by John Daulton
She laughed and leaned back in her chair. “Oh, and we don’t even screen for it. They could be making a killing off of us, couldn’t they?”
Black Sander’s grin was wide beneath his long, long nose, and he set upon her his most charming and innocuous look. “Yes, but the boys work hard, and if your great empire doesn’t need all its small diamonds and rubies, and even its little moonstruck pittance of silver or gold, I imagine these lads could stand the extra pints of ale.”
She laughed again, and even the stone-faced man beside Black Sander had twitches of humor touching the corners of his mouth. Black Sander felt his feet, and his confidence, settle a bit more firmly on the floor. They were all, in the end, so easy. Toss a bone to the working man, and there they were, appeased. So honest and well-meaning. So easy to deceive.
She was tapping her fingers on a bit of dark glass lying upon the table then, and she frowned for a moment before looking up at him. “How do you spell your name?” she asked. “I’m not finding it in here.”
He spelled it out carefully for her.
She shook her head, clearly regretfully, as she tried entering the name again. She chewed briefly on the bottom of her lip before asking, “Did your people send a file to TGS central to be entered in? I’m just not finding you.”
Feigning confusion was not difficult for him then. “Why, no. Not that I know of.” He recovered quickly enough, and began in earnest to modify his plan. There was still a chance to salvage it. “Lord Dovenstake simply asked that I bring this gift to Captain Hawthorne of the Lima.”
He pulled the huge topaz out of his pocket and showed it to her. She let go a long, low gasp. “Holy crap,” she said. “It’s as big as a plasma grenade.”
“Well, I should think not quite so big as that,” he said with a humble smile, though he had no idea what the object she spoke of was. “But still, My Lord hopes that Captain Hawthorne will accept this small gift in gratitude for all she and her crew have done for the working men of Kurr.”
“Well, I can see why you don’t care much if anyone’s pulling a few little diamonds or rubies out of the mines,” she joked as she looked up from the topaz and winked at him.
He muttered the words to an illusion just for her, a low-level charming spell that would paint him in her eyes in a subtly gossamer light, a divine radiance that was just beyond her ability to see. With it he layered in an equally subtle pheromone, the scent of centaur sweat carried on a waft of cocoa and tea. It was all very deft and minor, and all for her. It was all on a bet, and risky, he knew, for it might fail just as the first one had, especially if the lights flickered for having cast it. Which they did, at least those in her monitor did, but she wasn’t watching it. She had eyes only for him.
“What’s that?” she said, unable to make out the words as he cast his spell.
“It’s a little song we sing in Dae, a sailor’s prayer begging the Goddess to forgive us our greed.”
She was all smiles then, like a little girl pleasing a favorite uncle on whom she’s always had a secret crush. “Well, don’t worry about that. We won’t start checking in their boots. But let’s see about getting you logged in. I can requisition paperwork from TGS in Dae and give you a temporary pass for today. Will that work? How long do you need to stay?”
He showed all his teeth as he smiled down at her. “Oh, you are such a sweet thing. Thank you, of course that will be fine. And I think an hour or two will be more than enough.”
Chapter 22
Orli leaned over Doctor Singh’s shoulder, watching as he worked. She had to bend low enough so as not to hit her head on the thick pipe jutting from the machine. In the absence of an atmosphere, she couldn’t hear the roaring hiss of the water jet as it cut through the crystals near Yellow Fire’s heart, but the clouds of mist that whirled around them spoke volumes for what she might have heard had he been doing the work elsewhere.
“Suction, damn it,” the doctor said for the third time in less than a minute. “Rabin, what are you doing up there?” It wasn’t really suction anyway. That was simply the surgeon’s reflex. The baby-faced grad student was supposed to be blowing the mist away, angling an air jet at the end of the machine’s long arm.
“I’m trying,” came Rabin’s reply. “There’s a big difference between practice and reality.”
“Well, get it right. I can’t see.”
Orli could see the air nozzle move, and more mist came blasting back out of the nearly microscopic incision he had made. It sprayed all over the doctor’s facemask blindingly.
