by Kate Elliott
The hold clearly showed signs of age. An old ship, a trifle neglected, perhaps, but Heredes had said it was a bit of a dog-tag. Kyosti collided with her and she felt a hand press against her neck and hair, as familiar as a lover’s. Against her back, his body was warm. Behind him, singing, floated Bach, followed by Heredes and the mercenary. The lock shut.
“Hawk!” Heredes’s tone was as scandalized as a maiden aunt’s.
Lily turned just as Kyosti removed his hand. He lifted the hand to his face in a gesture so alien, as if the contact between them could tell him something about her, that for an instant, like an hallucination, she wondered if he was human.
“We’ll be going out fast,” said the mercenary in a low voice, coming past them. “Especially if you caused that alarm. I’ll show you to your—” She paused, taking in three where she had expected two, and she grinned at Lily, as if to say, Look what a mess these idiots have made. “Your cabin,” she continued, directing a dark-eyed and knowing glance at Kyosti and Heredes. “You can share with me,” she finished with a companionable nod to Lily. “By the way, my name is Jenny. Jenny Seria.” Her grin broke out again, gently cynical. “And, from Captain Bolyai, as well as myself, a warm welcome to the Easy Virtue, queen of the highroad.”
“This boat isn’t really called that,” said Kyosti.
“But of course it is.” Jenny winked at Lily. “But frankly it’s more a comment on our cargo than our crew.” She led them into the ship, which was, judging by the spasm of conversation and command over the intercom, undocking even as they walked. “In here.” She coded open a door into a tiny double-bunked cabin. Heredes shoved Kyosti inside. “How about the ’bot?” asked Jenny.
“He goes with me.”
“My cabin is just down here.” Jenny had a long-limbed stride that forced Lily to double-time. “I’ve never seen a ’bot like that before,” the mercenary added. “Or a man with blue hair.” She paused for the barest moment, as if testing the tension between them, then ventured, “Is the other one your brother?”
“My brother!” Lily, looking up, met Jenny’s eye, a frankly speculative gaze, and smiled, “No.” For some reason she thought of Kyosti’s hand on her neck, and of Heredes’s sharp reaction. “More like my father,” she said slowly, much struck.
“That explains it,” said Jenny. “Even my father got testy when I started bringing boyfriends home.”
“Boyfriends!” exclaimed Lily, but Jenny had halted in front of a cabin door and now coded into the panel. Lily shrugged. “My name’s Lily. Lily Hae Ransome.”
Jenny gave her a little salute in acknowledgment as the door opened. “Come in,” she said, “but watch out for small animals.”
The high warning chime of final undocking rang out over the intercom.
“Get a seat, quick,” said Jenny as Lily collided with a waist-high, golden-haired impediment. It yelped. The ship lurched, sending Lily tumbling past the impediment to land with a jar on the lower bunk. Another lurch slammed her against the bank’s side wall, but the third found her prepared, with a stiff grip on the edge of the bunk’s pad. She rocked violently. A few rolling movements, like a restless beast at last settling down, shuddered through the ship. Lily let go of the bunk’s edge.
Bach, upside down, winked eye to eye with a small boy of about five years whose light hair proclaimed him to be the impediment. The boy began to make distorted faces at himself in the gleam of Bach’s surface.
“Gregori!” This admonition produced in the cabin as much effect as the quivering of a draft might in a closed room. The boy darted a glance in its direction and resumed his contortions. But Lily, more startled, found a young woman beside her on the bunk who was certainly younger than herself and who was drawn up into one corner like a frightened, but defensive, creature caught out in the wild.
“Excuse me,” said Lily, rising. “I hope I didn’t knock into you.”
“Keep down,” said Jenny quickly from the floor. “We’re due another roll.” The ship rolled, seating Lily with firm neatness. The young woman on the bunk smiled. “Milhaviru has some predictable habits,” added Jenny. “You may have guessed she didn’t graduate top of her class at pilot’s academy.”
“But, Jenny.” The other woman’s voice was so soft it seemed barely to penetrate the air. “You said yourself we would be undocking without permission, so you can’t fault Milhaviru for the roughness.”
