The Crystal Variation

by Sharon Lee

  In short order, just ahead of them, a glare of light, and then the port-ward scans lighting up at the same instant as the ship’s collision alarm went off. He took it in, didn’t swear.

  “Con coming your way.” Cantra’s voice was firm.

  Another burst, and the pilot slapped the transfer button, swapping her board for his. His hands moved, feeding in avoids, hoping the pattern he had in his head was going to be good enough.

  “Three,” Pilot Cantra said meditatively. “And the man don’t know who loves him.”

  Being engaged, he let the debate go, kicked the engine up another notch, and felt the ship surge while screens one, three, and five showed explosions.

  Though they were still in atmosphere he slapped up the meteor shields, then played the controls a moment to check reaction time . . . let the ship spin about the long axis, the modest airfoils working just fine at this velocity.

  Tower came over the open comm, ordering the armor to cease and desist, which would do as much good as ordering any other robot unit to do the same.

  “Ships coming on line behind us,” Cantra said quietly. “Main screens going up as soon as we’re clear.”

  Ships coming on line—that could be bad, or good, and in either case not on his worry plate until any of them actually fired. He slid the throttle up another notch, felt the instant response in his gut as the acceleration kicked in, and then quickly backed off power as the collision alarm went off again.

  “Tiny!” was what Cantra said, and she was describing the munition struggling to change course, to catch them . . .

  Jela slammed the control jets, bouncing the ship and occupants around ruthlessly as the missile seemed to skitter along some unseen barrier. One final burst of acceleration now and the projectile slid helplessly behind them.

  Another cluster of bursts, below them now, and—

  “Shields up! Got us a ship burst—”

  He frowned at his screens, reached to the reset—

  “One armor gone,” Cantra said. “Tower can’t decide whether to be happy or not. ID . . .” An audible in-drawn breath. “Pretty Parcil.”

  “Not bad,” Jela said. “For a civilian.”

  She didn’t say anything, loudly. He notched the engine back, reached to access for the next item in the navigation queue—

  “Nothing close, now,” he said. “I think we’ll do.”

  Suddenly a blast of noise, internal, as Cantra brought the audio to the speakers.

  Jela sighed. So much for a quiet departure. Ships calling for weapons, pilots demanding information, the local air defense group issuing contradictory orders . . . and all thankfully behind them.

  Cantra nodded at him, with a quick hand sign that was thanks, in pilot hand-talk.

  “I’ll rig that up for auto-run,” she said, and the lights flickered under his hands—swap back. He sighed to himself, fiddled with the comm, checked the screens and said nothing. Her ship, her rules, her call.

  Pilot Cantra fed the silence, fingers moving with deliberate purpose, locking in the auto-run. At last, she sat back, unsnapped the shock straps, and leaned her head against the chair.

  “Dulsey!” she called.

  “Pilot?” Languid. Sounded like she’d been asleep, for true. Jela grinned. Nerves spun out of steel thread. She’d do, all right. Maybe.

  “You ride a board, Dulsey?”

  “No, Pilot. I regret. The Batch-grown are not allowed to hold professional license.”

  Cantra sighed. “Replay what I asked you, Dulsey. I don’t care if you got a license, scan?”

  Silence. Jela shot a glance over his shoulder. The Batcher woman was sitting on the edge of the jump-seat, straps pushed aside. She bit her lip.

  “Pilot, I can ride a board,” she said slowly. “But I am the verymost novice.”

  “Just so happens you’ll have Pilot Jela on first, and he’s something better than that, as we’ve seen demonstrated. Do what he tells you and you’ll be ace.”

  She turned her head and glared at Jela, who considered the lines etched in by her mouth and the discernible trembling of her arms and her fingers, and forbore to bait her.

  “And you’ll ring me, if something comes up except a clear route and easy flying, is that right, Pilot Jela?”

  “I’ll do just that, Pilot,” he agreed, and touched the green button at the top of his board with a light forefinger. “That’ll be this?”

