Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  She was so transported by the sheer, glorious rapture of the scene that she never felt the girl’s first strike. Or the second or the third. She was vaguely cognizant of her slipping close and then away, of arms and hand flashing faster than Nicole’s mind could follow. Something presented itself as increasingly not right, but the ongoing momentum of the dance, its rhythms so fundamental and overpowering, meant that she had to take a calculated mental step back to survey the setting. That, too, caused its own moment of dislocation, leading to a fatal lag between realization and response.

  The girl was no longer spectral, and her companions nowhere near benign. Her glowing body had turned a deep ebony—Nicole’s mind registering colors even though the massed star and ghost-light rendered the hilltop in shades of chiaroscuro black and white—the only silver aspect of her was her hair. Eyes of the deepest blue Nicole had ever seen, to put the ultimate sapphire to shame. A pattern of silver stripes down the spine and branching over the curve of the hips, echoed by cuffs over the wrists. All interlaced, reminding Nicole of the Celtic-type knotwork decorating her own body. At the same time, Nicole’s color had faded, flesh edging towards insubstantial, silver where the girl was dark, dark where she was silver, the sole difference being that Nicole was fire-toned where she was earth.

  She saw the hand, but it was as though Nicole had become the ghost. She moved reflexively to block the attack, yet somehow she missed. A myriad of excuses instantly presented themselves, anything to deny what her eyes actually saw—the girl’s solid hand passing through both of Nicole’s. Claws crossed her line of vision, so light a caress that Nicole didn’t believe she’d even been touched. Then, heat. Eating its way inward, top to bottom across her face. Nicole’s mouth opening to scream but no sound emerging because there was no air to activate her vocal cords, because diaphragm and lungs and cords, all the active, physical elements of being had no substance. She was less than smoke, held together by no more than force of will.

  It was enough.

  She knew that Abyss, she’d seen oblivion up-close, in friends and strangers.

  Awareness splintered, presenting her more views of more realities than she wanted to handle, like being stuck on a Virtual Prismatic Moebius loop, perceptions fractaling into the mental equivalent of an insect’s eyes, only each image was different. She relaxed, letting the ride carry her through, sensing the girl approaching for the coup de grace and trusting that she’d find the way to parry it.

  A thousand thousand messages, threading neatly by as though they were humming along the ultimate freeway, telling her each in its own way that all was well. Sense of wholeness, power unimaginable, politely restrained. A friendly presence, unaware that Nicole was watching. Desire to move, to flee, to be free, thwarted by shackles binding her to the ground. Simply dealt with, by diverting a car off the freeway, passing it on to a neighboring loop—all this happening in blips of time so small the measurement had no meaning—and the manacles popped open.

  The girl was closer, but Nicole still wasn’t ready to respond. She needed power. And found it within her greater self.

  Nicole bared teeth, mixing human humor at last with Hal, and when the claws arrived to bleed her dry, she was no longer there.

  The girl hurled herself at Nicole, without pause, without restraint, in a killing frenzy that nothing living should have stood against. Only Nicole wasn’t quite alive at that point—or perhaps was so much more so. Each attack failed. And with each failure, a little more of the balance was redressed.

  Until Nicole and the girl faced each other alone atop the knoll, each returned to the state they were in when they began, one woman, one specter.

  The girl laughed a very human laugh and said in English, “Not too terribly shabby, Shea!”

  Nicole bowed—but not too much for only a fool takes that great a risk after a blood duel—eyes downcast but hands ready to parry any betrayal. There was nothing tinny or misformed about her voice, her Hal was as perfect as the girl’s English.

  “You have done my soul more honor than I know my soul can bear.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Are you a ghost?”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “Is this a dream?”

  “Isn’t everything?”

  Nicole looked around, and grabbed her head as that simple gesture set the entire Universe tumbling off its axis. The world was gone, the ghosts were gone, about her were nothing but the stars and somehow she could see them all, whether they were before her eyes or not. She wasn’t afraid because she knew Hana was with her, watching her back as she’d asked.

  She thought she heard Hana’s voice, which wasn’t possible, and then she heard Raqella’s, which shouldn’t have been...

  ...and opened her eyes—real eyes at long last, for which she breathed a hearty sigh of relief—and had to close them again, right away, until her pupils contracted sufficiently to accept the glare of morning.

  Raqella was crouched before her, but she’d been levered up at an angle, with someone else supporting her shoulders and head. She felt the curve of breasts on the top of her scalp and spoke the first name that came to voice.

  “Hana?”

  “You wish,” in fluent Trade, but with a bad accent Nicole recognized immediately.

  “Amy,” she said, and hazarded another try with her eyes. Better. Not great, but well within her ability to cope—especially since she was damned if she’d show any weakness to the girl.

  “Raqella,” she said, taking a decent look at him, “what are you staring at?”

  Her first panicked thought was that she’d become a ghost—and for those seconds her head filled with the stories told by her relatives in the Western Isles of fairy mounds and the prices paid by feckless, foolish mortals with the temerity to challenge a dance with the eternal Sidhe—but then he held up a mirror and she saw it was actually something worse.

