by Paula Guran
“What?” Virtue looked around at her partner. “Why are you ragging on me?”
“Because you’re grinding your teeth and it’s getting on my nerves.”
Dayva had come up out of the gravity well of a little planet named Asp. She had a straight back, a penchant for darkside philosophy, the face of a dark angel, and a fine-boned frame that seemed better suited to dance, or something equally courtly, than the rough work on a hover boat.
A wind frisked along the beach. The whisper of bronze silicate-sand sliding over itself hissed into the air as the Artace rocked at her mooring. Virtue finished a check of the utility skiff and moved to the salvage equipment. Filtered illumination came up through the Coreyal’s waters and reflected warmth along the hulls of other rigs, up into her face as she worked, the scent of heated metal and deep water making her mildly euphoric.
Dayva stretched from her hunched position at nav, dark fingers spread to the station sky. “Be a shame to grind those fine teeth down to nubs, girl.”
“Nothing better to do than kive my offhand comments in your head, D?”
Dayva snorted, delicately—something Virtue had only seen Dayva manage. “You’re the most stimulating company I’ve been able to scare up since coming to this misbegotten slag heap of a space station.”
“Take it up with the tourist board, D.”
“Come clean, Virtue, you took this job just because General threatened to give it to Turner, didn’t you?” She glanced down at the comp as it spit out the numbers kive, then sat in one of the seating hollows and leaned elbows on knees, peering up at Virtue. “You’re a competitive headcase, you know that, right?”
Virtue opened her mouth to answer, but out past Dayva, a spot of motion turned into someone heading down the docks toward them.
Someone wearing dark clothes, looking over his shoulder every few steps, like some other someone might be following him.
Which predisposed Virtue not to like him.
Dayva came up behind her. “Friend of yours?”
Virtue shrugged. “Yeah, you may have noticed, I’ve got so many.” Then she muttered, “What’s it want with us, that’s the issue.”
Their visitor reached the Artace and stepped down on the dock, looking up. He trailed off, uncertain, took a step back at what must be showing in her face.
The grip of her knuckles was white.
Their visitor looked up past her, at Dayva, back to Virtue. He tilted his head, as if to say, well, you’re rude, but I’m a forgiving sort. Then he quirked his mouth like he might say something funny. “Should I go away and come back later? You’re obviously . . . busy.”
The red tide crested and washed through her, leaving a puddle of toxins to shiver her muscles and trace an ache behind her eyes. Virtue swallowed, feeling the shakiness in her limbs. She was still hanging on to the Artace as if they’d just come through a stormwall of heavy weather.
The Rage was hard—supposedly impossible—to subdue.
She pulled her hand, trembling, off the hull, and folded her arms. “Why would Horatio send someone? He has a perfectly good uplink.”
The clone shrugged one shoulder. “He had something he wanted to send personally—not on a delivery transport, I guess. I wanted to get off Piranesi, see some of the universe.” A slightly embarrassed, crooked smile.
Wind riffled across the deck.
It was so familiar, that smile, it slipped behind all of Virtue’s defenses.
She imagined she could hear the infinitesimal whirr and click of biochemical mechanisms. There was that chance, of course, that his puzzlement was genuine, his candor real—so far as he knew. That he didn’t know he was a clone, whose clone, or why he’d been sent to Virtue.
“What’s your name, brother’s messenger?”
“Tao-Jin James.”
Virtue pictured the registry data, in some code-locked, vaulted compfile. James Xu, what—five, ten, thirteen? How many clones had her brother decanted by now?
She leaned forward on the rail. She’d play, until she knew what was behind this latest sally of her brother’s.
“So, what’s he sent?”
The kid slid a sphere the size of an apricot out of his hip pocket. The sphere glinted opalescent cloudy gray, like a brakfish’s eye. A Shiralsky-Deek Modular Coded Comp Messaging Holo. Shiral, for short. A baroque technology, rarely used and fabulously expensive. Horatio used them as an idiosyncratic tic that he wanted to be seen as an eccentricity.
