by Ann Maxwell
“Rheba, if you don’t stop that I’ll—”
The rest of his threat was lost in an excited shout from a man down the street “There she is! That blond with the big furry! She caused the riot at the Black Whole!”
Kirtn took a fast look down the street. One look was enough. The people staring toward him wore the red-and-silver uniforms of Yhelle Rangers. He would have preferred the local police. They were noted for taking bribes first and shooting only as a last, unprofitable resort. The Rangers were celebrated for shooting first, last and on the least excuse.
Bre’n muscles bunched hugely. Rheba grabbed Kirtn’s weapon harness in the instant before he leaped. He hit his full stride in a single powerful surge. Behind him a tight beam of lavender light smoked across the sidewalk. Her fingers frantically probed the pockets on his harness.
“Where’s your gun?” she demanded.
“Ship,” he said laconically, reserving his breath for running. “No license.”
She whistled a Bre’n expletive between her teeth. Grimly, she hung on to him. Lavender lightning vaporized a puddle of water in front of them. He leaped aside with no loss of speed. Farther ahead, the spaceport’s silver arch shimmered, separating spacers from downside spectators.
Kirtn was strong and fast, but so were two of the Rangers—and they were not carrying anything heavier than their guns. Rheba measured the distance separating pursuers from pursued, and pursued from safety.
The Rangers would win.
“There’s an alley where those buildings meet,” she said urgently. “Drop me there. I’ll hide, then take the first ship out to Zeta Gata. You can pick me up there.”
He neither commented nor paused. The alley whipped by, a slice of darkness wedged between two pale buildings.
“Kirtn, you can’t outrun them carrying me!”
He lengthened his stride. She loosened her grip and tried to throw herself free, but the Bre’n had anticipated her. His arms tightened until she gasped. Struggling was not only futile, it ran the risk of unbalancing him.
Lavender beams split the darkness. Kirtn’s breath rushed out in silver bursts, but his stride did not shorten. Rheba looked over his shoulder, cringing when the lethal beams came too close. One shot was so near it made her eyes water. She cursed her lack of a gun. Her aim would have been no better than that of the running Rangers, but return fire would it least have made them more cautious.
Light hissed across a building, leaving a head-high groove of incandescence. Desperately, she grabbed at the energy with the immaterial fingers of her will. She gathered what she could of the backwash of Ranger lightguns, shaped it and hurled it toward them.
Light burst over the Rangers, light so bright that it washed out the scarlet of their uniforms. Reflexively they shot again, spraying lavender lightning. Rheba grabbed what was possible, twisted it and gave it back to them with brilliant vengeance.
The result was blinding. Rangers stumbled and fell helplessly, but she did not see them go down. She had closed her own blinded eyes and buried her face against Kirtn’s neck, expecting each instant to be cooked by Ranger fire that she could not even see coming. Kirtn ran on, knowing only that she had done something to stop the Rangers' fire. He did not know that she and their pursuers were temporarily blind.
As he raced under the spaceport’s silver arch, a figure separated from the shadow of a nearby warehouse. The man’s black robe lifted and fell as he sprinted after Kirtn. The Bre’n’s back quivered in anticipation of another fusillade, but unless he let go of Rheba there was nothing he could do to defend himself.
“Rheba—” panted Kirtn. “Do whatever—you did to—the Rangers!”
She let go of his weapon harness long enough to rub her streaming eyes. Blinking frantically, she stared over his shoulder. The lone pursuer was less than a man’s length behind.
Shaking with fear and fatigue, she began to gather harsh filaments of energy into herself. Her hair crackled with hidden life, but still it was not enough. She must wait for Kirtn to pass near one of the spaceport’s powerful illuminators.
The man’s hood fell back, revealing his features, blue on blue, grim.
“Jal!”
He did not answer. He simply held out his hands, proving his lack of weapons. Rheba sighed and let the energy she had collected bleed back into the night.
Kirtn pounded up the berth ramp to their ship’s personnel lock. He slammed his hand down on the lock plate. The door whipped open. He leaped through, Jal right on his heels. Rheba’s high, staccato whistle brought the ship’s emergency systems to life.
