Dusk (Dusk 1) (2 page)

Not everyone wore their magickstone in the same place. Some people preferred a pendant about the neck, depending from a slender yet strong chain. Some preferred a ring, or a bracelet. One brash young fellow of her acquaintance, with rather a larger credit balance than intelligence, had set his magickstones into wristlets that covered fully half his forearm. He felt the bracers made him appear more menacing. She just thought they made him look callow and ludicrous.

One last item remained. From the closet, she prized out the butter-soft silk boots that matched her current attire, such as it was. She stepped into the left boot and then twisted the tiny stud on the side that cinched the footwear around her calf. Olivia repeated the process with the other boot with dispatch and made the tiny twirling twitch with her fingers that would shut the closet door again.

“Mirror,” she said aloud.

Obediently the door brightened and turned silver and reflective. She considered her image in the shiny surface for a moment critically and gave a small nod of approval. Turning away, she picked up the small satchel containing her credit chit and identification and clipped it to her belt. With a final glance at the chronometer, she turned and hurried out of the room. The door whispered closed in response to her silent mental command.

* * *

Minutes later, she stood in front of another set of doors, elaborately emblazoned with the stylized phoenix emblem of the Dusk Diplomatic Corps and a number of scenes abstracted from its history. Even through the sound-baffled metal structures, she could hear the thumping and scraping as the members took their chairs. As fast as she’d hurried down from the top levels of the Aerie to the DDC chambers, she had still managed to be several minutes late.

She winced. That meant she had missed the opening oath and invocation, the gossip session beforehand, and the chance to finalize her plans with Merrick on top of it all. Even better, she’d just set herself up for a truly epic ass-reaming if Ambassador Trelawney was in a bad mood.

She swallowed and squared her shoulders. If the ambassador were in a bad mood, delay would do nothing to sweeten his temper. Better by far to get in and get it over with before she caused an even greater disruption.

With a muttered word that resonated through the magickstone at her brow on the same frequency as the doors, she commanded them to open. They opened noiselessly, allowing her just enough room to step in. Another mutter sent them shut again as quietly as they’d opened.

“So good of you to join us, Ambassador,” a stentorian voice with a crisp Scots accent echoed coldly through the high-ceilinged chamber.

Every eye in the room turned toward her.

Olivia squeezed her eyes shut for a second, biting back a curse. She thought about voicing a protest, or at least an excuse, but checked the impulse. One of the first things a junior ambassador learned was that one never offered excuses. One could be late, or even absent, one could behave in a disgraceful manner, one could even commit cold-blooded murder in the Terran Council Chambers. What one never, ever did under
any
circumstances was offer excuses.

“Thank you for your gracious welcome, Ambassador Trelawney. Please accept my sincere apologies for my tardiness.”

The rote response had the desired effect. Instead of pressing the issue, Trelawney nodded at her. “I trust you are well, Olivia?”

“I am, Ambassador.”

Although in the chamber everyone present was at least nominally on equal footing, by unspoken mutual accord the senior ambassador was always granted a measure of deference by his juniors that just missed overshooting into the realm of derision. Olivia’s answer, devoid of emotion or anything that might even remotely suggest sarcasm, further served to defuse the situation.

“Excellent. If you will take your place, we have already dispensed with the formalities to discuss the most pressing business before us.”

It was Trelawney’s way of saying that although Olivia’s tardiness had been noted, he had no intention of taking her further to task. She relaxed subtly under the implied forgiveness. Trelawney, as a consummate diplomat, had made his point while still cutting her an appropriate level of slack. She shuddered to think how much worse it could have been had she been half a minute later, but hurried to her seat with as much decorum and dignity as her furiously flushing cheeks would permit.

As she folded into the chair, made from the leather of a native lizard, Trelawney stood.

“We have had a request from Terra.”

