The Crystal Variation

by Sharon Lee

  He grimaced slightly; he hadn’t noticed that complaint come on line, but there it was: transition was starting to affect his aches as much as dirt-side weather could.

  A flitting image came to him—a tree, it must have been, as viewed from another, leaning into a prevailing wind.

  That would be about right, he thought, got my roots set and have to weather things as they come at me.

  That thought was swept away with the blink of light on the board—

  Anomaly!

  The infra-red scanners were showing multiple changing heat-sources . . .

  “More rocks,” he commented.

  “I got ‘em too,” came Cantra’s laconic reply, “and if we didn’t, I’d say we was in trouble. If my memory’s at all good, rocks is about all there is out here, ‘cepting the Uncle and his kindred.”

  THERE WAS TIME now for Jela to consider where they were. Cantra had the ship’s brain doing a long-range comparison and analysis of the rock-field, looking for objects that she’d seen once before. Not that she was personally trying to identify this or that bit of stone or metal, but she had the ship trying to match images the former captain had been wise enough to capture and store in deep archives.

  The process was time-consuming, and would have brought Jela to the edge of distraction had he not had both a practical and an academic interest in what the edge of forever looked like from the outside.

  Where they had come from was not precisely visible now, with threads of dust and gas in the galactic disk obscuring where things had been multi-thousands of years ago and the more immediate pebbles, rocks, and gassed out-chunks of protocomets acting as a dulling screen to both vision and scanners attempting to use line-of-sight.

  But around them, other than the thin scatter of what was—on galactic scale—negligible sandy left-overs, there was nothing. At this distance from the core, there were no individual stars to act as beacons, and all the other galaxies were too distant to be seen as anything more than point sources, if they could be seen at all. The galaxy they orbited faded to a distant nebulous smudge . . .

  Jela imagined all too vividly what it would be like to be suited up or in a canopied singleship here now, and felt the involuntary, perhaps instinctual shiver. There was no darkness like the dark of emptiness.

  CANTRA WAS MUTTERING again, which Jela knew ought to have worried him, but it mirrored what he would have done had he been sitting in the pilot’s spot with old information and a mission in peril for it.

  He’d taken con for a short while as she grabbed a quick break and some tea, returning as renewed to his eyes as if she’d had a three day shore leave.

  Now she was back at work, digging among files and archives that only she could access. That she added a running commentary was her choice, and if it helped the pilot think, why then, he’d seen pilots with worse habits.

  He glanced at her—not for the first time since transition—wishing that he’d had her match in any of his units. She had an economy of movement, and a wit as well, and for all her complaining there wasn’t a bit of it that was an actual whine.

  Too, he admitted, there was an underlying energy in her that was quite pleasing. Perhaps it was the training and background she so vociferously denied, perhaps it was the pheromones . . .

  He wiped that thought away, or tried to, for there was no doubt that the night they’d met she’d been on the prowl for more than dinner company. Certainly if things had moved in that direction—and without the interruptions that had come their way—they might have had a good tumble. For his part, as someone willing to appreciate irony, metaphor, strength, energy, and honor . . . he knew he could have found some energy to share.

  That this would not have been against orders he knew, for certainly, the troop understood that duty required nurture and recreation. And certainly, one could feel a certain amount of affinity for a pilot of excellent caliber who was also good when it came to hand-to-hand, and had a clear eye and quick understanding with regard to who were enemies.

  Hadn’t she stood at his back? Guarded the tree? Was she not now engaged in a rather fine—not to mention out of the way—balancing of accounts in delivering Dulsey to a safe zone? Indeed, Cantra could be counted as comrade in truth . . .

  From somewhere, a distant, whispery scratching sound, barely on the edge of perception. Jela started, blinking the momentary abstraction away, and sent a quick glance to the tree . . .

  An image built inside his head, of a distant dragon in the sky, drifting away as the breeze brought haze . . .

