A Liaden Universe® Constellation: Volume Two

by Sharon Lee

  As it happened, he hadn’t been quick enough.

  “Message from Tower, welcoming Fortune’s Reward home,” Padi said. “They request access, and promise a quick descent to the . . . the boss’ own pad.”

  “The . . . boss?” Quin said, memory stirring, but failing to fully wake.

  “That will be your father, Boy Dear,” Grandfather said from the jump-seat. “The Boss of Surebleak, Pilot Natesa styled him. You recall it.”

  Now he did, at any rate.

  Cheeks warm, he addressed his co-pilot.

  “Please thank the tower, and allow access.”

  * * *

  Tower pulled their files, and routed them the promised fast drop to port, whereupon they busied themselves with shutdown, not to full sleep, but to twilight. That had been Grandfather’s suggestion, and while it was undoubtedly a good one, Quin felt his stomach cramp with renewed worry.

  If Grandfather had second thoughts about Pilot Natesa’s tale now . . .

  Shutdown complete, they gathered the twins and Syl Vor. By then, the hull was cool, but it seemed that none of them wanted to open the hatch.

  While they were standing in the piloting chamber, looking uneasily at each other, the comm pinged.

  Padi leapt for it, got the bud in her ear, listened, and stammered, “Yes, sir, at once,” she licked her lips. “Pending pilot’s approval.”

  She turned to Quin. “Tower relays a message: The boss requests that we open the hatch.”

  Quin stepped forward—and stopped, his arm caught by Luken, who handed him Shindi.

  “I’ll go first, Boy Dear.”

  Quin looked to Padi and gave her a nod. She fingered the sequence and the hatch came up.

  * * *

  Three men in pilot leather stood in the hatchway. The biggest man was Terran, Quin thought, and he stayed well to the rear, calling as little attention to himself as a big man might.

  The man nearest—

  It was Father, after all! Father wearing a pilot’s jacket, with his hair in need of a trim, and his face chapped, as if he spent a lot of time out in the cold wind that blared through the open hatch.

  He embraced Grandfather, and Quin looked to the man who stood a little to the side. That man was . . . strangely difficult to see, as if he were somehow thinking himself invisible. Once one had him in-eye, however, he was found to look like Grandmother; dark hair going to gray, and ironic black eyes.

  “Quin!”

  Padi snatched Shindi out of his arms and he was caught in a strong hug, cheek to cheek.

  “Quin. Child, I am all joy to see you!”

  Father stepped back. Quin sniffled and blinked, embarrassed to be found crying, but then he saw that he had no need, because Father was weeping, too.

  “Welcome,” he said, “to your new home.”

  He turned, then, holding his hands out to Padi and Syl Vor.

  “Welcome. Your parents send their love, and their regret that duty keeps them so long away. Directly, we will go to Jelaza Kazone, as soon as—”

  He raised his head, looking beyond Syl Vor, as if expecting someone to emerge yet from the interior of the ship.

  Quin gulped, and stepped forward, his hand on his father’s arm.

  “She’s not here,” he said, his voice wavering.

  Father looked back to him, his face suddenly still. Frighteningly still.

  “Is she not?” he murmured.

  “There were intruders,” Grandfather said, turning from a low-voiced discussion with the pilot who so looked like Grandmother. “Truly, the pilot came to us in the very nick of time, Boy Dear—and stayed behind with your mother to deal with the problem. Neither would see wolves among the clan’s holdings, nor would they have us pursued.”

  “Of course not,” Father said, his voice cool and smooth. His gambling voice, Quin thought. He shook himself, then, and looked back, to where the big man tarried on the gantry.

  “Mr. McFarland,” he said in Terran, “I shall be returning immediately to Runig’s Rock. Pray you take my father, and our children under your care, and see them safe to the delm at Jelaza Kazone.”

  “All right, sir. Daav sitting second?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for worlds,” the pilot who looked like Grandmother said, his voice deep and rough.

  “I’m coming, too,” someone said, as Grandfather and the rest sorted themselves without question, preparing to accompany Mr. McFarland.

