by Tanya Huff
Torin turned to Ressk, his face lifted into the wind, eyes and nostril ridges slitted nearly shut.
“What?” he asked. “You think we only have trees on Harask, Gunny? We have oceans. Four of them. And rivers. And lakes.”
She knew that.
“Look, Yeen!” Binti pointed at long, lithe shapes moving parallel to the ship just under the surface of the water, rounded curves and translucent flukes rising and falling amidst the waves.
Squinting, trying to pick out a definitive feature, Torin decided to take Binti’s word on the species. Three members of the Confederation were water breathers, but the Primacy had never attacked a wet world, so the Corps had never deployed to one and Paradise had been rejected after offering her seas for colonies. Before Colonel Hurrs, Torin had believed the water breathers had rejected Paradise because her seas had been too cold or too salty or too warm or not salty enough. Now, she suspected it had more to do with the 2.8 billion Human inhabitants.
“I bet they let the Yeen land in a shuttle,” Craig muttered.
“Or they filled the tether with water. It’s waterproof,” Alamber added.
“Do I want to know how you know that?”
“If you can’t figure it out, I have serious concerns about your ability to extrapolate from known data.” He laughed when Craig flipped him off. “I checked before we docked.” The wind moved Alamber’s ribbons in long sinuous arcs his hair tried to copy. “There’s always seats on the freight tether.”
“I don’t like being dependent on someone else’s schedule.”
“What’s the difference between that and taking the shuttle to and from Paradise?” Torin wondered.
He braced his forearms on the railing. “We weren’t working on Paradise.”
Although they were working here on Abalae, there should be nothing in this part of the job that would require them to leave suddenly, on their own schedule. Of course, should was one of those words that got people killed, Torin acknowledged, watching a huge white sea bird dip down to touch the crest of a wave.
A spear thrust up out of the water and red bloomed against the white. The bird hit the water, floated for a moment on the surface, and then abruptly disappeared.
“Seriously?” Alamber snorted. “You know their interstellar craft use an independently developed version of the Susumi drive, right? They can bend space and they hunt with a spear. That’s just wrong.”
“That was a sport hunter, nothing to do with tech level. Or don’t your people fish?” Werst asked when Alamber made a disgusted noise.
“Kill for fun?” His eyes were so light Torin wondered if he could see, and his hair flattened so tightly against his head she could see the curve of his skull. “That’s barbaric!”
“You know, for an ex-criminal . . .” Torin moved away from the railing and tucked him into the circle of her arms. “. . . you have a number of interesting blind spots.”
“I never killed anyone,” he protested, the fine tremors shaking his body beginning to ease with physical contact. “And even Big Bill didn’t kill for fun.”
Torin had her doubts about that, but decided to keep them to herself.
“You know what would make me feel better?” he asked after a few minutes.
“Yes.” She shifted Alamber into Craig’s arms and checked his masker. “But Binti’s gone to find food, so you’ll have to settle for that.”
The transport station had been built over the end of the dock, a sturdy structure covered in photovoltaic panels, large enough for passengers to disembark inside. While the station could have easily been automated, a dozen Trun in transport uniforms stopped working and watched as they crossed from the landing to the ticket counter. At a glance from Torin, Alamber peeled off and advanced toward them, smiling his most distracting smile, one hand at the pheromone masker at his throat.
“Lower it one mark only,” she’d told him. “We have no idea how the Trun will react . . .” All mammals reacted. “. . . and we only want them happy enough to answer a few questions.”
“Maybe that’s all you want,” he’d sighed.
“Six seats.” Craig touched his slate to the counter and two fingers to the plastic casing around the edge of the screen. “Commerce Three, Section Eighteen.”
The Trun who ran the transaction slid six pieces of actual paper across the counter, half turned, and murmured something that sounded distinctly uncomplimentary to zir companion. When zi looked back, Torin met zir eyes. And smiled.
Zir eyes widened. “Details . . .” Zi swallowed and tried again. “Details have been sent to your slates, Visitor.”
“Thank you.”
“Sure.” Zir tail wound around the other Trun’s. “I mean, you’re welcome, Visitor.”
“Letting them know they can’t trash talk Humans?” Craig asked as they walked away.
“Letting them know they can’t trash talk us,” Torin snorted. “Humanity’s on its own.”
Transport turned out to be a maglev train, much like the ones on the stations and the larger of the Navy’s destroyers. The trains, like the tether, were set up predominately to carry freight, the four-link trains tagged Learning, Discovery, Commerce, and Nature, looking distinctly second class beside the sleek metal platforms being loaded with crates. Arguing about their baggage, the Niln climbed into Learning, the Rakva family boarded Nature. The team had Commerce to themselves.
The link’s seats had been designed for tails, but were comfortable enough for those species without. Everything was worn, rubbed smooth by use. In spite of the lingering scent of powerful cleansers, the interior had the grubby patina of a link too long in service. Torin touched one of the faded red plastic seats that made up a row of four along one outside wall before she sat, her back to the window, her reflection in the window across the car.
“They really don’t like anything in the air, do they?” Craig touched and sat on her right.
