by Andrew Post
Dedication
For Traci
Published 2015 by Medallion Press, Inc.
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is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.
If you purchase 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.”
Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Post
Cover design by Patrick Reilly
Edited by Emily Steele
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Typeset in Hoefler Text
Printed in the United States of America
EPUB ISBN# 9781605426181
PROLOGUE
Changing Spots
Adeshka: three hundred square miles of stone and steel kept standing by grime and stink. Ugh, it just had to be here.
Before stepping off the curb, Margaret Mallencroix pressed her mask to secure the seals. She couldn’t imagine going around without filtration. The air was faintly green, and even with the mask on, the city’s reek slithered in. Garbage juice, burning tires.
Autos treated the traffic lights as suggestions. Once in the street, she could go barely more than a step without a vehicle barreling past. She felt invisible, which she wouldn’t mind if she weren’t bumped so often.
Hasty pedestrians wore a mad kaleidoscope of clothing: spider-silk robes open to reveal deflector vests, taped boiled leather, chainmail hoods paired with slippery satin tracksuits. Some, either brave or daft, walked the rubbish-sprinkled streets barefoot.
Someone jostled her again.
Yes, I do hate this city, Margaret decided.
The bumper of an auto nearly introduced itself to her knees, and her gasp came out of the respirator as a honk. She gave the driver a not-very-nice gesture, which was returned in kind, and splashed on through deceptively deep puddles to the far curb.
She missed Geyser. People were generally pleasant, and the air didn’t smell like a stew of exhaust and sickness. Plus you could actually see the sky, not just a basket weave of wires and pipes overhead. All streets in her home city, reaching from the square like spokes of a wheel, offered a view of the horizon: on a clear day, Jagged Bay in its white-capping splendor, the mist-hugged mountains on the mainland. Wondrous. But so far away now.
Finally, she made it. In buzzing neon: The Bejeweled Talon Pub.
Stepping inside, she felt as if that choking churn of Lowtown Adeshka had spat her free. Her ears rang in the sudden quiet, all conversation paused. Unable to discern how many people were actually here within the smoky murk, Margaret forced a confident stride.
When something warm drew a line down her neck, she clapped a hand over it. She wondered for a moment if it was raining here inside but noticed the volume of hunched Cynoscions bellied up to the bar, clutching flagons in their small, nimble pincers. They’d halt drinking on occasion to crane back, eye-stalks angling upward, and breathe deep the misty air. The stuff must’ve carried vapors of home, just as a salty breeze would’ve brought Geyser to Margaret right about now.
High on the wall, ethereal blue holodigits displayed the time for every major territory on Gleese. She was pleasantly surprised to see she was early. She’d gotten lost several times since the port. One particular set of digits yelled out to her—those giving the time for the Lakebed. Barely morning there, where Clyde was. Please be okay . . .
Continuing, she snapped off her respirator, let it dangle around her neck, and was shocked by the state of its filters. A single hour’s walk and the once-white cotton had been stained to muddy brown. Well, better than your lungs.
Flinging her cloak over one shoulder, she passed the row of booths set into alcoves along the back. Each had a pinch of privacy. The ghostly-glowing beaded curtains rattled like dry bones as she brushed through them.
She looked in on the cozy little cubby. Lush red leather hooked around a knife-gouged table. Words flicked above in the vacant space. In holoscript: Reserved for Coog McPhearson.
The defector pirate made reservations. Quite the gentleman.
Letting the curtain fall back, she had a seat, removed her engagement ring, and pocketed it. With it, she put away Margaret Mallencroix and became Nevele once more, and waited.
An hour later, Nevele dropped a palm to the grubby tabletop, pinning the plastic coins.
The pirate observed her hand, then trailed his gaze up the rest of her, taking note of her arm. Coog’s jaundice-yellow eyes bulged.
She knew how it looked—it being her arm and all—a map of interweaving cuts stitched with twine, string, and dark thread. Odd, sure. She was still getting used to her fabrick. Had been for over twenty years. But to someone who’d never seen her, she looked like she’d been flung into the engine air intake of a starship. If they only knew.
“Fifty spots, as requested,” she said.
“Well, I’m not so sure.”
“Either you’re talking or you’re not.”
“Aye, but it’s of Geyser minting,” he whined, sitting back. “What’m I suppose to do with that shite?”
“Have it changed,” she said, nodding toward the pub’s far corner.
While waiting for him to arrive, she’d watched people sulkily approach the Flashcraft with all sorts of things: old clothes, dinnerware, batteries filched from autos. After the machine ran a flickering pulse over the offering, it absorbed it with a flimp, and spewed forth its worth in Adeshka coinage, rattling like a machinegun. Or, if you preferred, the instapawn machine could rematerialize something of equal value: interstellar passports, self-cooking meals, clothes, guns. Most preferred the cold, hard coin.
The traitor pirate turned back, trying to contain a smile. No doubt seeing the instapawn, haloed by the fug, was like stumbling upon the end of the rainbow, its golden bounty so close. After all, fifty spots of Geyser coin changed to Adeshka currency would fetch a decent haul. Might even come out ahead.