Kirtn threw her into the pilot web and leaped for the standby couch. The ship’s alarm lights blazed from silver to blue, signifying hits by small energy weapons. Either the Rangers had recovered their sight or reinforcements had caught up.
“Get flat,” snapped Rheba, grabbing for the override controls. “This will be rough.”
Jal dove for a second couch as the ship’s downside engines blasted to fullmax/override. The Devalon leaped into Onan’s cold sky, slamming Jal into the couch and crushing him until he moaned that nothing would be left of him but a thick stain. Then he lost even the air in his lungs, and consciousness.
Kirtn lay on his back, fighting to breathe. He did not complain. Rheba was doing what had to be done. The fact that Senyasi could pull more gravities than most spacefaring humanoids was a double-edged weapon that she rarely used. Grimly, he counted the red minutes until the ship would be far enough out of Onan’s gravity well to safely initiate replacement.
The effort he had given to outrunning Rangers caught up with him. The ship’s walls bleached to gray, them became shot through with impossible colors. He groaned very softly. He would have closed his eyes, but even that small comfort was denied to him; both sets of eyelids were peeled open by implacable fingers of gravity.
The minutes until replacement was possible stretched into eons.
Rheba felt the pilot web gouging into her body until skin parted and muscles pulled. She did not need to look at Kirtn to know that he was suffering. She wished he would just pass out as Jal undoubtedly had, but knew that the Bre’n would stay conscious. Bre’ns had a legendary ability to absorb pain without losing control. It was a necessary trait; otherwise, they and their dancers would never survive a dancer’s adolescence.
An alarm light pulsed blue, then underlined the warning with a low sonic that crawled over her bones. She looked at the war grid. Three lights burned, Ranger patrol ships cutting tangents toward the green circle of the Devalon. The ship was being fired on. Worse, the pursuers would converge on her before she was far enough out of Onan’s gravity well to slip safely into replacement.
Pain wracked her, leaving her weak and nauseated. The acceleration was too much even for her tough Senyas body. She could no longer breathe, and would soon pass out She felt the contours of the override clenched in her hand and stared through a red haze at the grid. The Devalon was giving her all the speed it could, more than she could take. But it was not enough.
Her hand convulsed, closing contacts that hurled the ship into replacement. The Devalon vanished from Onan’s gravity well between one instant and the next, but to her it lasted forever, a force wrenching her apart in all nine dimensions at once. She and the ship shrieked as one.
The ship came out of replacement eighty light-years distant from Onan. A short hop, but unexpected enough to keep the Devalon off Ranger patrol screens. The ship coasted with engines off, circling the replacement point, waiting for new instructions.
None came. Inside the control cabin, Rheba hung slackly in the pilot’s mesh, the override dangling from her nerveless fingers. Blood dripped from her lips onto the pale, resilient floor.
III
Kirtn groaned softly as consciousness raked him with claws of pain. Gradually memory surfaced, galvanizing him to full wakefulness. Despite the white agony in his bone marrow, he forced himself to stand.
“Rheba....?”
No answer.
“Rheba,” whistled Kirtn raggedly, focusing on the figure hanging limply in the pilot web. “Rheba!”
He knelt by the mesh. With careful fingertips, he stroked her neck, seeking a pulse. A steady beat of life answered his search. She was bruised, bloody and welted, but still strong. A short time in Devalon’s womb would remove all but the memory of pain.
For several moments, Kirtn savored the warm rhythm of Rheba’s pulse beneath his fingertips. The Rangers had been close. Much too close. He had not been so certain of dying since the instant he had realized that Deva’s sun was finally beyond control of the akhenets. Fire dancers, storm dancers, earth dancers, atom dancers, mind dancers—even Bre’ns in rez—nothing had deflected that last outburst of plasma from Deva’s volatile sun.
Rheba moaned as though in echo of his memories.
“It’s all right, dancer,” he murmured. Very gently he kissed her bruised lips. “We’re safe. You snatched us out of the dragon’s mouth again.”
