The Dark Reaches Read Online Free PDF Page A

now the center and fortress of the Cold Minds—it should be impossible, and yet they’d both seen the evidence that it was true. Linnea was right: Understanding how humans had survived under those conditions could be vital.
    But the Hidden Worlds were fighting their own war, right here, right now. How could Linnea, how could anyone waste time, energy, resources, on so slender a possibility, so dangerous a journey?
    “We’ll talk about it at home,” Iain said. “Please. Let’s go home. Marra is safe now. You’re free to move on.”
    “I’m ready to move on,” she said, her voice tight. “I’m sick of being groundside. I can’t rest. I want—I want to be out in the stars, in otherspace.” She looked at him squarely. “Away from people judging me. From politics. From seeing everything from seven points of view. It’s the only freedom I’ve got left. I need it so much, sometimes, sometimes I think—” She broke off, and he saw that her eyes were bright with tears.
    “Linnea.” He pulled her gently against him. “Tell me.”
    She was rigid in his embrace. After a long time, she said, in a choked voice, “I’m having—dreams.”
    The back of his neck prickled. “Dreams about—”
    “About otherspace,” she said. “I dream about it all the time.” Her voice was distant, slow. “Every night. I dream about what I see in otherspace—pictures, images, places I’ve never been. And all I want in the dream is to get there. I wake up crying, I want so much to be there. It—it calls to me. Somewhere out there is my home.” Her voice changed, tightened again. “But I don’t know where it is.”
    She could not go on. He stood there holding her, his hand absently caressing her hair, but he stared off into the shadows across the room, his heart beating slowly with dread. This happened sometimes, to young, new pilots. Othermind , the Line called it—that, and blunter names. He felt cold, remembering. Othermind could end a career, ground a pilot forever.
    But Iain had thought Linnea was past the risk. Too well trained, too experienced. Otherspace overwhelmed the mind and senses, its beauty undeniable; he loved it himself, missed it when he had been groundside too long. But this mindless yearning—He hid his face in her hair.
    This happened sometimes.
    This was madness.
     
     
     
    Linnea shivered in the cold, still morning air. Santandru’s distant, pale sun, masked by a thin haze, hung low over the snowy eastern hills. Its light did not warm her as she walked around her ship again, her booted feet crunching in frozen slush. Once again she checked that all fueling and power connections had been properly released, all supply ports were sealed, the skin seamless as it should be. Ready for launch.
    She still did not feel completely one with this ship. Iain had urged her to accept it, new from the yards, when the chance came, and she hadn’t resisted. The old ship Iain had stolen for her had suffered damage on Nexus that left it better suited to short training jumps in local space; it could no longer land or take off safely in planetary gravity.
    This jumpship was a beauty, a long narrow knife blade of gleaming gray metal with none of the usual marks of age or wear from many atmosphere landings. Its smooth skin was unbroken by ports; when Linnea piloted in normal space, she “saw” with the eyes embedded invisibly in that skin, not through any window.
    And in otherspace, of course, she could not see at all. Not in the same way. She had only the inner sight, entirely within her mind—the experience no pilot could describe in words, even to another pilot.
    She brushed her hand along the chilly metal, seeing the blurred reflection of her own face, dark against the white glare of the hazy sky. This ship had a range far beyond her old one. It could carry three passengers safely on a long jump, swaddled in its state-of-the-art passenger shells, and it had supply and recycling capabilities to match. Even though