by Diann Read
The sight beyond the carrier’s windows, as he came aboard, made him stop in mid-stride and stare: the whole world, as much of it as he could see, lay buried under white.
He had sometimes seen patches of Ganwold’s prairie that looked white—or yellow or blue or red—when wildflowers bloomed in the spring; but this whiteness lay over everything as thick and heavy as a peimu robe. Tristan dropped into the carrier’s nearest seat and rubbed frosty condensation from the window with his sleeve so he could see out. He barely glanced up when Pulou settled beside him, huddling deeper into the blanket he’d wrapped around himself. He couldn’t tear his vision from the whiteness.
Shuttleport lighting illuminated white particles large as lomo feathers drifting down from the night sky. Tristan observed the crewmen shuffling around in it on the ground. When a piece of it struck the window in front of him, he studied its six-pointed structure, intricate as the lace on one of Larielle’s dresses, until it slid down the pane and disappeared.
“It’s what, little brother?” asked Pulou, peering over his shoulder.
“Snow, I think,” Tristan said. “My mother tells me about it. She says we live too far south on Ganwold to have it.”
Pulou blinked and cocked his head at that.
The crewmen disconnected the passenger carrier from the shuttle, folded its ramp closed, and it drew away from the landing pad and lights and burrowed into the early winter storm with a growl of engines.
Several minutes later it began to crawl up a hillside, under trees that rose like skeletal black hands clawing at the gray veil of snowfall. The Governor’s Mansion stood at the crest, a tower of cantilevered blocks extending to the eight points of the compass. White under floodlighting, it appeared to have been constructed out of ice. Tristan shivered, eyeing it.
At the mansion’s entry, they stepped out of the carrier’s steamy shell into a wind laden with snow. The layer on the ground gave a brittle crunch under their boots. Tristan paused to trail his hand through a drift, felt its crystalline cold bite his fingertips, and jerked them away. Behind him, Pulou urged, “Go, little brother,” and placed his feet gingerly in Tristan’s bootprints.
At the threshold, Pulou stopped to shake snow from his mane—and froze, nostrils working. His eyes widened, his nose wrinkled, he drew his lips back.
Tristan, shrugging off his coat, saw him and stiffened. “What’s wrong?”
Before Pulou could answer, he started at a whine, a whimper, and the noise of claws clattering on the stone floor. When three furred beasts bounded into the vestibule, he bared his own teeth, his hands curling hard, and Pulou pressed up behind him, hissing and hyperventilating.
The beasts’ broad heads reached to Tristan’s midsection. He stared at slavering jowls, at small eyes rimmed with red, at ears almost lost in mottled haircoat as long as Pulou’s mane. He backed up a step.
“Jous!” Pulou hissed over his shoulder. “Jous!”
They shoved around him, their tails beating his legs, and thrust their muzzles into the governor’s hands. Renier smiled, stooping to fondle their heads and speak to them with words Tristan didn’t understand.
“My pets,” Renier said. “Their breed, Sybrin bearhound, is almost extinct now. I don’t like leaving them here but they’re ill-suited for our residence on Issel.” He snapped his fingers and pointed, and the largest dog shifted its head toward Tristan.
Tristan started to draw back but Renier said, “Reach out to him slowly. Bearhounds don’t readily accept strangers; they were bred as much to be bodyguards as bear hunters.”
Tristan felt Pulou’s claws dig into his shoulders, heard his hissing heighten near his ear, and wondered if Pulou would attempt to climb up his back. But he gritted his teeth and put out a hand to the beast.
Its black nose touched his palm, cold as a fish. He flinched away.
“Hold!” said the governor. “Bearhounds can smell fear. They know threat and flight, and either may provoke an attack. If you pull back your hand too suddenly, Tristan, it might be torn from your arm.”
Mouth pressed closed to keep from hissing, Tristan stood rigid and let the dog snuffle at his hand. Let it butt and sniff at him from belly to boots until the governor called it back.
“He’s identified you now,” Renier said, smiling. “Abattoir never forgets a scent.”
