Duncan looked up.
“Your authorizations,” said Koch, “are for mediation—at my discretion. Your defection was anticipated.”
Duncan folded the paper, carefully, put it into his belt, and all the while rage was building in him. He smothered the impulses. If I can make you angry, Niun had said once, I have passed your guard again. I have given you something to think about besides the Game.
He looked at Sharn, whose nostrils trembled, whose bony lips were clamped shut.
“If there is no further firing,” said Koch, “we will cease fire.”
“That relieves my mind,” Duncan said from that same cold distance.
“And we will land, and establish that things are permanently settled.”
“I will arrange cease-fire. Set me on-world again.”
“Do not,” said Sharn. “The bai will take a harsh view of any accommodation with these creatures.”
“Do you,” Duncan asked cynically, “fear a mri’s memory?”
Sharn’s nostrils snapped shut and color came and went in her skin. Her fingers moved on her console, rapidly, and still she stared at them both.
“Mri can adapt to non-mri,” Duncan said. “I am living proof that it is possible.”
Koch’s dark eyes wandered over him. “Drop the veil, SurTac.”
Duncan did so, stared at the man naked-faced.
“You do not find it easy,” Koch said.
“I have not passed far enough that you can’t deal with me. I am what Stavros, perhaps, intended. I am useful to you. I can get a she’pan of the People to talk, and that is more than you could win by any other means.”
“You can spare a day. Firing has stopped, while we maintain distance. You will debrief.”
“Yes. I will talk to Boaz.”
“She is not qualified.”
“More than your security people, she is qualified. Her work makes her qualified. I will talk to her. She can understand what I say. They wouldn’t. They would try to interpret.”
“One of the security personnel will be there. He will suggest questions.”
“I will answer what I think proper. I will not help you locate the mri.”
“You know, then, where their headquarters are.”
Duncan smiled. “Rock and sand, dune and flats. That is where you will have to find them. Nothing else will you get from me.”
“We will find you again when we want you.”
“I will be easy to find. Just send Flower to the same landing site and wait. I will come, eventually.”
Koch gnawed at his lip. “You can deliver a settlement in this?”
“Yes.”
“I distrust your confidence.”
“They will listen to me. I speak to them in their own language.”
“Doubtless you do. Go do your talking to Boaz.”
“I want a shuttlecraft ready.”
Koch frowned.
“I will need it,” Duncan said. “Or arrange me transport your own way. I would advise sending me back relatively quickly. The mri will not be easy to find. It may take some time.”
Koch swore softly. “Boaz can have ten hours of you. Go on. Dismissed.”
Duncan veiled himself and rose, folded his arms and made the slight inclination of the head that was respect.
And among the guard that had remained at the door, he started out.
A squat shadow was there. He hurled himself back. A regul hand closed on his arm with crushing strength. The regul shrilled at him, and he twisted in that grip; a blade burned his ribs, passing across them.
Security moved. Human bodies interceded, and the regul lost balance, went down, dragging Duncan with him. Galey’s boot slammed down repeatedly on the regul’s wrist, trying to shake the knife loose.
Duncan wrenched over, ripped a pistol from its owner’s holster and turned. Men reached for him, hurled themselves for him.
Sharn.
The regul’s dark eyes showed white round the edges, terror. Duncan fired, went loose as the guard’s seized him, let them have the pistol easily.
He had removed the People’s enemy. The others, the younglings, were nothing. He drew a deep breath as the guards set him on his feet, and regarded the collapsed bulk in the sled with a sober regret.
And Koch was on his feet, red-faced, nostrils white-edged.
“I serve the she’pan of the People,” Duncan said quietly, refusing to struggle in the hands that held him. “I have done an execution. Now do yours or let me go and serve both our interests. The regul know what I am. They will not be surprised. You know this. I can give you that peace with Kutath now.”
In the corner the regul youngling, released, disarmed, crept to the side of the sled. A curious bubbling sound came from it, regul grief. Dark eyes stared up at Duncan. He ignored it.
“Go,” said Koch. The anger on his face had somewhat subsided. There was a curious calculation in his eyes. He looked at the guard, at Galey. “He will go with you. Don’t set hands on him.”
Duncan shook his arms free, adjusted his robes, walked from the room, passing through a confused knot of regul younglings that gathered outside. One, more adult than youngling, stared at him with nostrils flaring and shutting in extreme agitation, darted behind another as he passed.
Quietly, without a glance at the humans who lined the corridor to stare, Duncan passed back to Flower.
* * *
“What are you going to do now?” Boaz asked after long silence.
Duncan looked at the tape. Boaz turned it off. He sat cross-legged on the large chair, elbows on knees, not choosing the floor in deference to Boaz.
“What I said. Absolutely what I said.”
“Reason with mri?”
“You yourself don’t think it’s possible.”
“You’re the expert,” she said. “Tell me.”
“It’s possible, Boz. It’s possible. On mri terms.”
“After murder.”
He blinked slowly. He was veiled. He was not comfortable among them, even here, even in conditions of hospitality. “I did what had to be done. No other could have done it.”
“Revenge?”
“Practicality.”
