The Stolen Future Box Set

by Brian K. Lowe

  But they lay not peacefully. Smaller shapes were soon skittering among the fallen, feeding on the dead and near-dead. Even between the scavengers there was competition, and battle, and some of the scavengers quickly became the scavenged.

  “I think we were wise to stay inside at night,” I noted to Maire, but she wasn’t paying attention.

  “Look!” she pointed, her finger penetrating the holographic cube itself. The technician quickly hid his annoyed expression. But we both followed her lead.

  Peeking out of a doorway was a humanoid head. Even in this light we could see its silvery fur glint. It scampered into the street and another followed.

  “Breen,” I agreed. I turned to the technician. “Mark that spot. That’s where we want to go.”

  I stood before the entrance to what we had firmly established as a breen burrow, bolstered both by the word of Uncle Sam that: “The breen have long memories,” and even more so, I admit, by the assurances Maire had given me that not only could the Lady’s fire computers stop even a charging breen with one shot, they could also differentiate between hostile and merely cautious movements. I needed the breen not simply to refrain from attacking me, but also to trust me. The memory of the poor, emotionally-scourged soul I had been forced to kill on the arena stage still twinged painfully when I touched it.

  No one accompanied me; I was on this fool’s errand all by myself. I shouted a halloo toward the building, squat and dusty, its windows gone. It would be surprising if the breen did not already know I was there, but the trick was going to be letting them know who I was. Far above I could feel the eyes of my crew, and the rest of them, jostling for a look at the monitor cubes or craning as far out over the railings as the force fields would allow. Their breath would be fast and shallow, their hearts beating heavily against their chests…they might as well have been here with me.

  But they were spared the breen-scent that clung to the walls and the bushes and the very ground all about me. I knew it would stick to my boots when I went back—and when its pungency rose suddenly like a musical crescendo, I knew they were here.

  They stood back in the darkness, not from fear, but from having lived their lives underground. Normal breen were not nocturnal, so I was fairly certain I had met the right clan. If I had not, I would soon be meeting my Maker instead.

  “Come in.” Sweat trickled down my back. Mangled by bestial mouths, most breen speech was garbled at best, and telepathy among them appeared rudimentary. I strode forward and hoped I had not mistaken “Oh, look, breakfast,” for an invitation.

  I could almost hear the screech when Maire realized what I was doing.

  My vision disappeared completely the moment I walked through the door. I could not see a thing. The scent remained the same, my nose having given it all the credence it was warranted. One clawed hand gently—so gently!—encircled my upper arm and I was led away.

  “All the same, I thought Maire was going to jump ship and go after you when you went inside.”

  “What was I supposed to do, Timash? I wanted them—I needed them to trust me, and I needed to know that the men would be safe with them. If they killed me, at least you’d have known not to bring down the rowers.”

  “If they had killed you, we would have turned around and left your bones rotting in the sun!” Maire slammed the cabin door behind her. One look at Timash and he beat a hasty retreat. I raised my eyebrows at her and took another sip of my beer with a sigh. Man had lived a million years, but he could never get tired of beer.

  “And what’s that to you? I thought you wanted your ship back.”

  Now it was her turn to raise eyebrows. “What? You think Skull would just hand it back to me? ‘All’s forgiven, dear. Forgotten all about that slave-rower nonsense. See you around?’“

  I nodded in beery satisfaction. “So you need me. And judging from that reaction a minute ago, maybe you even like me a little?”

  “Let’s stick to ‘need’ for the moment.” She stuck out a hand. “And speaking of needing…”

  With no little surprise I passed over the mug. At least I did not have to worry about her taking too much; the mug simply made more, until I told it to stop. And it kept the beer cold. Lord, I prayed, if you could just let me go back home with this one little thing, I could stop all wars forever. Amen.

  She gave it back, licking foam from her upper lip. “It tastes like you.”

  I stopped short of another sip; thank goodness she hadn’t waited another second to say that, or I would have choked on it and made the whole argument moot.

  I thought of the other day right there in that cabin, when I had kissed her.

  I couldn’t help myself. “You should know.”

  Maire leaned forward, a wicked smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Shadows gathered at the opening of her blouse.

  “If you ever try something like that again, you’ll wish the breen hadn’t given you back.”

  With God as my witness, I could not help myself.

  Chapter 45

  I Become a Ghost

  To my knowledge, it was the first and only time Maire ever lied to me: Kissing her did not make me wish the breen had filleted me for lunch. It was, in fact, an uncommonly good kiss, for all that my experience in such matters was limited. Still, it is a uniquely subjective judgment in any case.

  Only afterward did I feel horrible.

  “Great,” Maire murmured. “Now I really am the captain’s woman.” She opened her eyes. “What’s the matter?” We had just broken off our kiss—or rather, I had done so—and I inhaled her breath when I spoke.

  “I can’t do this—!” I pushed away from her as though to push away the past few moments with her.

  But neither she nor the past would let me go. “What? What’s the matter?”

  I inhaled deeply, grabbing the arms of my chair and looking anywhere but at her.

  “I can’t do this. I’m in love with Hana Wen. She’s the entire reason I’ve come out here; I can’t just abandon her.”

