by Ann Maxwell
Rheba stared into his gray eyes, level with her own. Unconsciously she retreated a step, bumping into Kirtn. The combination of corpses, Daemen’s fey presence and the Yhelles’ illusion was unnerving.
“Sorry,” she murmured to Kirtn as she stumbled against him. “As much death as I’ve seen, it still . . . bothers me.”
He caught her and gently set her on her feet. “Back to the ship,” he said. “You need to rest before you work with fire again.”
“But we’re only licensed for today.”
Kirtn shrugged. “Without a licensed killer, we’re helpless.”
Rheba looked at the wounded J/taal, who leaned against Kirtn. M/dur’s compact body was bloody, but some of the burns were healing even as she watched. It was a gift the J/taals had, part genes and part training.
“I won’t be any good to you for two days,” said M/dur flatly. “It would have been better to let me die.”
“I value my J/taals.”
M/dur’s head moved in a gesture both proud and submissive. “I’m yours to kill or keep, J/taaleri.”
“Remember that,” she snapped. “None of you is to die without my direct permission.”
Something that might have been a smile changed M/dur’s face. “You’re a hard woman. We’re proud to be yours.”
“You aren’t mine.”
M/dur smiled and said nothing. It was an old point of disagreement between them.
Rheba made an exasperated, untranslatable sound and turned to Kirtn. “Carry that unbending lump back to the ship.”
When Kirtn picked up M/dur, the clepts made a menacing sound. They fell back at a gesture from the J/taal. The war dogs ranged themselves into a moving shield that broke a path through the crowded streets back to the spaceport.
Once inside the Devalon, the illusionists sighed and let their last illusions go. Kirtn, seeing the amount of loot they were carrying, whistled approvingly.
I’sNara smiled and began peeling off ropes of gems and purses of magnetic OVA tabs. “I’d like to take all the credit, but my really valuable stuff came from Daemen.”
“Mine, too,” admitted f’lTiri, dumping gems and tabs out of his pockets. “That halfling is uncanny. Four times I was sure he was going to be caught, but each time his victim coughed or stumbled or farted or sneezed at just the right moment. I still don’t believe it. I could steal more deftly with my right foot than he could with four hands—but he got away with it!”
Daemen smiled. “I told you. Lucky is better than good.”
Kirtn gave M/dur to his J/taal mates and turned to face Daemen. “You ride your luck pretty hard.”
“No.” Daemen’s face changed, haunted now, withdrawn. “It rides me.” He emptied his inner pockets into Kirtn’s hands. One of the items was a comb made of precious-metal strands studded with oddly carved gems. “This is particularly valuable,” he said, handing it over with obvious reluctance. “It’s—”
Fssa, who had been studying the growing pile of loot with his opalescent sensors, interrupted with a piercing sound. “Let me see that!” he demanded, using the idiom if not the visual organs of the Fourth People.
Kirtn held the comb out toward the Fssireeme. “This?”
In answer, Fssa began to change shape, going into a mode that would permit him to scan the comb with a variety of wavelengths. The coins inside him clanked and clinked. With a disgusted grunt he opened a long slit in his side and disgorged the money.
While Daemen and the illusionists watched in fascination, the Fssireeme went through a rapid shape-changing display, scanning the comb with all the subtle means at his disposal. Finally he held one shape, a bizarre fungoid imitation. It was the shape he often used to communicate with Rainbow, the Zaarain construct that looked like a sunburst of multicolored crystals.
Rheba recognized the shape and recoiled. Rainbow was the jeweled fragments of a library millions of years old. Unlike a true First People, Rainbow was not a living crystal independently conceived out of unguessable lithic imperatives. Rainbow was manmade yet . . . different. Fssa insisted it definitely was more than a machine. Rainbow vaguely remembered being built by the legendary technological genius of the Zaarain Cycle. It remembered wholeness and mourned its fragmented self. It was terrified of being further reduced by man or circumstance.
Rainbow’s expression of that terror on odd wavelengths was what had alerted Fssa to the fact that what looked like a grubby mineral matrix was actually a living being. Well, almost living, and certainly sentient. When Fssa told Rheba about Rainbow’s nature, she rescued it from dismemberment at the hands of greedy slave children.
