Spear of Light

by Brenda Cooper

  “Easy for you to look that way,” Satyana whispered to Ruby’s image. “You’re dead. All you had to do was teach us not to be cruel. I’ve got to teach the whole damned Glittering not to be afraid.”

  Ruby on the wall failed to answer. Nevertheless, Satyana stared at the picture as if it could talk. Ruby had been her greatest creation. Oh, Ruby had been flesh and blood, and downright naive when Satyana first met her. Almost irritating in her single-mindedness about fairness and equality, in her desire to change everything she didn’t like about the Diamond Deep. Ruby had more fire and more passion than any ten women Satyana could name. The picture had stayed in her office all of this time, had even been cleaned and restored twice. Even though she had created the buzz that made Ruby famous all of those years ago, Ruby had given her purpose. Satyana often used her memories of Ruby’s reactions to moral dilemmas to help guide her own choices.

  Ruby would be most unhappy with the current state of affairs. In addition to freeing the poorest of the poor, Ruby had been the first to befriend a Next.

  There were no windows in Satyana’s inner office, but she could feel the ship around her. When it was new, she had piloted the Star Bear through adventures. For the last hundred years, it had been a small, still part of the behemoth that was the Diamond Deep. It had been her home, a stage for her performers, and the first stage Ruby the Red sang on. From here, Satyana had built an entertainment empire. She knew every piece of metal, every bolt, every strut, every communications system.

  All of it was at risk right now.

  For years her physical world had remained basically the same. Her own power had waxed slowly, and certainly the wild young ship’s captain who had docked the Star Bear at the Deep all of those years ago wouldn’t recognize—or even like—the woman she had become. It had been a slow change, a good one, full of risk and hard work.

  One of her current risk factors burst through her office door, ducking and turning slightly sideways to manage it. Gunnar Ellensson bulked four times her size, dark skinned and dark eyed and full of so much power that most people acted cowed around him.

  Satyana didn’t suffer from the same nerves he brought out in most people. She rose and glided to him, using every piece of training she’d ever had in both control and seduction. He took her in his arms, folding himself around her from the sides and the top until she nearly suffocated in the scent of his musky soap and the rich pile of yellow and gold that counted as his shirt of the day.

  In spite of the warm hug, she wasn’t comforted. Their relationship was built more on balance and lust and need than on comfort. She pushed back away from him. “I understand you’re bargaining with the Next.”

  He smiled. “Of course I am. Weren’t you the one who first taught me to think of them as something other than pirates?” He went to her sideboard and poured them each a glass of red wine from a deep blue decanter decorated with opals from his mines on Mammot. He had given her both—the decanter for their tenth anniversary as lovers and the wine from his private stocks just last week.

  He handed her a glass. “I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m meeting two Jhailing Jims at Pearl Gate in two weeks. It’s just at the right place in its orbit to be directly on the way to Mammot.”

  Mammot. His personal planet. More accurately, his bank. While no one could own the planet itself, Gunnar owned most of the mineral rights. She found it hard to trust him on matters of money. “I heard they’ve agreed to give you some of the secrets to that flowing metal that they use for robot bodies.”

  He raised the wine glass. “To a series of good trades.”

  “Anything we get from the Next needs to be for everyone,” she declared, keeping her glass in her hand and close to her stomach.

  He raised an eyebrow. “I’ll share. For a fee. Besides, that’s not what I want at all. Well, I do want that. Who wouldn’t? Although we have materials almost half as good. I think they stole the idea from us.”

  She laughed at his expression. He could almost always make her laugh, the bastard. “Could be.”

  “What I really want is their navigation AIs. That and the algorithm for the Wall on Lym. You’ve heard about that?”

  She didn’t have time to let a wall distract her. “You know we need the other stations. We’ve got to hold the peace.”

  He cocked his head to the side, his expression suggesting he was playing dumb. A deep anger crawled up inside her. “We need something to give the others. Not something to sell to them. You already have more credit than anyone else in the Glittering.”

  She could see that stung him; he blinked and turned away. True to form, his discomfort only lasted a moment. The man was born to wrest a great business deal out of every breath he took. She followed up on her barb. “Can you think about something more than yourself?”

  He scowled at her. “I’m thinking about every ship and station we have. I’m thinking about all of them being safer and all of them getting where they need to go more precisely. I’m thinking of a self-healing, selfdirected navigation system that takes any change in the whole system into account, so a flap of a butterfly’s wings on Mammot doesn’t blow the Diamond Deep an inch out of its original orbit. I’m thinking about getting unmanned ships wherever they need to go.”

  She sipped her wine. Bitter and good. “You’re thinking of making a ton of credit.”

  “Since when do you comp people who can’t afford tickets into the concerts you run?”

  She stood on tiptoe so she could look more closely at him. “I have been. I’ve been streaming them all for everyone. You still have to pay to be here. But I’ve lost millions of credits since the attack. People need hope and diversions and to work together. You and I and the rest of this damned station have to stop caring who’s the most powerful human until we’ve dealt with the Next.”

  He turned his back to her and poured himself a second glass of red wine. “Dealt with?”

