Rift in the Races (33 page)

He reached down and stroked Pernie’s round little cheek, though less round than it had been only a year ago. She was growing up.

“Listen to them,” he told her. “Do what they say. All of it. Even the boring parts. It’s very important. Especially the boring parts.”

She nodded, but the bravery flickered out in her eyes like a candle under glass, replaced by the first hints of fright and a glimmer of wetness appearing there. She’d never been away from home before.

He smiled and turned to leave, quickly, lest she see that his own eyes had begun to glimmer too. And besides, on the subject of schools, he realized he’d nearly forgotten that he still had a bit of research to do.

Chapter 20

O
rli sat before her magic mirror, the very idea of it setting a grin upon her face that ran nearly ear to ear. She once again poked her com badge into the little orifice, slipping the silver button into the dark slot cut into the bonelike twists of the frame and pushing it in snugly. She stared into the mirror expectantly, watched her own face watching back at her as she waited. It was the fiftieth time she’d tried in the last two hours, but Altin still did not appear.

With an impatient tick, she reached in and pulled the badge back out. She had to pry it out with her fingernails, because, exquisite as the mirror’s manufacture was, its crafter clearly hadn’t had an actual com badge to work with, and the space was barely wide enough. Thinking about that made her smile as well—as incredibly powerful as the magicians of Prosperion were, in the end, they were only human too. It proved to her why Captain Asad with his endless mistrust and rants had to be so completely wrong about them.

And it was due to her recent and finally achieved victory over the unyielding and voraciously hostile Captain Asad that she was trying to get a hold of Altin. She wanted to tell him that their plan had worked and that whatever he had done had gotten her transferred to
Citadel
.

She was ecstatic. Such a turn of events and in only a few short days. She felt bad for how much time she’d spent considering Thadius Thoroughgood’s offer—which had been considerable—now that she had a better option. A compromise that allowed her to meet obligations, even if imposed, to her friends and to her home world. It settled right in her conscience.

But the fact that Altin was not answering her summons was driving her to fits of impatience now. “Where are you?” she said into the mirror. “I have fantastic news and you are avoiding me.” In the back of her mind, she couldn’t help fear that he might have done something reckless and gotten himself killed. She shoved the thought away as fast as it came. She told herself it was more likely that he’d angered someone in power and gotten himself in some kind of diplomatic mess. Impulsiveness definitely held a prominent position in the parliament of his personality. She glared into the mirror at her own reflection still taking up the space where his face should have been and chastised it as if it were him looking back at her. “You better not have done something stupid. Or opened your big mouth and got yourself in trouble somehow.”

Altin’s face suddenly appeared. He was laughing.

“Did I just hear
you
, of all people in the universe, speaking to me about knowing when to hold my tongue?”

She harrumphed loudly and put on her best indignant face. “You should have programmed some kind of sound on this thing to tell people when you are coming online,” she said. “It’s rude to eavesdrop on people when they are talking to themselves.”

“To themselves?” He laughed again. “You can’t speak into a two-way mirror and expect to be talking to yourself.”

“I took my badge out; I expected I was alone.”

“The badge only lets me know you’re looking for me,” he laughed. “Which you already know.”

“You’re lucky I’m not down there,” she said.

“Or what?”

“Or … or I’d have to kick you. Or maybe a good hard slap.”

“I’d slay ten thousand orcs to let you,” he said. “A hundred thousand for that one touch.”

His expression was so immediately serious as he said it, so passionate and intense. His green eyes burned with the truth of it. She loved when he talked to her that way, even outrageous as it was. Nobody on Earth talked like that anymore. Courtship was a dead thing, the brittle shell of a dead culture, a crumbling remnant of romance delivered in bits of video on big screens or on bent knees at fancy restaurants, stock-yet-expensive trinkets around which entire industries arose, and mostly nothing but words in service of elemental biology. But not Altin. He savored her with impulse and patience tapping out the rhythms of his heart, measured by the time of his people and his curious world. All the tension of the last two days left her in a breath.

“I missed you,” she said. “I hate how our last conversation ended.”

“I was left melancholy as well. I am sorry.”

“It’s okay. I know you have a lot to do. And you are Her Majesty’s superstar, so she’s got to keep you in the game. I completely understand.”

Altin looked confused, but she ignored it in favor of her news. “So I got my new orders,” she said. She wanted to make him smile, so she put on a poker face and under-represented what she had to say. “I got transferred to another ship.”

“You did?” He looked hopeful, but trepidation could not hide itself in his voice.

“Yes,” she tormented, keeping her expression blank and the tenor of her voice flat. “It’s a new assignment. And I won’t get to work with Roberto anymore.” A touch of sadness drooped her features a little then, un-pretended and augmenting the game she played with him.

His expression began to wilt with hers.

She relented at last. “But he can come visit whenever he wants … on
Citadel
.”

Joy filled him, so much so that he looked as if he were about to leap from the stool and jump about the room. Doing so would have broken the spell that held her face before him in his newly refilled scrying basin, which he knew, so he did not. Instead, he leaned further into it, clearly wanting to be nearer to her. “That’s wonderful! When? Did they say when?”

“Yes.” She grinned, a wide thing that grew one tooth at a time until it could hardly grow more. She delighted in the impatience radiating from him. So unguarded. So honest and sweet. He looked as if he might explode, but she waited with a devilish glint in her eye until he asked again.

“When?” It practically burst from him.

“Technically, I’m already on the Prosperion clock.” Her expression was triumphant.