“Sold.” Through the bottles he’d accumulated during their haggle, his greasy fingers reached hers, which she kept pressed flat.
With a malignant twinkle in his eye, the same that all creepy men use thinking it makes them charming, Coog stroked her thumb. “Cold feet?”
“Info first.”
The waitress clattered through the beaded curtain. Tattoos raced down the sinewy arm that delivered another bottle of Lenny’s Pale Ale.
Before she slipped off, Coog grabbed the woman’s wrist. “Hold up. You got chark bars here?”
“Not on hand. Might check that thing over there.” She indicated the instapawn with a sidelong nod and, with a shrug, pulled herself free. “And anything else . . . besides the water for you, miss?” She’d hesitated—must’ve really looked at Nevele this time.
Nevele fixed her gaze on Coog. “No.”
Despite the shouts for beverages, the waitress lingered. From her periphery, Nevele confirmed she was making that face they always did: dead-eyed gawping as if she were a bad auto wreck.
“Take a picture.”
The waitress choked on an apology, mumbled something about good night because her shift was over, and
was off.
“Rude lass,” Coog said, the curtain swaying. “Personally, I like my beauties with a few den
ts in the fenders. Truth, I prefer them to—”
“Info.”
His laugh was like a horse choking on a brick. “You know, I could just lie. Tell you any day and time.”
“Oh, I have faith in you.” Due to the stitches, her smile—even when faked—was a little crooked.
“That’s sweet o’ you. But why’s that, love? Been told I don’t possess what you’d call a real trustworthy look.” He stroked her hand again.
“Why? Because right now you can feel something crawling up your left trouser leg . . .”
His smile collapsed, thumb stilled. “Eh?”
“You figured it was probably an itch brought on by bone worms or something, but this? This feels different, doesn’t it?”
Coog’s face fell further.
Nevele’s too, except literally—her stitches were gone from her cheek. The skin panels detached as she urged the threads down the tributaries of cuts on her neck, her left shoulder and arm, into her free hand under the table, then out, around the table’s legs and up the pirate’s.
Each string was a raw crawling nerve, her cartographers mapping by curious touch. His legs were scabby. Here and there, weeping bandages. She stopped only when one of Coog’s eyes involuntarily squinted, twitchy.
“So if you fancy leaving with all of yourself intact,” she said, “I’d recommend not fibbing. I have an ear for it.”
He took his hand off hers. Finally. “They’re planning an attack. Got a warhead. From the Mole Hole armory last year.” He attempted a nonchalant sip of beer, but the bottle’s dregs sloshed in his grasp. He pushed it aside, movements both tight and tremulous.
“What sort of warhead?” She had a slight lisp now with her bottom lip coming unmoored. A sharp nod swung a banner of auburn hair forward.
“A big one.”
“And what’s their intent?”
“Remodel the guest bathroom. What do you think they’d do with a warhead?”
She gave him a warning squeeze.
Coog didn’t shout, but his cheeks grew pink. “They’re going to topple Geyser,” he quickly elaborated. “Not so hard, eh? Those don’t grow back, you know.”
“Don’t you shites ever get bored of killing innocent people?”
“It’s not for sport this time. We—they, I mean—have Gorett now. And the good king—wouldn’t you know it, the generous wank—promised them the wendal stone. Half the deposit, fifty-fifty.”
“It’s not his to give. Tell me their plan, or I’ll return the money to my bag and be on my merry way—with a set of new additions.” Squeeze.
“All right. Bloody hell, all right. They got drills and the rest o’ the gear ready, okay? And snapping Geyser off its stem would make it easier to get at. Just go straight down, drag it out. That’s what the warhead’s for. Like you’d blast-mine, except . . . bigger.”
“And after? Can’t take a deposit that size anywhere expecting to get it appraised—let alone sold off—without raising the alarm. They’d know precisely where it came from.”
He shook his head, sweat dotting the table in small foggy hemispheres. “They’re not getting it appraised. Or selling it. They want to use it.”
“For what? Prop open an enormous door somewhere?”
“To make weavers. Now if you’d just ease up—”
“What?” Just for suggesting such an absurd thing, another squeeze. “Go ahead. Give me your best explanation as to how your friends could possibly make weavers using wendal stone.”
“Think about it.” Coog mopped his brow with a cuff. “Why do so many o’ you pop up in Geyser? Something’s in the water.”
Flam’s uncle Greenspire had claimed a similar thing. And it was—according to the old Mouflon—how one Blatta had been able to give live birth. Man and insect spending so much time together in shared proximity to the deposit, living right on top of it for generations. But she’d never really believed it, since this was coming from a Mouflon whose mind had been chewed by cabin fever—or cavern fever, as it were.
But even if it did sound impossible, wendal stone’s properties had hardly been studied. It was valuable in its rarity. Never had she heard any other reason to covet it.
“Hypothetically speaking, if the stone does cause the genetic whatever to happen,” Nevele said, “you can’t just get a handful of the stuff and make a weaver. I mean, how weavers come about has been documented. It gets passed down on the mother’s side. And even then it’s not always guaranteed to show.”