“They do not hold resentment toward the regul, you say.”
“They have forgotten the regul. It is a Dark ago. I have wiped the present slate clean. It is over, Boz. Clean.”
“And your hands?”
“No regret.”
She was silent a time, and whatever she would have said, she did not say. It was like a veil upon her eyes, that sudden distance in them. “Yes. I imagine there is not.”
“There was a woman whom the regul caused to be killed. She was not the only one.”
“I am glad there is that much left in you.”
“It was not for her that I killed the regul.”
Boz went silent on him again. There was less and less that remained possible to say.
“I will remember the other Sten Duncan,” she said at last.
“He is the only one you will understand.”
She rose, gathered up his weapons from the counter, gave them back to him. “Galey is going to fly you down. He asked to. I think he has delusions that he knows you. The dus is shut in the hatchway.”
“Yes.” He knew where the dus was. It knew his presence too, and remained calm. He buckled on the weapons, familiar weight, touched the j’tal that was his, straightening the belts. “I’d like to be away now.”
“It’s arranged. There’s a signal beacon provided to a kit they want you to carry. They want you to use it when you can provide them a meeting.”
“I will need a while.” He walked to the door, stopped, and thought of unveiling, of giving that one gesture to what had been a friend.
He did not feel it welcome.
He went out among the guards that waited, and did not look back.
And with the dus beside him he descended to the shuttle bay, accepted from security the kit that they provided; he left
the guards there and walked the ramp to the ship, the first moment that he had been free of them.
He entered and went through to controls, where Galey waited.
Brave man, Galey. Duncan looked at him critically as the man rose to meet him, giving place to the dus that crowded between. Afraid: he felt that in the dus-feelings; but something else had driven Galey to be present despite that.
Loyalty?
He did not know to what, or why, or how he could have stirred that in a man he hardly knew . . . only that they two had walked Sil’athen—that this man, too, had known the outback of Kesrith, as few of his kind had seen it.
He gave his hand to Galey, human-fashion, and Galey’s hand was damp.
“Got some idea where you want to go?”
“Let me out by the ship, at Flower’s recent landing site. I’ll manage.”
“Sir,” Galey said.
He settled into his place at controls; Duncan took the seat beside him, buckled in while the dus wedged itself in firmly, anchoring itself: spacewise, the beast.
Lights flared. Duncan watched Galey’s intent face, green-dyed in the light of the instruments. The port opened and the shuttle flung itself outward, toward the world.
“High polar,” Duncan advised. “Defenses are still active.”
“We know the route,” said Galey. “We’ve used it.”
And thereafter was little to say. The ground rushed up at them, became mountains and dunes over which the shuttle flew with decreasing speed.
There was the sea chasm, their guide home. The dus, feeling braver now, stood up and braced itself on four legs. Duncan soothed it with his fingers, and it began to rumble its pleasure sound, picking up that which was in his mind.
The shuttle settled, touched, rested. The hatch opened.
The cold, thin air of Kutath came to him. He freed himself of the harness and stood up, took his hand from the dus as he gathered up his kit and walked back to the hatch. He heard Galey’s rise behind him, paused and looked back at him.
“You’re all right?” Galey asked strangely.
“Yes.” He took about his face the extra lap of the veil that made the change in air more bearable, and gazed again at the wilderness that lay beyond the hatch. He started forward, down the ramp, and the dus padded at his heels, down to the sand, that had the comfortable feeling of reality after the world above.
Home.
He set his face toward the sea chasm, a false direction first. He would take the true one when light faded, when he was sure that there were none to watch him. He would bury the kit in the rocks there against future need, not trusting to bring any human gift among the mri; his weapons also he would strip and examine, distrusting what had been out of his hands among them. They would not trace him.
The she’pan’s service. The wild, fresh land. He inhaled the wind, and only when he had come a considerable distance did it begin to worry at him that he had not heard the shuttle lift.
He looked back and saw a small figure standing in the hatchway, watching him.
He turned and kept walking, and finally heard it go.
It passed over. He looked up, saw the shuttle bend a turn as if in salute, and depart.
Book Three:
Kutath
Chapter One
There was chaos about the docking bay; Galey observed it as he was coming in, heard it, a chatter of instructions in his ear, warning him to keep his distance. He held the shuttle parked a little removed from the warship, watching kilometer-long Saber disgorge a trio of small craft. Blips showed on his tracking screen, an image supplied him by Saber-com, from Saber’s view of things. One blip was himself; one other was blue and likewise human—that had to be Santiago . . . Saber had deployed the insystem fighter between itself and the red blip that was Shirug.
The outgoing blips were likewise red: regul shuttles in tight formation. Galey read the situation uneasily and kept his eye to the steady flow of information on the screen. There was one dead regul to be disposed of: that was likely what was in progress out there . . . the late bai Sharn Alagn-ni, ferried out to her own ship for whatever ceremony the regul observed with their dead. Sharn: ally, as all regul were allies according to the treaties . . . according to the agreement which had brought a human and a regul warship into orbit about this barren world, this home base of the mri. Regul made Galey’s skin crawl. It was a reaction he did not speak aloud: promotions in the service were politics, and politics called regul friendlies.