  “Assimilated. Gotten used to. Stopped being scared of or fascinated by. Until they finish whatever they’re doing down on Lym and we know what it is so we have something to understand that’s not a rumor. People are scared. Frightened into making bad choices. We have never—never— been threatened by beings so far beyond us.”

  Gunnar teased her hand and her glass away from her stomach playfully, his energy a counter to hers. He whispered, “It will be okay. It really will. They are not aliens; they are us. They are what we will all eventually become.”

  “You’re eating their propaganda.”

  “I’m drinking my wine.” He started some music playing and picked her up, dancing with her in the wide open space in the middle of the room, while the picture of Ruby looked down on them both. “It will be okay,” he whispered again. “The stations will come to us; they have to.”

  “And you’re doing what to help?”

  “I have to have a deal before I can decide whether or not to give anything away, you know.” He twisted right and spun, amazingly light on his feet given his size.

  She kissed his cheek. “You should put me down.”

  “I will.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.” He nibbled at her ear and turned the other way and she felt soft and vulnerable and warm in spite of her frustration with him.

  They filled the space, they and their music, and she closed her eyes and felt the rocking motion of his carry, the slide and dip of his feet. She remembered that year they started dating when she used to run on the inside track and chant in her head. Gunnar Ellensson loves me. Gunnar Ellensson loves me. Gunnar Ellensson loves me.

  Even now it was possible to re-create that secret awareness, that amazement.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHARLIE

  Charlie shivered. Cold wind sheared around the skimmer as he drove and pinked Nona’s and Jean Paul’s cheeks. Nona had found an old coat of his and pulled it on, but her legs were still bare and must be cold.

  He banked left to follow the contours of the northern Resort Mountains. They flew ha
lfway between sea level and the tree line, and twenty minutes out from Ice Fall Valley. Jean Paul’s last two calls to Manny had gone unanswered, and Amfi hadn’t picked up calls to her vid since she first contacted them back at the spaceport.

  He and Jean Paul were rangers, not military. There had been no need for anything more exotic than catching smugglers for hundreds of years. The rangers did that fine, accepting the least possible help from the Port Authority. The tools he was accustomed to were designed to catch someone trying to hide or to deal with close combat once you found them. The Port Authority had better training and software, but he had never been allowed to use it. They even had battle-robots, although he wouldn’t want one of those now. Some fool would think they were Next.

  “Flying into Ice Fall Valley blind is just plain stupid,” he mused out loud.

  Cricket gave a low growl, probably a response to his tone of voice. He glanced at her, worried, to find she was leaning into Nona as if her life depended on it.

  Jean Paul sat back in his seat with a heavy sigh. “I’m trying Wilding Station again.”

  “Good idea.” It had grown late enough that the forests were shadowed by the mountaintops, although the sky above was still a deep blue.

  “Gerry here.”

  The perky dispatcher from Wilding Station always sounded unnaturally upbeat, often annoyingly so. But at the moment she was the best thing Charlie had heard in hours. “Great to hear from you! Everything okay?”

  “Lonely. Sorry no one was answering. It’s all good now.”

  Her tone of voice didn’t imply anything at all was good.

  Jean Paul talked her through their status and gave her the story of the call from Amfi. She asked a few clarifying questions as he went and then calmly repeated the gist of the story back to them. “You’re flying into an unmarked and barely mapped valley to save a gleaner who might already be dead, and who told you another gleaner has been killed. You don’t know who is attacking the gleaners. You’d like more rangers to come help you.”

  Jean Paul smiled. “That sums it up.”

  Even though she’d first answered in her usual perky voice, Gerry now sounded ragged. “They’re all on their way to Manna Springs. There’s some kind of fight there. Maybe you should go join them. Or come back here and wait.”

  Charlie’s jaw tightened. “Amfi is my friend.”

  “They’re already almost to Gyr Island.”

  “I’m sorry things have gotten so messed up.”

  Now she laughed. “It’s all your fault.” It was good natured; she knew better. They’d had a conversation about his experience.

  “Wish us luck,” he said.

  “If you go into that valley, you could be fighting Next.”

  “No. It’s got to be humans,” he replied. “There’s no reason for the Next to be here. They got what they wanted.”

  “But why would humans be there?”

  “I have no idea. If I can’t have rangers, I’ll take information. Do you have any good tracking data from out here? Do you see any skimmers or other machines?”

  “I’ll look. Just a minute.”

  He kept his attention on the terrain in spite of the fact that the autopilot could probably handle it. “Nona? Are you okay?”

  Her hand touched his shoulder from the backseat. “Yes,” she said. “How much longer?”

  “Ten minutes. Unless we circle. I need to find out what’s down there.”

  The display in front of him showed hot spots here and there for animals, but most were stationary. They would start moving as dusk approached, since the dinner hour for most predators was just before true dark.

  Soon.

  He brushed his fingers across Nona’s, marveling for just a moment that she was here and they were touching and they felt close. “I’m sorry this is going crazy.”

  “I was captured either once, twice, or three times a few weeks ago in the Deep. I’m getting used to it.”

  Jean Paul asked, “How can you not know how many times you were captured?”

