The Horseshoe Nail (The Donn Book 1)

by S Thomson-Hillis

  * * *

  In a dimly lit cabin aboard the huge flagship Imperious of the Union’s Peacekeeping Fleet, a lonely man shot out of sleep. Who’s there? he gasped, who’s there?

  There had been no Donn calls since his family had been culled by the Autocracy and he’d felt them die in agony, one by one. The Donn were dead and gone. He was the very last and that fact had poisoned all his years. So why? Who? Someone was screaming, lost in a terror so fierce it cut. Who’s there, demanded Mark Macluan, again and again, who’s there?

  But no one answered.

  * * *

  The Union Peacekeeping Fleet patrolled the outer reaches of its galactic territory and was the base for the scouts who’d surprised Harth Norn’s beacon. They’d reported and their commander decided to send on a team to check the signal’s estimated destination. He’d chosen a two man UC-I team, nearly reaching the end of their present duty-spell and worn out both by each other and the cramped conditions of their ship, a tiny ZR-2. UC stood for UnderCover Operations, their division, and UC-I should have meant a crack team. The leader was a tall, dark naval commander from Scolos, Tam Harris. His younger pilot was a sandy youth called Sim Edger, fresh out of training and downright soggy behind the ears.

  The new mission was not going down well.

  “Solly found it?” Tam Harris was shocked. He’d done his basic training with Solly Dennis and the man generally couldn’t find his arse with a spotlight. “Damn,” he muttered, “and it’s still working?” The signal’s tag showed it had been sent by one of Imperious’ better Communications officers, Timmis, famous for not messing things up, so it was a fair bet. “We’re off. Chasing some beacon Solly Dennis’ UC-III team tripped over and set off.”

  “We’re going home,” objected Edger. “Two days and we go home.”

  Harris sighed and sent the coded Roll acknowledging the mission. “All we need to do is check out message destination. We’re in the right sector at the wrong time. Co-ordinates downloaded to cone,” he added as a comforting blip told him that the necessary information was installed in the navi-computer. Then, with his fingers poised but without bated breath, he waited. “Pick them up and lay in the course, please,” he tacked on a minute later. That should have gone without saying but with Edger you usually needed to dot the I and cross the T.

  The young man snarled something unbroadcastable, groaned theatrically and stabbed a thumb at a cone on his board. “Harth Norn,” he pronounced eventually. “Wow. Harth Norn at last, I can hardly wait.” A hand flapped lethargically. “One hell of a world, Harth Norn.”

  “Never heard of it,” replied Harris, trying to defrost his smile. “Are you going to calculate us a Bylanes window or shall we wait for one to form naturally about us?”

  * * *

  Imperious ran a twenty-four hour day system which kept most of its crew more or less happy and healthy for most of its two-year tour. You can’t please all the people all the time, especially when diverse an understatement. At any rate, ship’s time dictated it was early morning and two old friends inspected the duty-spell’s bulletin board for current postings. It was a mounted display panel next to the lift for convenience, supposedly at an average eye-level. Both men were tall enough to look down on it but only one was bothering.

  “You look how I feel.” HStJ Jenson tapped the board impatiently. He was a mousy-haired, beaky-nosed Wing Leader in Flight Command. Finding the postings took a few minutes as his friend, propped up by his shoulders on the bulkhead after the lift and muffling a yawn, ceded to UnderCover Operations and their names were tagged in different areas.

  Mark Macluan watched cynically, wondering if Jenson was going to use that nose of his on the board. He’d had done flakier things in his time. It was kind of a trademark.

  “Which is?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question. His friend was clearly suffering. Imperious was a big ship, there were lots of ways to party and Jenson was ingenious.

  The pilot screwed up his face thinking up a reply that wouldn’t earn him a verbal black-eye. “Dead beat,” he decided finally. “Many hard nights on the trot. But you, you’re the clean living, upstanding type. You don’t look like this without good reason. Remember?”

  To be fair, the theory didn’t hold much water. Mark could recall days when merely waking up had dramatically accelerated his aging process but, as it happened, this wasn’t one of them. This was something different and still far too personal for sharing. “Can you actually focus on the duty-roll or do I have to sort out where we’re working this spell?”