Tristan followed Rajak to a suite at the outermost end of one upper wing, relieved to leave the dogs behind.
He didn’t wait until the valet left to push aside the drapery covering the far wall. The gray-tinted pane behind it dimmed the floodlights and snow below. Cold numbed his fingers and face when he leaned on the pane, and it clouded with his breath. This was no holograph screen.
Beyond the hill and the park, clouds above and snow below held the glow of nighttime city lights.
Aeire City.
His mother’s home city.
Tristan stood looking out into the dark for a long while.
* *
The shuttle sent thunder across the low sky, appearing first as a flash, then as a streak like a meteor. It hovered, firing landing rockets, and descended gradually over the VTOL dish until it touched on pillars of fire that shook the ground and boiled the ice around it. Steam rolled as it settled, making its skin shimmer, and even the honor guard turned their faces away.
Tristan braced himself against a wall of wind, still heavy with moisture though last week’s snowstorms had passed. He felt the cold as an ache in his legs and chest; he fisted his bare, stiffened hands and tried to resist shivering.
He heard a clipped order, saw the honor guard snap to attention and bring weapons to present arms, forming a double file that faced the shuttle. The order and the stamp of boots rippled through four companies of soldiers assembled on the tarmac behind the receiving party. Tristan slid a glance sideways at the governor in military cloak and medals, and Larielle in furs.
A hatchway slid open on the craft’s underside and a ramp lowered. Tristan saw shadowed movement within as the first figure emerged onto the ramp and others followed.
They stood taller even than Renier, wearing tunics and cloaks of various colors that brushed their knees with golden fringe. Thick hair on ruddy skin darkened their exposed arms and lower legs, heavy beards covered more of their faces than not, and the hair of their heads tumbled longer and wilder about their shoulders than a gan’s mane. Heavy brows could not conceal ursine eyes, nor did mustaches hide fanged smiles more menacing than a jou’s.
Tristan recoiled, remembering the hirsute shape that had seized his mother in the dark of a captured transport’s hold.
They wore leather boots, strapped tight around ankles and muscled calves. Scuffing footfalls up a ship’s corridor echoed in the pulse pounding hard in Tristan’s ears.
He glimpsed knife hilts stuck into belts among the rich fringe, and saw again the flash of a blade at his mother’s throat, close to his own face.
Ten of them, representing Mi’ika, the chief world in the Bacal Belt, strode down the ramp and approached the governor’s party as if they owned Adriat. They paused barely two yards in front of Renier, and the foremost raised one hand before his chest in greeting, his palm forward, his three thick fingers tense.
The wind rolled itself into a cold ball in Tristan’s gut. His hands curled involuntarily, hard as claws. He bared his teeth. “Masuki!” he hissed. “They’re masuki!”
Twelve
The Commander of the College of Surface Warfare clasped wrists with b’Anar Id Pa’an, son of the Pasha of Mi’ika. They embraced briefly and smiled for the bank of holocorders at the rear of the viditorium. All around the half circle of stage, humans and nonhumans rose, cheering and applauding, from tiered seats.
Cheers echoed in the amphitheater, swelling anew as Pa’an’s fellows came forward to salute the Commander in similar fashion and be presented to the college’s assembled officials.
Two junior officers in the center of
an upper tier exchanged looks as everyone resumed their seats at last and the Sector General took the podium. Neither young officer had come from Issel; one was nonhuman. Both wore instructor’s badges.
“Here comes another load of ‘Progress Through Cooperation’ rubbish,” said the human, a native Adriat, under his breath. He sat back in his seat and folded his arms over his chest.
His counterpart, an umedo from Saede, agreed with a brief darkening of its ashen skin and swept a damp pad over features that resembled thumbprints in firm clay. Its whisper rasped through the translator at its throat. “I am not concerned for advantages to growing the industry and the economy. We do not need a conflict against the Unified Worlds.”
“Especially not in an alliance with the Bacal Belt,” said the Adriat. “Establishing even trade relations with a species that deals in slaves would make me uncomfortable. But this—” He twisted his features in distaste.