“I feel,” she whispered hoarsely, “more like something the dragon ate and left behind.” Her eyes opened, cinnamon and bloodshot. “Next time I’ll let the Rangers win.”
He smiled, tasting blood where his teeth had lacerated his lips. “Nothing can beat a fire dancer and a Bre’n.”
“Except Deva’s sun,” she whispered.
His gold eyes darkened, bat all he said was, “Can you sit up?”
She groaned and pulled herself upright. The sensitive pilot web flowed into a new shape, helping her. She cried out when her hands came into contact with the web.
“Let me see,” said Kirtn.
Wordlessly, she held out her hands. Fingertips were blistered, palms were scorched, and akhenet lines of power had become dense signatures just beneath her skin. The lines stretched from burned fingertips to her elbows. A few thin traceries swept in long curves all the way to her shoulders.
Kirtn whistled a Bre’n word of surprise. He looked speculatively at her worn face. “What did you do to those Rangers?”
She frowned, remembering her desperation when she was certain the Rangers were going to kill her Bre’n. She stroked his velvet arm with the unburned back of her hand. “The beams were so close, even the backwash burned. I . . . I just grabbed what I could, trying to deflect it. That’s what fire dancers were bred for, isn’t it? Deflecting fire?”
He nodded. Absently, he traced her new lines of power with his fingertips.
“But I’m not very good at it,” she continued ruefully, looking at her burned hands. “I drew the fire instead of deflecting it, I guess. I had to weave faster than I ever have, and then I threw all the fire away as quickly as I could. That, at least, worked well enough. The light blinded the Rangers so that you could outrun them.”
She looked at the new lines curling across her skin. They itched. New lines always itched. She reached to scratch, then snatched back her hand when blistered fingertips came into contact with bruised flesh.
“You attempt too much,” said Kirtn. His voice was soft, final, the voice of a Bre’n mentor. His words were a protest as old as Rheba’s first awakening after Deva’s death. She had vowed then to find more of her kind and his, to build a new world of Bre’ns and Senyasi out of the ashes of the old.
“I don’t have any choice,” she said.
“I know.”
“Besides,” she continued, holding out her arms, “what are these few skinny lines? Shanfara’s lines covered her whole body. Dekan’s skin burned gold when he worked. Jaslind and Meferri were like twin flames, and their children were born with lines of power curling over their cheeks.”
Rheba dropped her arm abruptly. She dragged herself to her feet, preferring physical pain to the immaterial talons of memories and might-have-been. Better to think only of now. “Is Jal alive?”
Kirtn glanced over at the second couch. He noted the blood tracked from beneath the pilot web, along the front of the controls, and then to Jal’s couch. He concluded that the trader had recovered sooner than anyone else and wanted to keep that fact a secret. “He’s awake. Don’t trust him.”
Rheba’s cinnamon eyes narrowed. “I don’t—though he wears a Bre’n Face.”
Kirtn stiffened. “You’re sure?” he demanded.
“He had it around his neck in the casino.”
Kirtn came to his feet in a rush, pain forgotten. He crossed the cabin in two long strides, bent over Jal, and yanked the trader’s robe apart. Hanging from a heavy gold chain around his neck was a Bre’n Face. Kirtn stared at the carving, his breath aching in his throat
“A woman,” whispered Kirtn at last. His hand closed tenderly around the Face. “A woman!” He turned toward Rheba. “Where did Jal get her Face?”
“We have three weeks to find out”
Kirtn’s hand tugged at the chain, testing its strength. Jal “awakened” immediately, proving that he had been conscious all along. The trader looked from the huge hand wrapped around the carving to Kirtn’s hot gold eyes. Deliberately, Jal ignored the Bre’n, focusing instead on Rheba.
“My body is bonded to you for three Onan weeks,” Jal said in Universal. “My possessions aren’t.”
“A Face belongs only to the . . .” She hesitated, seeking an analog in Universal for the Senyas word “akhenet”. “It belongs to the Bre’n’s scientist-protégé child.”
Jal blinked. She had spoken in Universal, but the meaning eluded him.