  “Dust,” said Cantra lazily, and the image faded. “Carbon dust, with a bit of extra hydrogen. And that’s a good sign, Pilot. You be ready to sing out when you got something to look at. Kind of amazing that a veil like this can hide the Uncle’s little quarry for so long.”

  In the jump-seat, Dulsey stirred, eyes bright.

  Cantra laughed, and even her laugh was loaded with accent, as if the weight of piloting had worn through a veneer.

  “S’alright girl. Your numbers worked. Likely, though, if you’d have come in piloting yourself you’d have had to beg to be picked up, which is how the Uncle prefers things, I gather. Us now, we’re going to be ringing that door chime on our own. Keep watching.”

  And as if Cantra had a cloud-piercing telescope to show her the way, the scans began to register, and video began to show distant objects vaguely outlined against the nebulous presence of the galaxy.

  “Straps tight, now,” she said, “each and all of us.”

  * * *

  HE’D THOUGHT ONCE before that Cantra flew like a bomber pilot, and now, as the aches built up in his knee and his admiration grew, he was sure of it. He made a mental note to check on the training given to aelantaza.

  The thing was that—within this strange space—her reactions were absolutely sure, and absolutely perfect. She threw the craft through crevices in the dust, around rocks and coils of rocks, sliding this way and that . . . for in this realm beyond the galaxy, action and reaction held sway, with but a nod and a twitch required to overcome the microgravity of the dust clouds or the trajectory of free-moving rock.

  On the screen was the destination, a rather forbidding tumbling conglomeration of dust-stuck rock not even big enough to become a globe under its own gravity. The course to the target was irregular, with projected and suggested approaches appearing on-screen, being selected or deselected, or assigned back-up . . .

  Jela watched and sat second, hands and eyes mostly in synch with the real action, though from time to time Cantra’s choices were idiosyncratic at best. In some ways, he was reminded of training games and mock-cockpits, where one could play a ship with abandon . . .

  Here though, abandon was not what she was displaying. Here, Cantra was showing honed skill. If she flew it like it was a game, then it was her game, and not his. But then it was her ship, and she the one who had actually been to this unlikely bit of here before.

  “Pilot,” she said suddenly, “what we’re going to do is to fly formation with this thing for a bit. There’ll be another one around for us to look for, not a lot like it . . .”

  And with that, she rolled the ship slightly and slung it around, slowly matching pace with the object—asteroid, dead comet, dustball . . .

  Once they had achieved “formation,” Jela saw it was too bright and speckled to be a mere dustball. In fact, it showed signs—

  “See there,” Cantra said carefully, her eyes on her screens, “we got a dozen flat surfaces or so here. One of them ought to be mostly red in visible spectrum, assuming we can shine enough of a light on it. It’s been worked a bit, and it’ll be obvious if we got the right rock. That’s gonna be your job, and I’ll tell you when to go to light. Same time, you’re going to bring them guns up full, just in case.”

  “Pilot,” he replied, and found the controls for the tracking light. They felt odd to his hands, and he doubted that he had touched anything like them since his long-ago days as a pilot trainee.

 
What kind of rock could have been “worked a bit” out here? Something else to add to his . . .

  The spectralyzer flashed, and the infra-red too. There was an anomaly.

  “Light it up!” Cantra snapped, but he’d already hit the switch, gotten the range—

  They were following the rock formation, its weird slow tumble immensely weirder under the ship’s spotlight. The rock looked like it had been sliced and grooved, as if whole slabs had been taken away. There was a flash of color—greenish—then gray, more gray, and—

  “Red!” he said, exultantly.

  “Right,” Cantra agreed, lazily. “We got the right rock. Now all we gotta do is sit back and listen real hard. I’m punching the bands up now. Get me a directional on it if you can.”

  There was a signal . . . so faint as to barely budge the meter. A chirping sound, in identical sets of three, filled the bridge.

  The ship’s computer struggled with the signal for some moments before Jela sang out.

  “Got it!” He copied it to the pilot’s screen, and heard her laugh, soft.

