“And…orbit.”
“Hi, pretty!” Irine added from her brother’s lap.
Hirianthial paused as he stepped off the lift, eyes drawn by the world magnified on the Earthrise’s old and cranky viewscreen: a tawny ball streaked in aquamarine and cobalt blue and swaddled in sullen gray clouds. He said, finally, “Promising.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Sascha said, and snorted. “Of course you are.” He leaned back, resting a hand on Irine’s head. “That is Kerayle.”
“And Kerayle…,” Hirianthial began, trailing off.
“Is the world Reese asked us to come to,” Kis’eh’t offered from her station. The Earthrise’s crowded bridge did not allow for many crew, and Kis’eh’t’s centauroid body took up more than one person’s share; she kept her paws tucked close and eschewed the chair someone else might have used at the sensor station. “It’s a colony. She thinks they might have useful things to trade since no other ship comes out here regularly yet.”
“They don’t even have a Well repeater in system,” Sascha said. “Weather satellites, sure, but no station and no repeater. This is honest-to-angels middle of nowhere.”
“It’s the brave frontier,” Kis’eh’t said.
“It’s something,” Sascha said. “I just hope it’s not ‘too poor to be able to afford shipments.’”
Irine bumped her head against his hand. “Scratch behind my ears!”
Sascha obliged her. As Harat-Shariin activities went, it was one of the less outrageous the twins engaged in; initially Hirianthial had thought Reese’s agitation in that regard exaggerated, but he had in fact happened on the twins at least twice while engaged in activities that would probably have made their captain’s blood pressure spike. Hirianthial himself had no opinion on the matter. The Pelted had their own history with genetic engineering and reproductive challenges, and what the twins chose to do together was not his business. Unless they asked him to participate, which they did. As they always cheerfully accepted his rejections he did not allow the invitations to perturb him.
“So where is the captain?” he asked.
Sascha and Kis’eh’t exchanged looks. Then the latter said, “She’s in her cabin, doing accounting for the quarter.”
Hirianthial said, “Ah.” He glanced at the last chair. “I suppose I might use that?”
Sascha chuckled. “Because you’re not volunteering to interrupt her? Be our guest.”
Theresa “Reese” Eddings, captain of the registered Terran Merchant Ship Earthrise, was sitting in her room at its battered old desk in front of her display. Scowling at numbers was one of her least favorite activities, and yet she always seemed to be doing it. It didn’t seem to matter whether she was in the black or the red, she always found a reason. Reese had been frowning at these for so long that her cheeks hurt; she stretched her mouth and rubbed her jaw, wincing as it popped.
An image formed in her head: drooping willows, their melancholic fronds dragged in a leaden gray stream. She looked down at the fuzzy round alien in her lap and said, “All right, all right, it’s not that bad.”
The sun tried to gild the leaves of the tree in her head. “Don’t get too optimistic, though,” she said. “Fleet gave us a hell of a lot of money, but the upgrades were expensive. And I don’t want to dip into our savings.” She paused to savor the word. She’d never had savings before. Squaring her shoulders, she said, “I want to protect our reserve, you know?”
The alien’s neural fur turned a bright, cheery yellow. She smiled and petted him—it, technically, but she’d never been able to think of Allacazam as an it—and said, “We’re going up, slowly. But I don’t want to blow it. It would be easy to end up poor again.”
The Flitzbe set fire to the tree in her head, added people running around it, screaming, and then threw in a rain of frogs for good measure. