The Crystal Variation (24 page)

“Ace?” he asked.

She took a step forward. “Ace,” she answered.

Behind her, the hatch began to descend, hissing lightly as it did. She turned to look at it.

“A remarkable device,” she commented. “Am I correct in believing that it was constructed by the Enemy?”

“I think so,” Jela said. “Pilot Cantra doesn’t deny it.”

“Remarkable,” she said again. She turned to face him and held up her left hand, palm out.

“Pilot, you have, I believe, very fine eyesight. Do you see the scar across my palm?”

Her palm was broad and lined. There were no scars.

“No,” he said. “Was it an old scar? They fade, over time.”

“They do,” Dulsey said. “But it was a recent scar, still noticeable. Will you look again? It was rather obvious—from the base of the thumb very nearly to the base of the little finger, somewhat jagged, and—”

“Dulsey,” he interrupted. “There’s no scar.”

She took a long, hard breath. Her face, he saw, was tight, her eyes sparkling.

“Thank you, Pilot.” Her voice was breathless. She raised her other hand, fumbled a moment with the wrist fastening, then peeled the sleeve of the coverall back, exposing pale flesh, smooth, hairless, unscarred.

“It’s gone,” Dulsey breathed. Fingers shaking, she unsealed the other wrist, pushed the sleeve high.

“And it.” She looked up at him. “Pilot—”

“They’re both gone,” he said, keeping his tone matter-of-fact, despite the fact that his neck hairs wanted to stand up on their own. He raised a hand.

“Use your brain, Dulsey. You know those tats are cellular. Just because they’ve been erased on the dermis doesn’t mean they’re gone.”

“True,” she said, but her eyes were still sparkling.

“Dulsey—” he began . . .

“Transition coming up,” Pilot Cantra called from the wider room. “Pilot Jela, you’re wanted at your station. Dulsey, strap in.”

THEY TRANSITIONED
with the guns primed, and the passage was just as bad as it could be.

As a reward, they reentered calm, empty space, not a ship, nor a star, nor a rock within a couple dozen light years in any direction.

“Well,” said Cantra and looked over to her co-pilot, sitting his board as calm and unflapped as if he hadn’t been bumped and jangled ‘til his brain rang inside his skull.

“Lock her down, Pilot,” she said when he turned his head. “We’ll sit here a bit and us three can have that talk about where we’re going, now that we’re nowhere in particular.”

“Right,” he said, briefly, fingers moving across his board.

Cantra turned to look at Dulsey, who was already on her feet by the jump seat. The coverall’s sleeves were rolled up, showing pale, unmarked forearms. Cantra didn’t sigh, and met the Batcher’s sparkling eyes.

“Trouble with that first-aid kit,” she said, conversationally, “is it don’t think like you an’ me. There’s no deep reader on this ship, Dulsey, and you dasn’t believe that what you got there is more than a simple wipe. Keep your sense hard by.”

“The pilot is prudent,” Dulsey said. “Shall I make tea?”

“Tea’d be good,” Cantra answered, and added the polite. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome, Pilot. I will return.” She went, her steps seeming somewhat lighter than usual.

Cantra spun back to her board, letting the sigh have its freedom, and began to lock down the main board.

“We got eyes,” she said to Jela, “we got ears, we got teeth. We’re giving out as little as possible, and while we aren’t exactly in a high traffic zone, I want to be gone inside of six hours.”

Finished with the board, she spun her chair, coming to her feet in one smooth motion. She moved a step, caught herself on the edge of her usual calisthenics, and instead twisted into a series of quick-stretches, easing tight back and leg muscles.

Behind her, she heard the co-pilot’s chair move, and turned in time to see Pilot Jela finishing up a mundane arm-and-leg stretch. He rolled his broad shoulders and smiled.

“It’s good to work the kinks out,” he said, companionably.

“It is,” she returned, and was saved saying anything else by the arrival of Dulsey, bearing mugs.

THEY’D EACH SIPPED
some tea, and all decided that standing was preferable to sitting. So, they stood in a loose triangle, Cantra at the apex, Jela to her left and ahead, Dulsey to his left.

“This is an official meeting of captain and crew,” Cantra said, holding her mug cradled between her hands and considering the two of them in turn. “Input wanted on where and how we next set down, free discussion in force until the captain calls time. Final decision rests with the captain, no appeal. Dulsey.”

“Pilot?”