Murmurs immediately broke out through the chamber. Over the last six hundred years, Terra had treated Dusk as the red-headed stepchild of the Interstellar Confederacy. With its relatively isolated location and its utter lack of military usefulness, Dusk was hardly a favored trade partner. The planet’s only exports of any real value were industrial-grade diamonds, of which Dusk had rather more than its fair share by mass, and various medicinal and fabric plants like Dudley’s extended family. While tourists often came to marvel at the sight of Galacia’s galaxy-famous black sand beaches and the (to them) unsettling appearance of Astaroth over the ocean, relatively few humans chose to make Dusk a home.

“What kind of request?” Merrick asked Trelawney, his generous mouth and narrow cheeks drawing down into a frown. He turned to his left and offered Olivia an abbreviated but lustful once-over, clearly appreciating her choice of attire, before he turned his full attention back to Trelawney. “Terra hasn’t wanted much of anything to do with us in eight generations. What’s changed?”

Trelawney’s mouth twisted as if he’d just regurgitated a bit of stomach acid. The visage thus created had the disconcerting effect of adding two decades and a legion of wrinkles to his already roughened leather catcher’s mask of a face.

“It seems Terra wants to look into extracting gallartium for commercial usage, and has requested an embassy to discuss possible terms.”

If the Ambassador had lobbed an armed plasma grenade onto the teal diamond surface of the table, he could not have garnered a more immediate or negative reaction.

“That’s absurd!” Ling snapped. “Gallartium is only practical on Dusk because of its concentration.”

“A known factor,” Ingrid Roberts seconded. She waved a dark mahogany hand in the air indolently. “While magickstone is quite costly and highly prized on Terra, there’s no way they could extract enough of it to use it commercially. It’s far too dense to mine easily and the matrix is too unstable for safe transport. What possible value could it have to Terra?”

“They are experimenting with it as a palliative treatment,” Trelawney replied, his expression neutral.

A sea of blank faces stared back at him. Olivia imagined her own visage was frozen in the same confused mask as everyone else’s.

“A therapy to enhance lifespan,” he clarified.

“Don’t they know it doesn’t work that way?” Clarence Granger demanded. He stood, running an agitated hand through his close-cropped salt and pepper beard. “Magickstone only enhances human lifespan when humans are exposed to it at high levels for decades. Short of hauling Dusk to Terra’s orbit, which would be impractical to put it mildly, there is no way to mine out a sufficient quantity to make it an effective treatment.”

As the lead physician in Galacia, Granger would know better than anyone how magickstone affected human physiology. The discovery of the life-extending properties of the precious ore had made Dusk a Mecca for people seeking healing generations before, until they learned that they would have to live on Dusk for the rest of their natural lives to maybe have a chance at attaining the extended lifespan magickstone permitted. It was far more likely that their children or grandchildren would get the benefits than they themselves would, making the pilgrimage across thousands of light-years of alternately empty and fairly hazardous space not worth the expense or the time for most people. Granger’s cultured voice crackled with ironic irritation that Terra would even consider such a foolish idea.

“Can they synthesize it? Is that why they want magickstone?” Merrick drawled. He flexed his muscular arms idly as he spoke. An errant lock of dark hair fell over one eyebrow, lending him a rakish look that made Olivia’s mouth water.

God, I want him right now
! A low pulse of heat at her center echoed the mental complaint with a physical twinge.

“While they may be able to duplicate the physical properties of gallartium, at least to a degree, there is no indication that they have the technology to replicate the
radiation
it emits. That is the ultimate source of its power,” Roberts observed, tugging on a few strands of brilliant silver hair.

Olivia pressed her lips together as she considered the problem. It seemed to her that something was being omitted from the discussion, something more sinister. The stated purpose of Terra wanting to extract gallartium at the cost of billions of credits, when one considered transport, cost of mining and wages, cost of refinement, and the scale of time involved in moving millions of tonnes of magickstone matrix across slightly less than sixteen thousand light-years seemed a little too convenient.

