The Crystal Variation

by Sharon Lee

  “Strategic placement! Well.” Gorriti wiped his eyes. “Even supposing it had any, my orders remain unequivocal, and I will tell you, Captain, that I am not one of those who feel we must hold the Arm at any cost!”

  Jela took a hard breath and kept a firm grip on his temper. “I’ll still need to inspect your defenses,” he said, evenly, that being the reason for his visit, according to the papers Cantra had produced for him. Commander Gorriti waved an unconcerned hand.

  “Go, inspect! Orders are orders, after all. Allow me to provide you an escort.” He raised his voice. “Sergeant Lorit!”

  The door in the right-hand wall popped open and an M Series soldier stepped briskly into the room with a sharp salute for her commander.

  “Sir?”

  “Sergeant, the captain here is under orders to inspect our defenses. Take him on a tour, won’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said and transferred her attention to Jela. “This way, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. He hesitated, trying to form something useful to say to Commander Gorriti, something that would bring him to a sense of a soldier’s duty—but the man was engrossed in reading his orders, fondling the appended ribbons. Sighing, Jela crossed to the patiently waiting M, and followed her out of the room.

  THE FORT, to which Cantra turned her attention after Jela disappeared for his-forever behind the guarded inner gate, was something interesting. She set herself to walking about, getting a feel for the layout.

  It was a substantial edifice, formed out of cermacrete. The first gate and all behind it to the inner, was public, and looked a deal like any spaceport, only much smaller than even the smallest she’d seen. There were three eateries, a bar, two sleepovers, some sorry looking shops selling necessaries, and a sagging trade hall where the choices on offer were “antiques” and ore.

  Despite there being nothing much there, really, the public gate area of the fort was buzzing. Cantra hadn’t supposed there were any law-abiding citizens left, but as it happened, her supposition was wrong. Granted, those left looked to be miners, which it was likely a charity to give them “law-abiding,” and most still working claims, which explained the ore on offer, but not necessarily the type or grade.

  A pilot is only as good as her curiosity bump, or so Garen’d maintained. Besides, there might be something here worth taking on, that was wanted elsewhere. No sense, she told herself, lifting empty, trying hard not to think just how empty Dancer was going to be.

  It ain’t you that’s dying, she snarled, aghast to find her vision swimming with sudden tears. She took a hard breath, and looked around her.

  Live pilots need food, she told herself carefully, and their ships need fuel. That means cargo, Pilot Cantra. Focus.

  Focus. Right. A sign advertising eats caught her eye, which seemed propitious. She crossed the street and sauntered in, looking for info.

  That she shortly had, by way of one Morsh, who was agreeable to paying for her tea and rations with amiable chat about her homeworld.

  The mines, according to Morsh were nicely full of timonium.

  “Not like the oldays, mindee,” Morsh cautioned her. “Back de before, all dem shafts fill wit stuff? Back de before, dose shafts still bean work. Yeah, it was timonium, then, too, and ollie made money hand over hand. Miners, they made considerable less, but still not too bad. Now, timonium he hide harder, so ollie pull out, de money bean less easy. Us, dough, we know where timonium hide, so we do. Not in mine-outs er garbage pits. Timonium, he hide in little pocket an sharp corner. We fine him, yeah, an we sell true de tradehall, freelance. Do bout as good as when ollie run it, and no olliecop stickin his nose where don it belong.”

  “Stuff in the shafts?” Cantra murmured. “Ollie leave his boots?”

  Morsh snorted a dry laugh, and had her a swallow of tea. “Ollie take him boots, missy. Dat stuff, it here before ollie. M’gran, she said de Vane been mine longtime. Story was, de Vane solid timonium, clear true.” She shook her head. “Ain’t, dough.”

  “The antiques on offer at the tradehall, they’re out from the mines?” Cantra persisted, thinking about Jela’s world-shield, and, truth told, feeling just a little uneasy about a major cache of oddments dating back to the First Phase.

  “Dey are,” Morsh agreed. “Tecky like dat ol stuff.”

  Cantra sipped her tea. “Old stuff still work?”

  “Ah, who know,” Morsh said, with great unconcern. “Tecky don care. Wanna peek at de possibles, er maybe takem souvenir.” She grinned. “Soften up tecky bed-bounce.”

