Embrace the Romance

by S. E. Smith

  “What?”

  “It’s an honor.” Mattiz-Kol’s eyes shone with enthusiasm. “I’m on the Keepers’ side myself!”

  To his own surprise, Rik nodded.

  After dinner, Brina showed him a tall smooth stick made of real wood. “Pike. It can be used to good effect by the unskilled as long as they’re not uncoordinated. It can trip people or brain them. The spear end can be used to stab.” She anticipated the objection he was about to voice. “We wear body armor, gloves and helmets, so we don’t get hurt and when we do Dr. Lee patches us up right away.”

  Rik parsed that and concluded that she meant we don’t get permanently hurt. By now, they had an audience of stationers, including Tattujayan, who looked ironically interested.

  “We have nonlethal beam guns to simulate the ancient projectile weapons that they used on Earth. The beam gun paints a hit with light and makes body armor turn red. Beam guns have power packs with limited energy—simulates running out of ammunition—so we also use weapons that don’t run out of juice. It’s fair to pick up any weapon that rolls by, relieve an enemy of theirs, take the weapon of anybody’s who’s dead on either side, pick up any inanimate object to hit somebody with, or resort to street-fighting.”

  It was definitely interesting to have a Goyan space-mining guilder explaining a Wendisan space game to a Faxen auditor, and apparently doing so accurately. Romeo Ito nodded approval.

  “All’s fair in mixed melee except changing sides or attacking the Referee.” Brina used the pike to point at Tattujayan, then handed it to Rik. “Here you go.”

  He spent an hour in the recreation center, practicing pike-moves with Jax Trover, who was another piker. Then stationers started bringing in props for tomorrow’s war, for which the recreation center would be the stage. Empty, stacked cargo containers represented buildings. One tall stack of containers was labeled as a Religious Tower. Several empty tailings trucks were trundled in to represent overturned vehicles. The next morning in the recreation center, the sides formed up for the war for the control of a deserted village.

  Everyone had colored sashes to help tell friend from foe. The sashes echoed two large banners mounted on opposite sides of the rec center. The Trovers assembled under a blue banner with a silver circle—signifying Trove; Trover sashes were blue. The Keepers had a white banner with a green device that looked like a pile of leaves. Rik blinked when recognition set in. It was a hugwort.

  “That’s our mascot,” a Keeper explained.

  Rik was happy to fasten on a blue sash. It would have injured his dignity to be on the side that had an animated plant for a mascot. The plantimal itself perched on its shelf over the goldfish tank—placed there by a partisan, Rick guessed. It might be happy enough to be in a position to purloin a goldfish.

  The war began at noon. At first Rik held back, watching from the sidelines. Beam guns splashed on fighters’ body armor. The armor responded by turning telltale red. The wounded had to stop using the affected body part or, if it was a killing wound, play dead. To conserve the beam power packs, both sides also used non-energy weapons from the start. A physical hit made the body armor puff out to protect the wearer. The armor stayed puffed out to testify to the hit.

  Tattujayan darted around awarding points to fighters for their kills and form. Nobody was supposed to hit the referee, but a couple of times only her own fast reflexes saved her from a side-swipe. She called demerits against several over-excited fighters who disregarded having taken hits evidenced by bright red or puffed-out body armor.

  If she was in the thick of it, what was he doing on the sidelines? Rik plunged into the melee. For a few frantic few minutes he did well enough to just avoid becoming a casualty. Dead and the dying fighters littered the floor, some of them moaning from non-life-threatening but real injuries.

  Seeing an opening, Rik extended his pike to trip an unwary Keeper and send him sprawling on the floor. Rik used the spear end of his pikestaff to finish the Keeper off with a stab to the chest. The Keeper’s body armor instantly inflated to absorb the force of the blow. Rik got a little salute from the downed fighter.

  “Score one for the Trover!” Tattujayan announced behind him. She leaned close to his ear. “Your blood’s hotter than I expected, auditor!” Her words and the warm breath that carried them made his blood stir in private parts of his anatomy.