  “The Shining Revolution was a capture for sure. They locked us up and kept guards on us. Then the military took us from the Shining Revolution, and according to them it was protection. But they kept guards on us, too. Then Gunnar liberated us from the military.”

  Jean Paul said, “Sounds like a capture and two liberations.”

  Charlie laughed. “You don’t understand how complex the station’s politics are.” He reached over and touched Nona’s cheek again, just because he could. “You’ll have to tell me the whole story later.”

  “Over coffee in front of a fire.”

  His voice sounded slightly husky. “Soon.”

  Gerry came back on the line, calm, reciting facts. “Two skimmers flew into the valley a few hours ago, and one about half an hour ago. I don’t have any sensors that will tell me where they are now.”

  “Thanks. We can get the satellite feed, but I don’t have enough eyes or displays to watch everything. If you see something will you tell me?”

  “I don’t have enough eyes either.”

  “You have more automation than I do.”

  Her voice trembled, the fear just barely audible as a backdrop to her calm dispatcher’s tone. “I’ll use what I have.”

  Charlie asked, “Do you have any news about Manna Springs?”

  The silence went on for so long he almost checked the connection. “Manny’s house is surrounded, but we haven’t heard that he’s been hurt or captured. The Port Authority building is under attack. People are spreading out across the spaceport itself. They’re singing and chanting but not doing any harm except that nothing can land.”

  “We were there just a few hours ago and the spaceport was normal.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come back here?”

  He did want to. She was his friend, and her request was a cry for help. But Amfi had been shot at. “I will. First I need to know what happened out here.”

  “Remember those skimmers.”

  “Can you tell me if any of them leave the area?”

  “I’ll set a watch on it. But there’s only me here and on duty right now.” She didn’t need to remind him that she was helping the other three sets of rangers, who were apparently all trying to restore order in Manna Springs.

  “We’ll come back as soon as we can,” he said.

  “Thank you.” He heard the relief in her voice.

  He turned to face the other two. “I’ve been thinking about how to do this. I have infrared sensors that tell me what animals are where, and they also show humans.” He grimaced. “Living ones, anyway. We use them to hunt smugglers.”

  “We’re going to fly through the valley once, fast. Right down the middle. I’m going to pay attention to flying and to what’s in front of us. Nona will watch the display over the back seat and call out anytime it identifies a human. Jean Paul will look for humans. He’ll know who’s friendly and who’s not.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t want to imagine that’s true.” But of course it was.

  They were nearing the end of the valley. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.” Nona sounded as calm as an experienced ranger might have. “At first, I’ll call out everything the display tells me. Will that work?”

  “It’ll be great. Is the line back to Gerry open in case she sees a skimmer move?”

  “Yes.” Jean Paul pulled his glasses out of his pocket and fiddled with them a little, probably testing the infrared. The glasses were thin and elegant, barely visible. He knew how to make good use of them. “I’m ready.”

  “All right then.”

  Charlie took a deep breath and willed himself to be as calm as possible. “What do you see in the scope, Nona?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s right.”

  He flew lower. “Now?”

  “One animal. It’s labeled as a tok grazer.”

  “Excellent.” She’d do okay. He nudged the skimmer faster with h
is foot and kept them just above the tree line on a thick, flattened ridge. He watched the terrain monitor on his own glasses and rolled left at just the right moment to catch the wide open end of the valley. A huge waterfall plummeted from a long, thin bowl-like structure and fell down the face of the mountain, disappearing in the tops of low clouds below. “That’s High Mist Falls,” he said. “Some winters it freezes over and creates a long flower of ice that a stream falls through on its way down to the low valley floor.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “It is.” They flew over the river that fed the falls and through a slice of sunshine and then into shadow. Forested walls closed around them. “This is Ice Fall Valley. It was a resort location, used thousands of years ago for ice climbing in the winter, and for fishing and hunting and hiking in the summer. There are a number of old fallen-down remains of what must have been beautiful buildings a long time ago. Almost no one lives here now except gleaners.”

  “How do they get here?” Nona asked.

  Jean Paul answered her. “They fly in, like we’re doing. Or they walk up the mountain on any of a number of paths and hike down into it. Gleaners use technology. Just not anti-aging treatments.”

  Charlie guided the skimmer up one wall and back down, and then up the other, trying not to keep it too straight. “Or anything else designed to prolong life. But transportation and communication technology? Lots of it.”

  “There’s a big herd of something.” Nona squinted at the display. “Langers?”

  “Yes. They’re grazers. Look closely. You might see tongats.”

  Jean Paul was looking where the display suggested. “I see the herd. It’s big.”

  Nona’s voice rose with excitement. “There’s two tongats.”

  Maybe he should train her to be a ranger. “Watch for humans.”

  “I am.”

  “Surely they’ll be further up the valley,” Jean Paul said.

  Silence fell for a moment. Charlie allowed himself to appreciate the beautiful valley walls, the hundreds of waterfalls that fell down the side closest to the mountain and fed the great river they barely saw winking here and there amid the myriad trees below them. Some of the falls sent windswept spray in a great arc from the top of the cliff.