  Cantra laughed. “Maybe so.” She picked up the pot and refreshed the tea mugs. “Supposing,” she said. “Supposing I was interested in hunting some old stuff down in the mine-outs. How’d I go about that?”

  Morsh laughed, and shook her head. “You ain no treasure-tecky, missy.”

  “‘deed I am not,” Cantra agreed. “But a woman sometimes needs a bit of extra something to keep her warm ‘tween paying jobs, if you understand me.”

  “Timonium pay better. I sign you partner.”

  “‘preciate,” she said. “But I’m thinking I know somebody might have an interest in the old tech.”

  Morsh shrugged. “Get you a paydown wit pit boss,” she said. “You risk, you take. You fail, nobody care. You don fail, nobody care, too.”

  She nodded. “Fair.”

  “Soldier, he take a piece on de port. You don wanna pay, you come see Morsh, she show you freedancer.”

  I’ll bet you will, Cantra thought, keeping her face thoughtful as she sipped her tea. “Don’t know ‘bout the dark market . . .”

  “Nothing dark,” Morsh said firmly. “Ain soldier port, ain soldier ore. Soldier ain sweated and toiled. Wherefore dey get a piece?”

  “I guess,” Cantra said dubiously and finished off her tea. “It was an idea, is all. I’ll jig around and see what else might turn up.”

  “Do dat,” Morsh said with a chuckle. “Maybe jig down Inside. Fortunes waitin for to be made Inside, I hear.”

  “Yeah,” said Cantra rising and dropping a few coins onto the table. “I hear that, too.”

  THE DEFENSES, duly inspected, were in better shape than Jela had feared, given Commander Gorriti; though it was likely the M soldiers who had made sure the old fort was defensible. There were a good many refurbs of older, not to say obsolete, equipment in evidence, and a couple outright fabrications. Lorit stood by with a blank, soldierly face while he inspected it all, not offering him much more than, “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” and “Couldn’t say, sir,” which was how he himself would treat an unknown officer appearing on the eve of evacuation with orders to inspect the defenses.

  “That’s the lot, then?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” she answered stolidly.

  Jela eyed her, made his decision. “I’m going to level with you, Sergeant. Your defenses are in top shape, considering what you had to work with—but you know that. The reason I’m here so close on the heels of the pull-back order is because somebody at Command realized they’d been ignoring something pertinent. There’s a record from the First Phase that indicates this fort was equipped with a world-shield capable of turning away a sheriekas attack. That it was partly the use of this device that stopped the sheriekas here, and disheartened them so much that they pulled back.” He gave her a straight look, which she met expressionlessly. “I’d appreciate being taken to that device, Sergeant.”

  She didn’t say anything, and he didn’t rush her. Just met her eyes straight on and let her make her own determination, trusting to her M nature—

  “To the best of my knowledge, and the knowledge of the troop,” she said, carefully, “there is no such device here. Sir.”

  “But,” he prompted, and damn’ if she didn’t smile.

  “But,” she acknowledged, “this planet has so many mines through it, it’s a wonder the surface doesn’t collapse. And somebody, somewhen, stockpiled a shitload of First Phase tech down in the shafts. Could be your armor
’s down there. But I wouldn’t know how to start to look for it. Sir.”

  Jela blinked. “How much tech,” he asked, but Lorit only shrugged her broad shoulders.

  “A lot,” was all she said, then, “Are you done here, sir? I can escort you back to the gate.”

  “I’m done,” he said, “but where I’d like you to escort me, if you would, is to the M services medic.”

  She gave him a hard stare. “Problem, sir?”

  “Not necessarily,” he said, keeping his voice even. “To the best of my knowledge, I’m approaching decommission.”

  Her stare softened, and she turned, leading him back the way they’d come. “This way, sir,” she said.

  CANTRA HEADED BACK to the tradehall for one more tour, though it was beginning to look like lifting empty was her option. She had a commission, should she choose to accept it—deliver a leather log-book to Solcintra, which was a fair trip from Vanehald, though not so far as Vanehald from Landomist—and nothing to trade for there, either, she thought, trying to work up some annoyance. Nobody went to Solcintra, which Solcintra liked just fine, the founders of same having explicitly wished to divorce themselves from the so-called “dissipated lifestyle” embraced by the citizens of the Inner Worlds.