  She melted away as Keepers responded to Rik’s score by closing in on him. Rik fended off a blow from a Keeper who was using the butt of an exhausted beam gun as a club. But the Keeper’s teammate used a mace to knock the pike out of Rik’s hands. The two of them raised their weapons like clubs, meaning to rain Rik with blows that would send him out of the game.

  When the first Keeper swung, Rik seized his arm, got under his center of gravity, and hefted him into his teammate. Both went down in the ensuing collision with body armor inflating as they hit the floor. Rik snatched up his pike up and finished them off. He heard Tattujayan’s voice. “The Trover scores by revealing martial arts skill! Double points!”

  From then on Rik mixed martial art with pikestaff work. Thanks in part to him the Trovers started winning. But Rik wondered if the Keepers were all on the battlefield. He had a good memory for faces, and there were six or seven faces he thought should be in the ranks of Keepers but he didn’t see. One was the unmistakable Mattiz.

  Suddenly a cry rang out from six or seven throats. “Ban zay!” Leaping off of the stack of containers marked as a Religious Tower, into which they’d crept one by one to hide, fresh Keepers descended on the Trovers and quickly overcame their startled resistance. One of the Keepers was Mattiz, brandishing a sword. Mattiz cut Rik down. Rik spent the last ten minutes of the war lying dead on the floor. Finally Tattujayan announced, “Game over! Victory to the Keepers with perfect honor to the Trovers!”

  The dead and dying sat up.

  Rik rubbed his neck. The collar of his body armor had deflected the blunt edge of Mattiz’ sword, but still left him with a twinge in his neck. Doctor Lee put a numb-pack on his neck. It soothed the twinge. And that, Rik thought ruefully, explained the excess medical supplies. Looking around, he saw animated faces, handshakes between Keepers and Trovers, and glowing camaraderie—here, in a remote space place where, the gods knew, personnel might easily have been space slack, dissolute under the influence of drugs, or split into sullen factions.

  Excess medical supplies? More like morale supplies. And not excessive at all.

  The war made Daya admit to herself that she was irresistibly attracted to the auditor. Even with trust issues. Even with his allegiance to Faxe.

  Faxens encountered elsewhere than Faxe tended to be likable people. They often had a well-cared-for innocence that often bordered on the naïve. Mattiz was a good example of an expat Faxen in all respects including his looks: physical perfection that had gotten scuffed around the edges from being outside of the bubble of privilege that was life on Faxe.

  The auditor was different. As a functionary of the Faxen government, he carried his bubble of privilege with him across the stars. Yet he didn’t come across as a sheltered innocent. He wasn’t physically too-perfect, either. With tawny skin, thick, short brown hair and a strong-boned face with mobile features, he came across not as perfect so much as very real.

  And in the war, he had been really splendid.

  The fight was followed by a feast, the feast followed by a long rest period. Daya felt restless. She always had excess energy, plucking at her nerves from the inside, sometimes pushing her into trouble. With the Station quieter even than at night, almost everybody sleeping off the fight and the feast, she decided to enjoy her favorite view.

  To her surprise, she encountered the auditor coming the other way. On impulse she put out a hand to stop him. At her touch he wheeled around and came to a stop, slightly leaning toward her.

  Oh. How revealing a reaction that was! Like a horse feeling a familiar hand on the bridle. Or like a man feeling a touch from a woman he was interested in. She bi
t back the words that sprang to her tongue— Are you prowling around looking for secrets I haven’t shown you? Instead she said, “Auditor, let me show you something else.”

  He fell in step with her.

  It might be a good idea to compliment him. “You played the war well, and your martial art was something no one saw coming. Are you a martial arts practitioner?”

  He gave a rather pleased laugh. “No, but I’ve had self-defense training, a course taken by civilian interstellar government workers—auditors like me, lawyers, diplomats and even an interstellar conciliator. The reason for the course was that any of us, even the conciliator, could find ourselves in an abduction situation or civil unrest, thanks to the Disunion terrorists.”

