and leggings.

Hawk strode around the lounge to the sliding doors and walked onto the long balcony which overlooked the yard. He indicated a table on the balcony.

There was a note on the table, covered with large, childish hand-writing. Maddie picked it up, looking to Hawk for permission to read it. He nodded.

“I’m sorry, Hawk,” she read aloud. “Time, now. Inland for rites. Couldn’t tell you. Secret. I hope I will see you again. Kee.”

At this last sentence, Hawk turned a stricken gaze on us. “She’s been acting oddly for weeks, quiet, uncommunicative. I shrugged it off as Kee, as alien. She gets like that from time to time. Christ knows, it’s hard enough having a relationship with a human woman–”

“Tell me about it,” Matt quipped, earning an elbow in the ribs from Maddie.

“But Kee’s alien, and they do things differently.”

“Hawk,” I said gently. “You said you feared for her safety...?”

He took a deep breath and nodded. “In the early days, when we first got together... I wanted to know more about her, her people. I reckoned if I knew more about the Ashentay, then... I don’t know... then maybe it’d be easier to understand Kee, to work out how best to respond to her. I knew I was in love, whatever that means, and I wanted to keep her, so I quizzed her about her people, their rites and customs.”

He stopped there. Matt prompted, “And?”

“And I remember she once told me about a certain rite that each Ashentay has to undergo around the age of thirty. It’s one of the many they take part in throughout their lives.”

Maddie said in a small voice, “And how old is Kee, Hawk?”

He said, “Thirty.”

“And this rite?” Matt asked.

Hawk nodded. “It’s called smoking the bones.”

“Sounds… exactly like something the Ashentay would cook up,” I said. They were a strange race, with beliefs that made little sense to human observers.

“What does it consist of?” Maddie asked.

“The Ashentay are a hunter-gatherer people,” Hawk said. “They have been for hundreds of thousands of years. They hunt a certain animal... I forget what they call it. Anyway, they don’t hunt this beast for meat – it’s inedible, apparently – but for its bones.”

Matt echoed, “For its bones?”

“They kill the animal, strip it to its skeleton, dry its bones and smoke them. I don’t know whether they grind the bones to dust, or actually smoke the bones like pipes, but anyway, they smoke its bones and go into a trance. While in this trance, this altered state, Kee told me they’re granted a foretaste of the future, of their individual destinies.”

I said, “And Kee’s gone to take part in this ceremony?”

“I put two and two together: the Ashentay smoke the bones in their thirtieth year, at a sacred location inland of here: and in the note Kee said… she said she hoped she would see me again.”

Maddie shook her head. “But why shouldn’t she?”

Hawk hesitated, then said, “The effect of smoking its bones is sometimes lethal. Kee said that the fatality rate is often thirty per cent. And this is accepted by the fatalistic Ashentay as their destiny...”

I almost said something bigoted about primitive belief systems, but restrained myself.

Maddie reached out and took Hawk’s hand. Matt said, “Then there’s only one thing for it, Hawk, we’ve got to either try to stop her before she smokes the stuff... or be on hand afterwards to help her.”

Hawk looked bleak. He nodded. “I’ve been away almost a week, down past MacIntyre delivering a starship habitat to a rich industrialist. I don’t know when Kee set off.”

“Do you know where the sacred site is, Hawk?”

He nodded. “She’s mentioned it in the past. It’s in the central massifs, high up beyond a native village called Dar, about a hundred kilometres from here.”

“And was she on foot?” Maddie asked.

“That’s just it, I don’t know. She can drive, but rarely does. I checked, and she hasn’t hired a car locally. But she might have gone into MacIntyre and hired one there.”

Matt nodded and looked out across the junkyard. On the horizon, the bloated, blood-red orb of Delta Pavonis was lowering itself slowly into the ocean.

“It’ll be dark in an hour,” he said. “We’d never make it through the mountain pass. How about we get some provisions together, camping gear and food, and set off first thing in the morning?”

Hawk said, “I don’t know how Kee might take what she’d see as our interference... but we’ve got to try to find her.”