  Quin blinked, recognizing his own voice—and the rightness of his assertion.

  “Oh?” Father considered him, one eyebrow raised. “By what right?”

  Quin cleared his throat, and glanced at the elder pilot, who gave him an encouraging nod.

  “I left them there,” he said. “Pilot Natesa and Grandmother.”

  “You can scarcely argue the pilot’s melant’i,” the elder pilot said.

  “Can I not?” Father gave him a cold stare. The usual effect of such a stare was a glance aside and a bow of submission.

  The elder pilot laughed, then looked to Quin, black eyes glinting.

  “I have the honor to be your grandmother’s brother. My name is Daav. You will address me, please, as Uncle Daav, as I don’t feel able to support Grand-Uncle.” He returned his attention to Father. “Pat Rin, do you go?”

  “At once.”

  “Excellent. I engage to talk the tower into giving us a quick lift while you, Pilot Pat Rin, look to your course. Pilot Quin, the jump-seat for you, sir; you’ve flown enough, and there are two here able to relieve you.”

  Uncle Daav had an oddly decisive way about him, for someone who proposed to sit second, Quin thought, but he folded into the jump-seat with a certain amount of relief.

  He considered the screens as the pilots began their work, and so it was that he was the first to have eyes on the neat, and very familiar ship coming down near to hand.

  “They’re here!” he cried, snapping upright. He pointed—and then froze, looking to Father’s face.

  “It may not be—”

  Uncle Daav touched the toggle and the general port babble filled the cabin.

  “Shadow Drake,” came Pilot Natesa’s soft, calm voice, riding a wave of argument over an extended wait time. “We are down and locked. Shutdown proceeds immediately.”

  From the pilot’s chair, a sound between a laugh and a cry.

  “Bother,” said Uncle Daav, sweeping his hand down the board. “I had so been looking forward to a flight.” He sighed, theatrically, reminding Quin of Cousin Shan. “Well, I suppose one must make the most of it. Shall we go over and display our manners, Pilot Pat Rin?”

  Father gave a long sigh, and reached out to trigger the final shutdown.

  “Indeed,” he said, his voice not quite steady, “we should.”

  * * *

  “It will require Housekeeping,” Natesa told Pat Rin, after they had embraced and he had assured himself that she was well. “And—I regret—there was damage to the clan’s holding.”

  “Damn the clan’s holding,” Pat Rin said into her hair, and sighed.

  “Such terrible risks, Inas.”

  “Nonsense,” she answered. “And, you know, I would not have your mother think me faint-hearted, or unworthy of you.”

  He laughed at that, which was well, and allowed her to step out of his embrace, though he retained a grip on her hand.

  Elsewhere in Shadow Drake’s piloting chamber, Quin sat, palpably patient, and studying the board as if he had never seen one before. Daav yos’Phelium lounged against the back of the co-pilot’s chair, to first glance completely at ease.

  Second glance, however, marked a certain tension in his shoulders and the cock of his hip, and the way his glance returned, time and again, to the door that led to the passenger’s section.

  “Lady Kareen,” Natesa began, and paused as the door flicked open, admitting the lady herself, none the worse for the wear, saving some singed hair and a neatly bandaged scrape along her arm.

  One step into the
chamber, she paused, dark eyes on the tall shape in his lounge against the chair.

  “Kareen,” he said, his voice quiet, his tone absolutely neutral.

  The lady took a breath deep into her lungs.

  Sighed it out.

  “Daav,” she temperately, in the mode between kin. “Well met, Brother.”

  Moon on the Hills

  Surebleak

  Yulie had the frights pretty bad this time, bad enough that he’d waited, tucked down and froze-quiet in the rugged hatcher-nut grove in the hills well above the road, shaking, until long after the noisy threesome from somewhere downroad rushed to the clearest of the paths to the south in the face of impending darkness.