“Where did you get this carving?” Kirtn asked in harsh Universal.
Both the question and the menace were clear.
“I won it,” said Jal quickly.
“Where?”
“The Black Whole. The owner wagered it against a—”
Jal gagged as Kirtn’s fist twisted the gold chain until it cut into the trader’s throat
“Don’t lie to a Bre’n,” said Kirtn. He loosened the chain, allowing Jal to breathe. “Where did you get the carving?”
“On Loo,” gasped Jal. Then, seeing no comprehension on Kirtn’s face, “You don’t know about the planet Loo?”
Kirtn made an impatient gesture.
Jal managed not to smile as he turned his face toward Rheba. “Loo is part of the Equality. You do know about the Yhelle Equality, don’t you?”
Rheba shrugged, concealing her interest in the subject. She and Kirtn knew almost nothing about the area of space called the Yhelle Equality; that was one of the reasons she had been disappointed to lose Jal in the melee at the Black Whole.
Trader Jal watched her closely, then smiled. He looked meaningfully around the ship. When he attempted to rise, a sound from Kirtn changed the trader’s mind.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” said Jal, his voice mellow with overtones of trust and fellowship. “Even if I weren’t bonded to your smoothie, I’m helpless in this ship.” He looked at the pilot web and the enigmatic displays. “I’ve bought, sold and, um, borrowed every kind of ship built in the Yhelle Equality, but I’ve never seen one like this. I can speak, read and draw in the four major languages of the Equality, as well as Universal, and I can read spacer lingo in six more.” He gestured around with one heavy-nailed hand. “But that doesn’t do me any good here. None of my languages fits your ship’s outputs.”
Neither Rheba nor Kirtn responded. Jal looked at her closely, as though seeing her for the first time. “Your ship’s different, yet there’s nothing remarkable about you or your big furry. You clearly belong to the Fourth of the Five Peoples. Humanoid to the last cell.”
She moved impatiently. “What did you expect—one of the Fifth People?”
Jal made a face. “You’re not a Ghost. You proved that when you undressed in the casino. But at least you know about the Five Peoples?”
Rheba made an exasperated sound.
Trader Jal smiled slightly. “Can’t blame me for checking. If your people didn’t divide intelligent life into the Five Peoples, I’d know you came from another galaxy. But,” he added, looking around the gleaming ship again, “this
wasn’t designed or built by any Equality race.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she said. The tone of her voice did not encourage further questions from the trader. “Tell us more about the planet Loo. Particularly its coordinates.
Jal smiled. “Information is a commodity.”
“So are you,” she retorted. “Remember? It was your bet, Trader Jal. And your loss.”
Jal smiled unpleasantly. “So it was. My compliments, by the way. That was a novel form of cheating you used. How did you do it?”
“Mirrors.”
Jal grimaced at the sarcasm.
“The coordinates,” rapped Kirtn.
“Impatient beast, isn’t it?” said Jal to Rheba.
Her eyes slitted. “A Bre’n woman is involved. Kirtn is Bre’n.”
“Bre’n . . .” muttered the trader. He shrugged. The word was obviously as unfamiliar to him as the ship’s controls. “Never heard of the beasties.”
“Senyas?” said Rheba, hiding her disappointment that not even the name Bre’n was known to a man as widely traveled as Trader Jal. “Have you heard of a race called Senyas?”
“No,” said Jal, replying honestly because he did not wish to be caught in a lie while the furry’s big hand was wrapped around his throat.
“Then how did you get the Face?” she pursued, watching Jal with burnt-orange eyes.
“Loo imports lots of . . . ah . . . workers. The carving must have belonged to one of them.” He shrugged. “Maybe the worker needed money and sold the jewelry to get it.”
“No,” she said, her expression as bleak as her eyes. “The Senyas man who wore that Face is dead, or the carving would be woven into his ear. But the Bre’n woman who made the Face for him might still be alive.” Her voice hardened. “Loo, Trader Jal. The coordinates.”
“Listen,” said Jal in a reasonable tone. “You have something I want and I have something you want. Let’s trade.”