The energy of the town reminded her of a gambling bubble, everyone desperate to hit a jackpot but not sure what to do with sudden riches if they got them. It was early evening at best, but the tables around her were packed with people drinking more toxic stuff than the pleasantry she was sipping her way through.
Someone touched her shoulder. She turned to see Manny, back after less than the hour he’d told her he was going to take. “Charlie’s here,” he whispered.
She finished off the drink, feeling lighter than the bit of alcohol it contained could possibly have accounted for, and hurried after him.
She spotted a small crowd in a corner of the spacious lobby of the Eternal Hope, the hotel next to the Hope’s Despair. Nona scanned the faces; everyone from Ice Fall Valley seemed to be there except Jean Paul, who Manny had suggested might be trapped at the spaceport. Even, she noted with a smile, Cricket.
The tongat sat stoically next to Charlie until Nona was a meter away and then stood and bumped into her gently, demanding a touch. Only after she got it did she let Nona in close to Charlie, who looked like a rumpled and worn version of the man Nona had met the day before. He wore the same clothes, and he smelled like he needed sleep. She grabbed his hands, wishing she could fling her arms around him. “I’m so glad to see you. I was worried.”
He touched her cheek near the jewel, the tip of his finger rough. “I worried about you, too.”
Manny asked, “Hungry?”
For a moment, she thought he had made a mistake, but then here in Hope it wouldn’t be awkward to show up at a restaurant with the soulbots. It must happen all the time. Sure enough, they found a nearby cafe where the waitress had a harder time with the tongat than with Yi and Jason. She gamely found an outside table that Cricket could lounge under, and wagged her finger at Charlie. “Don’t let her bite me.”
He smiled a tired promise. “I won’t.”
“Or anyone else.” She took their order quickly and from a bit of a distance.
Nona sat next to Charlie and watched his face grow angry and still as he heard how Manny had been pulled from his house after it was set on fire. A full-blown Jhailing Jim Next had come for him. They’d been shot at as they escaped.
Nona shuddered. It was easy to understand why this would make the people who had started the protests and eventual revolution unlikely to trust Manny again.
Manny pointed out the same conclusion. Charlie asked, “But wouldn’t you be dead if the Jhailing hadn’t saved you?”
“Of course. But that doesn’t change the fact that the damned thing might as well have branded me.”
The anger on Charlie’s face faded to pain as he told them about Kyle, and about shooting his friend in the foot. Manny looked fascinated and horrified.
As much to distract as inform them, Nona told her own story about Amica and the children, and about the Next who carried her to the gates of Hope but hadn’t been let in.
Yi, who had stayed quiet up until then, spoke slowly, almost carefully. “I think they could come in, but they don’t. They only send people like us.”
People like us. She smiled. “I suspect you’re right.” Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Losianna holding Jason’s hand and felt a brief but deep sense of vertigo. “We should go clean up.”
Manny stood up. “I arranged three more rooms right after I got here. Nona is in one. How do you want to split the other two? Soulbot and human?”
Amfi immediately said, “Yes,” which earned a quick glare from Losianna. That settled, they crossed the busy street back to the hotel.
As soon as Nona got Charlie into her room, she took his face in her hands, running her fingers along his cheekbones. “I’m so sorry about Kyle.”
“He’ll be okay.”
Regardless of his words, she sensed the doubt clinging to him. She whispered, “This is the first moment we’ve been alone since I landed.”
“I know.” He hesitated, his eyes on her face. “The day didn’t go like I planned.”
She laughed, and he laughed, and the mood between them lightened.
She sat beside him, grateful for the chance to relax as they filled in more details from their time away. He raised an eyebrow when she explained what it meant for her to be chosen as the Voice, to be a spokesperson for thousands of people on the Diamond Deep in a dark hour.
“You really helped make the decision about the Next? For the whole station?”
She laughed, glad to be distant from the experience. “It scared me.”
“But you don’t regret it?”
“Of course not.”
He told her how Amfi had drawn him into negotiations.
He must have hated that. She reached over and twisted her pinky through his. “How did Manny react?”
“He was pissed off.”
“But did you have a choice?”
“I didn’t think so.” He smiled wistfully. “But I’ll never know, will I?”
“No.” She squeezed his hand. “I bet you want a shower.”
“I do.”
She remembered a few painfully awkward moments on the ships they’d shared passage on and decided to avoid them entirely by following him into the shower and scrubbing his back. Instead of dressing, he lay naked on the bed. She turned him on his stomach and rubbed lotion into his back. His muscles were like small hills, tight and difficult to work the knots out of. She ran her fingers along two deep scars. “How did you get these?”
“Wrecked a skimmer chasing a poacher.”
“How long ago?”
“Twenty years. I used to think poachers were the worst thing imaginable.”
He didn’t have to say that a worse thing had come. She used her thumbs to press hard on the long muscles beside his spine.
He rolled over, his hands big and warm. Lying beside her, he traced the outlines of her limbs with his palm and fingers, trailing heat on her skin and bringing her heartbeat up loud enough that it thrummed in her ears.