The original settlers of Dusk had left Terra and its war-torn patchwork of squabbling nations for a hope of a better life on another world where political ideology and racial identity took a distant backseat to the sheer necessity of survival. On Dusk, distinctions of race, ethnicity, religion, and all the other reasons Terrans found or manufactured to ravage and destroy each other paled into insignificance. Olivia wondered darkly what the real purpose of the request was, since according to the hyperspatial commcasts not much had changed in several hundred years. History suggested if Terra wanted magickstone, there could be only one real reason for it.

She stood and squared her shoulders in anticipation of the wave of dissent to follow.

“It occurs to me,” she said slowly, “that Terra’s actual reason for this sudden request has nothing to do with their stated purpose. Lifespan enhancement is all very well and good, but as Dr. Granger pointed out, there is no practical way to expose a Terran to enough gallartium to ensure increased longevity such as we enjoy.”

Trelawney frowned, tugging on his sharp, clean-shaven chin. “Then what
is
their actual purpose, Ambassador?”

For answer, Olivia muttered a sequence of nonsense sounds and stabbed her finger at the writing stylus in front of her position at the table. It rose into the air, twirled sharply, and began describing an elaborate aerial pattern over the gleaming surface.

“
That
is what they really want, Ambassador, honored members.” There was no deference in Olivia’s tone now, only fact. If the other members wanted to believe she was a paranoid fool, then so be it.

“They want access to a new weapon, one powered by magick.”

Silence fell in a leaden cloak over the chamber. Olivia waved her hand in a gesture of negation.

The stylus fell to the azure surface of the table. In the sudden hush, the chiming echoes of the impact rang off the ribbed metal vaults supporting the plastiglas of the clear ceiling with a clear, piercing tone.

Olivia took her seat again.

Pandemonium erupted.

“About
face
!”

The detail of Marines took one step forward and pivoted, everyone in the formation keeping precise dress and cover with those around them as they executed the close-order drill maneuver with flawless precision. The leather-faced sergeant, her face tanned to the consistency of a dried apple by years of unshielded exposure to the light of a thousand stars, brought her right hand crisply up her torso in the ancient Terran hand salute. The slight divot between her middle and index finger seated against the slightly curved brim of her peaked dress cap.

“Sir, Platoon Six One Zero all present and accounted for, sir!”

Captain Pedro “Pete” Silva returned the salute with the same “snap and pop” as the sergeant. “You may dismiss the platoon, First Sergeant Wynn.”

“Sir, yes, sir!” Wynn barked. She stepped forward two exact paces and performed another about face so she faced the formation.

“Platoon, dis-
miss
!”

The formation fragmented into clusters of Marines in dress uniforms heading in all different directions, chatting and whooping excitedly. Pete allowed himself a small smile. They had earned the right to be excited, after thirteen weeks of hell on earth in training. The latest crop of basic trainees had largely been everything a commanding officer could ask for: hard-working, tough, and committed, but far from stupid.

He thought back to his own training and the illiterate, sadistic fuckheads who had made him and his platoon into Marines. If someone had offered him ten million credits and all the women from Terra to Taurus, he wouldn’t have cared to relive the experience. Even so, he had to admit the lessons he’d learned from the brutal bastards had stood him in good stead.

“A fine batch of new devil dogs, wouldn’t you say, Captain?” asked a low, quiet voice from behind him.

He twitched a little, as much at the ancient nickname for Marines as the fact he’d been so lost in his reverie he hadn’t heard the telltale scuffs of polished dress shoes on the parade deck. The familiar voice put him at ease, but he still hated being caught unaware.
Clumsy, Silva
! He scolded himself.
Daydreaming’s a fine way to get yourself killed. You’re getting sloppy
…

He turned and saluted the newcomer.

“Good morning, General.”

“How’s tricks, Pete?” General Fritz Neville returned the salute casually.

“Good, General. We’re off for a week. Good thing for First Sergeant Wynn… I’m pretty sure she’s going stir-crazy.”

“Think we need to reassign her for a while?” Neville asked the question slowly, as if pondering each syllable before letting it out of his hard-lipped mouth.

Pete shook his head. “No, sir. She’s got this, but you and I both know she’d be happier in a line company.”