  “That’s it.” She reached to her instruments, assigned control back to him, and came to her feet, swaying slightly. “If you have to vary for any reason, it better be good, and you’ll be checking with me. Right, Pilot?”

  “Right,” he agreed, amiable as he knew how.

  “I’m going to my quarters,” she said. “Chair’s yours, Dulsey.”

  She took two deliberately steady steps toward the hatch, stopped, and turned to stare at the tree.

  Jela watched her, not saying anything. She stood like a woman caught in a freeze-beam. He snapped his webbing back, noisier than it needed to be.

  Her glance flicked to his face, green eyes wide. “What is that?”

  He felt the hairs shiver on the back of his neck and produced a smile.

  “A tree, Pilot,” he said, easy as he dared. “Just a tree.”

  Had she been in strength, she’d’ve asked him more, he could see that. In her present state, though, it was sleep she needed, and she knew it. Questions later, he could see her decide, and she jerked her chin down, once, letting it go.

  “Orders. You ring me,” she said again. “If anything shows odd.”

  “Aye, Pilot,” he returned, and the hatch snapped shut behind her.

  TWELVE

  On Board Spiral Dance

  Departing Faldaiza

  PILOT CANTRA’S AUTO-RUN leaving no room for vary, nor any way short of physical tampering to take the thing off-line and just fly the ship himself, Jela amused himself for a time by running Dulsey through a series of board drills, the while keeping an eye on the screens and the scans.

  Dulsey completed every pattern he called for with competence, but without flair, her pale face displaying a tense seriousness that eventually brought to mind the fact that she had also suffered a long day.

  He stretched in his chair, and waved a hand.

  “You’ll do,” he said, striving for a tone of easy satisfaction. “Lean back and talk to me. Unless we get pirates on the screens, we’ve got nothing to do until transition.”

  She leaned back, tension ebbing, leaving her serious and puzzled.

  “What shall I talk about, Pilot?”

  A Batch-grown question if ever he’d heard one. So perfectly Batch-grown, in fact, that he suspected Dulsey of having fun with him—unless he looked stupid. Which, he conceded, was probably the case.

  “If it’s going to be up to me to choose the topic,” he said, still genial and easy. “Then I’ll ask you to retrace your logic for me.”

  Her face tightened. “Which logic, Pilot?”

  “The reasoning which brought you to assert to Pilot Cantra that the gentlefolk responsible for making the latter part of our evening so entertaining were working for off-world interests.”

  Dulsey frowned. “I believe my reasoning is linear, Pilot.”

  Outright irritation. Jela raised a hand and waggled peaceable fingers.

  “Grant that I’m having trouble with it,” he said. “I can go along with you, to a point—the abduction of my original contact, the people following us to the bar, the guards on our rooms. But what I can’t figure is—why did they make the mess we found at The Alcoves? Local forces wouldn’t have a reason, or the initiative, to vary from orders—”

  “Ah.” For a split-second, it seemed that Dulsey would actually laugh. She managed to restrain herself, however, and spun her chair so she faced him.

  “It is sometimes true that unrelated events run in parallel,” she said. “It is also sometimes true that the parallel-running events may share some components which makes it temp
ting to theorize a connection which does not, in reality, exist. Such is the case with the events of the evening, and the pilot’s puzzlement may be lain to rest by understanding that what appears, from his perspective as a shared component, to be one mega-event, is in fact two unrelated occurrences.”

  He considered her. “The business at The Alcoves had nothing to do with us, is what I’m hearing you say.”

  “The pilot hears correctly,” Dulsey said. “The fact is that the—the master had long been an . . . afficionado . . . of data. The pilot will have noted that the several alcoves in which he dined were data-mined. That the harvesting devices did not operate during the pilot’s tenancies was a source of amusement for the master, who pronounced the pilot a very able fellow.”

  He blinked. “I’m flattered.”

  “The pilot displays appropriate respect for the master,” Dulsey said, and he could’ve sworn it was irony he heard in her bland voice. “Unfortunately, there were others who were not so respectful, among them her heir, who, though it is not the place of this humble person to say so, is not an able fellow. The master’s devices thereby harvested data which he would rather they had not, and she had begun the process to have him disbarred from inheriting. As his debts are high and his prospects otherwise limited, he took steps to insure that the master’s property passed to him intact.”