  A mask fell over Maire’s face, instantly erasing all traces of the concern and—lust? affection? love?—that had previously suffused her face, as only a woman can do. Now it was she who pushed away, and rising from her chair, made to leave. I thought I had mortally offended her—and with good reason!—but as usual I had misjudged the fairer sex.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the wall. “I thought you just needed a little encouragement.” Abruptly she faced me again, a brave smile playing her delicious lips. “If we could just forget all about this, I’d appreciate it.”

  I hesitated; I had never known a woman to apologize for being forward to a man. But she stood frozen in a stasis of embarrassment until I should release her, so I mumbled a few meaningless words of pardon and allowed her to retreat with what dignity she could muster.

  At that moment, had another of Farren’s ships suddenly appeared on the horizon, I would gladly have boarded her alone.

  Perhaps it is just another evidence of the cruel and ironic humor of Fate that the first person I met upon making the deck was Bantos Han. That he was the man I was seeking made me feel no less a cad. It was his sister that I had traversed half the planet looking for, sweeping up innocent lives in my wake and ending more than my fair share of them. Yet not five minutes ago I had kissed another woman.

  The greatest shame came from recalling how much I had enjoyed it.

  He and I had not been given an opportunity ere now to greet each other properly, and I returned his warm bear hug with equal sincerity. I asked after Hori; he said she had been well the last time he saw her.

  “After the riots, things were never the same. The people were restless. All at once all of the malcontents and troublemakers seemed to find each other. Before we’d been afraid, but once we saw what the Nuum could do—what they would do, given the chance—we knew they’d taken their best shot. Even the threat of violence is less frightening once you’ve seen it actually carried out. Suddenly we thought, ‘Sure, they�
�re tough on a common mob, but with a little planning…’“

  “‘We’?” I interrupted.

  He grinned. “Uh-huh. I still had the gun you left. And we’re not quite as cut off from machinery as the Nuum think we are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have access. The Nuum still need us to do their labor, like Hori works in the library. That means we use machines during the day. When you’ve had as long as we have to work it out, it’s not hard to get around the alarms that guard them at night. We’ve been making copies of your gun for weeks, and hiding them around the city. When we have enough, the Nuum are going to be in for a surprise.”

  A sick fear roiled in my stomach, the fear of untutored men with unfamiliar and very real firearms. Bantos Han must have read my thoughts in my face because he moved quickly to reassure me.

  “Don’t worry! We made very sure we knew how your gun worked before we even started making copies. Nobody touches one without plenty of supervised practice.”

  “But where do you practice? Those guns make a lot of noise.”

  “Oh, computer simulations. And we’ve made some improvements: range, accuracy, noise.” He winked. “They’re really pretty crude, you know.”

  “But they make a hell of a mess, even so. I can guarantee that,” I said. “But what happened to you? How did you end up on a sky barge?”

  Bantos Han shook his head in disgust. “Bad luck. That’s all there was to it. The Nuum have started running patrols around town, picking up anyone out after curfew—there’s a curfew now—and they found me walking home after a meeting. They didn’t even know who I was. They didn’t even ask what I was doing. They just picked me up, dumped on a transport, and next thing I know I was on the Eyrie.” He shuddered. “Keryl, you don’t know how bad it was. I got lucky and managed to stay near the front because I was new and I still had some strength. I’ve only been on board about a month; if it had been much longer I could’ve been lost in the hold and never come out.”

  “I saw it,” I said quietly. “But you’re out of there now. You’re part of my crew. The Eyrie is going to stay here with the rowers while they regain their strength before they go home—” I fixed him with my gaze—”and we’re going to Dure to find Hana.”

  Joyful tears filled his unbelieving eyes and he pulled to him once more. Why didn’t I feel the same?

  Seeking to change the subject as much as anything, I led Bantos Han to the railing where we could speak privately.

  “What was all that excitement when I first boarded the Eyrie, right before I saw you? All of a sudden the rowers started acting very oddly, and some of them were yelling something…?”

  Bantos Han stared at me quizzically. “You don’t know? You haven’t heard? I would have thought that with all this—” he indicated my boat— “you’d have access to the datasphere.”

  I snorted without much humor. “My access to the datasphere is a touchy subject. And I don’t think,” I added after a moment’s reflection, “that it’s going to become any less touchy any time soon.”

  “Oh…” Bantos Han was evidently taking more than a moment to assimilate this new information. For the life of me I could not understand why. At last he blurted out: “Then you don’t know anything!”

  I blinked. The last time I’d heard that was in one of my first-year seminars, uttered by the same don who, four years later, proudly hung upon me my scholarship medal. I wondered what had ever happened to it.

  “Keryl,” my friend prattled on excitedly, “you’re a ghost!”

  “I’ve come close more times than I care to think about,” I agreed.

  “No, no.” His hands fluttered in frustration. “I mean, you’re a ghost. A—a non-entity. Someone who doesn’t show up in the datasphere!”

  My blank look was all the response I could muster.

  Bantos Han took a deep breath. “This isn’t easy. The datasphere is like the sun—it’s always been there. Nobody ever has to be told what it is.”

