Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  Raqella answered her pose with a similar one of his own, resonant to the crane stance in tai chi.

  They began to move. Nicole wasn’t sure who initiated things, nor if that mattered; from that moment, the two of them were a perfect match. The drumbeat was louder, more demanding. She responded, hearing as well the wild skirl of a Hal reel, unsure now which was real and which imagination. Both struck with equal force. Very little of their music was contemplative; their preference was passion, raw and untamed. Music and dancing were ways of unleashing the beast within, of hearkening back to the ages of tooth and claw, before they’d embraced the necessary strictures of civilization.

  Nicole grinned, swept up by music and movement and yet at the same time seizing control of both. The dance between her and Raqella was evolving as they went, each becoming an extension of the other, interacting with increasing confidence in a duet that was as much about war as love. He lashed out, too fast to see, and she felt the brush of surface tension across her cheek as she flinched just enough to make him miss by a hairbreadth. She in turn spun ’round behind him, hands flowing down his back, following the curve of his spine without ever touching, as he curved forward, then arched his body to full extension.

  Each moment fed on the one before. Each movement inspired another even more passionate. She would lead one measure, then let Raqella have the next. Her body knew precisely what to do; her head was just along for the ride.

  She lost all sense of where she was and with it of who. A small part of her awareness answered to the name of “Nicole” but it was a label without meaning. She didn’t think much about that, though, she was centered totally on her partner and the dance.

  Suddenly Raqella rushed in close and caught her hand. She started—up ’til now, there’d always been at least a fractional separation between them—baring teeth in anger at this breach of protocol. He took her by the chin and held her head fast, the barest hint of claws on. skin insuring that she wouldn’t move. She couldn’t speak, she was so outraged, as his golden eyes flicked back and forth between hers.

  “Ach’snai!” she finally managed to snarl, “back off!” In a tone that mandated instant obedience.

  He didn’t pick up his cue.

  Her free hand slapped up and outward, breaking his hold on her jaw; then she shoved hard at his chest to complete the disengagement. Didn’t quite work, though, his grip remained tight about her wrist.

  “Let go, Raqella,” she said icily in English, the glamour of their dance irretrievably broken.

  “Shea-Pilot,” he began, as though about to offer an explanation.

  She didn’t want to hear it. “Let go!” she repeated, in Hal.

  He did. But neither of them moved any farther apart. Nicole floated with feet apart, a combat stance, eviscerating him with her eyes, body primed to go for his throat. Common sense as much as pride kept Raqella where he was, as he realized that any gesture he made would most likely be misinterpreted.

  “You,” Hana, to Raqella, with a sharpness Nicole had never heard from her before as she pulled up beside them, “take a hike.” When he didn’t respond quickly enough, she turned to Amy, who was fuming in the background. “You! Get him out of here. Keep him the hell away from Nicole, is that clear?”

  Amy nodded, took Raqella by the arm. The Hal allowed himself to be pulled away, with a stumble to both step and attitude that was a pale echo of how Nicole felt.

  Hana took Nicole’s head in both hands, her palms splendidly cool against Nicole’s fevered skin.

  “Nicole,” she said quietly, “look at me. Listen. Can you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Of course I can, she thought, don’t be absurd.

  But somewhere between conception and execution, the reply got sidetracked. Nicole felt her mouth trying to form different words, recognized them for what they were, grabbed her friend by the wrists as though she were a life preserver.

  “Hana... ” she forced out.

  “That’s right, Ace. I’m here, I’ve got you, everything’s okay.”

  “Easy... for you to say.”

  “Complete sentence, and a joke. There’s life in the old broad yet!”

  “I ain’t no broad.” Pause for breath and a little reflection. “Wow.”

  “How d’you feel?”

  “Like I pulled too many G’s in a dogfight. Greyed out. Eyes are open, body’s functioning as though I’m awake, brain’s totally gone.”

  “Part of it, anyway.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I was dancing with Raqella. It was fun. It was wonderful, actually. Then he grabbed me and... everything went sour. Christ”—she looked at Hana, suddenly stricken—“am I nuts?”

  “If you are, I’ll never tell.”

  “If I am, woman, you’d better.”

  Nicole was sodden and breathless, as she let herself be towed to the sanctuary of the wall, as weary deep down in her bones as she was after a hard day’s sailing.

  Hana held out a drink. Nicole took it—in a hand that trembled, the reaction as much emotional as physical—placed the nipple in her mouth and drained it.

  “Grapefruit juice,” Hana told her, “to replace your key-tones.”

  “I’ll take another, please.”

  “Way ahead of you, Ace.”

  “Bravo, miss!” someone clapped her on the back—an Earthside gesture that bounced her off the padded wall and prompted an immediate embarrassed apology from the man. “Absolutely wonderful,” he continued, trying to make up for his gaffe with compliments, “I’ve never seen anything like it. I wish I had a video.”

  “Thanks,” was all she could manage in response.

  She looked around, letting the head movement pull her body along after in a gentle turn. She was at her limit and done with dancing for the night. For my lifetime, she thought.

  “Cobri Minor is at ten o’clock high, just along the seam,” Hana said casually, meaning Amy.

