The Crystal Variation (10 page)

“This humble person exists to serve,” she said. “What may it please the pilots to order from our available foods?” She placed her gloved hands together and drew them slowly open. In the space between her palms, words formed—the house’s menu.

Jela ordered leisurely, giving Cantra time to peruse the offerings and settle on the incredible luxury of a fresh green salad, non-vat fish steak, and fresh baked bread.

The attendant bowed, closed the menu and departed, silently slipping past the brocade curtain.

Cantra sipped her wine, relishing the flavors and the layers of taste. Across from her, the man—Pilot Jela—he sipped, too, cuddled deep in his lounger, forcefully projecting the impression of a man relaxed, indolent, and slow.

She having projected just such impressions herself from time to time in the interests of not frightening the grounders—maybe she was a little too aware of what he was doing. It might have been polite, not to notice. But it irritated her, to be treated like a know-nothing, and she brought her glass down to rest against her knee.

“You don’t have to go to all that trouble for me,” she said. “Pilot.”

There was a short space of charged silence, as if he weren’t used to being called on his doings, then a nod—neither irritable nor apologetic.

“Old habits,” was what he said, and lifted his glass to sip with a respect that she registered as real. The relaxation he showed now was properly tempered and much more restful to the both of them, she was sure.

They sat quiet for a while then, each sipping, and letting the water whisper its song down the wall and disappear.

“Where are you in from, if it can be told, Pilot Cantra?”

“Chelbayne,” she answered. Nothing to hide there, now that she was away, the cargo delivered and the fee paid. “Yourself?”

“Solcintra.”

Kind of an Inner world, was Solcintra, or near enough that somebody from the Rim might think it not quite on the Arm, proper. A kind of has-been old settle in a quiet area where everyone traded with neighbors, that was all. Not a place she’d normally find herself. Still, you never knew.

“Anything special?” she asked, and saw him shrug against the lounger’s deep back. She hadn’t asked what kind of pilot he was; he might be anything from a cruise liner captain to a freight hauler to a relief man. ‘Course, his presence on Faldaiza Port kind of argued against the cruise liner.

“There’s a military unit garrisoned there,” he was saying carefully over his glass. “A good few dozen ships attached to it. Most of them seemed to be in twilight.”

Well, and that was news, after all. Soldiers were inevitable, in Cantra’s experience. Garrisoned soldiers—they were something of an oddity. And even moreso, squatting down on a not-especially-prosperous world, trailing a buncha dozen sleepy ships . . .

“And how did you find things at Chelbayne?” he asked, taking his turn, which was polite and his right under peaceful welcome.

“Spooked,” she said frankly. “Pilots doubling up on port. Rumors thicker’n star fields. Reported sightings of anything you like, including world-eaters, manipulators, and ancient space probes showing up with ‘return to sender’ writ on the power panels.”

“Huh,” he said, sounding intrigued in the way somebody would be by somebody else’s craziness. “Anything stand up to scrutiny?”

She shrugged in her turn, feeling the lounger move to accommodate the motion. “The probes I heard about from somebody normally straight. On port for repair, she was, and looking to sign a new co-pilot. Could be she was ground-crazy. My inclination is to discount all I heard, no matter who gave it out. But maybe somebody really is collecting old space probes. Why not?”

“Why not?” he echoed comfortably. “See any yourself on the way in?”

She snorted. “Not to recognize.” She sipped the last of her glass and put it on the table. “You been on port awhile?”

“A while,” he allowed, finishing his own glass and leaning out of the embrace of the lounger. “More wine?”

“Yes,” she said. And then, thinking that might have sounded too short, “Please.”

He poured, splitting what was left equally between the two glasses, handed hers over, then sat back with his.

“Anything I should know, port-wise?” Cantra asked. “Don’t want to be here past scheduled lift, paying for a mis-step.”

He was quiet—thinking—honestly thinking, was her sense, and not mumming. She sipped her wine and waited.

“There seem to be some odd elements on the port,” he said slowly. “I’m not clear myself what makes them odd, or if odd translates into dangerous. The locals . . .” he paused to sip his wine gently. “The locals may have caught some of that spooked feeling from Chelbayne. Usual rules apply.”

