Korval's Game

by Sharon Lee

  The gauge topped the line. And stopped.

  Inside the helmet, Shan nodded and made one more adjustment on the board, draining what was now the topmost cannon, feeding everything he had into the belly gun.

  Power surged in the single live cannon. He could have wished for more. He could have wished for both guns full primed and on-line. For that matter, he could have wished for a ship to equal the one that came against him, but time was short. He had what was needful.

  Just.

  He flicked a toggle, relieving the boat of its mindless adherence to the coords, and slowed, dropping a few artfully wobbled meters toward what appeared to be a canyon, or possibly a quarry, at the extreme edge of the encampment.

  Behind him, the fighter took the bait.

  The other pilot jammed on speed, guns swiveling. Shan waited, wobbling slightly lower—though not too low—toward that tempting rocky edifice. Waited until the fighter was committed, until there was no possibility of a fly-by—and no possibility of a miss.

  Jaw locked, he whipped the thrusters, spending the dregs of his fuel. Agonizingly slow, the lifeboat tumbled. The fighter snarled by, the other pilot seeing the trap too late. Shan hit the firing stud, and the single canon blared, hot and bright and brief.

  The fighter exploded, raining burning bits down into the encampment’s perimeter.

  And lifeboat number four, guns and fuel utterly expended, fell the few remaining meters to the planet’s surface.

  ***

  He opened the hatch into the wary faces of two soldiers—one Terran, one Liaden—both holding rifles.

  Quietly, he stood on the edge of the ramp, gauntleted hands folded before him. He’d taken the helmet off, exposing his face and sweat-stiffened hair; the land breeze was cool against his cheeks. The sounds were bird sounds, and the slight wind abrading leaf and grass.

  It was the Terran who spoke first, sounding friendly despite the carbine she kept pointed at his chest.

  “You OK, flyboy? Nasty fall you took there.”

  “Thank you, I’m perfectly fine,” Shan assured her. And smiled.

  The flip maneuver had worked precisely as he had hoped. The lifeboat had fallen about 12 meters, to land, right side up relative to the ground and unharmed, on the rock apron at the entrance to the quarry. The pilot had received a stern shaking and would have bruises to show, but the space suit and crash webbing had cushioned the worst. “Perfectly fine,” stretched the truth, given other conditions, but not nearly into fantasy.

  The Terran nodded and turned to her mate.

  “Call and let ’em know we’re bringing him in.”

  He slung his rifle, pulled a remote from his belt and spoke. “Quarry patrol. We have the pilot, safe. Will transport.” He brought the unit to his ear, listened with a frown, then thumbed it off and hung it back on his belt.

  “The sub-commander wishes to speak with him,” he told his partner.

  “Right,” she said and jerked her head at Shan. “OK, friend. Let’s take a walk.”

  Eye on the rifle, Shan hesitated. The woman shifted, her demeanor abruptly less friendly. He held up his hands, gauntleted palms empty and unthreatening.

  “I do beg your pardon! I have no wish to keep the sub-commander waiting, but the case is that I am separated from my ship and I have every reason to believe that an attempt at contact will be made, once it is recognized that my position is stable. I should be here to receive that message when it comes.”

  The woman shook her head. “Sorry, pal. Sub-Commander Kritoulkas wants you and we’re under orders to bring you. Wouldn’t care to have to shoot you in the knee and carry you myself, but we can do it that way, if you insist.”

  Shan lowered his hands, taking a deep breath to push the sudden rush of distress down and away from the present moment.

  “I would hardly wish to put you to so much trouble. By all means, take me to Sub-Commander Kritoulkas.”

  ***

  Sub-Commander Kritoulkas was a sour-faced woman with iron-gray hair and a prosthetic right hand. She glared at Shan where he stood bracketed by his two guards, sweaty and out-of-breath from his hike. Heavy-duty work suits are not made with strolls through the woods in mind.

  “What else?” she asked, transferring her glare to the Terran soldier.

  The woman saluted. “He did say he was separated from his ship, ma’am, and expecting a call.”

  Kritoulkas nodded. “Tell Comm to keep an ear out.” She glanced at Shan.

