Crystal Dragon (40 page)

She caught it reflexively, only then seeing that it was Jela's book. Her fingers closed hard around it, even as she sent a glare into his face.

Wellik grinned.

"He said you were damn-all fast and that nothing caught you by surprise," he said, like he'd just been given a present.

Cantra sighed, and put the book on her lap, forcing her hand flat atop it.

"This is my paperwork?"

"Part of it," he answered, pulling a file toward him across his cluttered desk. "This is the rest of it." He flipped the file open. "It happens that Jela named you his next of kin..." He looked up and met her eye, though she hadn't said anything. "You're right that Series soldiers don't have next-of-kin in the ordinary sense of things, but the protocols exist and I'm the one to make the decision, so I've decided to honor his request." He glanced back at the folder. "As next-of-kin, there's a certain amount of money due you—hazard prizes, battle pay, that sort of thing."

"I don't—" Cantra began, but Wellik kept on talking like she hadn't said a thing.

"Next, there's this—" Something else shot out of his hand.

Cantra snatched it out of the air, fingered it, and held it up in disbelief.

"A ship's key? I have a ship, Captain."

"Now you've got two," he told her, flipping the file closed and pushing it across the desk. "That's yours, too."

She eyed it. "What is it?"

"Personnel records. Gene map. Letters of reprimand. Couple odds and ends from his various commands."

"Why do I want that?"

Wellik rolled his shoulders. "Don't know that you do want it, and frankly, Pilot, that's not my concern. Jela wanted you to have it, and that
is
my concern. What you do with it is up to you." He rummaged on his desk, pulled out an envelope and put it on top of the file. "That, too."

Cantra sighed. "And that is?"

"Copy of a letter with your name on it. Don't know what he was thinking, writing it all out in cipher like he did." He gave her a fleeting, unreadable look. "Your copy's decrypted; I'd hate to tempt with with challenge to break the code."

"I—"

"The money's been transferred to your ship's account. About that ship—it's been in twilight for the last few years and some. There's a crew bringing it back up—should be ready for a tour day after tomorrow."

"I—"

"Dismissed to quarters," he said, spinning back to his screen. "Kwinz!"

The door opened and the corporal was there.

"Escort Pilot yos'Phelium to her quarters, Kwinz," he said without looking up. "Same protocol as before."

"Yes, sir." Kwinz looked to her. "Let's go, Pilot."

Cantra took a hard breath, deliberately riding her temper down; she stood, picked up the envelope and the file, and turned, giving Kwinz a curt nod as she stalked past.

THE GREAT WEAVING WAS all but accomplished. They waited now upon the Sign, the moment of which not even the best of the prognosticators among the Thirteen could foretell, save that it would be soon. Soon.

Hovering above their base, Lute considered the order and turn of space and time. Soon, all would be different, excepting perhaps the ley lines. Though, if the Iloheen prevailed, they too would fail, shriveling in the outpouring of inimical—

The lines flashed and flared. Lute threw out a query, caught the response, and opened the way, following the visitor into the asteroid.

They manifested at once, the lady haloed in cruel energies, her submissive crouched, trembling, at her feet. Moonhawk looked up from her work, set the loom aside and rose. Lute, who knew their visitor of old, kept to the shadows and thought it wise not to manifest entirely.

"Sister," Moonhawk said calmly. "This is an unexpected visit."

The other lady swept out a glittering hand, dispensing with courtesy. "Have you bargained with the Rool Tiazan dominant?"

"Indeed, the Thirteen have made a pact of mutual support with Rool Tiazan. His dominant, however, is destroyed."

"Oh no, she is not—but leave that! Have you yet discovered, Little Sister, how we have been played? Have you Seen the event of massive proportion which is bearing down upon this probability?"

Moonhawk tipped her head. "Certainly. The work of the Iloheen goes forth, and the more quickly as it progresses. The Day is nigh. We all of us know this."

"Did you also know," the other hissed, "that we are
locked
into this probability? That the ley lines have been rendered fixed and unmoveable by some art beyond imagining, while the luck swirls as it may, obscuring all and everything on the far side of the event?"

