Crystal Universe - [Crystal Singer 03] - Crystal Line (25 page)

As she entered the Guild Master’s offices, the first thing she saw was the empty desk, its surface clear of pencil files or any work at all. She frowned. Trag? No, Trag was gone. Lars had not found a suitable assistant. He would have to. No wonder he had been snapping at her in the Ranges. She knew from the amount of work she had seen Lanzecki get through—and that with Trag’s help—that the Guild Mastership was no sinecure. She snorted to herself: Lars had been a damned fool to get roped into the job. She bet he hadn’t been sailing once since he had become Guild Master!

“When” was not a word she often used, but it suddenly flicked across her consciousness.
When
had he taken over from Lanzecki? She grunted, canceling that irritating consideration as she continued across the floor to the inner office.

Lars was deep in contemplation of whatever was on his desk screen. He had had time to shower and change; his hair was still damp. To one side, in front of the wide
window that overlooked the immense doors of the Hangar, a table had been set, and the enticing odors of some of her favorite foods wafted to her. Becoming aware of someone else in the room, he looked up with a scowl that shifted into a smile as he jumped to his feet.

“Sunny!” He gestured for her to join him at the table, then seated her.

“What are you after now?” she asked, a teasing note in her voice to draw the sting of her cynicism.

“Ah, lovey,” he said, dropping a kiss on her cheek before he took his own seat, “give me credit for some altruism.”

“Why should I?”

Grinning at her, he searched her face and was evidently satisfied by what he saw. She cocked her head at him.

“So?”

“Eat first, talk later. I’d like to see a little more flesh on your bones before we go out again.”

She groaned. “So we’re not going back out as soon as the storm clears?”

In place of an answer, he served generous portions of her favorite foods onto her plate. When he started to help himself, she saw that he had ordered the nicco spikes she hated even to smell. He grinned when she twitched her nose in disgust.

“You see, I’m not catering entirely to you, Killa Ree, and no, we’re not able to go out immediately. Black crystal’s not the only one of our products in demand.” He ended the sentence abruptly. “I’d be able to go quicker if you could see your way clear to giving me a little help.”

“I thought helping you was finding black. I’ll go alone.”

“No!” The single word was so forceful that she stared
at him in surprise. Lars hadn’t used to take such a tone with her. She bristled, but he reached for her arm, shaking some of the milsi stalks from her half-raised spoon, before his touch softened in apology. “No, Killa. Too dangerous. You’re not completely over the deprivation and you’d thrall. Especially if you were cutting black alone.”

While she still resisted his prohibition, she had to admit that she would be extremely vulnerable to black thrall. She also had to admit that she had been in a terrible state when they had gone out: as near as made no never mind to being a crystallized cripple. They might have been searching for black crystal, but she was bloody lucky they hadn’t found any. Green thrall had been deep enough. She owed him a lot for risking his own neck taking her out at all in that state.

“So, what do you need done, Guild Master?” she asked flippantly.

He smiled with genuine relief. “Thanks, Sunny, I really appreciate it.”

“So?”

“Eat first,” he said. “I can’t think when my stomach’s clinging to my backbone.”

She was hungrier than she had thought and quite willing to concentrate on eating. Odd how a full belly could reduce resistance to unpalatable business.

When they had cleared the last morsel from the platters, Lars leaned back, patting his stomach and smiling.

“That’s better. Now, if you could finish rounding up the figures and prices on the accounts I have on the screen, then I can go salve wounded feelings.”

“Whose?”

“Clarend and Ritwili have legitimate grievances which must be addressed, and I’ve a delegation to meet at Shankill that I can no longer postpone.”

“I might be better with the delegation than with the files,” she suggested warily.

“It’s the sort of thing you’ve done for Lanzecki before. D’you remember the Apharian contingent? Well, I’ve got the Blackwell Triad looking for favors now. Similar circumstances, similar solution, but I need the account figures on hand.”

“Bor-ring,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“A lot of what I have to do is boring, and yet …” Lars regarded her, his wide mouth curling in a grin. “I rather like finding out how this Guild hangs together against all comers.”

Killashandra snorted. “We’ve a unique product that no one else can produce, no matter how hard they try. We’re in control.”

“I like that ‘we,’ Sunny.” He reached across the table to fondle her hand. “I’ll go heal fractured feelings; you find me figures.”

“Just this once, because I owe you,” she warned him, pulling her hand away and shaking her finger at him. “Don’t think you can rope me into this full time. I’m a singer, not a key tapper! Find yourself a recruit with business training.”

“I’m trying to,” he said with a sly grin.

Once she became absorbed in the analysis, Killashandra found it more interesting than she had expected. Certainly the scope of the Guild’s authority—and its unassailable position as the only source of communication-crystal systems—was wider than she had imagined. Her job—the cutting—was but the beginning of a multitude of complex processes with end uses in constant demand throughout the inhabited galaxy. Deprive a world of Ballybran crystal, and its economy would collapse, so vital were the shafts, and even the
splinters, to technology on all levels. The pure research buffos in the labs here kept finding new applications of crystal—even ground shards had uses as abrasives. The more brilliant of the smaller splinters could be made into resonating jewelry, much in vogue again. She wondered how the galaxy had let one Guild gain so much power. What had Lars been on about? Reorganizing? Modernizing? What? The Guild bought state-of-the-art technology in other fields.