  Vivid slash lines slanted leftward in a straight diagonal from the crown of her forehead, over eyes and cheeks, to her jaw. In heraldic terms, she thought absurdly, a Bar Sinister—but to complement my fireheart pendant, or oppose it? Only they didn’t stop there. She pulled her singlet out from her body, staring down to see they continued across her collarbone and then the bicep of her left arm, the lowest band just touching the inside of her elbow.

  “You’re not surprised to see us,” Amy said, a bit petulantly.

  “Not quite. I’m surprised to see you.” Nicole wasn’t much interested in chitchat; she had too many questions about these markings. But the answers could come only from Raqella and she could see that he wasn’t yet ready to be pressed. She also wanted some time to restore her own equilibrium. A quick inventory of the rest of her showed that the stripes were the only alteration.

  “I saw a reflection from the top of the atmosphere at sunset. Perfect location and track for a HALA insertion.” HALA was High Altitude, Low Approach, considered a combat reentry. Make the initial transition from orbit at the end of the day, where the friction plume was partly masked by the natural colors of the sunset. Pace the sunset as you drop to the deck, attacking the Terminator, beginning far out to sea on a progressive angle that forced anyone trying to spot you from ahead to essentially stare right into the sun. By the time you reach land, you’re low enough and slow enough that you don’t cast a significant heat or light signature against the dusk sky. It wasn’t considered a practicable maneuver for anything as large as a shuttle or hypersonic spaceplane, but preliminary studies had been done with much smaller lifting bodies.

  “It was Raqella’s idea,” Amy said, with an evident pride that caught Nicole’s attention.

  Nicole was impressed and said so. The Hal appreciated the maneuver, and their equipment was much better suited to it; the one drawback was the necessity for a long overwater flight.

  “It had the virtue of being something no Hal in their right mind would consider,” he said, but with an air of distraction that made plain his attention was on other things.


  “We figured you could use some backup,” Amy told her. “Evidently, we weren’t the only ones,” she finished, fingering the strap of Nicole’s carryall.

  “Isn’t this breaking the rules?” Nicole asked Raqella.

  “If so, we are not alone.”

  “You mean, the Harach’t’nyn doesn’t begin with a kidnapping?” Nicole feigned astonishment. Raqella looked sourly offended, Amy amused.

  “You have Amy to thank for us finding out as quickly as we did,” said Raqella.

  “How so?”

  Amy picked up the story, after popping a quick smile to the young Hal for his compliment. “Jenny Coy was left at Ciari’s lodge, no com gear, no way to travel, presumably incommunicado. You’d made plain you wanted to be alone, the assumption must have been that you wouldn’t be missed until the formal farewell bash for the Constitution. Even then, your absence would be covered by telling a simple truth, that you were on your ritual walkabout. That puts Shavrin in a neat box. She sounds any alarm, she compromises the test; ’cause we all know neither Hobby nor Sheridan’s gonna stand by when they think you’re being seriously skunked.”

  “They’ll assume foul play.”

  “What assumptions, hotshot,” Amy chided, “there’s been foul play from the start.”

  “Did you eat or drink anything upon waking?” Raqella asked, as serious as Amy was being playfully conversational.

  “Of course.”

  His response was a profanity so foul, it made both women stare in astonishment.

  “Drugged?” Nicole asked him.

  “To make you susceptible to certain bands of pheromones.”

  “So that if a local male came calling, I’d be inclined to answer?”

  “It happens—only to Speakers and then very rarely. It’s considered one of their private mysteries, something to do with their genetic linkage to all their previous generations... ”

  Nicole held up a hand to forestall any further explanation. She could fill in the rest for herself. She felt her face grow warm with the memory of the emotions she’d felt only a couple of days before. She decided not to think of what might have happened had she proven more susceptible.

  “So what happened,” she demanded. “What brought you both here?”

  “Ciari’d map-marked Ranger and Rescue stations,” Amy replied. “Jen was ready to hoof her way out to one... ”

  “Any credible opposition would have thought of that, even allowing for the fact it’s p’m’taie range.”

  Raqella gestured agreement. “The com systems on the network are all intact, but our suspicions are that the emergency frequencies were monitored. More to the point, the nearest station to Ciari-Marshal’s habitat is inactive for scheduled maintenance, and the next was recently destroyed by natural causes.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Amy, leavening her Trade Tongue with a colloquial English structure that Nicole had to struggle to follow, “but you gotta figure, their main assumption was that the critters would take care of her.”

  “The p’m’taie are intensely territorial at the best of times,” Raqella echoed. “You yourself have seen what they are like with newborn young. The odds of Jenny-Physician’s survival on such a trek would have been slim to nonexistent.”

  “But you got there first.”

  Amy shrugged and for the first time looked intensely uncomfortable. The moment she spoke, Nicole knew why, as both women were reminded of the history between them that neither wanted to confront.

  “Your tag bounced off my scans,” she said simply.

  Nicole’s voice went so flat, so suddenly, that Raqella took a protective step forward, poising himself to leap between the two.

  “You’ve been monitoring me?” You arrogant little shit, was the snarled thought that finished the sentence.