“Orli,” the doctor said even as she was reaching out with a towel and wiping off his mask. He cut the order short and thanked her instead. They’d worked together long enough on the Aspect a few years past, when the first encounter with the Hostile orbs had brought devastating disease to the crew. It was strange how much of that chemistry came right back.
“Move it left, Rabin. Now I’m getting a double shadow from the spotlights.”
The large, fine-toothed gears moved across the rack that supported the machine, a long strip of steel with a serrated upper edge running parallel to the wall. The whole rig sat atop a sequence of these tracks, each mounted atop a row of steel columns set ten feet deep in the ground, the ground, of course, being the bottom of the thirty-by-thirty-yard hole that they’d excavated in the bottom of Yellow Fire’s cave.
Much of the machine was tank, a twenty-foot-long cylinder, domed at both ends, and wide enough that Orli could have walked the length of it inside without having to duck her head. But the essence of the machine was the enormous sequence of pumps, three of them, each linked to the previous by pipes that looked to Orli more like cable mesh than pipe. From one to the next, the pipe-cable got smaller, and the pumps got squatter, fatter, and thicker of casing. Together, they rammed the water and a few tiny particles of a coolant chemical through the jet that the doctor guided with a pair of specially fitted gloves. Every motion of his hand, every twitch of his fingers, sent signals to the machine. The barest movement of his eyes inside his helmet could move the heavy nozzle in increments too small for Orli to see.
“How’s that?” Rabin asked from his place in the water saw’s cab, a small, boxy compartment with a seat, three monitors, and the controls that operated the pumps and moved the body of the machine up and back along the tracks.
“A little more; I’m still getting a double edge on this.” The steel frame vibrated for a moment after, followed by the doctor’s grunt. “That’s better. Leave it there.” Once again the clouds of mist thrown off by the water jet resumed.
Orli watched breathlessly as the practiced hands of the skilled surgeon eroded away the barest layers of crystal around the velvet-purple pulse of Yellow Fire’s heart. Her own heart pounded so loudly she could hear the blood coursing through her ears. She couldn’t imagine having to be the one to do it, to actually carve out Yellow Fire’s heart. What if she messed up? A cough? A little tremble of a muscle or a nerve?
What if Doctor Singh did?
It wasn’t a matter of culpability; it was a matter of death and misery. And guilt. Lifelong guilt. This was all her idea. So much was riding on its success. So much more now, given Altin’s promise to kill Blue Fire if it didn’t work. Just thinking of that made her temper rise, even though she’d had several months to come to terms with it. She just couldn’t. What had he been thinking? So she watched and she fretted. There was so much more at stake. Two lives now. Doctor Singh had nearly refused because of it and, well, because Altin had been with her when she asked.
“So killing comes easily to you now, does it, Sir Altin Meade?” That’s what the doctor had spat at Altin when he and Orli explained what they wanted, and what was at stake. The way he spoke Altin’s title dripped with irony. “Well, I won’t do it. I took an oath to do no harm, and your gross willingness to kill anything that inconveniences your road to glory has rendered my help impossible.”
Altin had tried to argue, of course. And Orli had as well. “Why im
possible?” she’d asked, once the two men had finished their own emotional exchange.
“If I lose a patient trying to save them in earnest, and they have understood the risk, that is one thing. A weighing of risk and reward. That is what you have done, Orli, in asking Blue Fire to approve this procedure you want done. A reasonable conclusion to try the surgery. What harm if he has already been dead, or nearly dead, so long? Only Blue Fire knows how that all plays out long term. So that risk I call acceptable. No harm done. But now this, what you ask, what your … fiancée asks, is another thing entirely. Now I do harm by simply trying. The attempt is not about risking a patient already all but dead. The attempt is risking another being entirely. The probability for doing harm is now extremely high. Far higher than the chances for success. And all for a death promise from the Galactic Mage. Galactic Assassin, I say.” He’d turned such a bitter look upon Altin then, such absolute contempt, and said to his face, “You are in good company with that elf.”
