by Mel Keegan
“I … didn’t,” Lansdown admitted, “and here I am.” Her brow creased. “I’ll be careful, Harrison. And you – wherever you’re going – have a nice life. I’ll be thinking about you.”
“Thank you.” Shapiro reached over and hit the off.
“Speaking of chapters closing,” Marin said quietly. “You’re almost done here.”
“We all are.” Shapiro nodded at the baggage mounded by the door. “Dario and Leon and their partners might come back one day, but Mark has no more desire than I have to become a minor headline on a homeworlds news network. In his case, as a Resalq he can weather this particular storm and see it out. In thirty or forty years, he might return as his own son. The Resalq are so long-lived, and Terran agents don’t know he’s not human.”
“They’ll track down that information eventually,” Travers guessed. “Especially if the Resalq are coming out soon. Once the Veldn arrive here, all bets are off.”
Shapiro was nodding deeply. “I dispatched a package of selected data to President Cardwell’s office a few hours ago. The same is on its way to presidential offices right across the Commonwealth. Chandra Liang, Tarrant and Prendergast will be briefed regarding the Veldn; their scientists can wade in the Zunshu and Veldn data. When the Veldn get here they’ll be expected, welcomed.”
“And the Veldn,” Marin said thoughtfully, “will contact Joss here, and also on the Carellan Djerun, direct. If we’re anywhere in reach of the Deep Sky when they come, I’d like to see first contact happen. Again.” He gave Travers an amused look. “I want to see the look on Mark’s face.”
“I want to see the look on his face when the Resalq come out,” Travers added. “Five years, or ten? It’s going to be quite the show.”
“Meanwhile,” Marin went on, “I believe we have a wake to hold.”
“A wake?” Shapiro echoed, guessing. “Oh, please.”
“Cognac and Cutty Sark cigars, at the very least.” Travers was on his way to the bar in the corner of the dining room. “Now, where does he keep them? Joss, give Mark a hoy.”
And a moment later, from the lab: “You called, Neil?”
“Where does Dario hide the best brandy?” Travers prompted. “We’re holding a wake for Harrison Shapiro. It seems he was killed in line of duty a month ago … at least, Colonel Lansdown will be informing the president’s office of his death about now. It’s only decent to lift a glass.”
They were finishing the cognac when the Capricorn dropped in out of a patch of stars in the south, where the snow clouds had drifted apart on a west wind. Sunset had been bloody, broodingly magnificent over the heights of Mount Kepler. Shapiro watched from the big windows, captivated, perhaps especially so since he might never see this again – or, not on this world. His homeworld. The sky was fully dark when the Capricorn’s repulsion raised a blizzard, melted the snow on the lawns, which would be frozen to glassy ice in half an hour.
Without a respirator Vidal hustled into the house and was breathless, pale with cold, when the door banged behind him. Vents opened, blowing hot air to raise the house pressure back to normal in seconds, and Vidal made straight for the hearth.
“Cold outside,” he informed Marin and Travers.
They were on the couch, watching CityNet, a documentary about the return of indigenous species to parts of southern Borushek, where early colonial industry had recently been moved offplanet, allowing the native environment to reappear.
But cold or no, Vidal dropped the leather jacket soon enough and the collar of the black silk shirt was open, baring his chest. Marin might have commented, until he saw the refurbished tattoo, still bright, a little swollen, and likely sore. The Daku tattoo – the open-headed ankh – which Vidal had always worn as a symbol of his beliefs, was thoroughly reworked in blues and golds. The ancient sigil was closed now, and Marin remembered Alexis Rusch’s explanation for the reason the Daku had always displayed it open-headed. It symbolized freedom, and it had been broken. It remained broken until the Deep Sky was free.
“Nice.” Travers leaned forward to see the tattoo in the soft light of a half dozen glowbots. “Very nice.”
“There’s this tattoo artist I know in citybottom,” Mick told him. “He does the best work this side of Elstrom. Bobby Liang will have had the same done.” He stabbed a finger at the enormous mound of baggage and boxes by the door. “Are we supposed to load that?”
“Let Dario and Tor take care of it.” Mark’s voice spoke from the stairs leading down the lab. “Speaking of whom, where are they?”