  “Thanks for spotting,” Nicole told her as her own eyes picked out Amy on the wall, attended by a couple of eager lads. “And Raqella?”

  “Youngblood’s right and low, just around the corner.”

  Alone, and deliberately so.

  “Since when did you start using Hal slang?” The term referred to Hal males and females who hadn’t achieved their majority—which involved undertaking the ritual Hal equivalent of an Australian walkabout combined with an Amerindian vision quest. There wasn’t much call for the Ordeal these days, in its full and ancient form; as with the forms of Terrestrial religions, it had been modified and streamlined to make it more acceptable to a society that felt it had more important concerns. Still, it was the Halyan’t’a rite of passage, the point of transition out of the nursery and into the House proper.

  “Long time now.”

  “And, what, I haven’t been around to notice?”

  “Something like that. She’s grown some,” Hana commented further, meaning Amy.

  “Haven’t we all.” Nicole spoke in a tone meant to change the subject, but Hana refused to take the hint.

  “Her old man took her out of circulation right after her brother died.”

  “Is this any of our business, Hana?”

  “Considering our history, Nicole, absolutely. She’s been in therapy, you know.”

  “She was a screwed-up kid, I’m glad her father realized that.”

  “She’s been in virtual seclusion ’til this past year. This is the first time she’s been off the surface. To be honest, I’m surprised they’re letting her out alone.”

  “She isn’t alone, not even close. I can spot at least four bods who read as security, which means there’s probably triple the number present.”

  “Way to go. Little Ms. Nutcase is well and truly protected. Where does that leave the rest of us?”

  “Why are you so angry?” Nicole faced her friend, who’d pressed herself back into the crease where two bulkhe
ads came together, a position that not only covered her back but gave her a much wider field of possible escapes should trouble come her way.

  Hana sighed in disgust, but Nicole couldn’t tell whether it was for Hana herself or Nicole. “D’you have the slightest fucking notion”—deliberately emphasizing the profanity for shock value—“what it was like watching the three of you? What could have possessed you to put yourself in that bitch’s hands?”

  “Actually, I was concerned, about her and Raqella both.” She wanted to explain about the incident in San Diego but Hana didn’t give her the chance.

  “Well, I’m sorry, Nicole. I was concerned—about you!”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “So you say!”

  “Hana, if I’m willing to accept the risk—whatever, wherever, whyever—then you’ll have to accept the decision.”

  “Blood’s coming,” was Hana’s clipped response.

  “Greetings, Shea-Pilot,” the Hal said in English, his voice possessing only the promise of the rich thrill that would come with full maturity.

  “Raqella.”

  “I commend you on the dance. I had been told of your skill, but confess I did not believe. I stand corrected, and humbled.”

  Very pretty speech, Nicole thought, well rehearsed and with just the right touch of sincerity. He’d have said the same, she knew, if she’d been awful. A charmer certainly among his own kind, with all the right instincts, lacking only practice to work on Terrans.

  “Kind words. Good as I am, though, Dr. Murai here is better.” Which Nicole believed to be true.

  “Then she should have joined us. Will you come again?” This directed pointedly at Nicole, as people drifted into the air for the next set.

  “I’ll pass, thank you.”

  Without an acknowledgment, he was gone, flashing up and over in a madcap series of acrobatics that scattered anyone in his way and brought him straight to Amy.

  “Show-off,” Hana muttered.

  “What’s he trying to prove?”

  “Y’ask me, Ace, it’s that NASA’s star flight selection process ain’t all it’s advertised.”

  “He came with a full rating, from the Hal. The tour through NASA was icing.”

  “Then the Hal should know better.”

  The next set kicked off and with it Amy and Raqella, as fresh as when they started and even more daring.

  Nicole watched and as she did her expression grew increasingly somber. The two youngsters were quicksilver together, flesh made mercury, impossible to hold. It should have been a spectacular display. But to Nicole, it was scary.

  “The question is,” she mused, “why didn’t they?”

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  At last, miraculously, the water smooths and she manages to find enough of a footing on the bottom to leap straight up. Nothing in her life ever tasted sweeter than this first breath. But that’s all the triumph she’s allowed as she’s slapped in the face by another wave and swallows a heavy mouthful of ocean. She struggles to get her bearings, fighting panic as she realizes there’s no solid footing beneath her, no matter how she stretches her long, lean body, even taking the risk of ducking her head under the surface. The shore is as far in the distance as the water seemed when she first came onto the beach.

  Earth to Faraway was seventeen days. Eight in warp, the rest spent decelerating through the system to achieve final orbit around the planet itself. So easy to take for granted, Nicole told herself, a journey that didn’t exist barely a generation before.

  This was a much younger world than Earth, mountains newly formed, their sharp, sawtoothed profile relatively untouched by the wind and weather that would eventually wear them down. Because of the violent interaction of the crustal plates, the coastlines of the existing land masses were mostly demarked by walls of towering cliffs that Nicole found achingly, disturbingly familiar.