The last was said without irony, and with enough emphasis to move him well out of the passenger liner column on the pilot rating chart, as far as she was concerned. That was with the usual rules being: Watch your back, watch the shadows, and always expect trouble.

“That’s something,” she acknowledged.

He nodded, seemed about to say something more, but the gong sounded again, and he called “Enter,” instead.

The Batcher attendant slipped into the room and bowed.

“Would it please the pilots to receive their meals?”

THE FOOD
and the discussion of the food having both come to satisfactory conclusions, Cantra called for a third bottle of wine. It came promptly, was poured, and the two of them again sat deep into the loungers.

Cantra sighed, inert and content. The dinner talk, light on info as it had been, had finished unknotting the tension in her chest. She was in no hurry to move on; even the itch to find someone to share the upscale lodgings with had gone down a couple notches on the gotta list.

“So,” said Jela from the depths his chair, and sounding as lazy as she felt. “Where do you go from here, if it can be told?”

That ran a little close to the edge of what was covered by peaceful welcome. Still, she didn’t need to be specific as to when.

“Lifting out for the Rim,” she said, which was bound to be true sometime.

“Heard there was some military action in the far-out recently,” he said, slow, like he was measuring how much info to offer. “Maybe even a world-eater sighted.”

She moved her shoulders, feeling the chair give and reshape. “Rim’s always chancy,” she said. “All sorts of weird drifts in from the Deeps. Won’t be the first time I’ve been out that far.”

“Ship shielding doesn’t even give a world-eater indigestion,” he pointed out, sounding sincere in his concern. “And ship beams are just an interesting appetizer.”

“That’s right,” she said, puzzled, but willing to play. “But a ship can run; a ship can transition. World-eaters are stupid, slow and confined to normal space.”

“You talk like you’ve had some experience there,” Jela said, which was absolutely a request for more, and danced well outside the confidentials guaranteed under peaceful welcome.

She took her time having a sip of wine, weighing the story and what might be got from it that she took care not to say.

In the end, it was inertia and a full belly that made the decision. She wasn’t ready to move on just yet, and there wasn’t much, really, to be gained from the tale, setting aside piloting lore which this Jela, with his big shoulders and noncommital eyes, surely had, either from experience of his own or from training. He was no fresh-jet, in her professional judgment. Still, if he wanted to hear it . . .

“Not a new tale,” she said, bringing her glass down at last.

“New to me,” he countered, which was true enough—or so she hoped.

“Well, then.” She settled her head against the chair and paused, letting the whisper of the falling water fill the silence for a heartbeat, two . . .

“I was co-pilot, back when,” she began. “The pilot had some business out on the Rim, so there we were. Problem come up and we lifted in a hurry, ducking out a few klicks into the Beyond.” She paused to have a sip.

“That’s some problem,” Jela said after her glass came down again, and she nearly laughed.

You might allow it to be a problem when the cargo was wanted by the yard apes, who were all too ready to confiscate it and all the info there might be in ship’s log and the heads of pilot and co-pilot. You might allow it to be a problem that the client wasn’t particularly forgiving of missing deliveries and Garen having to make the call, was it better to lose the cargo out in the Deeps and maybe have a chance to collect it later, risking the client’s notable bad grace, or chance a board-and-search?

She’d opted to dodge and jettison, a decision for which Cantra didn’t fault her, though they never did find it again, worse luck, and wound up working the debt off across a dozen runs, the client having been that peeved by the loss.

“It was a problem of some size,” she told Jela. “Understanding that the pilot was out of the Rim, original—and didn’t maybe respect Beyond like she ought. Anywise, we’re out there, beyond the Rim, just meditating, and giving the problem time to brew down to a lesser size, when an anomaly shows up on the far-scans.” She shrugged against the chair’s embrace.

“A pilot’s not a pilot unless they got a curiosity bump the size of a small moon, so she and me, we decide to go take a look.”

“In the Beyond?” His startlement seemed genuine. “How did you navigate?”

“Caught the Rim beacons on mid-scan and did the math on the fly,” she said, off-hand, like it was no trick at all. Nor was it, by then. By then, her and Garen had been out Deep considerable.