“Virtue—” The tone in Dayva’s voice brought her attention off the problem standing on the dock below her. She followed the slant of Dayva’s gaze and saw Lobren, the Jumka bursar, coming along the dock toward them. Wanting their one-day-past-due dock fee—which they didn’t have, currently. “Void.” Virtue looked down at Tao-Jin James, chewed her lip. Then, what Dayva called her toffish perversity kinked into play. Damn all if she’d let Horatio Kana get any satisfaction out of this. Send her a copy of James, would he? And think to pull her strings thereby?
“Power up, Dayva,” she said. “We’re moving. So, Tao-Jin—you want to go salvage dust in the Fortunate Isles?” She sensed, rather than saw, Dayva’s brows come frowning down as she keyed code into the Artace and the hover boat came to life. Tao-Jin James blinked, trying to read her.
“Either climb on or toss me Horatio’s toy. We’re on a schedule.”
He gave her a hard look, suspicious even. But he slid the shiral back into his pocket, wrapped one hand around the lowest rung and pulled himself aboard in an easy, agile motion.
How well Virtue remembered that agility.
The Artace almost threw him the next moment, though, as the hover turbs kicked in, so she gave him a hand the last rung up.
Shiver of visceral memory as their hands connected. He got a startled look. Virtue’s expression was grim.
In the fourteen gens it had taken for the slowly built sections of Samjadsit Station to accrete into a unity the size of a small moon, some unintended materials had slipped into the mix. Legend had it that in the tenth gen of construction, the sixth region of what would become the Coreyal basin had been caught in the protomatter—whatever that was when it was at home—of a passing galactic phenomenon. The stuff had crusted into the unfinished matrix and never been removed.
Over the course of time and through the working of various chemistries, something came to exist in the isles. Dust. Its properties were variously believed to be restorative, mutative, miraculous.
La Cabeza Azul was offering more than respectable pay for a cache of the stuff—something Virtue definitely needed. Both the Artace and Virtue’s former partner, General, needed new parts—not to mention the dock fees. General, an old station relic before he’d ever become Virtue’s partner, needed them most. It was General who’d asked her to take the run; General who’d offered her his most precious possession—the route to an untapped cache of dust; General who’d cajoled, challenged, and, finally, threatened to give the route to another hover boat operator, Jake Turner. Dayva was right—Virtue was competitive and she didn’t like Turner.
The Artace sailed the air just above the water. Occasional displacements sent a spume of drops over the boat’s pale leading curve.
The vast network of the Fortunate Isles grew slowly closer, a vivid fringe of green under the distant station sky. The numbers General had given them were for a spot deep in the isle network.
“Tell me again,” Dayva said, removing the ear and eye pieces of her kive link to the ship and frowning into the slowly glooming distance, “why it’s a good idea to go so deep in? No one else does, not in a hover the Artace’s size.”
“That’s the spot General gave us,” Virtue shrugged. “The dust caches in the outer isles are all tapped, anyway.” She kept a hand to the Artace’s rudderpad, linked to comp, surveyed her partner’s face. “Scared?”
Dayva nodded. “You should be, too, crazy bitch.”
Tao-Jin James sat leaning over the Artace’s hull, face into the wind. Virtue was use
d to Dayva muttering unflattering things about her, but he looked around, from one to the other of them.
“What’s wrong?”
Dayva cast Virtue a glance that said, clearly, that’s your piece of ass, you want me to talk to it? Then she did anyway. “The deep parts of the isles are spawning ground for brakfish. It’s near spawning time.”
Tao-Jin tilted his head.
“What Dayva means,” Virtue said, “is that salvage isn’t usually a fish-fighting danger sport and she’s no harpoonist.”
He leaned forward, frowning, moved one hand in a gesture that echoed into her memory.
“So the fish are dangerous?”
Dayva laughed.
“The brakfish,” Virtue said, “is a monster of ichthyofauna, a speciation unique to Samjadsit Station, one which no one knows or claims the breeding and introduction of. The Fortunate Isles are brakfish spawning grounds.”
Dayva rolled her eyes at Virtue’s imitation of a tourist kive and Tao-Jin James smiled.