Unable to resist the temptation of having unrestricted access to the Guild’s master files, Killashandra ran some that she might never again have a chance to discover. Lars had said something about aggregate cutting figures. She wanted to know just how much she, Killashandra Ree, had contributed to the success of the Guild. Once in the ultraconfidential files, those entries were easy enough to find. But the dating of their first duet journey was a shock. They couldn’t have been cutting
that
long. They couldn’t …

She canceled the file and sat looking at the screen, patiently blinking a readiness to oblige her. She couldn’t …

“Sunny?” Lars’s voice on the comunit broke through the fugue such knowledge caused. “Sunny, got those figures for me? Sunny? Sunny, what’s wrong?”

His voice, concerned and increasingly anxious, roused her.

“I got ’em …” She managed to get the words out.

“Sunny, what’s the matter?”

“Am I old, Lars?”

There wasn’t much of a pause and, later on, she was never sure if there had been any before he laughed. “Old? A singer never gets old, Sunny.” His voice rippled with a laughter that sounded genuine to her critical ear. She couldn’t even imagine that his amusement was
forced. “That’s why we became singers. To never get old. Give me those figures, will you, and then I can get back from Shankill and show you just how ageless we both are! Don’t get sidetracked by trivia like that, Killa. Now, what are those figures? I’m nearly at Shankill Base. Patch them through, will you?”

Like an AI, she performed the necessary function and then leaned back in the Guild Master’s comfortable but too big chair and tried to remember how she could possibly have cut so many tons of crystal over so many decades.

Lars found her there when he returned long after night had fallen over Ballybran. Nor could he, using all his skill as lover or persuader, bring her out of her fugue. He did the only thing possible: took her out into the Ranges again.

She broke out herself when she realized that they were deep in the Milekey Range. On that trip they found the elusive black crystal, a full octave in E that was likely to sing messages around the biggest of the systems vying for comcrystals. But cutting the blacks enervated Killa to the point that she did not argue with Lars when he reluctantly but firmly turned the sled back to the Guild complex. For the first time it wasn’t a storm that drove them in.

Dimly Killa realized that he carried her in his arms all the way down to the Infirmary, refusing any assistance or the grav-gurney. He undressed her himself while Donalla attached the monitors and Presnol fussed over which medication would produce the best results in the optimum time.

“Shard the optimum!” Lars raved. “Juice up her symbiont! Heal her!”

He saw her harnessed into the radiant-fluid bath before he stormed off. She let herself drift then and didn’t even wonder how much credit that octave of blacks had earned them.

“D
id you get enough blacks in?” Killa asked Lars the first time she saw him after she began to pull out of the traumatic exhaustion.

“Enough to reduce the clamor a few decibels, Sunny.” He bent to kiss her cheek and then pinched it, a gleam of mischief in his eyes. “The ones we cut together were the best.”

“Naturally,” she said with a flash of her usual arrogance.

“Seen the figures on that octave?” he asked.

“One of my first conscious acts.” She leaned into the fingers that stroked her cheek. “I’ve a bird to pluck with you. You gave me part of those you brought in when you went back out by yourself, and that’s not in Rules and Regs. You cut by yourself,” she said, scowling at him but well pleased at his generosity.

“Ah, but it’s your site. All things being equal,
you’d’ve continued cutting with me until the weather turned.”

“So,” she said, moving her head slightly back from his caresses and eyeing him speculatively, “what is such charity going to cost me?”

Lars gave a hearty laugh, throwing his head back and tipping the chair away from the bed, balancing it deftly on the back legs. “I wasn’t so much charitable as conscious of my administrative edict that those whose claims were cut without their participation would be awarded a settlement.”

“I’m an existing and active singer,” she said, outraged. “I’m not—not yet, at any rate …” And she waved her hand in agitated denial toward the section of the Infirmary that cared for the brain-damaged singers.

“No, of course you’re not. The fact remains that I was compelled by press of orders to obtain black crystal from any viable site,” he said, solemn for a moment. “And you did cut there earlier with me, so it was only just, meet, and fair that you got your share—especially at the current market price of blacks.” He rolled his eyes. “Best ever.”

“Yes, it was, wasn’t it!” Killa grinned back at him. Blacks always generated top earnings. Their octave had earned her more than she had made in—her mind stumbled over the time factor. Quickly she turned away from such speculations. “Has that octave been processed yet?” She was still annoyed with Donalla and Presnol for not allowing her to access that information. They had kept her restricted to a simple voice-only comunit.

“Oooh, as fast as it could be shaped and bracketed. The Blackwell Triad drooled when I made it available to them. Eight was what they needed, and eight matched was a plus. Which they paid for.”

“Too right!”

“Terasolli installed them.” Lars’s grin turned sour. “Then lost himself so well in Maxim’s Planet I haven’t been able to locate a trace of him. Even with what the pricey establishments on Maxim’s charge, he’s got enough to lose himself for months.”

“I remember going to Maxim’s once with you,” Killa said, though she could recall no details of the legendary exotic pleasances that the leisure planet offered. Though some singers risked mind and body to cut enough for repeated visits to Maxim’s, she couldn’t recall any desire to do so.

“Once. No seas, not even lakes, so no sailing.” He cocked her a malicious grin. “Which reminds me. Care to get out of here for a few days’ R and R? You can crew for me.”

“To get out of here I’d even crew!”

Counterfeiting irritation at her gibe, he ruffled her hair into snarls and left, whistling a chanty.

Three days later, when she made her way down to the pier, she was surprised to find Donalla, Presnol, and Clodine already there, carisaks at their feet. She very much resented Lars’s extending his invitation to anyone else, much less these three. She had wanted—expected—only his company on board the
Angel.
The ship was more than enough rival for his attention. Then she experienced a second, more disjointing shock when she got a good look at the ship moored to the long pier: it was not the
Angel
she
thought
she remembered clearly, but a craft some ten or fifteen meters longer. A sloop, but a much bigger one. That somewhat explained the extra hands but did not disperse her disgruntlement.