Jenny grinned. She pushed herself up with practiced ease and scooped the boy up into her arms. He wriggled in delight and grinned; seeing the likeness in that smile and in the strong set of his jaw, Lily knew whose child he was. “Always fair, that’s my Lia,” said Jenny. “But Lily, this is my son, Gregori, and next to you is Aliasing, my partner. I hope I read things right back there—that you’d a wish to be away from the two men, for now. Sometimes I let my instincts run before I have a chance to think.”
Lily smiled back at her, finding her friendly and open manner balm to her confusion. Events had fallen with such chaos around her that she welcomed a moment to breathe. “Your training must have been good,” she replied. “Because your instincts were right.”
“You’ve had some training yourself,” Jenny said, sizing Lily up. “We’ll leave you alone as we can, in such space, but if you ever want a scrap, we’ve got a rec room on board that can be cleared out for a bit of sparring.”
“You’re on.” Lily studied the other woman. Jenny was much taller than Lily, big-boned but lean, with that tight, high-shouldered look that comes with physical authority. By contrast Aliasing looked insubstantial.
“Want to play with the ’bot,” said the boy emphatically. His mother let him down, glancing first at Lily.
“Of course.” Lily sat cross-legged on the platform. “Did we really undock without authorization? Isn’t that dangerous?”
Jenny shrugged. “No more than getting impounded by the Jehanists. Better to cut and run. They’re spreading like fire out here on the fringe.”
“But where did they come from? I grew up on Unruli, and I’d never heard of any rebellion until a few days ago.”
“That’s not surprising. Those of us on the road have come across it—oh these past several years, growing—but nothing like it’s growing now. Jehane, whoever she may be—if she or he really exists, that is—seems to have decided that the time, or her resources, are right.”
“Oh, he exists,” said Lily. “I met him.”
“Did you?” Jenny pulled a hard plastine chair down from one wall and sat. Gregori, at her feet, was happily engaged in trading whistled phrases with Bach.
“What was he like?” breathed Aliasing. A curling tangle of black hair hung almost to her waist.
“He terrified me,” said Lily.
Jenny chuckled. “You should see your face right now. But in any case, folk planetside really only hear what comes over the network, and you can be sure the government doesn’t let any Jehanish news get down there. Too risky, by half.”
“You mean they censor the news?”
“Where have you been, Lily Hae Ransome? Why do you think this old boat has the experience of cutting loose and running? Most of the cargoes she runs don’t have permits. The captain doesn’t even have a permit, for that matter. Most of our crew have some tattooed mark in their past that prevents them from getting work on authorized ships. Why else do you think we ship on a half-mended tub with a mediocre pilot whose vectors are slipshod and a captain who drinks too much ambergloss? Too many government regulations, that’s why.”
“I didn’t really get a look at the ship,” said Lily diplomatically.
“You will. Don’t look too close. Not that I have much sympathy for the Jehanists either, especially their giving so much power to the tattoos—it’ll only create a bloodbath. But I can’t say I don’t understand why so many are joining him. Central’s been giving all the privileges to themselves, and not to the rest of us. I saw that well enough.” The glance she exchanged with Aliasing was full of private meaning.
“I suppose I must confess,” said Lily, uncomfortable, “that I’m the child of a Sar-house. So it’s no wonder that I never noticed anything wrong.”
Jenny regarded her with a level gaze: her eyes were dark, a suggestion of the void, pulled oblique at the corners. “I daresay we can learn to tolerate you, despite all that.” She winked.
Aliasing laughed, and Lily realized that she was, for the time, at home here.
The next few days fell into a routine. Aliasing procured a second set of clothing for Lily. During the long hours of cruising to, or waiting for, windows, she sparred with Jenny and Heredes, sometimes even with Kyosti, accumulating a few bruises, met the disreputable crew of the Easy Virtue, and saw how life went on in a dog-tagging merchanter that smuggled for its living—she and Heredes and Kyosti being, evidently, their current cargo. Heredes refused to tell her the cost of their passage, although he did offer to man a bridge station on the odd shift; the captain, grateful for help, put him on communications.