It felt like it had on the ship the one and only time they’d allowed themselves this before, as if she had been starved for him for all of her life and he would never be able to touch her enough to fill her.
“Slow down,” she whispered.
He did, but only the tiniest bit.
She practiced control until she lost it entirely right along with him, their breath mixing, their bodies joining.
They lay side by side, her head pillowed on his arm and one of his legs crossed over hers. She lay there for a long time before forcing herself to find words for the news she had to give him. “I can’t stay in Hope.”
He pulled his arm away and sat up, looking down at her. “What do you mean?”
“I have to go to Manna Springs. Move there. For a while.”
To his credit, he didn’t try to tell her how dangerous it must be. He just asked, “Why?”
“I came partly to be a bridge between Manna Springs and the Deep. Satyana is trying to do the impossible and unify the Glittering. I need to be sure the spaceport stays open and that we don’t have a war down here.”
He frowned. “How are you going to do that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But I can’t do it from here.” She trailed her fingers up his arm, wishing they could talk of other things. That they lived in other times. “Besides, you and Manny need someone inside the town on your side, if just to gather information.”
“People won’t trust you if you’re with me. They might kill you anyway.”
“With everything going on, most people won’t be paying attention to me. I should be able to get in. I’ll buy someplace to live in. I’ll try to buy a guard, too. Set myself up as the formal ambassador from the Diamond Deep to Lym.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you?”
“Satyana said she’ll make it so. I’ll go in the morning.”
He looked contemplative for a long moment, and then he nodded a reluctant acceptance. “I may not be able to come to town without being conscrip
ted like Jean Paul.”
“I understand. But surely I’ll find ways to get here.”
He touched her belly, ran a finger up toward her chin. “I hope so.”
“I came to be with you. That’s all I wanted.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SATYANA
Satyana would have run down the plush hallway if it weren’t for the fact that this particular dress fluttered around her ankles and might trip her if she moved quickly. She swore to remember to dress in useful clothes until this crisis was over. What if she were kidnapped by some idiots like the Shining Revolution crowd again and she happened to be wearing a piece of fluff designed more for entertaining foreign dignitaries than for actually walking? She’d hardly slept in the two weeks since the mutiny on Lym, and it showed in her mood.
The guard outside of Dr. Neil Nevening’s office let her in with a nod. The security systems recognized Satyana as a frequent visitor.
Dr. Nevening himself was dressed in a comfortable-looking, off-white kaftan, with beige ribbons along the hem that almost matched his hair. As usual, he looked professorial, but she noticed small fatigue lines near his eyes when he smiled at her. “Sit down, dear,” he said in a soft, easygoing voice. “I made you tea.” He poured from a teapot the color of a sun.
She loved that teapot. He greeted all of his guests with it. It was thousands of years old, as thin and light and breakable as an eggshell, even though it held the weight of hot water with no problem. She knew he considered it a badge of his office as the Diamond Deep’s Historian. She reached for the tea and sniffed. “Mint.”
“Yes.”
It was, of course, exactly what she needed. “It didn’t go very well,” she said. “Horace won’t commit. I think she’s afraid of being overthrown from within. She said that half of her people want to hare off and join Vadim and his bloodthirsty wife. The other half is torn between tucking tail and hiding or heading for Lym and begging to live forever. I suggested she just tell these last to go ahead, but of course there aren’t enough entrance visas to Lym for even a small station to send its dissidents down.”
Dr. Nevening pulled up a screen between them, showing Lym and a hundred or so dots around it, most of them converging. “They’re almost out of airspace. Some want to land, some want to fight the Next. It’s all against the laws about Lym, laws the whole damned system agreed to honor.”
“How do they plan to fight them there?”
“I don’t know.” Neil sat back and sipped his tea. “Lym might not be the best place to fight them anyway.”
“It’s where most of them are.”
“And it’s where they expect to be hurt,” he said. “So they’re very well defended.”
“That damned Wall.”
“Every conqueror of a people who don’t want to be subjugated builds a wall. It’s entirely predictable behavior. Could you tell what Horace herself wanted?”
Satyana grimaced delicately. “She’s way too good a politician for that.”
“Perhaps you should rest. You could sleep in here if that would be better than going back home.”
The Star Bear was two hours of travel time away from the Historian’s office. “I’ll take you up on that. Just a minute.” She took a long enough break to order up something soft to sleep in and something comfortable, including flat shoes, for the next day. When she was finished she looked up at him. “That’ll save me two hours. I’m meeting with Justinia from Two Arrows in the morning.”
His eyebrows shot up. “In person?”
“No. The station’s too far away. But they’ve got an embassy here, and I’m meeting with her minion for stim. I think she’ll join the coalition. I met her once, and she seemed quite reasonable. Two Arrows is a ship-manufacturing station. If they join Vadim, they’ll probably be expected to give their ships away.”
“Good. Any more tomorrow?”
“I’m handling one more station and two ships, one of which is actually here.”
“I have one remote meeting. So does the Economist.” The Council handled the biggest and most important contacts. Satyana and three others were managing the next rung down, and another team had a list of thousands of small players.