  “Temper,” chided Jenson. “I’m on standard recall and you,” with a solemnly sarcastic thumbs-up, “you lucky devil, are on the bridge with the Admiral, yet again. Once more.”

  Macluan nodded cheerfully enough. If he was honest he still favoured field ops but military administration, acting as Executive Officer on High Admiral Eban Krystie’s bridge, brought promotion a step closer and, very quietly, he was studying for the test. Frankly, anything was better than the diplomatic post hanging over his fair head like a storm.

  Jenson was busily trawling for gossip when he should’ve known better. “What is she?” he probed daringly. “Blonde, brunette, redhead or something a little more exotic?”

  He got a dirty look. “Call the lift.”

  “Not till you tell me why you’re dead in the water.” The lift was on its way.

  “It’s just a feeling.” Lift doors opened, the interior column was empty, they swung in and Jenson thumbed for the respective levels. “It may turn out to be something I ate.”

  “A feeling?” The floor rippled like troubled waters beneath Jenson’s feet. Mark’s feelings invariably led to trouble. There had been times when his Donn intuition had saved them from chaos, of course, but Jenson never remembered that when things kicked off.

  “What kind of feelings are we talking? The usual portents of war? Or peace, joy and goodwill? Bonus leave all round? Emir Carolli and the Diplomats being recalled?”

  “Nope.” As the lift demanded ID for restricted command levels, Macluan flicked the sensor with a sigh. “It’s not good whatever it is, but then,” shrugging, “I may be wrong.”

  “Wrong? When were you ever wrong? Minders aren’t, it’s in with the job specs. You feel things we don’t – the Donn feel things – and then they happen. When do we leave?”

  This time the look turned the grey eyes into industrial lasers.

  They didn’t let up even when Jenson produced his best eager-and-trusty-sidekick grin.

  “We don’t.” Doors yawned and Macluan gratefully took a fluid sidestep onto the restricted passages leading to Imperious’ bridge. “Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

  The doors slid closed behind him.

  * * *

  Tye Beven leaned an enormous elbow on the shiny counter and surveyed his empty tavern gloomily. Things had gone very quiet after the shock of the Dome’s appearance. Trade was not good, dire was a better description, and he was beginning to wish he hadn’t got carried away buying the fine new centrepiece to his bar. It was an overhead three dimensional (Tri-D) representation of three different species, a human blonde, a Dimitrion and a Psamin, doing what most biologists reckoned was, at best, medically inadvisable. Hanging from the dingy ceiling like a coffin, it was controlled by an image-fazer at the end of the bar and had cost a fortune to install. He was glumly aware it was going to be tough to recoup the outlay.

  “Sheek? This is no good, no good at all. Where is everyone tonight?”

  The Giagosian bartender sighed and twiddled his beer in his hands. “Dunno, boss.”

  They were probably at home where every right-minded soul should be in this weather.

  “Hmmm,” rumbled Beven. A sudden thought struck. “Seen Minon lately?”

  Minon had collected a faction of hungry-looking scavengers and seemed to be entertaining them in Tye’s bar. Fair enough, they spent credit, but you didn’t get to be Tye Beven, purveyor of entertainment par excellence, without spotting tr
ouble on your patch.

  “Giving out Shiny Ears on the docks?” suggested Sheek, effortlessly tracking Beven’s drift and adjusting his Universal Translator so he could home in on the boss, not the distant table of maudlin drunks he’d been previously screening. His gaze locked on to Tye’s ear. Folk paid thousands to get rid of a real Autocracy Shiny Ear, a tricky extraction with no guarantees of survival. As Sheek watched Beven’s fingers wandered to the lobe and brushed the tiny scar thoughtfully. The Giagosian’s gaze scorched hot and Tye scowled fiercely.

  “Never mind, give it a couple of weeks,” Sheek said hastily, “and they’ll be forming a queue from here to Nicksies marsh. You’ll see. We’ll make sure of that.”

  Sipping his A-vine silently, Tye considered, his jowls wobbling as he savoured.

  The result of his trawl was very disappointing.

  After wasting days in recovery much of the new stock had ended up insane.