"Ah." Lady Moonhawk smiled. "Yes, we had discovered that."

"And yet Rool Tiazan and his dominant have not been unmade." The lady shifted, and a ice-fanged wind cut through the asteroid, freezing rock, loom, and—Moonhawk lifted a hand and smoothed it into a warm, gentle breeze.

"Whether or not we have been played," she said softly, "is moot. What remains is our agreement and that Moment which so concerns us all—which would just have certainly overtaken us, were the lines fluid and malleable. The maelstrom of the luck—you are correct to be concerned. However, as you are aware, the luck is beyond the beck of even the Iloheen. What weakens our enemy must strengthen us."

"An ill-considered sentiment," the other lady snapped. "To invoke the luck in such measure, to lock the lines and deny us the possibility of escape to a more fortunate probability..."

"We are committed," Lady Moonhawk interrupted serenely. "That is correct. Was there something else you wished to discuss? Sister."

Their visitor flared and melted. Lute threw open the way and made himself as small as possible—and still her energies burned him as she passed. He sealed the shields and fell into the asteroid, manifesting with a stifled scream—and then sighed as his lady cooled the pain and repaired the injuries.

"Will she," he asked, "abide by the agreement?"

"She has no choice," Moonhawk replied, moving back to her niche and pulling the loom to her.

"It is within her scope," he insisted, "to unmake Rool."

"It is," she agreed placidly. "But to do so she will have to hunt him through the luck. That the luck will deny her, I have no doubt."

CANTRA CLOSED THE folder with a sigh and leaned back in her chair, rubbing at the crick in her neck. Deeps, but the man hadn't been in trouble for a day of his life, had he? The reprimands stacked as thick as her thumb—and the citations did, too. He'd been a Hero, once; held rank a dozen times, and always managed to get himself busted back to a comfortable level. His last promotion—to Wingleader/Captain—had stuck for more than a half-dozen years, only, so Cantra thought, because he'd been free to carry out his orders as seemed best to him.

The citations and the reprimands, the write-ups for the offenses that earned him detention wove a kind of narrative, as if the Jela in the file was a character in a story who touched some points with the man she'd known, but was otherwise wholly imaginary. Not that she couldn't perfectly well imagine Jela taking on an entire squad of soldiers—and winning the fight!—but the smile and the sheer joy coming off him while he courted and committed mayhem—that didn't come through the reports. For Jela, she thought, had been bred, born, and trained to fight and destroy—and he'd been happy in his work. He'd been bred for that, too.

The gene map... Deeps. A military secret; it had to be. Here she had the formula for producing her very own army of M Series soldiers—which Jela had wanted her to have. That bore thinking on, since Jela had reasons for what he did. Why Wellik would have released such sensitive info to her—that was another puzzle. Though she supposed he could've thought there wasn't any harm done, Ms being the past and X Strains the up and coming kiddies on the street....

She pushed the folder away, eyeing the envelope. A letter, so said Wellik, written to her, in a cipher she could be expected—pretty much—not to try to crack. And this from Jela, who always had reasons for what he did.

Her hand hovered over the envelope, fingers trembling. In the one case, she wanted—Gods of the Deeps, she wanted!—to read what he had to say to her, direct and intentional. On the other case...

Ship's necessity, Pilot
, Jela's voice murmured in her ear. She took a breath that sounded like a sob in her own ears, caught up the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of machine-copy.

Private Correspondence To: Pilot Cantra yos'Phelium

About now, if I've got my timing right, you'll be wondering what I'm thinking, increasing ship's mass by a quarter-tonne of hardcopy. Call it an old soldier's fancy. I am a soldier, and so never gave much thought to what might go on after I fell. But I'm asking you, if you'll humor me, Pilot—I'm asking you to carry me in that long, deep memory of yours, like you carry Garen. Maybe the files will help; maybe not. I can only give you what I've got, and hope.

It comes to me that I owe you an apology—more apologies than I've got time left to say. A soldier does his duty, and mine pushed me to alter the course of your life, which I never should have done. Asking you to die for my mission—that was wrong, and no excuses.