  There’d been some little discussion of whether she would or wouldn’t also be delivering the tree to Solcintra; the tree being of one opinion on the subject and Jela another. In the end, what he’d done was asked for her promise to keep it safe, which seemed to satisfy both.

  Whether it satisfied her—Well. There was a reason why they said, “Crazy as a Rimmer.”

  She sighed and shook herself back to the here-and-now. Maybe she could try at the pilot’s hall, should there be one. Might be some courier work to be had or—

  “Pilot Cantra!”

  She almost stumbled, it surprised her that much, but she caught the boggle and turned, smooth and easy, pasting a smile on her face, and showing her hands empty.

  “Dulsey,” she said, flicking a quick glance over the crew clustered ‘round the ex-Batcher and finding nothing overtly life-threatening among them. “You’re looking well.”

  THE MEDIC WAS a natural human; a woman with the burdens of years he would never see etched into her face. He would have preferred, Jela thought, in case his preferences had to do with anything, another M, but he also owned to a feeling of relief, that the medic wasn’t an X.

  “Imminent decommission, hmm?” The medic’s name tag said ‘Analee;’ and there was a lieutenant’s chop on her sleeve. “ID number?”

  “M-nine-seven-three-nine-nine-seven . . .” He recited the long string of digits that described his particular self to the military. Beside his personal name, it was the first thing he’d ever learned, but it felt odd in his mouth, as if the shape or the weight of it had somehow changed over the years he’d been on detached duty.

  “Hmph,” said Analee. “Well, you’re in the range. Lie down on the table there and let’s have a look at you.”

  Obediently, he put his back against the table, feeling the sensors pierce him in a thousand places.

  “Hood coming down,” Analee said, stepping to her control board.

  Above him, the hood flared, light gleaming on a thousand more sensors, bristling like teeth, and began to descend. Jela closed his eyes.

  There was the usual space of hum-filled disorientation, then the sensors withdrew, the hood rose, and Jela opened his eyes. Analee the medic was frowning at her readouts, having apparently forgotten about him for the moment. In the absence of further orders, he swung his legs over the side of the table and stood.

  “Now, that’s odd,” the medic murmured, maybe to herself; then, clearly to him, “You’re certain of your date, Captain?”

  Jela sighed. “I thought I was,” he said wryly, “but I’m told the mind is the first to go.”

  Analee raised her eyes, spearing him with a look. “They say that,” she acknowledged seriously, “but it’s hardly ever so, with Ms.” She frowned down at her screen, touched a series on her pad. “I’m calling up your complete medical file,” she said, “to see if there’s some clerical error which would account for this.”

  “This?” Jela asked.

  “This,” she jerked her head at her screen. “You’ll be relieved to know that, according to records, your calculations are correct, and sometime within the next two days, local, you should be undergoing decommission. Visually, I’ve got clear signs of aging—hair going gray, some loss of mass and muscle tone—which are consistent with the early phases of decommission.” She raised her eyes to his again, hers pale and tired. “We have drugs, to ease the last of it,” she said, gently.

  “Thank you,” Jela said quietly, and considered her. “But?” he suggested.

  Her lips bent slightly. “But, what I have on the scan is the portrait of an M Series soldier who is several months short of decommission. Which is why we’re going to check—here we are . . .” She bent to her screen, manipulating keys, her concentration palpable.

  Perforce, Jela waited. For no reason, other than his tricksy generalist mind, he thought of the tree, and the taste of its pods. It came to him that he’d been eating quite a number of pods, lately—it had gotten so he’d scarcely noticed. And it also came to him that the tree had demonstrated some versatility in its production of pods—the one it had insisted he feed Maelyn tay’Nordif in order to ease her passing had been specially grown for her, and for that sole purpose, he thought. It could even have been, he thought suddenly, that the very first pod he’d ever had from the tree, in the desert with both of them at risk—which he’d eaten and straightaway fallen into an energy-conserving sleep that might just have saved his life—and the tree’s life, too.

  He wished, suddenly and sharply, that he could talk to the tree about this new insight. But the tree was gone by now, lifting out on Dancer, with Cantra at the board. His heart twisted painfully in his chest, he could see her sitting there just as clear . . .