“Aye, but how does the theoretical weaver mama have that certain something in her to pop out a theoretical weaver knee biter? Gotta do that homework.”
“And Dreck has done this? The homework? I’d be floored if the man could even sing the Common alphabet song.”
Coog’s lips curled. Leftover reverence for his ex-captain? “Well, he seemed pretty confident to me.”
“But how? Powder some up each morning, sprinkle it over their morning toast, and see what happens in a few eons?” She snorted. “Plus, it’d require your lot to breed—something I can’t imagine any woman being real keen on.”
“No breeding required,” he said, sad. “A few scientists Dreck had us nab ran some tests. They confirmed it, nodded all the way up until we zilched them.”
Nevele suppressed a cringe. “All right. Well, it’s pretty plain to me. Pirates are dumb. Fact. And really, it’s not going to matter much what their plan is or how many scientists lied to him thinking they’d get out with their lives, because no one’s getting the stone—so it’s not even worth worrying about.” Why do I sound like I’m trying to convince myself? “But for fun, hypothetically speaking, how?” Squeeze. “How?”
“F-Father Time,” he blurted.
Tales about Ernest Höwerglaz ranged from outlandish to ludicrous. One particularly insane one said he traveled to far-flung off-chart planetoids with nothing but a water dropper and a petri dish and, by unloading a few millennia he’d soaked into himself, effectively become a one-man world seeder. Others suggested he was the quantum engineer of the cosmos, patriarch to the great Everything, who, done world making, had settled in Nessapolis. To Nevele, a staunch realist, that was all make-believe, the malarkey prime.
Then again, she was engaged to a man who, for nearly twenty years, had been nothing but a myth himself. Part of her must’ve believed Höwerglaz was real if she’d allowed Clyde to go looking to recruit the mythical weaver. No reason to let Coog know any of that.
“Sorry. I call bunk.” And squeeze.
“It’s not,” Coog said, a sudden soprano.
A Cynoscion, though a hard-of-hearing species, must’ve caught that shrill note and angled an eye-stalk over a stony shoulder. Nevele waited until the stalk flipped back, returning its beady gaze to a plankton-whiskey cocktail.
“Even if Höwerglaz is real,” Nevele whispered, leaning in, “and that’s a big if, what use would he be in Dreck’s plan?”
“The story goes that Father Time can take and give years, aye? Far as I understand it, let’s say you take a bloke and put him alongside a piece of the stone. Then have Father Time rewind the years out of him and put them back, over and over and over. Forced evolution, skipping the regular, slow kind.”
Her scalp went tingly. Whether she believed it’d work or not didn’t matter; the prospect was scary enough. Dreck Javelin backed by his own army of weavers?
“So”—she paused to swallow—“when are they going to start looking for Höwerglaz?”
“No starting to it,” Coog replied, amused. “I’ve been out of the club for a week now, so who’s to say they haven’t already found him?”
Something zipped tight in Nevele’s mind, like a wire noose. Clyde. He might be inside Nessapolis’s city limits by now. Alone. Possibly hurt or worse. She blamed herself; she’d been the one to tell Clyde the Höwerglaz legend.
She raised her chin, ready with her next question, but faltered.
Amid the forest of empty bottles, a gun barrel peeked out. Bottles clinked as
the fluted barrel grinded over the tabletop.
Coog’s opposite hand returned to cover Nevele’s. Again with the dreadful thumb stroking. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind removing yourself from my unmentionables, I’ll have my pay and be off.” He tried prying his filth-rimmed fingernails under her hand. Failing, he clicked back the gun’s hammer. “Only got another hour on my ship’s parking spot, dearie.”
He won’t shoot you here. He’d never make it back to the port before the guardsmen got him. Which is exactly why she’d arranged to meet here. “First, when’s the attack going to be?”
“Sorry. Be another fifty for that bit.”
“And when did we agree on that?”
“You new? Feller with the shooter sets the rules.”
With a rattle of beads, a shadow spilled across the table. Waitress again, but a different one, just as thin but less inked. “Hey, guys. Let me clear some of this up.” She removed two bottles at a time, depositing them into a tub latched against her hip. She noticed the joined hands on the table. “Date, huh? That’s sweet.”
Nevele and Coog stared at one another. As each bottle crashed into the tub, the pirate flinched.
The waitress’s hand recoiled. “Uh, we have a policy about weapons here, sir.”
Eyes on Nevele, the pirate snarled, “Leave us.”
“There’s a sign,” the waitress said shakily, “in all languages spoken in Adeshka: guns are prohibited in this establishment.”
“Listen to the nice lady.” Nevele batted her eyelashes. “Wouldn’t want to spoil our night out, would you, love muffin?”
“Give me my due. I talked.”
“When are they going to attack? Date and time.” The pirate’s hand was warm and moist.
“I won’t repeat myself—”
“P-please, if you’ll just give it to the bartender, you’ll get it b-back once the tab’s been—”
“Give me the spots,” the pirate said, louder. “And get these bloody strings out from around my—”
“When, Coog? When?”