“Repacking their stuff on the Capricorn.” Vidal had returned to the hearth. “Tor’s probably bottomed out a bank account here. Then again, he’s not likely to see a store again for a year. Or several.” He glanced at his chrono. “You heard from Richard? He wants to ship out soon. We gotta get moving.”
“We are.” Mark stepped aside, and an Arago sled appeared behind him. “Curtis, would you call Leon and Roy downstairs? Half that pile is theirs. They can load it themselves!”
The sled went out the house’s side door, which was lock-in, lock-out, to save the inside air pressure. The night was very cold, the sky only thinly overcast; a few familiar stars showed in the east. The humans emptied out the closets for parkas and breather masks, but the Resalq barely acknowledged the cold. It was regret, not discomfort, on Mark’s face as he said,
“Joss, it could be a long time before anyone returns. Leave the security systems operational, otherwise power down. Monitor for signals from your synched counterparts, or from us, and … wait.”
“Very good, Doctor,” Joss said unconcernedly. Time meant even less to the AI than to a Resalq, whose lifespan so far outstripped the human. “Have a pleasant flight. I look forward to your eventual return. Good night.”
“Good night, Joss.” Mark was the last to step out of the house.
The lights and heating turned off behind him. The house would soon return to almost ambient temperatures and pressures and, Marin thought, like the rest of Riga it would hibernate until it returned to the mountains.
He watched the familiar property drop away below as the Capricorn fell directly up into a lake of stars. The lights went out right across Riga, plunging the valley into darkness lit only by starlight on fresh snow. Marin watched until the Capricorn passed over the mountains, and then turned back to find Travers’s blue eyes on him.
“You okay?” Neil asked softly.
“Me? Of course.” Marin only shrugged. “It was never my home, but I spent a lot of time here across the years. It’s …” He hunted for what he felt. “It’s a time I’m going to miss, I think, rather than a place. You know what I mean.”
“Oh, I know.” Travers picked up his hand, kissed it, and sat back for the flight. “There’s an old saying. Onward and upward.”
Vidal was flying, even then logging an orbital flightplan with Sark ATC. He told the controller he was headed for Sark High Dock, and it was only a faint lie. The Wastrel was two thousand kilometers west, close enough for the Capricorn’s instruments to already have picked up its acquisition signal. Vidal could have handed it to the automatics and sat back for the ride, but flight was his pleasure.
Sark brightened on the horizon while Marin watched; the stars burned ahead of the plane’s snub nose and Vidal throttled up the engines to take it fast out of the atmosphere. Borushek sprawled away in a fantasy of gold and blue lights picking out the shapes of coastlines and highways. Marin watched the world turn beneath them – where the fires of night are burning bright, thou shalt sing to the glories of yore.
“Wastrel Flight, this is Wastrel 101 on approach,” Vidal was saying.
And Etienne: “Hangar 4 is open.”
A combug slipped into Marin’s ear, cold and hard. He heard the loop a moment later – Ingersol and Jim Fujioka going over engine dynamics specific to the Wastrel, Perlman and Cassals conferring between the flightdeck and one of the hangars, Fargo and Jazinsky in Ops. The tug was securing to leave orbit. Ingersol had receiv
ed news from Jagreth – the London’s engine deck was clean enough to be undocked; Weimann and sublight engines plus three military-grade generators would be in transit to Alshie’nya in a matter of days. By the time the Wastrel returned from the Freyana assignment, the Esprit de Liberté would be scheduled for a second shakedown cruise. Ingersol was delighted.
The clock was counting to departure. The status board in the passage opposite the armordoors securing Hangar 4 showed minus forty minutes, and Marin spent most of that time in the crew lounge, looking down on the night side of the world. Travers was quiet, giving him the space to think, remember, for which Curtis was grateful.
The status bars clicked over to amber in the threedee and Etienne said into the loop, “Standby for sublight engines. Breaking orbit in one minute; vector plotted for the exclusion zone. Commencing Weimann ignition procedures. Departing Borushek space in twelve minutes.”