“Some changes while you were getting patched up. Me and Pilot Jela have consolidated. He’s got some places he feels a need to visit, except he wants to see you settled as best you might be, first.” She glanced aside, meeting his bright black eyes. “I have that right, Pilot?”

“Aye, Captain,” he answered easily. “Permission to speak?”

“Free discussion,” she said, lifting one hand away from the mug and waggling her fingers. “Have at it.”

“Right.” He turned to face the Batcher. “Dulsey, Pilot Cantra here tells me that there’s a way to establish you—”

“If the pilot pleases,” Dulsey interrupted. “I will ask to be set down on Panet.”

Jela frowned and sent Cantra a glance. “Pilot? I’m not familiar with this port.”

“I am.”
Unfortunately
. She fixed Dulsey with a hard look, and was agreeably surprised to see her give it back, no flinching, no meeching.

“What’s to want on Panet, Dulsey?”

The Batcher lifted her chin. “People. Contacts who can aid me.”

“Ah.” Cantra sipped her tea, consideringly. “Any kin to the contacts you didn’t make on Taliofi?”

Dulsey bit her lip. “On Taliofi, the—I had the incorrect word, perhaps. Or perhaps that cell no longer exists. On Panet, however, I am certain—”

Cantra held up her hand.

“Dulsey, you won’t last half a local day on Panet, even with the tats smoothed over. Your best course is to tell us what your final goal is, if you know it. It might be we can help you. Pilot Jela don’t want all his trouble going to waste by seeing you taken up by bounty hunters six steps from ship’s ramp, and I don’t want to have to answer personal questions about did I know you was Batch-grown and what kind of hard labor I’d prefer.”

Dulsey bit her lip, every muscle screaming tension, indecision. She raised her mug and drank, buying thinking time. Cantra sipped her own tea, waiting.

“I—” Breathless, that, and the muscles were still tight, but her face was firm, and her eyes were steady. Dulsey had made her decision, whatever it was.
And now
, Cantra thought,
we’ll see how good a liar she is
.

“It is,” the Batcher began again, “perhaps true that the pilot will know of the port I seek. I . . . had not considered that it might be possible to simply
go
rather than—” A hard breath, chin rising. “It is my intention to go to the Uncle.”

The truth, curse her for an innocent
. Cantra closed her eyes.

“Uncle?” Jela’s voice was plainly puzzled. “Which uncle, Dulsey?”

“
The
Uncle,” she answered him. “The one who has made a tribe—a world—populated by Batchers. Where we are valued for ourselves, as persons of worth and skill; where—”

“There ain’t,” Cantra said, loudly, “any Uncle.”

“The pilot,” Dulsey countered reproachfully, “knows better.”

Cantra opened her eyes and fixed her in the best glare she had on call.

“I do, do I? You want to explain that, Dulsey?”

“Certainly. The pilot survived a line edit, I believe?”

Cantra fetched up a sigh. “You was awake enough to hear Rint dea’Sord theorize, was you? He was out, Dulsey. Do I look
aelantaza
to you?”

Dulsey bowed. “The pilot is surely aware that the
aelantaza
do not share a single physical type. It is much more important that the pheromones which induce trust and affection in those who are not
aelantaza
are developed to a high degree.”

“That a fact?”

“Pilot, it is. It is also a fact that an
aelantaza
could not survive a line edit without outside intervention. Much the same sort of intervention—” She raised her unmarked arms— “necessary to wipe the Batch numbers not only from my skin, but from my muscles, bones, and cells.” She lowered her arms and addressed Jela.

“There is an Uncle, and Pilot Cantra knows where to find him. If you would see me safe, see me to him.”

“Pilot Cantra?” Jela said quietly.

Pain, in her head, in her joints, in the marrow of her bones. Garen’s voice, grief-soaked, weaving through the red mists of shutdown, “Hang on, baby, hang on, I’ll get you help, don’t die, damn you baby . . .”

“Pilot Cantra?” Louder this time. The man who held her ship ransom to his have-tos. And wouldn’t the Uncle just be pleased as could be to welcome a genuine soldier, not-exactly-military or—

“Pilot.” Back to quiet. Not good.

She sighed and gave him a wry look.

“There was an Uncle, years back. He was old then, and near to failing. Told us so, in fact. He’s died by now for certain, but the story won’t do the same. If I was a Batcher, I’d sure as stars want to believe there was a benevolent Uncle leading a community of free and equal Batch-grown. But it just ain’t so—anymore, if it ever truly was.”