Once cleaned up, Rainbow proved to be gorgeous, a scintillant mass of colored crystals. There was only one problem: Rainbow was desperately lonely; but when Fssa communicated with it, the resulting energy exchange gave Rheba debilitating headaches. Thus, she watched the Fssireeme’s fungoid imitation with premonitions of agony.
Kirtn’s arms went around Rheba in a protective gesture that was as futile as it was instinctive. Fssireeme-Zaarain construct communication gave the Bre’n a towering headache, but it was nothing to what Rheba endured.
Rheba bit her lip and moaned. Pain belled in Kirtn’s head. She twisted in his arms and moaned again. With a curse, Kirtn lashed out at Fssa.
The blow was harmless to the dense-fleshed Fssireeme, but it did knock him off balance. He changed back into a snake, a very dark, very embarrassed snake. He had promised not to speak to Rainbow when Rheba was within range. While what he had just done was not—strictly speaking—communication with Rainbow, the result was the same. Pain for the fire dancer who had befriended him.
A tremulous Bre’n apology hung in the air, sung by a chagrined Fssireeme. Rheba sighed, rubbed her temples, and whistled slightly off-key forgiveness.
“Is it part of Rainbow?” asked Kirtn, his voice harsh.
“I think so,” said Fssa, taking the trouble to form organs for speaking Senyas. As whistling required only a flexible orifice, the snake normally communicated in Bre’n, but he wanted to apologize for his lapse, and so spoke within the confines of Senyas. “Probability to the twelfth on the green carved gem, to the ninth on the three yellow gems and to the eighth on the blues. I didn’t have a chance to test the colorless crystals,” he added, “but they have a zigr probability of—”
“'Enough,” whistled Kirtn sourly. “We won’t sell any of the crystals until Rainbow has a chance to look them over.”
Fssa was tempted to point out that Rainbow did not have eyes with which to “look” at anything, but decided that now was not the time to insist on Senyas precision—especially with an irritated Bre’n.
Rheba eyed the mounds of loot with distaste, wondering if any more of Rainbow was hidden within, a dead loss as far as buying a navtrix was concerned. There were times when she wished she had left Rainbow buried in the dirt of a Loo slave compound.
“I doubt if there are any more pieces of Rainbow,” said Kirtn, guessing her thoughts. “With the whole galaxy to look in, it’s incredible luck that we found any of Rainbow at all.”
The word “luck” made Rheba flinch. “Maybe,” she said shortly. “And maybe Rainbow was as big as a planet once and we’ll be tripping over chunks of it every time we turn around.”
Kirtn looked at Daemen. The young man stood silently, gray eyes fastened on the comb with peculiar intensity.
“Let’s put the rest of this junk on the sensor plate and see what Onan’s computer will give us,” said Kirtn, scooping up the comb in one big hand.
It took several minutes for the computer to weigh, sort, describe and transmit information from its sensor plate to Onan’s port computer. It took about the same amount of time for a tentative sales figure to come back—37,899,652.753 credits, subject to physical scrutiny by Onan’s computer.
A gasp ran around the room as the figure hovered in the air above Rheba’s head. She closed her eyes and then looked again, as though afraid the figure would disappear or diminish.
It did not. She cleared her throat and looked up at Kirtn, who was watching the figure with a fascination that equaled hers. Only the illusionists were not surprised.
“I told you,” said f’lTiri calmly to the illusionist beside him, “that the braided cord of gems was a genuine MMbeemblini. It alone must have been worth eighteen million credits. What fool would wear something like that to a city like Nontondondo?”
“An unlucky son of a five-legged dog,” murmured i’sNara, satisfaction resonant in her normally colorless voice. “May his right-hand wife conceive by his left-hand son.”
A ripple of uneasy black ran through Fssa. The Yhelle curse was both obscene and vicious in the context of its culture. The fire dancer stared at the Yhelle woman, but asked no questions. Rheba had enough troubles with a hold full of vengeful former slaves; she did not need to rummage in their individual pasts to find more.
Her hands went out to the sensor plate. Within its energy field, her akhenet lines sprang into prominence. The plate flushed orange, accepting her identity, then cleared in anticipation of her orders.