  They were a waste of time and trouble and Beven had found it expedient to be picky.

  There was no place for nutters in the modern hospitality industry.

  Forty or so had been originally taken, about twenty tolerated revitalisation but only ten were what you might call viable. One of the first to recover, not the sharpest or shiniest penny in the purse, was a woman so plain Tye had no idea how she’d scraped past their initial selection. No matter, she earned her keep in the kitchen as well as serving in the bar when the inn got busy and he’d nicknamed her the Drudge. But you never could tell could you? She pulled punters despite being the stringiest heap of misery he’d ever clapped eyes on.

  Tye wasn’t going to revive any new stock until this lot started making profits and he knew for certain sure that nobody unwelcome was sniffing around his secret stockroom.

  It was only a matter of time, after all.

  Sheek was right. Sheek always was. Trade would look up soon enough.

  Where would Tye Beven be without Sheek?

  He lifted his glass to the Giag. “I’ll drink to that.”

  Chapter Three

  Days passed.

  Weeks passed.

  Ellis Matheson kept her head down and worked a pitch at Tye’s inn. The situation was survival and her father, Kai, had always vowed his daughter was one part devious, one part stubborn but all survivor. He was right. Since she’d been dragged out of the near fatal cryogenic process, she’d faced horror, time-lag, displacement and the total loss of her species. Believing she was the last Donn was bad enough but losing Kai was worse. After her mother’s sudden death there had only been the two of them and they’d been close. The Donn reaction to death was extreme. They called it Death Verb and it was a head-trap, an assassin. Kai was dead. His place was void and her life was a splintered bone. Staying upright was winning given the odds but Ellis wasn’t sure she was standing that straight.

  Ellis Matheson masked up and became Tye Beven’s Drudge.

  Creating a mask was the oldest trick in a Donn’s repertoire, rather like cloaking a ship, but far more risky. It was all smoke and mirrors but smoke and mirrors on a scale that made you dizzy and very often the mind rebelled. The technique sapped energy, it had never been meant for long-term use and Ellis had been weak to start with. She’d held her mask steady (more or less) since the first morning but it was slowly grinding her down.

  Her job was largely behind the scenes in the kitchen but earlier it had got busy and she’d been turfed into the bar to wait tables, amongst other duties. Everything could be bought at Tye Beven’s, except Sheek. He kept count for Tye and don’t you forget it.

  Ellis made sure that her services had been bought that night.

  It was late, oh so late, never mind the time. She leaned against the pitted wall next to the ill-fitting window frame of attic thirty-three on Tye’s top floor, dully counting loose slates on the rumble-tumble roof. Sheek allocated a room to a worker and felt that thirty-three, the pits of hell under the eves, best befitted the Drudge. Behind her on the rumpled bed lay the man she’d lulled into sleep. Persuasion, like tinkering with perception, was a Donn skill. When she was too bone-weary to carry on, she’d pick a likely suspect to book a good time, whisk him upstairs and straight into a dream-filled sleep. Thus she rested and replenished waning life-force. Customer satisfaction was high, Ellis was a trained adept who, even exhausted and sick, could take a snapshot of a man’s imagination and play it like a violin.

  Tiles tumbled haphazardly down to the rain-butt and she traced their reflection with a finger tip on the dirty pane. The nail scraped. The Drudge’s reflection winced.

  People who saw the Drudge would never recognise Ellis.

  She played with her reflection in the window and a thin, high cheek-boned face framed in a bush of ragged red hair peeked out from behind the Drudge’s face.

  That was Ellis.

  She smiled sourly. “Oh you pretty thing,” she mocked softly. “Speak soft now, honey, and tell me just what you want, no slowly, slowly, so I can understand you.” It ended with a mew of disgust as she glanced over her shoulder at the sleeping man. “Stupid.”

  That was too loud.

  She held her breath as he rolled and bedsprings shouted.

  If he’d overheard he would’ve understood. Language had not been much of a problem once Ellis had managed to process it properly. The Donn had no need to use the clumsy Universal Translation devices, they picked up raw brain. Yet speaking an entire new language could’ve proved thorny and she knew she was lucky. The local dialect had turned out to be a slightly abbreviated, slang infested, and semi-bastardised version of Galactic Basic, the common tongue used on most of the civilised (Autocracy) systems.