  “With the exception of your Pod,” Jela commented. “I’d’ve thought you were valuable.”

  Dulsey shrugged. “The master had allowed us much, and we knew him for what he was. Though we could not have initiated legal proceedings, nor even made a complaint to a constable, yet he would not have us. He knew the master armed some of us. He knew we had built the harvesting devices and—other—apparatus, that we assembled the records and were often required to listen to them. We were a danger to him, and best accounted for.”

  Jela took a moment to consider the screens and the scans. Sighed.

  “In that case, Dulsey, he can’t afford to let you be unaccounted for.”

  There was a short silence. “Pilot, I believe you are correct. However, I also believe that there exists significant opportunity to escape him.”

  “Not likely. All he has to do is let it out that the one missing from among the dead had a gun. Obviously, she’s the culprit—a Batcher gone bad. He could even get off with offering a mid-figure bounty with a story like that.”

  Dulsey closed her eyes, opened them, and stood up out of her chair.

  “Would the pilot care for a hot snack?” she asked distantly. He studied her face—closed—and her posture—tense; met her eyes and smiled.

  “Sure, Dulsey. A hot snack would be fine.”

  He spun his chair back to face the board, and pointed his eyes at the instruments, pilot-mind primed to shout out at the first sign of a problem. That left a good bit of mind left on its own, unfortunately, and he was tired, too. He took a breath, centering himself, and put the part of him that wasn’t watching into a doze.

  “Pilot?”

  He started, grabbed a look at the instruments, then spun his chair to face Dulsey, standing with a mug and a bowl in her hands.

  She stepped closer, offering both, and he took them, slotting the mug into the chair-arm holder and snapping the bowl into the board-edge restraints. The bowl gave off a pleasantly spicy steam.

  “Thank you,” he said, meaning it. “Feed yourself, too, right?”

  “I’ve eaten,” she said, sounding irritated. “There is something that you must know.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Go.”

  “We are locked in,” she said, even more irritated, to his ear. “The piloting room, and the hall beyond that door— “ she pointed at the interior hatch—”we are allowed. The second hatch, further down the hall, is locked, and another door, across from the galley, is also locked.”

  “That bothers you, does it?”

  Dulsey frowned. “Does it not bother you?”

  He pulled the mug up and had a sip. Tea, hot and sweet, just what a tired pilot needed. He had another sip, somewhat deeper, before looking back to her.

  “Not particularly,” he said. “Pilot Cantra didn’t exactly ask for our help, though she did realize she needed it. It only makes sense for her to lock us out of the places she doesn’t think we need to get into.” Another sip of tea—damn, that was good.

  “Besides,” he said to Dulsey’s angry eyes, “I’d rather be locked in the pilot’s tower than out.”

  “There is that,” she said after a moment, and went to the vacant chair. “I will watch, Pilot, while you eat.”

  THIRTEEN

  Outbound, Faldaiza Nearspace

  Approaching Transition

  SOMEWHERE, FAR AWAY, a two-tone chime was going off. Cantra rolled onto her stomach and pulled the blanket over her head. Not that it would do a bit of good. Ilan would be by too soon to enforce the wake-up call. She’d heard that in other dorms it was possible to bribe the top girl for a couple hours’ sleep-in. Not Ilan, though. Oh, she’d take the bribe, all right—she wasn’t a fool, was she? And then she’d write it up and hand it in to the Super and there’d be a short, intensely miserable time, during which you learned to wonder what sleep was, to have made you want more of it. And when you were well and truly beyond thought, feeling or—

  Damn chime should’ve finished its cycle by now. Might be an emergency drill. She struggled with the thought, trying to call the various drill-tones to mind. Which process tipped her over the edge from mostly asleep to mostly awake, whereupon she recognized the chime as her own alarm clock, which she’d just managed to set before crashing into her bunk, ‘skins, boots, and all.