“Trading of slaves has been a crime in the galaxy since the Stedjaard Convention,” the amphibian said. “Did the masuki not seal it?”
The human shook his head. “Some of the masuk worlds are party, for what that may be worth. We’re dealing with nonhu—uh, I mean uncivilized—mindsets and amorality here, for whom compliance with laws is determined mostly by convenience.
“Masuki,” he said, “value life only by what it’ll bring on the market. Our new allies have nothing to lose and quite a bit to gain by selling off their undesireables as mercenaries.”
“What is this, Ian?” asked the umedo.
“Didn’t you know? That’s how the Bacal Belt is paying for all the weapon systems we’ve given them—with mercenaries. Proxy soldiers to carry out the Sector General’s ‘progress.’”
He would’ve continued but an officer seated in front of them shot a glare over his shoulder. Ian sat through the rest of the speech with his jaw set, stood mechanically when the Sector General and his entourage departed for a tour of the college. He sat again to watch the viditorium empty around him, the assemblage moving down sloped aisles like water rolling to the bottom of a basin.
Beside him, the umedo said, “I am not understanding how the Sector General will prove the need for a war against the Unified Worlds.”
“It’s revenge, Katja, pure and simple,” said Ian.
The other stared at him. “That is niijik—insane! Does it desire a Tarssyginian Peace?”
“No. The governor’s public motives are to free his homeworld from its subjugation to the Unified Worlds.” Ian looked sideways at his counterpart. “You heard what he said about liberation."
Katja’s skin seemed to undulate with wave after wave of dark coloring. “It is niijik! It is not worth the elements of cost and risk, the expenses for the procurement, or the distances of transport. And it is estimating too low the Unified Worlds’ capability.”
“And overestimating the complicity of the masuki,” said Ian.
The umedo’s shade stayed dark. It appeared pensive, thoughtful.
Ian sighed resignedly and rose. The amphitheater had emptied by now. When his umedo companion stood, too, he began moving toward the aisle. They strode down it together, Katja mopping at its face again.
Stepping outside, Ian glanced around the portico as he put on his service cap and fastened his coat collar against the wind. “Did you notice the boy sitting near the governor in there?”
“Yes,” said the amphibian. It drew up the hood of its coverall uniform and touched a patch on the chest to activate heating filaments in the fabric. “Was it not an aide or a page?”
“He’s the son of Admiral Sergey, the Chief Commander of the Spherzah, the boy that’s been missing for twenty-five standard years.”
Katja darkened under its hood. “How does it have to do with this?”
“He’s the catalyst,” said Ian. “A hostage. He’s insurance for Sergey’s cooperation.”
* *
Boarding the carrier in front of the college administration building, Tristan deliberately trod on a foot thrust into the aisle to trip him and shoved his way between shoulders broader than a bull peimu’s. With Pulou close behind him, he glowered back at ursine leers, wrinkling his nose at rankness that rose from masuk bodies like steam in the cold. Dropping into an empty seat at the back of the carrier, he pressed his forehead to the one-way window pane in feigned boredom.
As the carrier began to move, he peered out between bands of violet bunting meant to disguise the vehicle’s armor and focused on landmarks: the hillside that rolled down from the campus to the city beyond, the distinct shapes of buildings against the winter sky. A couple of times he nudged Pulou and silently pointed.
At the back of his mind he envisioned the city map he’d studied, an historical work painted like a mural in one of the administration building’s vaulted concourses. Comparing map symbols and landmarks, he began to estimate distances and directions.
The vehicle entered the grounds of the governor’s mansion, and Tristan squinted through the dusk at something he hadn’t noticed before. A line of slender poles hemmed the forest. He noted their height and the intervals at which they were set. A lightning wall, like the one he and Pulou had leaped through on Ganwold.
He kept his gaze on the forest through the rest of the ride, thinking, planning. The trees cast a tangle of black upon white, fading into shades of blue in the approaching dark. He scarcely noticed.