“So, we went on out to look,” she resumed. “And we got a visual on something that looked to be a bad design decision on the part of the shipwright. Big, too. Not much velocity, spill spectrum showing timonium, timonium, and for a change timonium. Tracking brain plotted its course and saw it hitting the Rim at a certain point, in a certain number of Common Years.

“The pilot hailed it on general band and I hit it with every scan we had.”

She sipped. He sat, silent, waiting for the rest of it.

“Well, it didn’t answer the hail, o’course. And the scans bounced. I’m thinking it was the scans got its attention, but it might’ve been the hail, after all. It started to rotate and it started to get hot. Radiation scan screamed death-’n-doom. We figured we knew what we had by then, and the pilot was of a mind to turn it back into Beyond, where it couldn’t do much harm.”

“Turn it?”
That
got his attention.

“Right.” She raised her hand, showing palm. “Say the pilot was a fool, which I’m not saying she didn’t have her moments. Can’t say for certain if that was one of them, though, because the truth is she did turn it, playing easy meat, while I sat my board sweating and feeding everything I dared into the shields, which were peeling like old hull paint.”

“So I’d think.”

“We kept its attention until we was sure it was on course for Out-and-Away. Shields were just about gone by then, and I was starting to fear for the navigation brain, not to say the biologics, when the pilot decided we’d done what we could, and nipped us into transition.”

“Transition,” he repeated. “Using what for reference points? If it can be told.”

“Had the Rim beacons on long-scan, like I mentioned,” she lied glibly. “Did the math on the fly.”

“I—see.” He had a go at his glass, and she did the same, to finish, and put the empty on the table.

She’d come too close to a slip, she thought, half-irritated and half-regretful. Time to be moving on, before she got any stupider.

“I want to thank you,” she said formally, and his Deeps-black gaze flicked to her face. “For your companionship. The time was pleasant and informative. Now, I must take myself off.”

She stood, leaving the embrace of the chair with a pang. Paused for one last listen of the singing water—and very nearly blinked as the other pilot came to his feet.

“As it happens, it’s time for me to leave, too,” he said blandly, and moved a hand toward the curtained exit. “Please, Pilot. After you.”

PILOT CANTRA
was an interesting case, Jela thought, following that lady down the tiled hallway toward the foyer and the front door. The tale about turning the world-eater had rung true, though there had been, he had no doubt, a certain few tricky facts greased in the telling.

She wasn’t being easy to file, either. He’d’ve said prosperous free trader, from the quality of the ‘skins and the fact that she was eating at a subdued place on the high end of mid-range. On the other hand, there was that story and the easy-seeming familiarity with the Rim—and beyond. According to his considerable information, Rimmers had a flexible regard for such concepts as laws, ownership, and what might be called proscribed substances. Not that all Rimmers were necessarily pirates. Just that none of the contributors to the reports he’d been force-fed had ever met one who technically wasn’t.

Given that she wasn’t at all who he’d been expecting—he’d been expecting Pilot Muran, who was now some local days overdue for their rendezvous—he counted himself not unlucky in the encounter. She was a fine-looking woman—tall, lithesome, and he didn’t doubt, tough. Her weapon was quiet, but there for those who knew how to look—and he appreciated both the precaution and her professionalism.

He’d entertained the notion that she might be somebody sent on by Muran, when he found himself unable—and dismissed it when the meal took its course and she failed to produce either code words or a message from the tardy pilot.

That she was only a pilot who had wanted company over her meal—that seemed certain, and he made a mental note to chew himself out proper for supposing that any pilot who would choose such a restaurant would come complete with co-pilot, client, or companion. Getting civilians into soldier trouble, that was bad.

Though there was no guarantee that there was or would be trouble, he thought, trying
that
notion on for not the first time. Muran being late—that could be explained by a couple things short of catastrophe.

Muran not sending a reason or a replacement—that couldn’t. Jela sighed silently and owned to himself that he was worried.

Pilot Cantra had reached the curtain, swept it away with one long arm and stepped to a side, holding the doorway clear for him.