“Brakfish grow three times bigger than the Artace, and wily with it.” Virtue found she had to look away from James’ smile. She gestured. “Teeth long as my forearm. There are hunting regattas every year, people coming from all over to kill the unexpected miracle of accidental evolution.”
“Usually,” Dayva added, “some one or two hapless humans die in the course of the hunting, too.”
“So that’s a yes,” Tao-Jin concluded. “And they’re from the same place as this dust.” He glanced out toward the isles.
“Maybe that’s why Azul wants some.” Dayva rose to lean near Tao-Jin and peer into the wind. She looked like an icon, with her short white hair and long dark self.
“Why?” Tao-Jin asked.
“To grow something prodigiously large.” She raised one elegant hand, graceful bones turning, and put inflection on her words, drawling a bit. Tao-Jin’s gaze followed her hand, then he laughed. They all laughed.
For all the universe like friends on a joy spin, Virtue thought and then her thoughts snagged on the shiral in Tao-Jin James’ pocket. She wondered if she ought to listen to it. Later, she decided, because the air felt good and Horatio’s voice would take all the joy out of it.
They hit the outer isles shortly after the core went to ninety-five percent polar for station night. The intense radiance melted from the upcurve, fading to a soft, mellow limning; illumination left the water, the solar relays giving only a faint veining of wispy fire to the dark.
Tao-Jin James had been studying Virtue, surreptitiously. He met her gaze, though, when she turned her most impassive stare on him. Eventually he lowered his eyes.
Dayva slowed the Artace as the isles rose around them. The hover boat’s nightlight picked out the bristling shapes of ranga trees and formstone monoliths in the dark, one after another, an endless-seeming depth of them hinted at beyond its scope. The waterways narrowed. Insects spoke from within dense copses. A night bird swept from one isle to another, long silvery feathers briefly etched from the darkness.
Samjadsit Station was large enough, and one of the system’s planets near enough, that the Coreyal possessed tides. The station’s tide and spin motion stabilization systems—what Virtue thought of as the slosh compensators—were in a permanent state of repair and adjustment. There was a betting pool, on the docks, long standing, on whether and when it would be the erosion or the slosh that sent the station critical.
The scents on the Coreyal’s back were never those of a planetary sea. For one thing, the Coreyal was fresh water, not salt; but there was a dense, overcharged feeling to the air Virtue had never known on another station, nor on Piranesi, the planet she left when she was fifteen. Where Tao-Jin James had lately come from, emissary of her brother, who held the strings to a fortune she hadn’t touched since leaving, and—he thought—to things by which he could call her back.
The Artace tracked the specs Dayva had fed to comp until the numbers ran out. Full nav shifted to Virtue’s rudderpad.
“Watch for a jut of formstone that looks like a fat woman,” General had said, lying in his bed, shaping the air with one hand. His other hand, and the rest of him, was looped, plugged, or cybered into various bio support. His voice wheezed out, soft and fragile as ancient cloth. “Just after the breakaway—that comes up sudden-like. Narrow waters there. Skinnier than the Drift Witch’s gullet. Then comes the inlet, all covered over with ranga branches. Skinny, skinny—hard to get through. She’ll groan at you, but the Artace can do, if any can.”
They were in narrow channels now, ranga and other flora, colorless pale in the Artace’s light, rising to either side, closing above in places.
“Dayva, slow her to point five and disengage the hovers.”
Dayva didn’t move for a moment, than said quietly, stating the obvious, “That means setting down in the water.”
“Yes.”
“That’ll—”
“Yes.”
She muttered, but turned back to comp and did it. The hover turbs slowed, disengaged, and the Artace set down gently in a puff of air and a slap of water. Then it was the low hum of the engines, and the slip of water across the hull.
Tao-Jin James looked out into the isles, intent. Virtue could see his nostrils flare as he took in the unfamiliar scents. The posture was echo, mirage. Hair shorter than James ever kept his. He was younger than her memory of James.
None of that mattered.
General’s breakaway loomed, and just beyond it, hidden by a curve of ranga branches and a swarming of vines, his formstone fat woman loomed, a giant figure of rock, seeming to leer at them as they passed. The Artace’s light passed right over the inlet beyond it. Invisible, if you weren’t looking.