  “Anything we should say for you?”

  He considered her blandly. “That I am safe and among friends.”

  “Think so, do you?” She looked back to the soldier. “Pass it, if the call comes. Dismissed.”

  The soldiers saluted and were gone, leaving him alone with the sub-commander’s glare.

  She sighed and braced a hip against her desk, folding her arms over her chest.

  “OK, we’ll take it from the top. Name and rank. If any.”

  “Shan yos’Galan, Clan Korval,” he said. “Captain of the battleship Dutiful Passage.”

  “Battleship,” she repeated and shook her head. “You don’t look much like a soldier to me. Course, you don’t look much like a Liaden to me, either.” She shrugged. “Whatever. What’re you doing here, Captain?”

  “My ship took damage and I was separated during an Yxtrang attack that was launched during outside repair.”

  She nodded. “That’s one. Take a step further back and tell me the other one. Why is your battleship in this system?”

  Shan sighed, shifting his shoulders inside the hot, heavy suit. He emphatically did not want any more questions from this abrupt, sour-faced woman. He wanted a shower. He wanted his lifemate, his ship, and the familiar routine of the trade route. None of which he was likely to receive in the near future, if ever again, though the shower might just be possible, if he were polite and answered the sub-commander’s questions.

  So.

  “Family business. My clan is allied to Erob, and I have reason to believe that my brother is here.”

  “Yah? Name?”

  “Val Con yos’Phelium.” Shan watched her face closely, but saw no recognition there.

  “Not somebody I come across. You sure he’s here?”

  “I am positive that he is here,” Shan told her, the recollection of that painfully familiar music flowing from Erob’s warning beacon vivid enough to raise tears. He blinked.

  “Perhaps another name,” he said to Kritoulkas’ glare. “Miri Robertson?”

  That meant something to her. She straightened, glare melting into astonishment. “Redhead? She’s here, all right. Think she’ll own you?”

  “Yes,” he said, by no means sure of it.

  Sub-Commander Kritoulkas nodded.

  “OK, Captain, here’s what. Gonna have to pass you up-line anyhow, that being where we got folks who are real interested to hear about what things look like upstairs. We’ll keep an ear on your ’boat down there and let your ship know you’re among friends.”Her mouth twisted a little at that. It might have been a smile.

  “Meantime, we got a shift-change coming up in about four hours, which is about enough time for you to clean up, get something to eat and a catnap. Under guard, you understand, because I’m damned if I believe you’re regular military and I ain’t having you endanger my people.”

  A commander’s natural concern was the welfare of her people. Shan’s opinion of the sour-faced sub-commander rose slightly and he nodded.

  “I understand entirely, ma’am. Thank you.”

  She snorted, and raised her voice, bawling for “Dustin!” A shortish Terran strode in from his post outside the tent and saluted.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She jerked her thumb at Shan. “Take this guy to draw clothes and a couple sandwiches. Shower and time-out at the medic’s station. Stick close and get him to the departure squad on time.”

  Dustin saluted again. “Yes, ma’am.” He turned and nodded at Shan, face and eyes n
eutral. “OK, sir, let’s go.”

  He turned toward the door, heard Kritoulkas clear her throat behind him.

  “One more thing, Captain.”

  He looked at her over his shoulder and, incredibly, saw her grin.

  “Damn good shooting, coming in.”

  ***

  Shan lay on the hard cot, head on a crinkling, antiseptic-scented pillow, and closed his eyes. He had showered, and put on the fighting leathers provided by the quartermaster. He had forced himself to eat one of the half-dozen sandwiches Dustin had pried out of the mess tent, and had drunk several cups of water. Now, more or less alone, if one discounted the guard at the cubicle’s entrance, he prepared himself to enter trance.

  He took a breath, and another, building the correct rhythm. The noises of the camp faded, his heartbeat slowed. When the time was proper, he slipped over into trance.

  Healspace is formless, a void of warm frothing fog. There is nothing but fog within Healspace—until something more is required.

