by S. L. Viehl
Praise for S. L. Viehl
and the StarDoc series
“I don’t read much science fiction, but I got ahold of a manuscript copy of StarDoc and just loved it. Don’t miss this one.”
—Catherine Coulter
“Space opera somewhat reminiscent of C. J. Cherryh’s early work.”
—Chronicle
“An entertaining, almost old-fashioned adventure…. The adventure and quirky mix of aliens and cultures make a fun combination.”
—Locus
“Viehl has created an excellent protagonist … and she’s set the stage for an interesting series of interspecies medical adventures.”
—Space.com
“Space opera and medical melodrama mix with a dash of romance in this engaging novel … a rousing good yarn, with plenty of plot twists, inventive scene-setting, and quirky characters to keep readers thoroughly entertained…. StarDoc is a fun adventure story with an appealing heroine, a lot of action, a sly sense of humor, and wonders aplenty.”
—SF Site
“A fascinating reading experience that will provide much pleasure to science fiction fans. The lead character is a wonderful heroine.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Viehl’s characters are the strength of her novel, showing depth, history, and identity.”
—Talebones
Beyond Varallan
“[Cherijo is] an engaging lead character…. Viehl skillfully weaves in the clues to build a murder mystery with several surprising ramifications.”
—Space.com
“A riveting tale no connoisseur of excellence can put down without finishing. With more than a few surprises up her sleeve, this rising star proves herself a master storyteller who can win and hold a bestselling audience.”
—Romantic Times
Endurance
“An exciting science fiction tale … fast-paced and exciting…. SF fans will fully enjoy S. L. Viehl’s entertaining entry in one of the better ongoing series today.”
—Midwest Book Review
“[Endurance] gets into more eclectic and darker territory than most space opera, but it’s a pretty engrossing trip. Recommended.”
—Hypatia’s Hoard
“A rousing medical space opera…. Viehl employs misdirection and humor, while not defusing the intense plot development that builds toward an explosive conclusion.”
—Romantic Times
Shockball
“Genetically enhanced fun…. Cherijo herself has been justly praised as a breath of fresh air—smart [and] saucy…. The reader seems to be invited along as an amicable companion, and such is the force of Cherijo’s personality that it sounds like fun.”
—Science Fiction Weekly
“Fast-paced … an entertaining installment in the continuing adventures of the ‘StarDoc.’”
—Locus
“An exhilarating science fiction space adventure. The zestful story line stays at warp speed…. Cherijo is as fresh as ever…. Fans of futuristic outer space novels will want to take off with this tale and the three previous StarDoc books, as all four stories take the audience where they rarely have been before.”
—Midwest Book Review
Eternity Row
“Space opera at its very best…. Viehl has created a character and a futuristic setting that is second to none in its readability, quality, and social mores.”
—Midwest Book Review
“S. L. Viehl serves readers her usual highly entertaining mix of humor and space opera. This episode is enlivened by the antics of [Cherijo’s] daughter, Marel, and by an exploration of aging and immortality. As usual, I look forward to the next in an exciting series.”
—BookLoons
Blade Dancer
“Fast-moving, thought-provoking, and just plain damn fun. S. L. Viehl has once again nailed it.”
—Linda Howard
“A heartrending, passionate, breathtaking adventure of a novel that rips your feet out from under you on page one and never lets you regain them until the amazing finale. Stunning.”
—Holly Lisle
Bio Rescue
“Like Anne McCaffrey, only with more aliens … entertaining.”
—SF Crowsnest
“Viehl does a good job of telling the story, with believable alien as well as human characters and with more romantic emphasis then you usually see in SF.”
—SFRevu
ALSO BY S. L. VIEHL
StarDoc
Beyond Varallan
Endurance
Shockball
Eternity Row
Blade Dancer
Bio Rescue
Afterburn
REBEL
ICE
A StarDoc Novel
S.L. Viehl
A ROC BOOK
ROC
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,
Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,
Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, January 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Copyright © S.L. Viehl, 2006
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-101-56340-3
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
Printed in the United States of America
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This book is for
my friends
in New Zealand,
Teulon and Teresa,
who graciously allowed me
to borrow their names
for this story.