Maneuvering the Artace into a passage she could only take on faith to actually be there, Virtue grimaced as ranga roots groaned against the hull, leaf and branch scratching and whining over the upper carapace. It went on for long moments, her hand tense on the rudder, sweat dripping down her sides. The Artace could lead with any end of her curve-framed self, nimble as hover ships came, but a root or vine in the engines would be bad, especially in brakfish waters. Dayva bent over comp; the ship bucked and creaked until, with a final groan, they were through. Both Virtue and Dayva breathed out, relieved.
Skinny passage for a bit, then the channel opened out, widened, deepened, and they were slipping down a tunnel made incandescent by the hover boat’s beam.
“Kill the light, Dayva.”
She did and it was suddenly very dark, the five percent of relayed sun’s light that filtered through the night polar blocked here by the thickness of roots below, branches above. The Artace’s running lights, motes of yellow reflection on the water, didn’t touch the darkness of the isles.
They drifted in the dark, silent. Slowly, here and there on either side, something began to singe at the edges of their sight: a burning of blue threads and embers in the depths of the isles. More and more, until there was enough of the blue glow to see the suggestion of ranga trunks and formstone shapes. Virtue locked the rudder.
Awareness of his presence was like heat on her skin—she couldn’t help herself. She looked over at Tao-Jin. His eyes were wide, lips parted. See the universe’s many wonders, adventure and excitement, you bet. Then he shook his head, at some thought, turned to look at her.
“Dust?”
“Dust.”
“It looks like something out of an Irdish fable.”
She found she had nothing to say to that and turned away to prep the equipment. Dayva set the anchor and started lowering the skiff to the water, the crank whining softly.
Virtue pulled a duck suit over her jump, belted it, hung a palm flash and a catchnet containing three preserving boxes and a scraping tool to the belt; last, she tucked the suit’s long gloves into the belt, leaving the filter hood down around her shoulders. Dust was toxic in its unprocessed state.
“Thirty minutes,” Dayva said. “Then you’re back here.”
“Forty-five.” She
slid over the side and climbed down, jumping the last step off the ladder to land in the skiff. Now she could feel the water under her, close and alive in a way it never was on a hover. Over the Artace’s hull edge, two faces peered down at her, Dayva mostly just white hair and brows.
“Don’t forget the hood, Virtue,” she gestured.
Virtue grunted, but her attention drifted to the figure beside Dayva. “My brother send you to talk me into going back to Piranesi?”
“He sent me to bring you the shiral. But—yes, he asked me to try.” He hesitated for a second, like he was going to say more, then didn’t.
“And you don’t know why he might have chosen you—someone I don’t know?”
Tao-Jin shook his head. “Horatio just said—I might do.” His voice carried softly: so, so familiar Virtue forgot to breath until her chest hurt. “It was free passage off Piranesi,” he said. “I’d never have afforded it on my own.”
She wished he was telling the truth, but knew he wasn’t. “When I get back,” she said, “I want a better reason than that. You think about it.”
Dayva shifted beside him, looking nervously up and down the channel. “Virtue—over the side of the hull isn’t the place for this conversation.” She waved her hands in a shooing motion, looking like a witch doing incantation in the blue light. “Get moving.”
Tapping a code into the skiff’s rudderpad to unlock it, Virtue set one palm to its surface. The skiff parted water. A short, silent, gliding while later it bumped up against the jagged formstone that passed for a shore. She knotted a line to a low hanging branch. One glance back to the Artace, the two faces, distant in the dim, still watching her.
She wondered what they’d talk about, and what Dayva made of the whole thing. The things she’d never told Dayva—anyone. General knew, some of it, but the old man had figured it out for himself, knowing a thing or two about the trade on Piranesi. With these thoughts for company, she headed into the ranga copse, ducking branches as she went. It was hard to gauge where the dust was, its burning blueness seeming to float in the darkness, fooling about with the distances. Shining a light on it made dust disappear—poof, nothing there. Dust salvage was strictly a night cycle activity.