  Life-forms were as primitive as the world, grassland plains with minimal forestation, insects being the highest order of animal existence. The soil was rich, however, and easily adaptable to Terrestrial biomes. A quarter century’s hard work had expanded the initial settlement at Hart’s Landing to better than a dozen communities scattered across the single huge continent, plus various research stations established on a score of attendant islands in the Northern Ocean. Despite this, immigration wasn’t anywhere near as extensive to Faraway as to the other colony systems—Paradise, Last Chance, and Nieuwhome—basically because the world remained geologically active. Its surface was still meshed together into a supercontinent that strongly resembled Earth’s Gonwondaland, the proto-land mass from which all the modern continents derived. The tectonic forecast here was for some fairly violent—and to a certain extent unpredictable—epochs in the future, as tectonic evolution reshaped the planetary plates into new configurations. The saving grace being that this “future” was measured in tens of millions of years.

  Throughout the flight, Nicole found herself kept far busier than she’d imagined—indeed, than she could ever remember, on the ground or in space. As a field grade officer, she had watch-keeping responsibilities, alternating between SecCom—where she sat the Throne—and the Bridge, where she shared the Second Tier Systems Manager role with three others. They switched consoles every tour, which in fairly short order gave Nicole a comprehensive working knowledge of the Constitution’s central systems. In addition, she was assigned a division of the crew, roughly three hundred people all told, including dependents; they had problems, they came to her. If there was trouble, it landed on her doorstep. This job, thankfully, she shared with Tom Pasqua, who proved as adept at handling personnel as he did paperwork.

  And, of course, there were the Hal.

  Both had kept their distance since the Initiation ceremony. In Raqella’s case, the explanation was simple: off-duty, he was hanging with Amy. It was Ch’ghan who had Nicole stumped. They’d never been close, in the way she’d been with the first Hal she’d met—Shavrin and Kymri—but now their relationship was defined by a formal reserve that he wouldn’t explain and which nothing would break. After a couple of days, Nicole quit trying. So long as it didn’t interfere with their work, it was a state she’d learn to live with.

  However, those tasks barely began to fill the dance card of her working day. There was the Swiftstar to see to, and the investigation of the C3 glitch Nicole had reported during the prelaunch checklist.

  They were a day past Approach Transition, blue-shifting velocity in the braking phase along a huge cometary parabola around the sun that would bring them up on Faraway from behind, when Hobby asked for a status update.

  “Nothing really to tell, sir,” she told him, seated with Hana and Pasqua in his Alert Facility off the Bridge. “We pulled the archival software from the vault and ran a comparative evaluation; perfect match, top to bottom. Hardware looks clean, too—although those are only preliminary indications. We specced a random sampling of the circuitry boards and registered nominal function on every one.” Nicole glanced at her DataPad. “This isn’t to say there may not be a fault, but based on the evidence at hand, especially the fact that the system has passed every test we’ve thrown at it, I don’t think we’re justified in looking further.”

  “How about the monitor subroutines?” asked Hobby.

  “Clean bill of health there, too, skipper.” It was Pasqua who replied. “Major Shea even pulled the console to trace the fiberoptic wiring.”

  “In line with what you’d said, sir,” was Nicole’s follow-up, “about your car’s electronics. I was hoping to find a loose connection that’d explain everything.”

  “Would’ve been nice,” the Captain agreed. “I gather that wasn’t the case?”

  Nicole shook her head. “The problem is the sophistication of the system. We’re talking about boards whose control paths are etched onto chips on a molecular and even atomic level. The manufacturing process is totally automated; likewise, any inspection. Ultimately, all we can tell yo
u is what our machines have told us.”

  “You tried a blind replacement?”

  “Twice, using randomly selected replacements from stores—including a generic, all-purpose CRASH board.”

  “Very thorough. I’m impressed. Tom, Dr. Murai, I assume you concur in Major Shea’s conclusions.”

  Pasqua, enthusiastically so. Hana offered a slight tilt of the head that Hobby chose to construe as agreement.

  Nicole wasn’t so sure, as she said, “I’m sorry it turned out to be a waste of time.”

  “Hardly that, Major. It gave me an ideal opportunity to watch you in action. All in all, I’d rather deal with false alarms anyday.” He consulted his own notes.

  “Before we adjourn—what’s this from your Hal about modifications to the Swiftstar?”

  Not my Hal, sir, she thought, uncomfortable at being frozen out of their company. Aloud, she replied, “A project we initiated back at Edwards. We want to mate a warp generator to the plane, to give it localized jump capabilities.”

  “Is that possible?” Pasqua asked.

  “Given the size/mass ratio of the plane, you don’t need that big a Baumier cell. The Hal have come up with a self-contained module that they feel will do the job. Preliminary tests have been quite encouraging.”

  “Live or Virtual?” from Hobby.

  “All computer models so far. The requisition is to fabricate a mockup of the Swift from ship’s stores, and see how the gizmo works for real. We’d like to try some In-System runs during our layover at Nieuwhome.”

  “I’m not sure I see the point,” Pasqua again.

  “I do,” said Hobby. “There are occasions when I’d love to be able to slide into a system aboard something significantly smaller than the Connie. Especially something with atmosphere operating capabilities. I’ll green light your tests, Major; keep me abreast of results.”