“Ground transport allows greater control of visitors.” She touched the seat to her left and silently acknowledged that touching every seat would border on obsessive. “We’re confined, at their discretion, to a five-by-three–meter compartment.”
“And that doesn’t sound at all ominous,” Werst muttered as he and Ressk sat in the two seats at the end of their row facing the direction of travel.
Binti took a seat across the aisle. “At least we’re not heading into a war zone.”
Torin had led them to the middle of the car so they couldn’t be cornered, movement preferable even over the possibility of being surrounded. Without a heavy gunner, it was easier to fight through flesh than a solid wall. Not that they’d have to.
“Did I mention those tails are fully prehensile?” Alamber reached up and pressed his palms flat against the ceiling. The Trun, while not as short as the Krai, weren’t tall. “I am really looking forward to a test drive. What?” he demanded when Werst snorted. “Plenty of people spill secrets after sex.”
“He has a point.” Ressk admitted. “You told him about our . . .”
Werst’s nostril ridges flared. “That was not a secret.”
None of Torin’s business. “Have the workers at the terminal seen any . . .”
“Of us?” Alamber’s head moved one way, his hair moved another. “No. Looks more and more like they spent the lolly to take another tether.”
“Lolly?” Torin asked.
Alamber nodded at Craig. “He says it.”
“And you’re working on a new dialect?”
“Might come in handy.”
Torin couldn’t argue with that.
As a bland, species-nonspecific voice began listing the behavior expected while the train was in motion, Binti shook her head. “Low rent tether aside, this is not the rough and ready free trade sort of place you’d expect grave . . . antique hunters to resupply at.”
“Maybe th
at’s why they came.” Torin frowned up at an ad for a spa on its second loop through a dozen static-filled images. “No chance of being caught up in a sweep by the Wardens. Or maybe this is rough and ready for the Core worlds. How would we know?”
At almost five hundred kilometers an hour . . .
“This train is moving faster than the tether.” Ressk glanced up from his slate. “Does no one else find that strange?”
. . . the windows were opaque unless specifically touched transparent. Werst tapped the glass clear, dark, clear, dark, clear, dark until Torin reached over and grabbed his wrist.
“Stop that, or I’ll puke in your lap.”
Krai didn’t get motion sick. Or space sick. Or, apparently flickering images going by too fast to really focus on, sick. Neither did gunnery sergeants, but Torin wasn’t willing to completely discount the possibility.
At the first station, they were instructed to remain seated while five people entered the link. Two Trun. Three Katrien. The Katrien Torin saw OutSector were plush, their fur thick and dark with silver tips, their hands and feet glossy black. These three had sleeker fur without the silver, their hands and feet a deep brown, the darker masks around their eyes and muzzle less distinctive. The glasses protecting their sensitive eyes from the light weren’t mirrored but after a moment’s thought Torin realized that might be one of Presit’s affectations rather than a species imperative. The Katrien reporter liked to make an impression. All three fell silent as they realized who they were about to share the link with, then turning their backs, began talking at once, their voices rising quickly into the cat fight range. The Trun, however, huddled silently at the far left of the link, tails entwined.
Binti flicked her eyes in their direction. Torin shook her head, willing to bet, in spite of unfamiliar physiognomy, the Trun looked wary, not threatening.
At the next stop, two adults and a juvenile Trun stepped on at the far right end of the link, looked around, and, hair up and ears flat, froze in place. They jerked as the doors shut and finally sat as the train started to move. Before the train was fully out of the station, the youngster knelt on the seat and stared over the back. When Torin smiled, without showing teeth, zir eyes widened but before any further contact could be made, a tail dragged zir down into the seat.
The next stop was close enough the train hadn’t time to reach full speed and the car was three quarters full when they pulled away. They were still the only members of the Younger Races present and the seats around them remained empty.
“Are you a Marine?”
Torin looked up from her slate. She’d been watching the youngster approach, wondering how far zi’d make it before the adults noticed zi was gone. “I was.”
“Was it scary?”
“Sometimes.”
“Oh.” Holding zir tail in one hand, zi stroked the orange tip with the other. “My kada says there wasn’t no reason for there to be a war.”
“There wasn’t.”
Zi cocked zir head, golden eyes wide. “Then why did you go and fight?”
“We thought there was a reason.”
“Were you wrong?”
Sliding through the spectrum and then fading back into gray, the alien mass rose in the middle, rounded the crest, extruded two short arms, and created a vaguely bipedal shape. It turned its minimal face toward the camera and blinked gray on gray eyes. “It takes time to collect sufficient data on new species. Creating extreme situations erases all but essential behaviors and shortens the duration of the study.”
“Yes.” Torin dried her palms against her thighs. “We were wrong.”
“My kada says your kind can’t stop fighting. My kada says you fight like nunnurs in spring.”
The rest of the team was listening in. She could feel their attention. “And what are my kind?”
“Like you. Big with boots.” Zi pointed at the Krai’s bare feet. “And like them. Littler with no big boots. Or hair.”
“And what’s a nunnur?”