Heredes, indeed, was taking on the attributes of her guardian. Whatever Lily’s feelings about Kyosti, which could easily swing from annoyance to attraction to curiosity about his intriguing strangeness with the space of a few moments, she would at least have liked to get him to herself to question him about his and Heredes’s past. Heredes, in response to those questions, deflected them so easily that she wondered where he had learned such methods of equivocation. To her outright demands he counseled patience. And when she asked if Joshua Li Heredes was his real name, he merely said, “As real as any name can be, defining so much with so little.” Kyosti persisted in calling him Gwyn and in laughing at allusions whose source or meaning Lily could not guess at.
Five days into the trip, Lily returned to her cabin to find Aliasing helping Jenny outfit herself. Gregori had been banished to the top bunk.
“Trouble?” asked Lily as they both looked up at her entrance.
Jenny shrugged on a double-belted shoulder harness that sported a fascinating array of weapons. “Nothing that isn’t routine for a smuggler,” she said with a grimace. “The main routes into Central are so heavily policed and regulated that we’ve got to come in the back door. But the back door also means the back roads, and it’s a little fey out there, the navigation points a little shiftier, if you take my meaning, and we’ve run into pirates more than once.” She wore a skintight gray bodysuit; her hair, short anyway, was covered by a skullcap. She took out a forearm length metal rod and twirled it. “Heredes knows how to use one of these,” she said. “We had a go at it today.”
“Is that how he got that cut on his cheek?”
“Forgive me, but no!” Jenny contrived to look offended. “I’ve got better control than that. And anyway, your father is one mean old bastard and taught me a trick or two, much as I hate to admit it. No, your blue-hair had to try it. I don’t mean to say he’s useless, because he’s really rather good, but he’s not got the real knack, not like us. He lacks control.”
“I wish I’d done more weapons.” Lily took the stick when Jenny offered it to her and weighed it in her hands. “We did some, but I’ve always preferred empty-hand.”
“That’s because you’re an artist.” Jenny retrieved the stick and slid it into her belt. “I’m just trained to kill.”
“Can I help?”
“You’re not used to this kind of raiding. Stick to the cabin, for now.”
Heredes had other plans. He persuaded the captain to let Lily sit next to him on the bridge for the next shift. Strapping himself in, he leaned to whisper to her.
“We’re going to be running an irregular route here, Lily. This is possibly the best chance you’ll ever get to see firsthand how they run the road virtually on manual.”
Her reply was equally soft. “Isn’t it a lot more dangerous?”
He smiled. He seemed placid, but beneath it—beneath it she suspected he thrived on chances like this. “Living is dangerous, Lilyaka,” he said. He turned back to the com-console.
She watched the two harried sta navigators, doubling shifts to ensure accuracy; Milhaviru, the pilot, a sloppy, loudmouthed woman who sat still as sealed air now; Captain Bolyai, nervous at the sensors; the weapons man; and the scanner operator. It was remarkably quiet:
“Homing at eleven ought two two three degrees. Forty-seven bits.” The sibilant tones of a sta.
“Check.”
“Did you hear the one about the pirate’s son who—”
“Shift—two point eight on vector.”
“Vector shifted.”
“Eleven ought three. Forty-eight.”
“Closing imperative.” Heredes’s voice.
“Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Break.”
They went through.
The mind like water, formed to calm reflectivity. All is mirrored.
And came out.
The calculations began anew. A station, a solitary beacon in a dark and isolate system, quavered a greeting and wished them well.
They went through.
The mind like the moon. Light touching all equally.
And came out.
They drifted for an eight-hour rest shift on the edge of a minor system. On a dog-tag such as this, with a necessarily small crew, Lily saw how easy it would be to lose your ship through a miscalculated window or on an incorrectly vectored entrance just from fatigue. She wondered where such ships ended up. And she saw how these folk might easily come, like Jenny, to bear themselves with a cheerful fatalism. Heredes woke her, and they returned to the bridge.
They went through.
Infinity of stars. Place, in this dimension, a hand, so. Bend, angle, shadow, each exact.
And came out.