“You’re what?”

“I’m already on your time.” She leaned back, reaching for the tablet on the desk nearby. She still had the orders called up on its glowing screen.

He watched her stretch for it, her body lithe and sinuous, and an absence overtook his countenance, a faraway aspect in his eyes and a dull sort of smile. She caught him and made a show of mortification.

“Altin Meade,” she said. “Don’t leer at me like I’m some kind of sex object. It’s hardly becoming for a knight.” The contortions of his denial, the expulsions of Puritanical apology that followed amused her as it so often did. She laughed at his red face and blotchy neck. She could do that to him at will. She sighed, happily.

Done toying with him, she presented the tablet to him briefly, a momentary flash of its bright text-filled square to the mirror, and then spun back so that she could read. She put on her most official face and began: “Ensign Orli Pewter. Temporary assignment,
Citadel
. In service of the Royal Space Armada. Report to: Master Aderbury.” She flipped it around so he could see it again. “And look, it’s signed by both Captain Asad and Admiral Jefferies.”

“I wonder if your captain was smiling or hissing when he signed it,” mused Altin.

“He’s not
my
captain,” she grinned. “Aderbury is. And I’m sure Asad was having a silent fit. I am convinced that man hasn’t got a smile function built into his DNA.”

“Whatever that means, I am pretty sure you’re right.” His eyes narrowed some after that, something semi-sinister in them, playful but with menace of the type that could summon giant snowballs capable of sending Earth women careening into snow banks. “It also means, at least technically, that you are now under my command, given that Aderbury is under me.”

“As if you’re going to use that kind of power properly.” Her eyes narrowed back at him as she watched for his response.

He started to say something, stopped, then returned a quizzical look. “What do you mean?”

Her devilish grin returned full force, but she said nothing, choosing to watch and bide her time as all good predators do. Eventually he would figure it out.

He did, and once again the bright red blotches came back to his neck and face, bringing the merry laughter back to her lips. “Oh, Altin,” she said at length. “I’m going to have to cure you of that one day. One day soon. Immersion therapy is what you need.”

That didn’t help.

They spent a few more moments in such fashion, her tormenting him and him squirming somewhere between rapture and agony, until finally, in his indomitable and unendingly forward-focused way, Altin brought the conversation back to practical things.

“What I was going to say, before you diverted me as you so often do, is that, until you have to report to Aderbury, you are, at least for a while, off duty, right?”

“Well, no. Not quite. I haven’t gotten my transfer files yet, or been given a date and transportation orders. So, I’m fairly sure I am supposed to keep working here until those come through.”

He looked as if he’d been hoping for another answer. “In the mine?” he asked.

“Yes, in the mine.”

He spent a few moments thinking on that. “Will anyone miss you if you come with me?”

“Come with you where?”

“To find the Hostiles.”

“What?”

“I’m going to find the Hostile home world, I already told you. Would you like to join me?”

“It’s just as horrible an idea today as it was two days ago, Altin. Why would you possibly think I would want to accompany you on a suicide mission?”

“I could order you to.”

“But you won’t. Besides, no final transfer yet, remember?” She waggled the tablet in front of the mirror. “See?”

“It will be fun.”

“No, it won’t.”

He stared at her through the water of his scrying basin, fixing her with the long and unfathomable intensity that he somehow managed in ways nobody else she’d ever known managed to do. Even through the effects of the water, which moved a little and made his features shift and blur, he was so beautiful and intense. So ferociously focused. So powerful.

“Fine,” she said. “But if I get in trouble, it’s on you to get me out of it.”

“Always,” he said.

Chapter 21

T
he tower hung motionless once again in the space where Altin had sent the Hostile away barely a day before. Orli stood next to him, mouth wide in total awe. This was the first time she’d traveled so far with him. To have the entire solar system gone in a blink was amazing to her. One moment she was in her quarters on Tinpoa, the next in Altin’s tower on Prosperion, and in only a few rapid breaths and a bit of chanting after that, she was so far from Prosperion that its sun was no bigger than any other star. She reached out and covered it with a fingertip, blotting it and a few others out with the black silhouette of just one lone digit.

“That’s amazing,” she said. “So incredible. It’s already gone.”

“It certainly seems more efficient than your ships,” he agreed. “And I mean no disrespect to your technology.”

“None taken. This is better. It just seems impossible.” She spun about, taking in the panorama of stars. “I’ve never seen it without any lights.”

He moved quickly to the table and snuffed the lamp. “Now there are no lights.”

As he stood next to her, her hand crept into his. He took it and held it tight.

They stood together for a long time, watching the dimmest stars become brighter as the lamp’s effect on their night vision wore off. He asked her questions about them, pried through what she knew of the centuries of scientific knowledge her people had accumulated. He marveled in the depth of understanding, the precision that stood as such a different type of knowledge than the sort his people had—steeped and ruined as it sometimes seemed with all its superstition and myth. It frustrated him to think how much time his people had wasted on all of that. But he listened to what she said, asked and clarified, consuming her every word as if it were the water to abate a mortal thirst. It was all he could do to keep himself from taking notes.

He didn’t notice, perhaps she didn’t either, that over the course of their conversation, the shuffle and sway as they spoke had brought them shifting and gazing back around to stare toward Prosperion once more. When she saw it, she fell silent, the words of an explanation failing like the last bit of thread winding off a spool. Her sigh made less noise than a settling snowflake, but he saw it in the movement of her chest. The ho-hum of resignation, the longing to go home. He sighed too.