Zi cocked zir head, the markings on zir brow folding into a double-u. “You don’t know?”
“I’ve never been to Abalae before.”
“Oh. Nunnurs are little.” Zi dropped zir tail and brought zir cupped hands close together. “And soft. With short puffy tails and big, big feet.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
Zi leaned closer. “I petted one once. Zi tried to bite me. They have lots of pointy teeth. Your boots are very shiny.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you have toes?”
All members of the Confederation spoke Federate. Most also spoke another, species-determinate language. Trun was a deep bass line, languidly rhythmic even when being growled at a protesting child scooped up by arms and tail and returned very quickly back to the other end of the car.
“Cute kid.” Craig pressed his shoulder against Torin’s. “Don’t think I like zir kada, though.”
“I’m more than my boots,” Alamber grumbled.
“This is not what I expected.”
The station at Commerce Three, Section Eighteen was a larger copy of the oceanfront station. Grubbier, smellier—both Krai had their nostril ridges nearly shut and Alamber’s hair had begun to flip back and forth in small, jerky arcs—but essentially the same. A crowd of several species surged past them to get onto the car, the barriers that had once kept the arriving and departing apart having been snapped off, leaving nothing but jagged ridges on the floor.
“They’re not all going to fit,” Werst grumbled, glaring a Trun out of his way.
“Not our problem,” Torin told him. It wasn’t an evacuation, people fighting their way onto the last ship out of a burning port. They’d be fine. “If you want to worry about something, worry about how far we are from the tether and how we’re dependent on the links to get back.”
“Thanks a fukking lot, Gunny.”
She grinned. “No problem.” But now he’d be keeping an eye out for a vehicle they could commandeer if things went down the shitter. Not that things should. And there was that word again.
The early evening air outside the station was warm and humid under a low, gray cloud cover.
“Fukking hell.” Werst snapped his nose ridges shut as Ressk began to sneeze.
Breathing through her mouth, Torin grabbed one of Alamber’s ribbons, dragged him back out of the station, and led the way down the stained stairs. “We’ll get used to it.”
He had a hand clamped over his mouth and nose. “I don’t want to get used to it, Boss.”
Three roads that began at the half circle below the station divided Section Eighteen into thirds. The roads had originally been broad avenues but had been divided in turn by stalls and carts, a jumbled mass of wood and plastic and metal that may have started out mobile, but over time had become permanent. It reminded Torin of the ships that made up the structure of the salvage station Craig used to call home and, from his expression, she’d bet he was thinking the same.
The prevailing smell—although by no means the only smell—was hot oil and frying meat. The stalls and carts selling food were surrounded by harried looking people—mostly Trun but some Katrien and Niln—pushing forward, yelling out their orders, and making it clear they had no time to waste. Given the scrum, Torin was impressed the Truns’ tails didn’t knot with their neighbors. Most wore the minimal harness of Commerce workers and the steady stream of snacking Trun heading for the train suggested they’d arrived at a shift change.
The three- and four-story buildings lining the roads were made of stone and wood—both probably harvested to create the section’s plateau. On the other side of the station, great rocky ridges rose to the sky fringed with trees that caused the Krai’s eyes to widen.
“If we have time and there’s a nature sector close enough . . .” Werst’s voice was as close to awe as Torin had ever heard it. �
�. . . I wouldn’t mind a closer look at those trees.”
“With luck, we’ll get some down time when we’re done.”
“Yeah, but, Gunny . . .” Ressk paused to sneeze. “. . . we’re here now.”
“Here and now, we’re working.”
It was late enough the lights had begun to come on, breaking the chaos into even smaller pieces. This looked more like the sort of place an illegal artifact might be sold, although Torin still had a problem getting around the distance from the tether. It was the closest Commerce Sector to the tether, however, so she would have to be satisfied with that.
“Room first,” she decided. “Then food. Then we find out who blew into town with the biscuit warmer.” Which continued to sound ridiculous.
Ressk sneezed twice. “Who’d look for a high-end preConfederation piece in this?”
“The best pieces are found at the worst stores. Because,” Alamber continued before anyone could ask, “most of them are acquired illegally, so it’s not like they’re going to be sold at high-end, squeaky clean places, are they?”
“How do you know?” Werst asked.
“Hello? Big Bill? Vrijheid Station? Illicit gains?” Alamber’s hair spread out and settled as he sighed. “You people are so sheltered.”
There were three Trun waiting for them at the edge of the plaza. Not Wardens. Wardens maintained the law between the worlds—until they couldn’t; then they called in Torin and her team. These were quite obviously the local equivalent. Someone at the station had called ahead and this was what the bargain basement Commerce Sector could field at short notice.
When they moved to block the way, Ressk murmured, “They’re called facilitators. The baton on their belt is a stun gun.”
“Visitors.” The shortest of the three stepped forward. Torin stopped about three meters away, heard the others spread out behind her. “Welcome to Section Eighteen, Commerce Three.” The voice was unexpectedly deep for zir size. Torin touched the place where the cylinders of ash should be. The facilitator reminded her of Captain Rose. “What,” zi continued, tail tip lashing, “brings you here?”