And were hailed. Heredes caught the channel and relied. Captain Bolyai stood anxiously beside him.
“This is the Easy Virtue. We are, I repeat, passing through.”
“Throw down your colors, Easy Virtue, and prepare to be entered.” The static across title channel lent a certain insouciance to this command.
Bolyai flipped on the alert. It echoed over the intercom.
“Captain!” The woman on scan gasped. “I’ve got them. Void help us. They’re huge. Captain, look at those specs! Central’s battle fleet has got nothing this big—Look at that hull!” Her voice trailed off in horrified awe.
“The Easy Virtue replies that she is not available to just anyone,” said Heredes primly.
Static crackled. “We respect your finer feelings, Easy Virtue, but this is La Belle Dame, and she takes what she wills.”
“Get me the closest window!” cried the captain, rushing to the scanners. The navigator began frantic calculations on the computer, but Lily saw Heredes’s face freeze into stillness and thaw into anticipation.
“La Belle Dame,” he called into the console. “Tell your mistress that my original country is the region of the summer stars.”
Lily stared at him. Most of the bridge, catching the end of this, stared at him. Bolyai stepped back, about to speak.
“Stay on course, Easy Virtue. Don’t attempt evasion.” Static arced.
A second voice came on. “Hold your course. Please repeat your last statement.” Heredes repeated it. A longer pause, scrambled with the faint hiss of static.
“Easy Virtue.” A new voice. Female, yet something more than that. “‘Long and white are my fingers as the ninth wave of the sea.’” Even the sta, now, ceased at his calculations to gaze in astonishment at Heredes. “Are you coming over?”
“Of course,” replied Heredes, and he unstrapped himself and rose. “Captain, give me a shuttle and crew, and I can guarantee your safety, your cargo, and your ship.”
“But who is that?” the captain asked, gazing at the scan numbers with bewilderment. “What is that? What pirate has a better than class seven fleet ship?”
“An entirely different breed of pirate,” Heredes answered, not ungently. “And in any case, we have just met the queen.”
“I thought we were on the queen
,” Lily said.
“That was a joke,” Heredes said with perfect seriousness. “La Belle Dame is the true and the only queen of the highroad. Shall we go?”
11 La Belle Dame
KYOSTI CAME, AND THREE of the crew, but the blue-haired man, after the jerky removal from the Easy Virtue, demanded and received the shuttle’s controls. The massive hulk of La Belle Dame loomed outside the viewports. She was as large as the unmanned lowroad freighters Lily’s father commissioned for transport of unprocessed ore, but she was also as sleek as an animal, a dark creature stalking the highroad.
“Do you know her, this ship?” Lily asked Heredes.
“This ship, no. She’s new.” He was tidying himself, straightening his clothes, combing his hair. “But I know her mistress. I know La Belle Dame.” His voice had a husky quality, almost passionate. “These people are not from the Reft, Lily. Like Kyosti, they’ve come a long way to get here.”
“Like you,” she said, but he merely smiled.
Grappling hooks rang on the shuttle’s hull as the big ship fastened onto them; the lock sealed on, and Heredes, Lily, and Kyosti passed into the ship.
Four armed men met them. One, to Lily’s surprise, was a tattoo, standing with complete ease among her fellows. They wore striking clothes: large-sleeved shirts of silk, each a different color—scarlet, turquoise, emerald, and indigo—with collars and wrist bands of profuse white lace; tailored white trousers, wide belts, and ornately hilted cutlasses; high boots, rings, jeweled bracelets, necklaces of gold and silver and platinum. It was a uniform, but one individual to each man and woman. Kyosti sighed deeply, but forebore to comment on his own drab tunic.
The guards politely requested their presence on the bridge. Heredes politely agreed.
They followed corridors that seemed as numerous and as long as those of Ransome House. No grey walls here—from brilliant solid colors on the lowest deck the decoration progressed from simple geometric patterns, to murals, to, at the top deck, a complex interaction of color, pattern, raised relief, and texture that was evidently so fascinating to Kyosti that he lagged behind to examine it by touch. He had to hurry, finally, to catch them just as the lift doors began to shut.