As it spoke the deck began to thrum. The engines ran up to peak in test and then lapsed back to their normal purr, and Marin felt nothing physical as the world slipped down out of the long viewport, and away. Travers’s arm was heavy across his shoulders and Neil’s voice was soft. “We’ll be back.”
“Will we?” Marin was doubtful. “And if we weren’t, it wouldn’t matter.” He turned into Travers’s embrace, savoring the strength in the big arms which closed about him. “Would it?”
Travers said nothing, but kissed him.
3: Raishenne, Carahne
From space it was a blue-green jewel, fourth from a yellow G4 sun in a region of absolute stability. The Aenestra had also surveyed the nearby star systems, all of which were mineral rich, wealthy in planets, impoverished in life. In twenty light years, only Carahne was blessed with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, liquid water across forty percent of the planet and abundant indigenous life, none of it more advanced than the great bipedal felinoids which hunted through the equatorial forests and savannahs under the ranges of ancient, extinct volcanoes.
Saraine itself was no more perfect for the Resalq. With an axial tilt of 22o, the climate was constant; the metal-heavy core generated gravity that was just a few percent heavier, only noticeable for the days it took the body to adjust; and the world was large. The Resalq would not want for space to grow for centuries, or ever. The only lethal life form to be engineered into extinction was a flesh-eating insect which immobilized a living host with narcotic venom, laid its eggs in the warmth of the abdomen and kept the host alive in a state of catalepsis until the larvae hatched and devoured it. The insects were selectively eliminated while the city of Raishenne was built by construction drones, and when the Wastrel drove into high orbit the system was already busy, noisy, dynamic.
Mines were working on two rocky worlds, and one of the three moons had become the cargo port. Security drones negotiated with Etienne while the Wastrel was still out by the Weimann exclusion zone, instructing it to bring the ship to Raishenne High Dock and wait there.
“Pretentious,” Vaurien observed, “aren’t they?”
Mark Sherratt turned his eyes to the ceiling, or the gods. “You have no idea. Pompous, arrogant, conceited, haughty, snobbish.” He looked through the haze of the navtank at Midani Kulich, whose mouth had compressed in annoyance. “Ask him.”
But Midani’s wide shoulders lifted in a noncommittal shrug. “Is Emil. Is old Resalq. You remembering good, Doctor … me remembering, me being only just technician before became soldier. Technician not worth too much. Soldier getting more hul’rim.”
“Respect,” Mark translated.
“Ress-peck,” Midani said doubtfully.
Roy Arlott enunciated the word slowly and emphasized the consonants. “Reh-spect.” He chuckled richly. “What’s it matter? Chances are, you just came home. In a year, you’ll forget any Slingo you ever learned. You’ll have precious little use for it after this.” He was watching a flatscreen, where the vidfeed of the new city showed wide avenues, the green of a park where the trees were still small.
“Maybe,” Kulich said darkly. “Maybe.”
It was Emil on his mind, Travers thought. He and Marin had volunteered for shuttle duty. Perlman and Fargo were in a brand new transspace simulator, assembled, wired and loaded only a day before, and Vidal had passed responsibility for the session to Rabelais and Queneau. They were more than capable of running data, collating results; and Perlman and Fargo were close to qualifying. The hand-holding days were gone.
The Capricorn was already preflighted as the Wastrel made her way to Raishenne High Dock. The precious, delicate cargo was loaded onto three industrial Arago sleds, and Ingersol and Fujioka were about to jockey them into the cargo space on the engineer’s tractor. Vaurien and Jazinsky lingered by the navtank, still waiting for the city AI to summon a Resalq to answer formal calls, and Travers knew Richard’s temper had begun to shorten.
“There she is.” For several minutes Jazinsky had been monitoring the deep scan. As a major icon appeared she touched Vaurien’s arm. “There’s the Freyana, parked neatly behind the second moon … she looks fine from here.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” Mark mused, but a few moments’ examination of the deep scan dispelled any doubts. “She is fine. I’m seeing good numbers from engines, hull, interior.” His brow creased. “The only thing she’s not doing is transmitting. Not a squeak.”
Gestures abrupt with annoyance, Vaurien reached over and slapped the comm. “Captain Kulich, this is Richard Vaurien. We have a consignment for you, data and hardware. Where do you want it?”