It's come to the point, now. You'll be carrying the war on from here. I know you'll be as strong and as brave and as tough as you need to be. I know you'll prevail. The Enemy—they don't have a chance.

I'll shut it down now, before you get irritable.

Remember me for as long as you can, Cantra.

I'll do the same, for you.

Jela

SOLCINTRA PORT DIDN'T precisely tantalize a trader with promises of wealth and treasure, be that trader Light, Grey or Dark. Point of fact, Cantra was near to calling it the sorriest port she'd ever had the misfortune to find herself on—excepting there'd been worse. Vanehald, for an instance.

It was something funny, too. There were plenty of ships in—that was not counting the slowly waking fleet under Wellik's care. Far more ships, indeed, than she would've thought likely, given Solcintra; including a cruise liner that had been sitting in close orbit when she'd brought
Dancer
in. She'd've thought the liner'd been long departed, maybe having stopped for repair, but she'd seen more than a few luxury class uniforms on port during the course of her ramble.

The reason she was on-port, with a pass all signed and legal in her pocket, instead of cooling her heels behind locked-and-guarded doors—well, there was a tale worth repeating.

Deeps preserve me from gently brought up kiddies
, she thought. For it would be the boy who had talked Wellik into unlocking her door and vouching for her good behavior like he was even younger than he looked.

"Didn't your grandma teach you not to speak for strangers chance-met on the port?" she'd snapped when he came to put the pass in her hand.

He'd frowned; absurd purple eyes clouding. "Surely, she did," he answered, in a clipped, too-formal tone that he might've thought hid his spurt of temper. "She had also taught me that pilots aid pilots, and that a co-pilot's first duty is to his pilot. So I put the case to Captain Wellik, who appears to have received the same lessons from his grandmother—and thus you are free to tend business on the port." He stopped there, though she could tell he had more to say, his lips set into a straight, firm line.

She grappled with her own temper, concentrating on breathing even and deep until she was sure she could answer him mild.

"One. I'm obliged to you for your trouble, Pilot, but the fact of the matter is you ain't my co-pilot.

"Two. All honor to your grandma, but there's some pilots you don't want to be laying down your good word to aid. I'm the sort of pilot who'd like to've curled her hair, and
ought
to curl yours. You got no way of knowing if I'm going to ever walk back in that gate once I'm on the outside of it."

That should've ended the discussion, but the kid was tougher than his soft face gave a pilot to think.

"Jela vouched for you," he said, his voice still clipped and cool. "He said you were the best damn' pilot he'd ever seen."

"
Jela
was the best damn' pilot he'd ever—"

"And he sat co-pilot to
you
!" The boy interrupted in his turn. He took a hard breath and produced crisp, angry little bow. "Pilot. Duty calls me elsewhere."

And who would've considered, she thought now, that so soft-looking a boy had so firm a temper?

She paused at a table to inspect a display of hand-thrown pots. Indigenous hand work was usually a good sell; even lopsided pots had their admirers. These, though, were not only lopsided, but dull, the glaze unevenly applied and the finish rough. It could, she supposed, be a School; but the smart money said it was just bad pots.

Well. She turned away, moving quiet and alert down the ragged rows.

Cool reflection established that the boy hadn't taken as much risk in his vouching as it first seemed. There was, after all, Jela's ship to be dealt with, though what she was likely to be able to do with a troop transport wasn't at the moment clear to her. She supposed she might sell it to her profit—though not on Solcintra. Nor it wasn't any such vessel as could be flown by a single pilot. Two might manage, if the voyage wasn't long and the pilots fresh. Four were best, running shifts and rotations 'tween them. She'd studied the specs during her happy time confined to quarters, and allowed herself to be in awe of such a ship. The keepings of a small planet could be packed into the outer ring of pods, if the balancing was done fine, and more soldiers than she felt comfortable thinking about could ride at slow-sleep in the second.

The third ring was quarters and mess for wide-awake crew, while deep inside, at the very heart and soul of the cluster—that was the pilots tower. Each section had its own set of engines; the tower could be broke entirely away from its pods and run as its own ship. And even stripped right down to the tower,
Salkithin
was twice again as big as
Dancer
entire.