“Ask the port computer if it knows of anyone in Nontondondo who has an up-to-date navtrix to sell,” said Rheba, “and at what price.”
There was a pause, then the plate went into colorful convulsions. When it cleared, a woman’s face was staring out of the ceiling at them.
Rheba went cold, then her lines of power flushed hotly as she recognized the woman. She was one of the few people on Onan who could recognize the fire dancer who had illegally razed the Black Whole.
The woman’s image suddenly became a hologram hovering at ceiling level. Black eyes, elongated and shining, searched the upturned faces until the woman saw Rheba. The woman smiled. Her teeth were silver, as shiny as the closed circle she wore in her ebony hair.
“Hello, Rheba. There are a lot of people who would like to see you again.”
“Hello, Satin,” said Rheba evenly. But she leaned against Kirtn, joined in minor mind dance as her thoughts rang in his: I knew bad luck would find us, but I didn’t know her name would be Satin.
V
Satin’s eyes continued cataloguing the multiracial contents of the control room. Either the illusionists, Daemen, or the three striped men behind him caught her interest. Her eyes narrowed to intense black slits. She laughed bleakly. “Of course. I should have guessed.”
“What do you want?” asked Kirtn, his voice calm and hard.
“Curiosity. A weakness of mine,” said Satin, her eyes returning to Rheba. “When newly licensed thieves are so spectacularly successful, I want to know their names. And when those same thieves want to buy a navtrix, little chimes go off. I own the only loose navtrices on Onan, you see.”
Rheba muttered a Senyas curse.
“I don’t see Trader Jal,” said Satin, her restless glance probing the room.
“You won’t.”
Satin looked at Rheba with renewed interest. “Dead?”
Rheba remembered Trader Jal, the man who had enslaved her and Kirtn. She had last seen the Loo lord on his back in a spaceport light-years away. He was very dead, every last bit of heat drawn from his molecules by a Fssireeme, the galaxy’s most efficient energy parasite. Drops of rain had frozen into a shroud over Jal’s body. “Yes. Dead.”
“Congratulations,” murmured Satin. “There will be parades in Nontondondo.” Her eyes watched Rheba, noting with particular intensity the hair that lashed restlessly. “Are there many more like you out there, beyond the Equality?”
Despite her control, Rheba’s face echoed some of her memories of Deva burning, Senyasi and Bre’ns dying but not quickly enough, not before their flesh blistered and cracked and they screamed. “No,” she said. “No.”
“Ahhh, then you’re alone, too.” Satin’s black eyes took in the many races, faces of every hue crowding around as word passed in the ship that something unusual was happening in the control room.
“No, not alone. I have my Bre’n.” Rheba drew Kirtn’s arms around her, warming herself against the cold of her memories.
“But he isn’t your kind.”
Silently, Rheba rubbed her cheek against the suede texture of Kirtn’s chest. “He’s Bre’n. I’m Senyas. That’s enough.”
Satin smiled, a gesture both predatory and oddly comforting. “Come to the Black Whole.” At Rheba’s surprised look, Satin’s smile widened. “I rebuilt the casino after the fire. It’s mine now. I claimed Jal’s half.” Her head turned quickly. The movement made her killer’s circle gleam. “No one wanted to challenge me for it. Strange, don’t you think? I’m such a small woman, not strong at all.”
Kirtn laughed grimly. Satin looked at him, caught by the sound of Bre’n laughter.
“Come to the Black Whole,” she repeated.
“No. Once was enough,” said Rheba.
“If you want the navtrix, you’ll come to the Black Whole.”
“If I go there someone else might recognize me. I wasn’t,” Rheba added dryly, “very popular the night I left.”
Satin made a dismissing gesture with her shoulders. “If you’re worrying about the Equality Rangers, don’t. Your last OVA covered fines and damages for unlicensed rioting. As for the dead”—she moved her shoulders again—“you were licensed to kill. I think you even have a few credits left over.”
Rheba wanted to trust Satin, but did not. Satin and Jal had been partners; perhaps she had vengeance rather than business in mind.
“Bring your furry,” added Satin.