Orli had had to stop Altin’s response with her fingers placed softly on his mouth, pleading with her eyes that these two men whom she loved so very much would not grow to hate one another any more than the doctor already did the mage. “Please,” she whispered, and Altin had relented.
It had been the work of eleven days and countless conversations that had finally gotten Doctor Singh to do the surgery. A lot of begging and a lot of tears. But at last he had relented, perhaps knowing in his heart that it really was the only hope of happiness for Blue Fire. And with Orli’s secret promise not to let Altin keep his word.
And so now the doctor worked with a strange tool, not so different than a laser scalpel in its way, but much messier and much more difficult to use. There were no cutting templates for a living planetary heart, and the odd properties of the gray crystals, the gray Liquefying Stone all around, gobbled up attempts to map the surgery properly. They could not get a visual representation with sound, X-ray, neutrino, or Higgs flow. They’d managed a gross sketch between each of those, each having marginal ability to permeate and shape the heart stone, but there were far more blank areas in the organ map than there were details. Which meant the doctor was on his own, though he did have the careful advice of Marks Bryant in his ear, the professor’s years of archaeology aiding his great knowledge of geology.
So Orli watched, and the doctor worked, and everyone not operating the machine or the lights, or monitoring the settings of everyone’s environmental suits, waited and paced. Which included Altin Meade.
Altin, therefore, paced back and forth on the bridge of the Glistening Lady, relegated to that distance at Orli’s request. The farther he was from Doctor Singh, the better off everyone would be, especially Yellow Fire, who needed the doctor’s hand steady as a steel plate, not quivering with rage. So Altin watched on the monitor of Roberto’s ship and waited anxiously.
“You’d think your daughter was late coming home from the prom,” Roberto said, trying to break the tension Altin kept painting across the deck. “I know you and the doc ain’t really all kissy-kissy anymore, but the man is good. It’s going to work out fine.”
For a moment Altin was taken aback, the words his friend chose confusing him. Altin was trying very hard to learn the language Orli’s people spoke, and he was within the radius of a translation spell now, but some of that made no sense. Besides the enchantment on one of Altin’s amulets, and enchantments on the com buttons of the ship’s entire crew, Roberto also had enchanted torch sconces mounted all over the ship, a gift from the Lord Chamberlain that Roberto had been too polite and too delighted to send back. Which meant Altin should have been able to understand everything. And yet, with Roberto more than most, he often couldn’t. He did know the man well enough, however, to realize much of it was likely some bit of inanity or sarcasm, so he forced himself to let it go. “I know Doctor Singh is competent, the best,” Altin said, responding to what he had gotten out of it. “I have absolute faith in his skill. But I’m worried about putting it back.”
“What do you mean?” Roberto asked as he laid a card on the table he and his crew had set up on one side of the bridge. He looked to the brawny woman sitting across from him, whom Altin had first seen standing guard at the base of the ship’s loading ramp that first day at Murdoc Bay. “Just one, and make it sweet,” Roberto said. She seemed to be amused by that, and her muscles flexed beneath tanned skin as she dealt Roberto a card, her arms toned and strong, with veins like blue snakes visible at the inner elbows and down her forearms.
“I mean, when he cuts it out, and we figure out how big it is,” Altin replied, “how are we going to get it into the cave on Red Fire? I’m watching the man work, and it occurs to me that we’re not going to be able to just stuff this heart into a hole like planting daffodils. It’s going to have to be put back perfectly.”
Roberto looked like he was going to make some smart remark, but Deeqa Daar, standing beside Altin, saw where the Prosperion’s thoughts were going. “You do not think they will be able to cut a new hole for it properly on the red world, despite all of that?” She pointed into the monitor, indicating all the expensive equipment that Tytamon’s—that Altin’s money had bought. “That is a high-end setup you have there. It is the best that money can buy.”
“Yes, I know. And Professor Bryant says they’ll cut a hole to match. The machine is monitoring the doctor’s every move, and taking notes of some kind. But I’m still worried that it has to be an absolutely perfect match. A hand in a kid-leather glove isn’t going to be a good enough fit. It must be more like those flexible gloves Earth doctors wear, and I just can’t see how they’re going to do that with that water machine. All that money, and I saw no plaster or even mud down there. I had hoped they might at least plan to make some kind of wet mold or something.”