  The tiles outside were slick, rain sluiced off rooftops that dipped so low she could’ve opened the window and walked out. Once she might’ve strolled out the main door if she fancied and no-one the wiser. Not tonight. Tonight was not the night. It was never the night.

  There was nowhere to go. Yet.

  How many years had she lost to the Dome? Ellis didn’t know.

  And what about the other Domers? There were only a few left but they were out there, hidden close. Ellis wouldn’t leave them unless it was to fetch help. Kai would have disowned her for even dreaming about betraying or running out on them and she’d never leave unless it was to get help. They were the prettier ones, the special ones, they had been held back so Tye Beven could train them personally. Ellis had not been trained. What need? She was the Drudge and the first time she’d pulled a trick Sheek had all but died of shock. It was possible that neither Ellis nor Beven would’ve lived through it if he’d tried his tactics on her, but he would’ve died first, even with the constraints of Donn ethics and her strict upbringing.

  Or perhaps not. She was too weak to defend herself properly.

  There was some kind of bug gnawing at her system.

  Perhaps it was left over from cryo, a lingering toxin. Donn usually converted drugs so they had no effect on their systems, but Ellis had been abused and unaware and now she was too frail to fight. Every time she snatched at the invader, it faded, laughing at her clumsy efforts. If she hadn’t been Donn, blessed with the Donn resilience and the ability to heal fast she would’ve died already, and unless her system regenerated it would only be a matter of time before she caved in. That was where stubborn denial kicked in. She would not cave in to illness, pride forbade. That was the place where she couldn’t go, couldn’t believe she had to go, but every day it was getting harder and harder just to move, to think, to even eat.

  No. Forget it. She was going to find somewhere safe to go and rescue the others.

  If there wasn’t that hope then there was nothing.

  The man on the bed rolled over, snuggled, sighed, drooled and jabbered.

  Resignedly she turned away from the window. It was time to wake him, let him go and trudge down the rickety stairs, return the key to Sheek with the credit she’d earned and so on, and so on. Her nose flinched from his stench as she leaned over him. He was
foul, his mind a blind white worm, but Ellis, as her strength failed, tended to pick the losers for the obvious reason that they were more biddable. This brandy-sodden wreck was a new catch, a shrivelled fisher hooked on the local product and he was so easy to manipulate he might be added to her list of last-ditch regulars. He was called Rocket though Ellis never did find out why and couldn’t have cared less. His purse had fallen out of his back pocket.

  “Sweet soul, too kind,” she approved, and picked it up.

  It was cash-down at Tye Beven’s inn. Once credit was on the table you couldn’t duck out and Sheek, like all Giagosians, was as good as a calculator. You couldn’t fool Sheek, so Ellis had got into the habit of sneaking an extra contribution from the punters as they slept, saving towards the day she’d leave. Not enough so it would be noticed, oh no, but enough.

  The purse was worn and greasy and her fingers cringed as she dug. He wasn’t a rich man so a couple of the low denomination bars they used for cash locally should do it.

  Then it happened.

  It happened so fast, it made her dizzy.

  Every molecule in Ellis’s worn body shifted onto red alert.

  For a minute she stared at the object glowing in her palm while a complex jigsaw slithered into place inside her head. It was a metal squiggle, a big coin with a loop at its apex, nothing to look at but it sang out to Ellis like a ferocious soprano. It sang press-here-for-hope; it yodelled I’m-the-key-to-the-door; it yelled you-need-me. It looked like a key, a circular dial impressed with intricate circuitry. It surely had not been produced by the backwoods technology on Harth Norn. The Dome? A souvenir? Tye wouldn’t like that.

  Her lips pursed in a low whistle. If Tye didn’t know then Rocket couldn’t tell.

  It might be best to check that out, to find out its history for certain.

  The lucky Rocket was immediately scheduled for second-helpings.

  Then she had to wobble all the way over to the cracked basin and spew. Just another symptom that seemed to occur a mite too often recently, as if her stomach rebelled against hope. After she rinsed her face, she woke him up. He was confused, blinking and bleary.