  “Oh-ho,” Analee said from her computer. She looked over to him. “You were the one survived the attack on the lab at Finthir.”

  He blinked. “And that explains—”

  “Nothing—and everything,” she said briskly. “You’re an anomaly, is what you are—the only one of your cohort. Nothing else in the birth lab survived that attack. The sheriekas poured raw energy down on the facility—and I’m not telling you anything you likely don’t know when I say that they should have aborted everything in the nursery wing. The sheriekas were pressing, though, and every soldier was needed. So you were reassigned, allowed to mature, and to serve out your time.”

  He knew this, of course; the tale of the quartermaster’s mercy was at the bedrock of his existence. The few personnel remaining after the sheriekas attack had been repelled had needed a mascot; a reason to hope—so the quartermaster reasoned. And who was M. Jela, standing now at the end of his life, to say he’d been wrong?

  “But,” he said yet again, and this time Analee didn’t smile.

  “But that means you’re not a standard M Series soldier. The anomaly hasn’t shown up in any important way until now, and what it looks like is that you’ve got a while longer to serve, Captain.” She nodded at her screen. “I’m going to enter into your file that the high dosages of radiation you absorbed during a vulnerable developmental stage has lengthened your life expectancy. Short of a battle, or a nasty fall down the stairs, you’re going to see tomorrow, and a good few tomorrows after that.”

  AT DULSEY’S INSISTENCE, they’d staked out a table at what passed for a bar hereabouts, Cantra keeping an uneasy peace with the ex-Batcher’s comrades, haphazardly introduced as Arin, Jakoby and Fern. Arin, who Cantra had pegged as the leader of the expedition, was tall and lean and tough, with gray eyes set deep under strong black brows, and a perpetual frown on his face. Jakoby was fair and small and showed a business-like gun on her belt; she sat slumped in a chair at Arin’s right hand, her arm around Fern’s waist.

  “Have
you been in the mines, Pilot Cantra?” Dulsey was the only one of them having a good time, Cantra thought; though it didn’t seem exactly like her to be blind of her companions’ moods.

  “Can’t say as I have,” she answered, watching Fern wave a hand at the ‘tender. “Just hit dirt a couple hours ago, figure to be gone before local dawn.”

  “So soon? I had hoped you would be willing to accept a commission.”

  Jakoby sat up straight at that, and Arin’s frown got frownier, but neither one said a word.

  “Always willing to listen to a paying proposition,” Cantra said carefully. “But I have to tell you straight, Dulsey—I’m not looking at jumping off the Rim any time soon.”

  “Certainly not,” she said primly, as if such an idea would never occur to her. “What I wondered is if you would be able to take several canloads of artifact to—”

  “Dulsey!” That was Arin, goaded at last to speak. “She’s not in.”

  “Not in?” Dulsey rounded on him. “Do you know who this is? The Uncle himself has spoken highly of this pilot! Why, he had even offered Pilot Jela a place among—” She stopped and turned back to Cantra.

  “Where is Pilot Jela?”

  Well now, Cantra thought, that was a question, wasn’t it? She moved her eyes, taking her time about scanning the street outside the bar, thinking how best to put the thing. Dulsey’d been fond of Jela—maybe more than fond. It wouldn’t do to—she blinked as a familiar pair of shoulders hove into view among the thin crowd, moving quick and purposeful. Cantra looked back to Dulsey.

  “Jela?” she repeated, around the sudden lump in her throat. She nodded toward the window and the street beyond. “Here he comes now.”

  HE’D DRAWN A ROOM in the officers’ barracks and a meal card. There was, said the assistant quartermaster—a scarred and sardonic Y Strain—plenty of room, and plenty of food, too, stipulating base rations were food. His kit, he’d left on-ship, thinking there might be something in it that Cantra could use, and nothing he needed for his last couple days.

  And if he’d known those “last couple days” were in actuality months, he could have—he could have been on Dancer, sitting co-pilot and content. As it was, Dancer was no doubt long lifted, maybe even heading for Solcintra. He thought she’d take the book to Wellik, like he’d asked her to. Just like he thought she’d do her best to keep the tree safe. He had to trust to that.