And if Kulich did not respond soon, Travers thought, Vaurien was likely to dump the data into as many cubes as it took, offload cargo where it was most convenient to him, and call the job done.
Something in his tone must have spoken to Emil Kulich. The threedee at Comm 1 brightened only moments after Vaurien spoke. Midani stepped sideways, careful to put himself outside the pickup angle as his sibling stepped into view. He spoke only in Resalq, not a word of Slingo, and he looked down his long nose at Mark Sherratt and Roy Arlott.
The translation algorithm was recent, and Etienne ran it almost in realtime. In Travers’s ear the combug said in an approximation of Emil’s tone and timbre, “Welcome to Carahne. We didn’t send for you.”
Only those closest to Mark heard his groan of exasperation. “The Freyana stopped transmitting some time ago. You didn’t expect someone to come and investigate?”
“I did,” Emil said coolly. “I expected an investigation long before this. You are late, Doctor Sherratt. If we had required assistance in a catastrophe event, we would have suffered major casualties by now.”
“If you’d suffered any kind of catastrophe,” Mark said levelly, “it was your duty to evacuate the colony back to the Freyana and return. Drop the arrogance, Kulich. It does you no credit. What happened to the Freyana?”
For a moment Kulich glared at him, and then subsided one muscle at a time. “The highband burned out. We have not yet gotten around to replacing it, since we have little need of it. The colony transmitters are perfectly operable.”
“But you didn’t report this,” Mark said with ominous quiet.
“It was not germane,” Emil said offhandly. “I told you, the colony transmitters are perfectly functional.”
“Not germane?” Sherratt echoed, as if words failed him.
In fact, it was Midani who stepped into the vid pickup and unleashed a tirade in the Resalq which Etienne struggled both to keep pace with and properly translate, since much of it involved cursing, elaborate, almost picturesque profanity. Travers chuckled, and wiped the smile off his face as he watched Emil change color, his face infusing with anger from the line of his collar to the great elongated dome of his bald head.
“That’s enough,” he snarled at last. “You appear to have learned a new brand of impudence, working with these humans, and the hybrids.”
It was Midani’s turn to change color with rage. “Who was it,” he demanded, fluent in his own tongue, almost sneering, “wh
o flew Elarne? Who was it who found the Ebrezjim, walked its decks, paid tribute to the crew who stole it out of Zunshu space and were almost home before ill fortune overcame them? Who,” he hissed, “walked the streets of the Zunshu city, salvaged the computer core, confronted the old enemy face to face, and made the acquaintance of the Veldn, who walked those streets long before us?” He gave his sibling glare for glare. “Was it you, Captain Kulich? I think not. You were here, sitting on your ass in the sun, drinking wine and making sure the next generation is more pure, less mongrel, than the heroes who had the courage and vision to tread in the steps of our forefathers! And I –” he slapped his own chest, hard “– I walked with them, where the stars of the Orion Gate and the Blood Gate burn with the light of suns you never saw, Emil, and likely never will!”
Emil’s expression had shifted from anger to scorn to disbelief. “You walked the Zunshu streets?” His eyes flickered to Sherratt and Vaurien. “You fought Zunshu?”
“We fought,” Mark told him. “Not Zunshu. We walked those streets … if you can call them streets …and we were not the first. The Deep Sky is about to have visitors, Captain. The Veldn Peoples of the Worlds of the Second Star. And I’d advise you to be less arrogant, less pompous, in the face of a species that developed an engine similar to Weimann technology many thousands of years before we did. Now, do you want this data transfer, or not? In fact, I ought to be talking to the head of your science team – who is it? Jun’ba-tis?” He looked sidelong at Vaurien and Jazinsky. “Jean Baptiste Cleary, when he’s among humans.”
“He has gone,” Kulich said dismissively.
“What do you mean, gone?” Mark demanded.
“I mean, he stood down,” Kulich began.
Midani’s fists clenched. “You mean, you found a reason to dismiss Jun’ba-tis from the position of head of the science team! He is – a mongrel, like the Doctors Sherratt and Sereccio. Not good enough for you.”