  There are strangers on my ship.

  Recent memory got her eyes open and her legs over the side of the bunk, blanket sliding to the deck.

  She sat there a moment, taking stock. Her head ached, her thoughts were fuzzy, her throat and eyes were dry, and her stomach felt queasy. On the other hand, the down-deep shaking was gone, and her ears heard clear, meaning that the alarm was irritating. All in all, a four hundred percent improvement over her state of—she squinted across the room at the clock—three ship-hours ago.

  She was in shape to fly, if she had to—and she did. After a bit of clean-up.

  Sliding to her feet, she crossed the room and slapped the alarm into silence, stripped off ‘skins and boots, dropped them into the decom drawer, and stepped into the sanitation closet.

  She emerged dry cleaned and somewhat less queasy, opened her locker, and pulled on ship clothes—a close-fitting sweater and pants—and a pair of ship slippers. The polished metal interior of the locker showed fleeting reflections of a tall, thin woman, her beige hair cut off blunt at the jaw line, her eyes misty green under thin winged brows. The rest of the face was sharp—cheekbones, nose, and chin—skin the uniform golden-tan prized in the higher class courtesans. The reflection moved with spare economy, one motion flowing effortlessly into the next—a dancer’s grace. Or a pilot’s.

  Cantra slammed the door, picked up the fallen blanket, and began to put her bunk in order, thoughts on the piloting room and the strangers aboard her ship.

  No sense now second-guessing the line of logic that had led her to such folly in the first place. Done was done. She had a situation which called for some care and some planning, neither one of which she had been in shape to handle—and arguably still wasn’t.

  She owned that Jela had called the problem on Faldaiza Yard accurately, and that he hadn’t stinted on his answer to it. He was also the devil’s own pilot—as good as the best she’d ever seen. What he was doing without a ship was a mystery—a worrisome mystery, if he took it into his head that Dancer suited him.

  Well, she thought, tucking the blanket tight and reaching up for the webbing, if he took that notion, he’d have to kill her to fulfill it. More than a few had filed that course and failed at lift. Jela being a better pilot than she was—he might manage the thing. In which case, her worries were over. Best she could do was
stay awake, stay on guard, and hope she got lucky if matters fell out that way.

  Assuming that they didn’t . . . She sighed. The cargo was expected by a certain someone, on a certain date and time, there on Taliofi. The course was set in—she glanced at the clock—transition coming up soon—and even with the early lift the schedule wasn’t generous. So, Pilot Jela and Batcher Dulsey were with her ‘til then. After she’d collected her money, and delivered the goods—that was when she’d lose them. If it came to lifting without cargo—she could do that. Take on something at Kizimi, maybe. Or Horetide—that was an idea, in and of itself. She hadn’t seen Qualee in a ship’s age.

  She finished with the webbing and stepped back from the bunk. Ditch Dulsey and Jela at Taliofi and lift for Horetide. As a plan, it was simple, straightforward and not too likely to go wrong. It might get dicey if it came known she’d aided and abetted a runaway Batcher—but it was Taliofi they was bound for, a port that ‘hunters wishful of living long tended to avoid.

  In the meantime—another glance at the clock. Right. Time for her to relieve her crew, who were probably more than ready for their own naps. First, though . . .

  She opened the locker once more, ignoring the flickering reflections, and pushed on a corner of the right-hand wall. The concealed door slid away and she considered the pattern of light-and-dark, flicked two toggles, closed the hidden door and the public one and left the cabin at a brisk walk.

  She made a short detour through the galley for a high-cal bar, found the tea caddy warm, poured some of the contents into a mug, and sipped. Strong and on the edge of too sweet. Perfect. She filled the mug and carried it and the high-cal with her into the piloting chamber.

  The door snapped open, revealing a scene of ship’s tranquility, both pilots sitting their boards, attentive to the duty at hand.

  Mostly.

  Dulsey, alerted by the sound of the door, spun her chair around, her face neutral to the point of accusation.

  Pilot Jela, now, he merely lifted his eyes to the forward screen, tracking her reflection as she came across the room.