He and Pulou hung back when the carrier drew up before the mansion, letting the masuki disembark ahead of them so they and the governor would intercept the bearhounds’ greetings. He let his hands tense, watching the dogs lumber from the entry.
“Whelps!” b’Anar Id Pa’an snarled. He bent to show his fangs and the dogs cringed, hackles raised but tails between legs. Pa’an straightened, grinning at his companions. “Whelps!” he said again.
Behind them, Tristan flexed his hands and locked his teeth in a hiss.
He turned on lighting as he came into his room, and Pulou slipped past to settle himself on a rug in the corner, where he removed his wet leg-wrappings. Tristan sat down beside him to tug off his own boots.
“In big—picture of this camp,” Tristan described the map in gan, “on wall of big lodge where we go, I find Elincourt, where my mother lives when she is small. It takes maybe part of one night to walk there.”
Pulou cocked his head. “Her family is there?”
“Yes.”
“You know that, little brother?”
He didn’t. Not for sure. He lowered his eyes. “They are when I’m small,” he said.
In another moment he rose, crossed to the drapery, and pulled it aside to stare down through dark diaphametal on darker woods. “She’s sick, Pulou!” he said. “Where else can I go to help her?”
Pulou said, “You think of what?”
“They take jous out to run at night,” Tristan said. “When they do that, we dress in warm clothes and wait. Keep your knife at dinner.”
“We go out how?” Pulou asked. “Lodge only has one door, at bottom.”
“In latrine,” said Tristan, “there’s hole in roof.”
Pulou blinked at him and grinned. “Like lomos from burrow.”
* *
Tristan’s vision kept fixing on Larielle at dinner. He kept remembering what she had whispered to him in the corridor the last time he’d tried to escape.
She looked up at last. “Is something wrong, Tristan?”
“No,” he said, too quickly, and fingered the handle of the steak knife he’d stuck into the waistband of his trousers. “I’m just tired.”
He switched off the door’s automation when he and Pulou returned to their suite, locking it to the outside. He gathered up his warmest clothing and divided it into two piles.
Struggling to put on human garments, Pulou said, “Skin that,” and gestured at the bed.
“Clothes are warmer,” said Tristan.
“No, not for warmth. Why do I teach you to make s
tripes on your body?”
Tristan glanced out on a forest wrapped in white, and grinned. “To hide!”
Shrouded in a sheet over his winter coat, he paced before the partially opened drapes, watching the floodlit grounds. He saw handlers leaning against leashes as the hounds came into the open. The diaphametal shut out the noise of their baying but his hand still tensed on the pane.
They took more than an hour to come back. Tristan observed them until they disappeared through the entry, though he couldn’t see it from his window. He waited until he heard commanding voices and barks and claws rattling on the floors below. Then he motioned to Pulou.
A ventilation duct ran up through the hygiene booth’s ceiling. Tristan yanked out its fan, revealing a shaft less than a meter long with wind whistling through the vented cover at its top. Standing on a chair he dragged into the booth, he squeezed into a space almost too narrow for his shoulders and reached for what appeared to be latches holding the cover on.
He tugged at one. It didn’t budge. He reached for the second. It moved sideways. He twisted it experimentally and it loosened—came off in his hand. A wingnut. He dropped it and reached for the first again.
The wingnut still wouldn’t turn. Glancing down at Pulou, he saw the fan lying on the floor and said, “Give me that.”
Two fan blades bent together served as pliers to grip the wingnut. With a few quick twists, it bounced down on his head and shoulder. He used the fan blades on the third and fourth wingnuts, too. The vent cover shook in the wind and a sharp gust ripped it away. Tristan dropped the fan, pulled on his gloves, and reached up for the rim.
Pulling, straining, he thrust his arms, then head, out into a blizzard. Sleet in his face took his breath. He ducked his head away from the wind, gasping, and pushed himself up on his arms until his hips cleared, followed by his legs. Lying flat in the snow on the roof, he reached back into the shaft for Pulou’s hand. In another minute the gan emerged onto the roof beside him.