  “I know what it is,” I said testily. “The Librarian told me; he just didn’t think I was ever going to have a chance to use it.”

  “The Librarian? You mean Hori?”

  “Never mind. What’s a ghost in the datasphere, and why did it create such a sensation?”

  “A ghost… Like I said, it’s somebody who doesn’t show up in the datasphere. It happens sometimes; everyone knows someone who knows someone who heard about somebody in town dropping out of sight—I’ve heard there are places in the East where whole cities have dropped datasphere connections, but I don’t know if it’s true or not. The point is, when the Coremaire research station was ransacked, you missed a camera. Apparently it was in the infirmary; I don’t know why, maybe it was to record surgical procedures. After you left the Nuum found it, ran the disk, and saw you. So they ran the data through the ‘sphere for ID, and you didn’t register. You couldn’t—because you aren’t in the ‘sphere in the first place.”

  “So now the Nuum know what I look like?”

  “Well, yes…but they haven’t got the faintest idea who you are. Some of our people managed to tap the ‘sphere and picked up some of the messages about you—and boy, are they going crazy!”

  The import of this information left me a bit less elated than it seemed to leave my companion. Heretofore I had considered myself a phantom member of society, unknown and unlooked-for. Now that I had been formally designated a “ghost,” I found myself photographed, cataloged, and no doubt highly sought after. At least in evading the Silver Men we had both been playing on an equally strange field!

  “Can anyone access this information?”

  “Oh, no,” Bantos Han assured me. I relaxed. “Only the Nuum.”

  This brought less than the full joy of total security and comfort.

  “I meant, can any Nuum access this information?”

  He bit his lip in concentration.

  “We don’t know. The Nuum have secure areas that not even their own people can peek into, but we don’t know how badly they want to find you. Theoretically, by now they could have dumped your picture into the mailbox of every Nuum on Thora. On the other hand, if they haven’t, only certain people would have access. The Nuum have been acting very strangely the last few years—even for them. And if they suspect we can tap into the ‘sphere, they might not want this information getting around.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because things back home are already in a mess. We’ve used the datasphere ourselves to get in contact with Thorans in other countries—even Dure, where this ship is from. The people are ready. If word got out that the man who destroyed a Nuum research station was also a ghost—the rumorcasters would go wild. This planet is seething with revolution…” His voice trailed off and his eyes took on a feverish shine I did not like. “You could do it. You could be the spark that sets the world on fire!” Suddenly our surroundings seemed to take on entirely new meaning in his brain. “All this… A few months ago you didn’t even know how to communicate! Now you’ve destroyed a Nuum installation, stolen two of their sky barges… Keryl, do you realize what this news could do?”

  “Yes,” I said honestly. “It could get me killed.” Bantos Han’s news had shaken me, but regardless of the justification for my feelings I could almost feel the ghosts of ten thousand generations turn their backs in scorn and shame. I plead with them. “You have to understand, I have a war of my own to fight. I left men behind in my own time. If I can return to them, I can save them. The people of this time have to save themselves.”

  But to Bantos Han, the men I had left behind had never been real, only dust for a thousand thousand years.

  “I see,” he said quietly, and then he, too, turned his back upon me.

  “I have an obligation to your sister!” I reminded his retreating form, but his reply, if any, was lost in the wind of our passage.

  Chapter 46

  We Enter Dure

  The landscape passed below us with measured tread, strolling
steadily northward as we passed south. At first I woke in the night, dreaming that we had been overtaken by another Nuum aircraft, a shining, swooping metal bird of prey with wings like the craft that had taken me out of Vardan. But in common with the mariners of times past, we saw no one else on this vast sea, and as we progressed toward our destination my rest became less troubled, even as our chances of discovery grew greater. What we would do if hailed depended on the caller: Maire still trusted her family’s oldest allies, proof she was sure against any leverage Farren might apply, and those she would greet personally. But if we were contacted by strangers—or worse, Farren’s own household retainers—our tactics must be determined by our situation. We could bluff, run, or fight—but we would not know which was best until the choice was put to us.

  I spent much of the days in my cabin, leaving the ship’s running to those more competent than I. Timash took to sailing with the curiosity and enthusiasm of youth, and Maire seemed glad to teach him if it meant she could spend less time with me. Bantos Han had taken it upon himself to help organize the rowers, mediating disputes (with Timash’s backing) that once would have ended in fights. The rowers themselves still rowed, for they needed something to do, but their shifts were humanely limited, and their quarters had been improved as far as was in my power.

  Nights found me often on deck. Modern technology had dispensed with running lights, and the dark suited my moods. There were no rowers and only a skeleton crew which was glad enough to leave the captain to his musings as long as he returned the compliment. So far I had contented myself with the cooling breeze on my face and trying to memorize the changed constellations, but at last I forced myself to face the truth: The warm winds were drying out my skin and I had never really been interested in astronomy.

  There was no one for me to talk to about my feelings. Timash was asleep, and, I feared, too young to understand—notwithstanding that I was not much older. Bantos Han would probably not appreciate being disturbed. And Maire—my soul reeled at the thought.