  Warm within the formlessness, Shan spoke his own name. He smiled at the man who stepped out of the fog to join him, and extended a hand adorned with a purple ring to take a hand on which an identical stone flashed its facets against the fog. With the deft surety of a Master Healer, he opened a line of comfort between them.

  The turmoil he confronted was acute: Grief, joy, guilt, fury, bereavement, horror, love, confusion, repugnance. My, my, what a muddle, to be sure, but after all, demanding nothing more taxing than a Sort and a touch of reweaving. His scan found no irredeemable catastrophe, no resonance which so imbalanced the personality matrix that forgetfulness must be imposed. The matter was not at all complicated, and work could go forward at once.

  In Healspace, there is no time. There was the work, and the results of the work, Seen by Healer’s Eyes. The work consumed the time that the work required. When it was done, Shan smiled at Shan, opened their arms and embraced into oneness.

  Healed and at peace, he turned in the foggy nothingness of Healspace—and checked.

  This place was not Healspace. Nor was it the medic’s tent cubicle. This place was stone, strange and brooding: A vast stone cavern, or so he thought at first. Then he saw the weapons, hung orderly along the wall.

  The weapons . . . shimmered, in their places, as if each held its present form by whim and might as easily be something, quite, else. He focused his attention on a particular sword, and felt it slip from edge to shield, from shield to explosive, from explosive to . . .

  “Good moon to you.”

  The man’s voice was beautiful. The man, seated on a stone bench to Shan’s right, was lean and hawk-faced, the black braid of his hair vanishing into the tattered shadow of his cloak. A red counter moved in his long fingers, appearing, disappearing. Appearing. Gone.

  “Good moon,” Shan returned calmly, while with Healer’s senses he tried to Sort this place that was no more physical than Healspace, though it certainly was not Healspace. Nor had he ever met another in Healspace, save one he had called, or who had called him.

  “Ah, but you haven’t met another,” the man in the cloak said, his fine black eyes glinting amusement. “I am you. Or you are me. Oh, my . . .” In his fingers the counter flashed and vanished. He smiled. “I can see language is not going to be useful in this conversation.”

  “I’m familiar with the concept, as it happens,” Shan said, reaching out with Healer’s senses to touch the other. He encountered a cool smoothness very like a Healer’s protective Wall. “But we can hardly become all of myself if you are shielded away.”

  “Clever child. But as you say, this is not the sweet floating dream of a spellmist. This,” he gestured, grandly, with one long, sun-darkened hand. A silver dagger appeared in that same hand. He considered it, shrugged and thrust it through his belt.

  “This,” he repeated, drawing the word out, “is Weapons Hall. You are here because you have found it necessary to be armed. Do tell me why.”

  Shan frowned, allowed himself to wonder if this after all was madness. Perhaps he was even now dying in the wreckage of the repair pod, his mind spinning a last, rich fantasy to disarm itself.

  “Nothing so precipitate,” the man in the cloak said softly. “As you well know. You are strong, hale and sane. That being so, I must again ask—why come here?”

  “I don’t know that I meant to come here,” Shan told him. “It was necessary that I Heal myself, before I did damage. There is a war, you see, and the sub-commander is correct, damn her. I’m not a soldier. But the world is under attack. I must be able to fight. I must be able to—use all of my resources.”

  “And you trained as Soulweaver, the Mother be praised.” The man tipped his head. “When are you? Captain of a ship that sails between the stars, and more than a touch of the Dragon in you. And your lady is a Moonhawk. I begin, I think, to see.”

  He stood, flinging the cloak behind his shoulders, revealing a shabby black tunic and patched black leggings.

  “I—we—have been here no more than six times since Moonhawk showed me the way. We’ve never loved the place, nor sought it out of power-lust. Time, you understand, is not very orderly, but I do believe this is the only occasion upon which I met myself here.” He beckoned and Shan went forward to take the strong, callused hand.

  “Shan is my name in your when?”

  “Yes,” he said, as they walked toward the shimmering wall of weaponry.

  “In this when,” the man lay his hand upon his breast, “your name is Lute. Let us arm me well.”

  ***

  The world looked different, even with his eyes closed.