  “Right,” she said. “I’ll just mosey us along in that direction for a bit. When you get a change in those bird-noises there, Pilot, just put the docking lights, and docking shields, and docking radar on.” She sent a quick glance over her shoulder.

  “Dulsey, this is your last chance to change your mind.”

  “I wish to be with the Uncle,” the Batcher said firmly.

  Cantra sighed, soft, but plain to Jela’s ears, and her fingers formed the sign for pilot’s choice. He signaled agreement in return.

  “To hear is to obey, then,” Cantra said to Dulsey. She cocked at eye at him and grinned.

  “We’re sitting on Uncle’s back porch. We’ll just knock on the door and see if anyone’s to home. Whenever you’re ready, Pilot.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Rockhaven

  “Shut it down,” Cantra said quietly.

  Acknowledgment from the Uncle’s pile of rocks had finally been received after an annoyingly long—perhaps calculatedly long—wait. Now they sat almost against the rock wall, tied to the haven by two light ship tethers and their own extendable gangtube to one of four observable access ports.

  Jela paused with his hands on the board and considered her profile.

  “Pilot? No need for all of us to go down. I can stay, if you want it, and keep the home fire burning.”

  She turned her head, giving him a steady, serious look, with nothing wild or irritable about it.

  “Shut it down, Pilot.”

  There wasn’t any arguing with that glance of calm reason, and Jela turned his attention to an orderly shutdown of his board, the while pondering the fact that it was impossible to argue with Cantra when she was unreasonable, and impossible to argue with her when she wasn’t. Convenient. He’d also come to notice that she wasn’t unreasonable nearly as often as she let it seem that she was.

  The system lights went down one by one and in good time the ship was off-line, saving life-support.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her nod, once, then put her finger on the release and let the webbing snap noisily back.

  “Up, up!” she said, spinning her chair around to grin first at him, then at Dulsey. “Best not to dally and make our escort irritable.”

  He mistrusted the grin, just like he mistrusted the total lock down of the board—in all his experience of her Cantra had never locked the board down tight. That she chose to do so here, at a docking she plainly distrusted was—notable. Coupled with the mandate that all three of them step off for a stroll through an asteroid habitat controlled by questionable forces, it became out-and-out worrisome.

  On the other hand, there wasn’t any arguing with her—she was ship’s captain, and the only one ammng them who had previous experience of the Uncle.

  Carefully, then, he unstrapped and stood, finding Dulsey already on her feet, face shadowed.

  “Second thoughts, Dulsey?” Cantra asked.

  Dulsey’s chin came up and she met Cantra’s eyes.

  “Not at all, Pilot.”

  The grin this time was more amusement and less artifice, by Jela’s reading. Which didn’t make it any more comforting.

  “I’m glad to hear you say that. The Uncle I knew, he placed a certain value on boldness. For what it’s worth.”

  Dulsey bowed slightly. “I am grateful to the pilot for her advice.”

  Cantra sighed, then abruptly waved a long hand toward the door and presumably the hall beyond.

  “The two of you get on down to the hatch. I’ll catch you in six.”

  Jela felt the hairs at the back of his neck try to stand up all at once. If this was a vary now—but he couldn’t for the life of him see how, with the ship shut down into deep asleep, so he grinned, nice and easy, for the shadow across Dulsey’s face, and nodded at the door.

  “After you.”

  “Yes, Pilot,” she said, subdued, turned—and turned back.

  “Pilot Cantra.”

  The winged brows lifted over misty green eyes.

  “What’s on your mind, Dulsey?”

  A hesitation, and then another bow, this one very deep, and augmented with the stylized gesture of the right hand which roughly meant I owe you according to particular civilian signing systems.

  “The pilot has acquitted herself with honor,” Dulsey murmured in the general direction of the decking. “I am grateful and I ask that she remember my name, should there come a time when my service might benefit her.”

  Jela held himself still, already hearing Cantra’s pretty, sarcastic laughter in his mind’s ear—

  “Stand tall, Dulsey.” Her voice was firm, and if it held any grain of sarcasm, it was too fine for Jela’s ear to detect.