  What exactly his visitors had been doing he didn’t know—they’d called out hullo and whoha whoha a few times, like they didn’t know if the place was empty—and one of them called out “Captain Shaper” twice, and that made no sense since Grampa had been dead for so long, Yulie could hardly remember his face sometimes without looking at the image files. Likely someone had the house-spot listed somewhere as a leasehold to the dead company, but heck, that was so far back it shouldn’t matter to no one. They’d called his name once or twice, too, he thought, but by then he’d been moving away and it might just as well have been a trick of the wind.

  “We need to talk with you!”

  Maybe those were the words he’d heard, but even as he’d thought to come down, he hadn’t—there was dread in his way. He hadn’t had any company since Melina Sherton had walked up some butter awhile back, being a good neighbor like she was, for all that she was a boss. But he’d known her since he was a kid. Strangers—no, he wasn’t much used to strangers around and it did make him worry.

  They’d probably been in the house if they wanted, since the door didn’t lock beyond mild, and he could only hope that they hadn’t searched too hard—if he was lucky, they’d left him the gun on the wall. Real luck was that they’d probably believed the ancient outhouse shoved against the outcrop was what it looked like.

  The whining of the overloaded buggy died down along with the temperature, and still he waited, hearing the regular sounds return as the mindlessness of fear receded. He wilted against a tree then, aware of the tiny movements in the leaves and drying field grass, of the wind’s sigh, super aware of his vulnerability. The visitors all had guns, and he—he’d left his hand gun back in the safe and the long-gun locked into the rack. He hadn’t carried them with him for quite some time.

  He knew better, he did, especially since some of the city folk thought they could come up and hunt anywhere that wasn’t in the city. He didn’t mind them shooting at rats or wild dogs or whatever someplace else, but here—here they had no dogs, and the field creatures were few and far between mostly. The other potential targets—well, Rollie’d explained it to the neighbors the year of the problem, and they’d posted signs, and it ought to be clear he preferred being left alone, him and the cats.

  And they hadn’t looked to be intending assault . . .

  Not that he had reason to be assaulted, but they came from down the road, and Rollie’d gone down the road one day and never come back, dead from not knowing one boss from another, or from not having the sense not to antagonize a Port City block-boy at a tollgate.

  The odd thing was that the road—the road Rollie’d gone down, the road that grew to carry edibles for city folks, the road that ran all the way to port—that road, it started here. Here, on the property he called his, running right by the door of the cabin, right by the vegetable patch, right to the very cliffs that marked the first dig—and Rollie, like always, was the one wanted to wander the other way. He’d looked over World’s End enough that he wanted to get away from it, down the road with the ’lectracart in front of him, cart full of produce and him full of ideas.

  “I’ll have news of the doings, when I get back. Big changes, you know. Big changes!”

  His brother’s last words to him, “Big changes!”

  Yulie shivered, more from the memory than the weather. Mud, mud, mud! His old grandfather’d been a spaceman and that was the worst thing to him about being on a planet—the dirt and the mud and the rain—and here he was, the last of his Grampa’s line as far as he knew, what with Rollie dead in the city, down the road.

  That reminded him that he still owed a fetch of onions and maybe some grassnip to the lady, but he’d been pretty well shook to a standstill recently, and the debt was his accounting and not hers, anyway.

  The debt-letter was still in the house, walked up from Boss Melina Sherton’s closest tollbooth by a kid with a swagger. It felt like weeks ago, not like a year, like it was. Some things stick with a man, some things don’t.

  “You relative to Rollie Shapers?”

  He’d nodded, standing at the door, annoyed enough to insist— “Shaper, that ’d be. Don’t sizzle at the end of it.”

  The kid had shrugged, unslung his day-sack, pulled out a letter and a bag. He handed over the letter, held onto the bag, eyeballing the cats around the field edge before bringing his attention back to Yulie.

  “Down to the big whorehouse they had these to send on up—’spose to be for you, I guess. If you can write, I ought have your name here on this line to give back to Miss Audrey so she know I done it.”