  If the Faxen government hadn’t been bent on turning the Union into an Empire and ruling more worlds yet, while controlling the worlds it already had with a hard iron fist inside a soft coltskin glove, its representatives wouldn’t find themselves terrorized. “You made good use of that course,” was all Daya let herself say.

  She was beginning to think it possible to get a kiss from this man. And she wanted that. Further involvement and intimacy was out of the question; a kiss was on the dangerously attractive precipice just short of foolhardiness. That kind of precipice was her favorite place.

  After a vator ride up, they came to an unmarked door that opened onto a wide dark room. “The door opened to your hand,” he observed.

  “Administrative doors do. And this.” She touched a plate on the nearest console. A tall slit appeared in the far wall. The slit widened until it was a window full of stars and Trove. “Here is the best view in the Station. Usually it’s protected by an asteroid shield.”

  Rik moved up to the window beside her. He seemed eager to see out, and there was much to see.

  Trove eclipsed the coldly radiant blue star. In the diffuse nebula-light shining on Trove’s dark side, the deep pocks in the planet’s skin were clearly visible, as were pale splashes of ore tailings.“Trove’s mining history is written on its face,” Daya said.

  He nodded, still taking in the scene. A lesser but nearer yellow sun shone near Trove. The yellow sun tinted the starclouds around it with warm colors—gold and pink shading to salmon—behind the curved edge of Trove. “Strata had sunsets with colors like that.”

  Daya had heard of Strata, the capitol city of the planet Faxe. Like every human being across a hundred stars in reach of any kind of news media ten years ago, she’d heard of what happened there. A transit tower that reached all the way up to orbit had been brought down by Disunion terrorists, with terrible loss of life and innocence. “Were you in Strata when the tower fell?”

  “No. I wasn’t even on the planet.”

  Lucky for him, but she wondered why. Personal questions—much as she desired to throw a few at him—might offend him. She asked, “Why do so many Faxens leave to roam across the stars? Faxens don’t seem to bond with their own world. Yet the original name of it was Fiat Pax—‘let there be peace’ in Latin—when the ancient starship from Earth found it to be a world full of life, like an oasis in the stars. There’s never been such a wilderness since Earth. Yet so many of you go away from it.”

  “The wilderness has animals that can electrocute you,” he said wryly. “And vegetation that gives you an electric shock. And carnivorous plants big enough to engulf a human being. If you fall into one, it snaps shut around you. If you remain motionless it decides you’re debris, opens up to discard you, and you get away. If you struggle, it dumps digestive enzymes on you. You’ll give the plant indigestion but that’s little consolation. I’m not particularly attached to the Faxen wilderness. What about you? Why aren’t you still on Goya?”

  “This is my Walkaway.” His forehead furrowed, so she explained. “The Steppe is a great sea of grass ringed with high mountains. Rivers of snowmelt run in valleys thick with trees and vibrant with birdsong. It took thousands of years of the blood and sweat and tears and failures of my ancestors to terraform all of that land. We fell into tribal barbarism and climbed back out again to a way of life that isn’t barbarian, but isn’t civilized in the sense Faxe understands it.” In her opinion, Faxen civilization was an impersonal machine bent on consuming the resources of its own world and every other: barbarism like nothing since the long-ago Time of Terror. “Young people in the Steppe do a Walkaway—going out into space for a while to better understand what it is we have at home. I went further than most and stayed longer. And that makes two unwarranted questions of yours. You have one more,” she said with a smile, hoping he would take it as an invitation.

  “Will I use it up by asking what this place is?” he asked cautiously.

  “Not at all. This was the Control Room for Star Crossing Station. The Director of the Station sat there.” She indicated the deep but dusty chair. “With the Station largely decommissioned, the consoles in here were turned off. Because of that, this room is called the Grave.”

  He tilted his head to one side. To her surprise, he said, “It reminds me of a line from an ancient poem. ‘The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, methinks, do there embrace’ is how it goes.”

  “This isn’t that kind of grave,” she said.

  “Good.” He put his arm around her. She tilted her head to find his lips with hers. He responded eagerly. Feeling the hotness of her own blood, she kissed him back harder. His muscles tensed and he locked his arms around her.