Mri, now, mri were near human-looking, whatever the insides of them might be like. Galey hated them with a different dutiful hate. He was Havener, of a world lost and retaken in the mri wars. Parents, a brother, cousins—had vanished into the chaos of that war-torn world and never surfaced again. It was a remote kind of grief, rehearsed guiltily in every other scene of slaughter he had witnessed, but he could not recover the intensity of it. His kin were lost, in the sense of not found, misplaced in the war and gone: dead or alive, nor knowing for sure. He had not been home when the strike came, and in the years after, the service had become home, Lancet, Saber, Santiago, whatever ship received his papers, wherever his current ship took him, live or die. Mri were like that. Just soldiers behind their black robes and veils. Nothing personal. He had a friend who had gone mri . . . he had seen a different look on him after the years of absence, disdainful, remote; there was something heart-chilling in standing close to a man in that black garb, something intimidating in gazing close at hand into a face of which only the eyes were visible—amazing how much of expression depended on the rest of the faces, concealed behind black cloth. But for all of that, a human could understand them.
Regul . . . regul had hired the ships, the weapons, the mri themselves, and planned, and named the strikes, and profited from them. Forty years of war, bought by regul. An investment . . . Galey sounded the words out in his mind, distastefully. Po-li-cy. Cash on the table. Big folk, the regul, who sat fat and safe, who made the decisions and put out the cash, sending their mri mercenaries out to war. Humans and mri killed each other, and the wise old regul, reckoning a forty-year war nothing against their centuries-long lifespans, and reckoning the tally of gain and loss—kept the war going just so long as it profited them.
In the same way the regul turned up on the human side during the cleanup—had turned on their own mercenaries, slaughtering them and the mri’s civilian population without warning. That was the mri’s final payoff for serving regul. A simple change of policy: regul knew the right moment to move. And, truth be told, everything human breathed a sigh of relief to know the mri were gone, and that someone else had pulled the trigger.
Regul came now, having tracked the last two survivors of the mri who had served them, to their homeworld, to Kutath, the far, far origin of their kind. Regul had rushed ahead to destroy a peace message from Kutath before humans could hear it, had fired on a quiet world and elicited answering fire before humans understood the situation. More mri were dead down there. The last remnants of dying cities were shot to ruin; the last of a dying species were made fugitives on their own world . . . the last place, the very last, that mri existed.
Something tight and unpleasant welled up in Galey’s throat when he thought of that. Somehow it was Haven again, and civs getting killed. He had come very far to feel something finally. It was ironic that he felt it for the enemy, that deep-down sickness at the belly that came of seeing an unequal contest.
It would have been that kind of blind, helpless death for his own kin. It gave him nightmares now, after so many years. No fighting back; a city under fire from orbit; no ships; no hope: folk armed with handguns and knives against orbital strike.
Everything dead, and no way out.
There was a little drift in his position. It had been minor, but the shuttles were still in his path and he had to maintain a while longer. He corrected a fraction. Sweat was running down his sides. He tried to stop thinking, tried to concentrate on his instruments for a time. There was no reason f
or uneasiness. The feeling simply grew. And in time the thoughts crept back again. His eyes traveled inexorably and unwillingly toward the outward view. Kutath’s dying surface was barely in his visual field. The rest was stars, fewer than he ever liked to see. He sweated. He had never been in a place where the goblins got to him so thoroughly, those ancient human ghosts that tagged after a man in the deep. They dogged him, kept, as proper ghosts should, just behind him . . . gone when he would look.
Look back, they whispered against his nape, stirring the hairs, Look again.
The stars hung infinite in his drifting view, as deep down as up, as far on left as on right; and a near star, Na’i’in, the mri called it, which would make even Saber a mote of dust beside it. All, all those little lights which were suns, and some cloudy aggregates of suns, themselves reduced to dust motes by distance which reached out from himself, who was the center of the universe, and then not—an insignificance, less than the mote of a world, far less than a sun, infinitely less than the vast galaxies, and the distance, the cold, deep distance that never stopped, forever.
Move it, he thought at the ships which held him off. He wanted in, wanted in, like a boy running for his front door and warmth and light, with the goblins at his back. It had never gotten to him, not like this.
The mri had a word for it: the Dark. Scientists said so. Anyone who had traveled the wild places in little ships had to have a word for it. Except maybe regul, who could not imagine, only remember.
Mri felt it. He understood beings who could feel it.
He worked his hands on the controls, heard the chatter in his ear, the thin lifeline of a voice from Saber, proving constantly his species was real, however far they sat now from friendly, trafficked space.
Real. Alive. Men existed somewhere. Somewhere there were human worlds, less than dust motes in the deep, but living. And that somehow affirmed his own reality.
Was it this, he wondered, for the two mri, last of all their company . . . who had run this long, desperate course home? Their little mote was dying, an old world under an old sun, and what fragile life of their kind survived here, regul refused to leave alive. Was it such a feeling, that had made home more urgent for them than survival—to come in out of the Dark, even to die?
The Faded Sun Trilogy Omnibus Page 56