  So Yulie had gingerly taken the big fancy pen and signed the proffered clean white sheet of real paper Yulian Rastov Shaper. He did know how to read and write, because Grandpa had made that rule for all of the family. If he’d had kids he’d teach them. Rollie—he’d been Roland Yermanov Shaper. He’d not much been interested besides half-day gardening with side trips to The Easiery or girlfriends—he’d also known how to write, and sometimes Yulie came across odds and ends of notes on recipe cards and such, notes that weren’t from Grampa or Emily or Susten or—any of his ladies, so it must have been Rollie.

  He handed the signed sheet to the kid, who’d sealed it in one quick finger rub into a certiseal, his thumb hard on both sides before negligently dropping it into his sack, and handed over the bag.

  Inside the bag, Yulie’d been given a big, fancy, sealed, brown envelope, with a return emblem at the top of “Miss Audrey’s Deluxe, Port City, Surebleak.” It wasn’t an address he recognized but he’d never really been deep to the city, so names weren’t much connected.

  Inside the envelope was a letter, hand-writ, with a date and the same return address as the outside, that started “Dear Kin or Friend of Rollie Shaper.”

  He’d got that dread feeling then because hardly anyone wrote to him, ever—mostly just folks requesting extra greens or hoping for something out-of-season—and Grampa had spoke about how he’d had to write kin-letters more than once, and how hard they were to write even if there really wasn’t much to say.

  Sometimes he could push that dread back so he could see, and that’s what he did, pushed it away hard.

  Dear Kin or Friend of Mr. Rollie Shaper, the letter went, Rollie was a patron at Portside Deluxe some days ago and on expiration of his room rental his effects were collected and placed in storage, where we have them now. Unfortunately, it later became clear on evidence that Mr. Shaper was the previously unidentified victim of an altercation, and had died of his injuries before medical assistance could be sought. The block clean-up committee’s report should be attached; they had a working med-tech known to me with them who certified the negative results of revival tests and the clean-up committee’s standing disposal instructions were followed, with ashes included in the weekly south garden run.

  The letter went on of course, and he’d read it through, requesting him to come on down to the city to pick up the effects. What would they be? Could his Grampa’s Musonium still be there? The good blade that Rollie’d always carried though it was supposed to stay at home? Cash in bits or dex or maybe gold weights? Her name was at the end, and businesslike as it was, the lady’s signature was bold and delicate at the same time.

  He’d had to think a moment about the ashes, because it was a st
range thought, that sweaty, noisy, busy Rollie could be something other than he’d ever been, but they said so, and had bothered to write to him, which was probably proof enough. The south garden, that was one on the far side of the port itself, down toward the flat of the land. He’d never been there, but the maps and Grampa both said that’s where the small gardens were supposed to be back before the spaceport was plopped dead center on the best growing land the continent had, on account of it being convenient.

  Then he’d started to look at the report, but it wasn’t something kin wanted to see, really, about how many cuts and—so he folded it in, and held himself a second or two, knowing that he wanted to know and that he didn’t want to know, knowing that he’d seen something like that once, entrance wounds and exit wounds and—

  The feeling was building as the boy stood there, the feeling that something was going to happen, that more bad was going to happen, that the clouds held weight beyond rain, and that something really really bad—

  When it hit, the panic, it was solid, like a crashing wall of rock falling on reason, to the point that he saw that gray nothingness where vision should be, where if he concentrated and stared hard, he found his shoes and his hands fearfully far away, like looking the wrong way through Grampa’s optical telescope.

  He’d held on, still, so he wouldn’t run. He’d stood there long enough for the kid to ask, “You got anything to send back? Got any smoke or . . .”

  But as much as Yulie’d gotten to feel his breath run out, as much as he’d felt his hands go numb, and his eyes begin to search for the way out, that much so, with all that, he’d managed to scrape together the proper and secure, “We don’t got smoke here, boy, nor want it. Got something for your trouble, though, and something for Miss Audrey.”

  For Miss Audrey, the spice herbs, prime grassnip, just picked. They’d been going to go to the city on Rollie’s next walk down the road, so they might as well go now, anyhow, and then he’d picked up two of the prettiest spudfruit he’d seen in awhile—easily a meal or two for the kid and his family—and he’d handed them over.