  She stroked the smooth, strong-boned side of his face. “Rik—are you sure you don’t have more of a name? A single syllable is what we’d name a dog. Our horses’ names have as many syllables as ours.”

  “My name is Darik—but my friends call me Rik.”

  He’d left something out—the second part of his first name. She wondered why. “Call me Daya.”

  Three

  Here was what he’d been waiting for, though he’d only half known it: a real view of the Station and its place in the universe. It made him feel freer to be himself, to take a woman in his arms and kiss her. Kissing her gave him an almost electrical shock, but a good one. Unlike the plant life of Faxe, her electricity was human.

  He had his back to the Starcross Nebula. Its gold and pink light washed the dead consoles in the Control Room with an ethereal sheen. “Does Daya mean something?”

  “Davendaya means ‘light reflected on water,’ Daya means ‘reflected light’.”

  “Like the old machines here?” he waved his hand.

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Darik—” His real name, spoken in her voice, gave him a sharp, pleasurable jolt. “What is your—” She broke off as a new constellation appeared in in front of the window, three bright stars that hadn’t been there before.

  Her eyes widened. “Those are bubbles.” One of the strange things about starflight-space was that communications could go no faster than starships. Bubbles skipped from starpoint to starpoint to bring messages. Getting bubbles into this remote corner of starspace took a high-energy jump and they shone like stars when they arrived. “Usually we get one of those in three weeks, not three in a single minute!”

  Duty calls, he thought dourly, at the most inopportune times. “Sometimes on an assignment I get one. That doesn’t account for the other two. Let’s go see what they are.”

  They reached her office just before a white sphere rolled out of the tube into the in-box on Mattiz’ desk. As soon as it stopped moving, a crack appeared. The bubble split into into two hemispheres, revealing the message capsule inside. She unspooled the message. “This is a routine advisory that lists the freighters scheduled to arrive in the next week.”

  Another sphere rolled into the basket. This one fell to pieces. Like all medium- and high-security bubbles from Faxen Authorities, it was designed to arrive only where it was sent and not be accidentally or deliberately relayed elsewhere. Its message capsule had Rik’s name on it.

  Before he could open the capsule, a third sphere rolled to a stop in the inbox. It quivered and opened like a lily, p
etals unfurling around the capsule. “This is a Wendisan bubble. We’ve get them occasionally for someone who has relatives in Wendis. But I don’t see a name on the capsule.” The Wendisan capsule started flashing red. Daya’s eyes widened. “It’s urgent!” She opened the capsule—not keyed to any individual hand—and gasped. “This is an SOS. Starway is under attack by pirates!”

  Starway was the Wendisan interstellar crossroads station. Interstellar pirates had grown increasingly numerous and bold in recent years. Maybe some pirate leader had managed to unite the pirates to take the particularly succulent prize that was Starway. Enough pirates, well-organized enough, could pose a real threat to Starway. That would explain Rik’s message. His fist tightened around its capsule.

  She said, “We can’t help except to relay the SOS to a few even more remote outposts. And we’ll do that, auditor, whether or not you approve of the cost.”

  “Of course I approve.”

  “Mattiz is faster at packing bubbles than I am.” She pressed a button to summon the secretary. Then she rubbed her face. “If pirates have become so brazen as to attack Starway, I have to wonder whether we are in danger too. Star Corner Station is in no longer in a position to control the starways. We do control the mining of Trove. That might be attractive to pirates. Yet would pirates risk angering Faxe?”

  Rik thought about the Faxen Union’s starfleet with its battleships, destroyers and troop transports. “Absolutely not.”

  Mattiz hurried in wearing off-duty clothes, a Wendisan-style soft tunic and pants. While Daya explained the situation to him, he gathered bubbles to relay the SOS and said, “I’m not so sure pirates would leave us alone! The last few years have seen pirates masquerading as Disunionists, and Disunionists masquerading as pirates—that’s how they get some of their funding. Looting, ransom, and plunder.” Evidently, Mattiz followed the news better and with more interest than this remote posting of his would indicate. “What if they tried to plunder us?”