  The information that came through shuttered eyes somehow told him it was afternoon; it also told him that one wall of the tent where he’d been allowed rest-space was in shade.

  His left arm was slightly warmer than his right—the sun was on that side of the tent.

  There were sounds, each fraught with meaning: he could hear the quiet, regular step of someone walking a guard path; he could hear an occasional low mumble of voices, which meant that he was in an area where security was a concern.

  Even the sounds he wasn’t hearing meant something. He was alone in the tent, the med-tech having gone elsewhere for the moment.

  He savored the information coming in, sorted it and milked it dry of meaning, while some back corner of his mind not engaged in this vital task was explaining very calmly that these things meant nothing to him. He was a master of trade, a Healer—a peaceable fellow, really, despite his place in the line direct of a clan descended of a smuggler, a soldier, and a schoolboy.

  yos’Galan—the schoolboy’s line—had always been respectable, though, in all fairness, the genes had been mixed across lines so often that it was difficult now to know where respectable yos’Galan began and pirate yos’Phelium ended.

  Outside the tent, from the sunny left, came two sets of quiet footsteps, accompanied by the low murmur of a woman’s voice. He caught the word ‘backup’ on the edge of hearing that seemed much sharper than usual, then the steps went beyond the tent and Shan realized he was ravenous.

  He opened his eyes and sat up in one smooth motion. The cubicle was as he recalled it; the remaining sandwiches still wrapped under their cool-gel.

  He made short work of them, feeding a hunger so great it was almost nausea, at the same time aware that he could always eat one of the ration bars tucked into his combat belt, if the sandwiches proved insufficient to his need.

  As he ate, he considered. He was often hungry after a visit to Healspace—perhaps a two-sandwich hunger, he thought wryly, unwrapping the last of the food Dustin had wrangled from the mess tent. When he and Priscilla had traveled so far in spirit to talk to Val Con—both of them woke starving, having lost a tenth or more of their bodies’ mass. Magic, Priscilla had said then. Strong magic uses an immense amount of energy.

  So, Shan considered, polishing off the fifth sandwich with a sigh, Lute’s Hall of Weapons must be very strong magic, indeed. He sa
t back on the cot and shook his head.

  “Shan,” he murmured, mindful of ears close by, “what in the blessed name of sanity have you gotten yourself into?”

  He hadn’t taken much from the Hall: a knife and a shield. Things that would serve any soldier well, Lute had said, then held out a thick manuscript. Soldier Lore was written across the face of its leather binding in the ornate characters of a language Shan was positive he didn’t read.

  “Behold, the most useful of all the weapons in the hall,” Lute said with a flourish. “Take it.”

  Shan did, looking at his mentor—at himself—doubtfully. “It’s rather heavy, if one is to be marching about. Which seems to be my next assignment.”

  “Nonsense,” said Lute, “it’s not heavy at all.” When Shan looked again at his hand, the manuscript was gone.

  It appeared that the lore of a good soldier was still with him; his bones felt steeped in it.

  Shan shook his head and, in an instinct that was in no way his own, began to take inventory.

  He had no gun, no sword, no distance weapons whatever in his belt or pouch. The blade he did have was neither a combat blade nor a bayonet, but part of a folding utility kit.

  In an emergency, however, Soldier Lore informed him, a blade is a blade, so he inspected it carefully, oddly pleased with its quality and balance. He’d held worse and used it to good purpose—he shook his head, banishing the memory that was not his—It was Val Con who had the passion for sharp edges of all types; peaceable Shan was accurate enough with his pellet-gun, but he tended to rely on Healer skill as protection from harm.

  Weapons check complete, Shan turned his mind to other details that required attention. He stood and walked out of the tent.

  “Dustin?”

  The startled guard’s about-face nearly took Shan’s mind off his purpose. The gun had come around—but not dangerously so.

  “Sir. I thought you were gonna sleep till the cows came home.”

  “Are we expecting cows, Corporal? I didn’t think . . .”

  “Naw,” the man waved the expression away with his free hand. “Just meant I was sure I’d have to rouse you when the time came. You’ve got another hour or so, if you wanna catch another snooze. Sir.”