Satyana turned her empty cup over and over in her hands, running her fingertips across the smooth, unbroken surface. “I knew the Glittering was big, but I didn’t know how big until we started this process.”
He laughed and took the cup from her, refilling it. “We’d do more tomorrow, but we have a joint meeting about military objectives for internal peacekeeping all afternoon, so that’s all I can manage. My assistants have a tally now. Out of the top four hundred ships and stations, we’ve talked to twenty-four. Five joined the coalition. Ten promised they would, but they haven’t yet. And seven have told us to leave them alone.”
She smiled. “Thanks. That many actually standing up to us is bad, isn’t it?”
“The smarter course would be to string us along like the others. They clearly have internal pressures that are greater than their fear of offending us.”
She sat back, feeling every lost hour of sleep anew. “We should have used all of the years the Next were gone to build this coalition.”
He sipped his tea without looking at her. She wondered how much sleep he’d been getting. “No one would have listened to you,” he said.
“We don’t have time now.”
“No one ever has time for war.”
That shook her up. “Do you think it will come to that?”
“It depends on how much time we can buy.”
“A meeting about internal peacekeeping sounds innocuous, but it’s not, is it?”
He shrugged. “Our internal campaign is pretty good. But there are still factions. I’ll learn more this afternoon.”
So he wasn’t willing to really tell her anything. That meant it was worse. She’d have to set some traps out in the socweb and see what she could find.
One of the Historian’s assistants came in with her clothes, and she excused herself to get dressed. When she came back, she found Neil at the sink, hand washing the sun-colored tea set. The couch she’d been sitting in had been transformed to a bed, complete with pillows and a comfortable, and very boring, set of sheets and blankets.
Satyana sat down on the bed and waited while he meticulously dried the tea pot and put it away neatly. He looked toward her, at the couch. “I suggest you lie down.”
She complied, and, to her utter delight, he covered her up and planted a soft, dry kiss on her forehead.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
NAYLI
Nayli sat in the control room with the ship’s AI and a few crewmen in minor positions moving around her. She laughed to no one in particular. She was back on her favorite ship, the Shining Danger, she was in charge for the moment, and she was hunting. It made her feel lighter than she had in years, full of a simple purpose.
Kill the Next.
Some day they would kill her. She had always known that. But not today.
Far to her right, a man so bland she never remembered his name watched for unexpected signatures of debris or asteroids. On the other side of the room, to her left, a thin stick of a woman, incongruously named Round, flicked her eyes through the myriad tell-tales of the ship’s dashboards. At the moment they were all green and purple and blue, so everything was good.
Nayli had named the AI’s avatar Stupid years ago. Maybe decades ago. The commander she had become would have given it a more dignified name, but she had never changed this one. Vadim grumbled about it, he had never changed it either.
At the moment, Stupid looked like a tall cleaning robot, complete with a billed hat and a silver buckle and a silly tool belt full of things it would seldom use on a starship. Stupid was virtual, but she always set it to have a holographic body, and from time to time she changed its clothes or even its size. She waved a hand at it. “Show me our target again.”
Stupid displayed a green square in the air in front of Nayli. On the far
edge, the bright blue light that symbolized the Shining Danger glowed steadily. A line showed her trajectory toward a major dock-and-shock station, a place where ships of all kinds stopped for repair, or to exchange cargo, crew, or vast amounts of money.
Every station had its own banking system, and Star Island Stop had one of the best. Most important, the station staffs were known for their expensive willingness to keep secrets. There were four stations like her in the Glittering, and Nayli and Vadim had used them all multiple times. So did every other enterprise that was trying to stay hidden or dark or independent.
Star Island Stop was big. Nothing like the Diamond Deep, of course, but big. Ships didn’t stay here; there was no permanent community except the owners and the crew. It was truly unusual to get permission to dock for more than three to five days. Even now, at least two ships were leaving and three or four were coming in.
Stupid had drawn incoming ships a lighter blue than the Shining Danger. Outgoing ships were black, with likely destinations written below them.
Since the invasion began, Next ships made up a full ten percent of the traffic to and from Star Island Stop. They claimed to need repairs, but Nayli doubted there was a single thing they couldn’t make on the fly. She’d watched the videos of the various Next as they made what amounted to first contact in three locations, and she’d seen the kind of materials science they had mastered. The almost-magic of transmutation.
She suspected the Next used Star Island Stop to gather secrets and to tell their stories. For whatever reason, the robots had been actively recruiting humans since they passed though the Ring of Distance and came in to reclaim their place in the sun.
Nayli couldn’t tell why the Next wanted to transform humans any more than she could imagine why any humans would give up their own flesh and blood to become robots.
The Shining Revolution and the Next occupied two opposite poles of thought, and most people aligned with one or the other. Become the Next, or destroy them. Nayli found some comfort in knowing the “destroy them” camp had more people by far. A few—the scared, the old, the ones with resources—took a middle way. The Diamond Deep did this, which explained their absurd willingness to “help” the Next. That could be forgiven, chalked up to lack of backbone. But taking the metal way? No. They were in a race for souls, she and the robots.
Spear of Light Page 11