BEFORE
When the healer came to my world, I felt pity for her. I wept for her.
Then I took justice for what had been done.
She arrived on the vessel that appeared just before dawn. I saw it at once as it came hurtling out of control, a thin white streak against the fading purple of the sky. Like too many others, it had been wrenched from its flight path by the kvinka, the fierce wind streams of the upper atmosphere, which shield the surface of Akkabarr, my homeworld.
“So cold.” My apprentice, Enafa, joined me at the window I had chopped in the thick blue ice. As she shivered, she also peered, trying to see what had caught my attention. “Is that a ship, Skjæra?”
“Quiet.” I measured the plume, silently calculating the rate of descent as I watched it elongate.
She hopped from one foot to the other, slapping her arms with her mitts. “Should we alert the crawls?”
“Wait.” I watched it fall until it bloomed with a flash just over the north fields. That decided the matter.” “Bank the heatarc and put on your outfurs.”
As Enafa obeyed, I heard her murmur “Die quickly,” one of the more traditional lisleg prayers.
“They will.” All the newly outcast pray, but I did not ridicule her as one of our skela sisters might. Truth be plain, I envied her that faith. It would probably not last through another season on the ice. “Finish your tasks.”
“Perhaps I will be singled out this time.” She sounded excited rather than frightened at the prospect. “My mother often chose me over my sisters, you know. When I lived in our iiskar. She favored me.”
I pulled on the thick pile of outfur I’d made for myself during my first season on the ice. “Yes, as you have told me.” Too many times.
Her vain wish would not come true, of course. Enafa had been among the skela for a mere three suns. Our headwoman preferred seasoned handlers on the ice. My apprentice’s fears and hopes, like her memories, reminded me of how different we were. She still clung to that once-life as if it were yet hers.
I had been dead for a long, long time.
At times I wondered if my own five seasons of exile had numbed the life out of me. I no longer felt sorrow for what I had been, or disgust for what I had become. It would not matter if I had. As long as I worked, none of the skela cared what I felt. Enafa had yet to learn that, but I had no desire to be her teacher in those matters.
Watching over the child and keeping her from killing herself through stupidity was work enough.
Together we trudged from the watch place back through the bitter cold to the crawls. Skrie Daneeb, our headwoman, had not yet risen from her crawl, where I glimpsed her wedged between two old ones. Likely sharing her prodigious heat with them, I thought, and sent my young apprentice to warm herself at the great heatarc in the central cavern. Daneeb never openly showed sympathy for the young or the ancient among us, and I knew she would not appreciate being discovered off guard by a newling.
“We show no mercy,” she told every outcast when they came to the skela. “No one shows it to us.”
I walked a few yards beyond Daneeb’s space and pretended to have an irritated throat. She appeared a moment later, balancing by resting one hand against a thermal pad on the stone wall while she pulled her trousers over her leggings. “What is it, Skjæra?”
“A crash, Skrie. Four kilometers past Golihn Ridge.” I hesitated as I recalled the plume, and the flash. If I was in error, handlers might be wasted, or needed. Also, there was much I could not say within the hearing of others, particularly Enafa. “The ship flashed just above the surface.”
Daneeb grunted, then shrugged into her outfurs and strode out to the central cavern. A moment later, I heard her bellow, “Crawls five, seven, nine, rouse yourselves! Work awaits!”
Forty-three of us occupied the caves since the latest outcasts had arrived two suns before. I determined our numbers the same way everyone did: not by counting faces, which would have been rude, but by the division of food. Our headwoman’s predecessor once secretly doled out extra rations to whoever brought in the most bodies, and hoped to recruit those she indulged as her personal protectors. Daneeb herself discovered the crime, dragged the headwoman from the cave to dark ice, and staked her out there.
I knew because hers was the first body I ever saw claimed by the jlorra, the enormous felines with which we shared our world.
“Forget life,” Daneeb often told me. “You are skela now.”
Abandoning hope and one’s memories was the price of becoming a dead handler. What had any of us left to dream over or remember fondly? My once-life had been taken from me, as well as my second chance among the Iisleg. Skela could never return to their iiskar, or see their families, or touch another living Iisleg for as long as they breathed. Even after our deaths, only another dead handler could touch us. To be cast into the skela meant enduring an unclean existence, one that rendered us forever despised and exiled.