“Four ladies, ladies,” Roberto announced, slapping four cards onto the table to the groans of both security crewwomen and his navigator. “Good thing I pay you well.” He turned a victorious face toward Altin as he raked in a pile of silver Prosperion coins. “Dude, that’s your medieval-age thinking going again. You’re so backwoods, bro. No offense, of course. But relax. They’ll scan that hole when the doctor is done and model it exact. I’m telling you, Singh won’t even have to make the cuts on Red Fire. The computer on that rig down there will match the hole way better than he ever could. It’s the first template that is the tricky part. That’s what Singh will do.”
Altin understood most of that very well, and he nodded, pacing right up to the monitor. “I certainly hope so. But I’m still worried about the joint. If it’s not close enough, it might not heal. Or grow. Or whatever it needs to work.”
“If you want something to worry about, you should be worried about how you’re going to get all that equipment teleported to the red world without screwing it up when this is done. Do you guys even have a hole cut out for it yet?”
Altin shook his head. They didn’t. He hadn’t even gone back since the day Orli blew the life out of the vicious Hostile they all called Red Fire, the day both she and Altin were nearly killed. He hadn’t wanted to. There’d been no need. Only a few quick trips with a seeing spell to confirm that the damage was done and that it had stayed that way. He’d looked again after Her Majesty had suggested there was a chance that Red Fire, like Yellow Fire, was merely lying dormant somehow. But he was not. The black, burnt-out remnants of his heart chamber lay open like a caved-in skull. The force of the explosion Orli had ignited with the mining charges had blasted out the bottom of the chamber and broken off a section of the cave wall, which dropped to the cavern floor like an unhinged jaw. There was no pulsing light in it now. Altin had even sent his magical sight scurrying through the debris, crawling with it through the darkness like a tiny insect through the rocks, looking through and beneath each boulder, all around, seeking the slightest pulse of light in the Stygian darkness. There had been none. Red Fire was dead. It was a certainty.
Or at least he hoped it was. He’d cast a divining spel
l for it, and that seemed to confirm it as well. So did the one the priestess Klovis had cast for him. The young adherent of Anvilwrath, part of the circle of clerics who had helped find Red Fire, had done it as a favor for him when he’d asked.
Now that there seemed to be a real chance that they could get Yellow Fire out, now that the professor’s insane-seeming water-knife idea was working as planned, the reality began to settle on him. They were going to have to go back. And if he was there, if Red Fire was lurking in that rubble heap, what might happen to them all?
He decided that perhaps he should put a little more effort into verifying the death than he had. Yes, the priests said it was so. But the priests lied as often as not these days. And when they weren’t lying, they simply got things wrong. Snatching up bits of this prophecy and that, trying to tie together the absolute truth.
He decided that, just to be sure, he’d go see Ocelot again. Orli would be busy for a while, and he thought a quick trip to the Z-class diviner would bolster his confidence before going back again. If it were only him, he wouldn’t be worried at all, but the whole lot of them would be going there in Roberto’s ship. And for the five or six hours it took to restart the ship’s systems, it and everyone in it would be vulnerable as it drifted in orbit above the huge red world. He supposed if there were to be bad news, now was the time to get it. And while he was on Prosperion, he would open up some books of transmutation spells. Maybe between him and Ocelot, they could figure out how to meld all that Liquefying Stone. He’d never tried to work with Liquefying Stone and his ring together. And certainly never an entire planet’s worth, a very big planet’s worth when it came to Red Fire. That world was no moon.
But he’d have to look into it. It was clear from watching this procedure that something most likely would need to be done to facilitate the transplant. The cut that Doctor Singh made now would have to be uncut on Red Fire, the damage undone. So home Altin would go, to Ocelot, and perhaps afterward, a visit to the man with the greatest gift for merging stone that Altin knew: Aderbury.