  “You’re a valuable asset,” the girl flashed back with equal vigor, as ready to stand her ground as Nicole was to reduce it to scorched earth. “With the investment I’ve got in you, and all that’s riding on it, damn straight I kept tabs on you.”

  “You don’t have the right—”

  “Spare me your talk of rights, Nicole, okay? One way or the other we’re all of us wrapped up by forces bigger than ourselves, defining the roles we have to play. We all do shitty things, we’ve all had shit things done to us, so what? Grow up and get a life! Tell me what matters more, okay, that I had a string on you or that I used it to watch your back?”

  That’s today, bright eyes, Nicole thought, but tomorrow you could switch that helping hand for a knife.

  “That how you found me here?”

  “We followed an SAR Homer, to Ciari’s suit, then to you.”

  “How’d you get across from s’N’dare?”

  “We caught a lift, okay?” Nicole didn’t ask more; she could see in Amy’s eyes that these were all the answers on this subject she was going to get.

  “Did you fly seeker orbits before your insertion?” she asked Raqella.

  “Too dangerous. There are defensive scanners in orbit and on the ground; we came straight in. I knew where to look,” he confessed.

  “Because you’ve been here before.”

  His eyes hooded as he looked towards the coast, then to his left along it.

  “Shavrin wanted my hide, she was so angry. Kymri argued for assignment to Earth instead.”

  “Why the anger?”

  “This is meant only for Speakers nowadays, Nicole. We are presented our past, our heritage, at face value. What we are, we are told and we believe, we have always been.”

  “You think something different?”

  “That is what I came to learn. Also”—and he made a shy twist of the fingers to complement the wryness of his tone—“in my arrogance, I felt that what Kymri did, I would do better.”

  “And did you? Learn,” she prompted, at his hesitation.

  “A truth, yes.”

  “Which was,” she let her growing exasperation show.

  “My truth, Shea Shavrin’s-Daughter. Yours, you must face for yourself.”

  “Is that what this is all about?” She didn’t have to indicate her new markings to tell them that was what she meant, and she didn’t try to hide the mix of fear and rage in her voice.

  Raqella looked genuinely perplexed as he reached a tentative couple of fingers over to trace the line of these new markings. She wanted to flinch as they crossed her eyes—and she had a sudden sense memory, so achingly vivid she lost her breath as though she’d been punched, of Shavrin’s fingers tracing the same path during their first meeting, aboard Range Guide.

  “It is something I have never seen,” he said, cognizant of her anxiety and shifting hands to her shoulders to steady her, the concern on his face echoed (to Nicole’s surprise) on Amy’s, “or heard of.” Next, he tried what passed from him for a joke. “But then, my ignorance in both regards covers a whole world of territory.”

  “Ghosts came to me in the night, Raqella. I danced with them—no,” she paused, reconsidering her memories, “only with one. A woman. Sable fur with a silver crest and blue eyes.”

  Raqella had no help for her. “I am not the one to tell this to,” he said. “Better to try Shavrin herself, or perhaps M’gtur. Or another Speaker.”

  “M’gtur?” Amy was openly contemptuous of that suggestion. “What makes you think the head of the opposition’s going to give a straight answer?”

  “We don’t know he’s part of this.”

  “Oh, really, Nicole? You got a better candidate? He’s against you, against the Alliance, and he has the clout in-house to pull all the necessary elements together.”

  “Suspicions aren’t proof.”

  “And platitudes, missy, won’t save your ass.” She knew Nicole wanted to slap her and took a stance that dared the older, taller woman to try.

  Nicole ignored the temptation and followed Raqella’s gaze. “You think there’s anyone waiting up ahead, on the assumption the drug didn’t do its job?”

  “’S what I’d do,
in their place,” Amy offered.

  “Me, too,” Nicole agreed. “What about Shavrin and Kymri, are they likely to send anyone after me?”

  “However badly this was begun,” Raqella replied, “the Harach’t’nyn must be seen through to the end. I know Shavrin is deathly afraid—she blames herself for much of this, so much so that she still holds herself obligated to the blood price she offered you.”

  “I released her from that debt.”

  “You may have said so, but she chose not to heed you. She says you have always been closer to the Void than you know. She believes this is the only way your inner balance can be restored.”

  “This applies to Ciari as well.”

  “Not so much, I think.”

  “I can handle what happens to me”—ignoring Amy’s scoffing comment from the background—“but the important thing is finding Ciari.”

  “You got any peeps from your Homer,” Amy asked, and when Nicole responded in the negative, “we got zip on ours.”

  “Then we presume—since we’re both cast from the same mold”—she was watching Amy out of the corner of an eye, but the only response her words provoked was a level gaze back at her—“that we’d both head in substantially the same direction.”

  Raqella pointed them parallel to the coast, as Nicole had sensed he would. She had other ideas.

  The little transceivers were line-of-sight units, designed to broadcast to airborne searchers—as the parent unit was meant to reach to orbit—and the country was too hilly for it to be effective over any decent range. The others grumbled—Raqella protested outright—but she pressed on towards the coast.