In most ways, that was worse than dead.
I knelt beside Enafa before the great heatarc to warm my limbs. No longer pinched by cold, her young face glowed smooth and plump, but drowsiness made her eyes heavy. “You should sleep while we are gone. You will have watch again with me this night.”
This made her pout, and resentment filled her eyes as she watched Daneeb leave the crawls. “Skjæra, can you not ask the skrie to take me with you this time? I want to go.”
Barely beyond her first bleeding year, cast out from her iiskar for stealing food, and now making demands like a spoiled child. Enafa needed more curbing than I had afforded her as yet. “No.”
Her mouth drooped. “You do not care for me.”
“No,” I lied. “I do not.”
“It did not pain me to watch her scurry away, cringing, rejected. She did not know that I had done her a favor.
One of our sisters emerged from crawl nine, groaning as she dragged the thermal wrap from her head. “Why do they never come down after the first meal?”
On top of my dealing with my apprentice, the mild complaint irritated me. The ferocious winds forced down any offworlder vessel that attempted to land on our world, and perhaps the ensleg deserved it for trying something so idiotic, but to care more about food seemed atrocious. “The kvinka has no regard for your empty belly.”
A big shadow fell over me, cast by Galla, the beast driver. Light from the heatarc made her shaggy, heavy outfurs glow red. “Malmi, get up or starve a day.” She moved her gaze to my face, and her silver eyes narrowed. “You, outside.”
I followed the beast driver at a cautious distance. Once our boots touched ice, Galla made an impatient gesture toward Daneeb, who was already out by the sleds, balancing skids. “She waits for you.”
Galla did not like our headwoman or me, but like most beast drivers, she disdained anything that stood on two legs or threatened her position. Someone had once made light of her devotion for the jlorra, who still preferred me over Galla. The beast driver’s response had left deep scars. I made a brief, courteous nod to her before I strode to the sled.
Daneeb looked up from the wide alloy blade that would keep us from falling through the sheet crust. “Tell me the rest.”
Very reluctantly, I did. “The stardrive may have imploded in the upper atmosphere, but if it did, they must have ejected it. The explosion was too small to be from anything but changes in the interior atmosphere. The vessel itself appeared to be League, military, not very large, possibly a leader’s transport.”
Daneeb knew my discomfort had nothing to do with reporting these facts to her. My unease came from the same source as my familiarity with offworlder ships: the time when I had lived and worked as a physician in the windlord cities.
My once-life, when I had believed myself to be Toskald.
I would still be among the windlords, living as one of them,
had the records of my birth been destroyed. I would never know why my parents kept the data, which showed that I had been born Iisleg. Perhaps they never thought anyone would find out that they had secretly purchased me as an infant from a slaver. Had I been aware of my origin, I would never have allowed it to be discovered after their deaths in a lift accident. But I had not known, and so the magistrate presiding over my parents’ estate used the information to seize possession of my inheritance. It had further amused him to send me to live on the surface with my mother’s tribe. My attempt to treat the wounds of an Iisleg female beaten badly by her husband resulted in my being cast out of the iiskar.
Iisleg women never went to the skim cities, unless they were sent as tribute to the Kangal. They could not be healers, nor were they permitted any form of proper education. It was blasphemy for a woman to even think of such things; thus I was walking blasphemy. The headwoman had discovered my abilities quickly enough, and occasionally made use of them, but extended more of the mercy she claimed not to have by helping me to conceal my forbidden upbringing and knowledge from the others.
Even the godless skela would stake out a heretic like me.
“A League leader. D?vena.” The headwoman’s spit froze before it struck the ice. “The gjenvin must be on their wind skimmers by now. Go, help Galla harness the beasts.”
The ice caves of the jlorra squatted beside the skela crawls, and were guarded only by the enclosures necessary to discourage the beasts’ nomadic nature. I carefully latched the entry gate behind me before picking my way through the skeleton yard and entering the largest of the passages the jlorra had licked out of the ice.