“Furries aren’t allowed in the Black Whole, remember?” said Rheba.
“New management, new rules. License him to kill and bring him along. Bring as many as you like—except don’t bring him.”
An immaterial hand appeared. A jet-black fingernail pointed plainly at Daemen.
“Come to the casino now,” said Satin, turning her attention back to Rheba. “If you wait, I’ll be too busy to see you. If you wait too long, I’ll be too angry to sell you a navtrix. Then you’ll have to try your luck stealing from the Equality Rangers. I don’t recommend it. They’re psi-blocked and immune to illusionists. I’ll expect you.”
Satin’s hologram vanished, leaving only a visual memory of her narrow silver smile.
“You’re not going to the Black Whole,” began Kirtn. “I’ll—”
Rheba made a flatulent noise that was an exact imitation of Fssa. Then she smiled tiredly. “Of course I’m going—licensed to burn, kill and steal. There’s no other choice.”
“Someone else might have a navtrix to sell,” offered i’sNara.
Rheba hesitated, then shrugged. “I doubt it. If Satin says she has the only loose navtrices on Onan, I believe her. Besides, if we take time to check around and then discover that she was telling the truth, she might decide not to sell us one at all. You heard her.”
Kirtn whistled intricate instructions to the computer. Two silver circles popped out the ship’s downside connector and rattled into the receiving compartment. The Bre’n pinned one circle on Rheba and the other on himself. A weapon thumped into the compartment. He pulled out the gun and tucked it into his weapon harness.
“Where’s my license to burn?” asked Rheba. “And to steal?”
His finger tapped her circle. “The lesser licenses are marked off on the major one.”
She noted the darker lines dividing her circle and headed for the exit ramp without another word. Once on the ramp she paused. “What about Fssa?” she asked. She looked back to where the translator-snake lay curled around a colorful mass of crystals atop the pilot mesh.
“Satin speaks Universal,” Kirtn said shortly. His eyes reflected his anger that Rheba once more had been maneuvered into danger.
Rheba saw his uncoiling rage and was silent. Like all Senyasi, she knew when it was not safe to disturb a Bre’n.
The air was cold outside, spiced with autumn and Onan’s sudden night. There was no darkness at street level. Advertisements and enticements flashed and beckoned in e
very color known to man.
Reflexively, Rheba drank the energy around her, storing up against time of need. Her hair lifted and quivered as though individual strands sought to touch the cascading colors of the night.
The Black Whole had not changed. The anteroom was still manned by a laconic killer. He glared at the Bre’n, but made no move to exclude him from the casino. Kirtn’s slanted yellow eyes were never at rest. He saw Rheba’s hair seethe and knew she was as edgy as he. Both would be glad to be off Onan, and delivering former slaves to homes they had never expected to see again. Only then would Bre’n and Senyas be free to comb the galaxy, looking for the few survivors of Deva’s holocaust that might exist.
But to do that, the Devalon must have a navtrix.
Side by side, Bre’n and Senyas pushed through the velvet force field separating the anteroom from the casino proper. Sounds poured around them, prayers and imprecations in every language of the Yhelle Equality. Far off across the huge room was a glitter-blue spiral galaxy. Beneath it were the seats and stations for a game called Chaos.
Rheba shivered and looked away. She had no desire to play Chaos again. She had been lucky to survive the first time. She stood on tiptoe, trying to see past the sweep of gamblers and hangers-on, looking for a pool of darkness where Satin would be.
Kirtn lifted Rheba easily, holding her high. She spotted Satin across the room, sharing a small table with another gambler.
Rheba pointed the way, then followed as Kirtn pushed through the crowded casino. Some of the patrons took exception to being touched by a furry. Their protests faded when they saw Kirtn’s size and the deadly warning he wore on his shoulder.
Satin looked up at their arrival. She gestured to empty chairs on either side of her, but Kirtn moved another chair so that he and Rheba would not be separated. The man across from Satin never looked up. He was obviously in difficulty, sweating and squirming unhappily. Despite the silver circle pinned to his square hat, he seemed afraid. He picked two gems from a small pile in front of him and placed them meticulously on the grid between himself and Satin.