“The pilot surely does not believe that the Uncle would have died without arranging a succession.” Dulsey again.

Cantra sipped tea, deliberately saying nothing.

“Do you know where the Uncle’s base is?” Jela asked, still on the wrong side of quiet.

She lifted a shoulder. “I know where it
was
. Understand me, Pilot, this was back a double-hand of Common Years. Uncle’s dead, and if he did arrange for a transfer of authority, the way Dulsey’s liking it, anybody with a brain would have moved base six times since.”

“I’d do it that way, myself,” he agreed, and his voice was edging back toward easy. “But, as you say, the info’s still out there, and it’s not impossible that somebody might strike straight for the base instead of risking an intermediate stop where they might be noticed. Even if this Uncle or his second has shifted core ops, they’ll have to have left something—or someone—at the old base, to send people on—or to be sure that they don’t go any further.”

That made sense. Unfortunately. It was looking like a trip to the Deeps in her very near future. Pilot Jela was going to be no end expensive, unless she could persuade whoever might be at the Uncle’s old place of business that he was an unacceptable risk, while keeping her own good name intact. That was possible, though not certain. Still . . .

“Where is it?” Jela asked.

Cantra sighed. “Where would you put it, Pilot?”

His eyelashes didn’t even flicker.

“In the Beyond.”

“Ace,” she said, and drank off the rest of her tea.

“I’d like a look at the chart,” he said then, and she laughed.

“You’re welcome to look at any chart you want, Pilot. You find the Uncle’s hidey hole, you let me know.”

“I hoped you’d be kind enough to point it out to me,” he said, in a tone that said he wasn’t finding her particularly amusing.

“I’d do that,” she said, pitching her voice serious and comradely, “but it’s not fixed. Or, say, it
is
fixed, though built on random factors.”

“The rock field,” Dulsey breathed, and Cantra regarded her once more.

“There’s a lot of detail in that story, Dulsey.”

“It is not one story, Pilot, but legion.”

“Is that so? Stories change as they migrate—you know that, don’t you? They get bigger, broader, shinier, happier. Might be, if—and in my mind it’s a big ‘if’—the Uncle I met did manage to pass his project on to another administrator, and if—another big one—they managed to be clever and stay off the scans of all who wish rogue Batchers ill, it might still be that the community of free and equal Batch-grown ain’t as equal or as free as the stories say.”

Dulsey bowed. “This humble person thanks the pilot for her concern for one who is beneath notice,” she said, irony edging the colorless voice. “Indeed, this humble person has been a slave and a chattel and resides now under a sentence of death.”

Meaning that the Uncle’s outfit would have to be plenty bad before it came even with what she’d been bred to and lived her whole life as, Cantra thought, and lifted a shoulder.

“I take your point,” she said, and looked at Jela.

“My business is nearer the Rim than Inside,” he said, which she might’ve known he would. “First, we’ll take Dulsey out to the old base and see if the Uncle’s left a forwarding address.”

“All the same to me,” Cantra said, doing the math quick-and-dirty and not liking the sum. They couldn’t run empty all the way to the Far Edge. She had padding, but a Rim-run would eat Rint dea’Sord’s eight hundred flan, and the ship’s fund, too, like a whore snacking through a packet of dreamies. There was cargo—legit, or, all right, Pale Gray—that could be profitably hauled to the Rim. It would mean buying at markets where she wasn’t known—and where her info was thinner than she liked. But it was that or run empty, and she’d rather not find herself broke at the end of Pilot Jela.

“Need goods,” she said, giving both of them the eye—Dulsey first; then a stern lingering glare for Jela. “Eight hundred flan is all very nice, but the ship needs to sustain itself.”

He inclined his head. “I agree that the ship should continue to trade and to behave, as much as is possible, as it always does.” One eyebrow quirked. “I said that earlier, if you’ll recall, Pilot.”

“I recall. And you’ll recall that I’m not taking you to my usuals. That means some bit of extra care, though I’m intending to carry legits rather than high risks. There’s profit to be made on the Rim, in small pieces. Coming out of the Rim, that’s something else.”

“First, we go in,” Jela said.

“That looks to be the case,” she agreed. “If there’s nothing else to discuss, then the captain declares this meeting at an end. Pilot Jela, I’ll be spending some time with the charts, if you’ll attend me. I’ll need what info you might have on some possible destinations.”