  The Batcher straightened slowly, and brought her eyes again to the pilot’s face. Jela, watching that same face, found it . . . austere, the green eyes bleak.

  “A person is worth as much as the value of their debts,” she quoted softly. “You’ve heard that said, Dulsey?”

  “Yes, Pilot. I have heard it said.”

  “Then you want to take some time to sort over who I am and what I’m about in the general way of things. Most would hold that an honorable freewoman shouldn’t ought to devalue herself by standing in debt to the likes of me.”

  Dulsey smiled.

  “A honorable freewoman must be the judge of her own worth, Pilot. Is this not so?”

  Cantra’s mouth twisted, unwilling, to Jela’s eye, toward a smile.

  “You’ll do, Dulsey. Now the two of you get outta here. I’ll meet you at the hatch in six. Ace?”

  “Ace, Pilot,” Dulsey said serenely, and turned to the door. “Pilot Jela?”

  “Just a sec,” he said, catching a ghost-view of dry sand behind his eyes.

  He returned to his station, pulled open the hatch and removed a sealed water bottle from the pilot’s emergency provision cache. Cracking the seal, he walked toward the tree, heard a murmuring inside his head, saw a flicker of visuals he couldn’t quite sort . . .

  “I know it’s not much,” he said, softly, dampening the dirt over the roots. “We’re not intending to be long. You keep a good watch and let me know if anything odd happens while we’re away.”

  Bottle empty, he straightened, reaching up to touch a couple of the higher leaves. Taller than he was, now. Not that that was such a trick.

  There was a sudden quick rattle, along with image of a pair of dragons nipping at a tree limb to grab . . .

  “Fair’s fair, I guess,” he said, catching the fruit pod as it snapped itself from the branch and fell.

  “I hate to bother you, Pilot,” Cantra’s voice carried a payload of sarcasm now. “But the sooner we’re gone, the sooner we’re back and the less time your friend there needs to pine for your return.”

  Another image formed in back of his eyes, very precisely: A small dragon sitting on the grass at his feet, exercising its voice loudly—and even more loudly as a sudden f
all of leaves came down over its head.

  Jela laughed.

  Behind him, he heard Cantra sigh. Loudly.

  “Now what? It’s telling you jokes?”

  Still grinning, he turned, resealing the bottle absently.

  “Pilot, the tree is learning irony from you.”

  Bland-faced, she considered him, then spun on one heel to address the tree in its pot, and executed as high-flying a bow as he’d ever seen, complete with a showy swoop of the left arm.

  “It is my pleasure to be of service,” she said, then straightened in a snap. “Both of you mobile units—outta here. Now!”

  “Pilot Jela?” That was Dulsey, sounding nervous, and right she probably was.

  “I’m behind you,” he said, though he’d have given his accumulated leave, assuming he had any, to see how Pilot Cantra was going to gimmick the board. The tree’s gift he happily consumed before they reached the dock.

  * * *

  THE DOCK was just like she remembered—rock, rock and more rock—the floor unevenly illuminated by the white glow from several cloudy columns of candesa, the ceiling lost in darkness, from which the light, so-called, woke an occasional spark—like a star glimpsed through drifting debris.

  At the base of the ramp stood a figure in light-colored ‘skins, blond hair cut close to his head. The utility belt around his substantial waist supported a holstered needle gun.

  Behind her, she almost heard Jela’s watchfulness click up a notch, like maybe a man didn’t have the right to wear a gun on his own dock. Feet still on the gangtube’s ramp—technically still on her own ship and not yet on the Uncle’s terms—she raised her hands to shoulder level, fingers spread. The status lights on the cuff of her ‘skins thereby brought into view glowed green-green-green. So far, so good.

  The guard sniffed, but didn’t ask her to turn out her pockets, which was just as well.

  “Names?” he snapped.

  “Cantra yos’Phelium,” she answered, giving him mild on the theory that it would probably annoy him. “Pilot-owner of Spiral Dance, just like I told Admin.”

  “You didn’t tell Admin who else.”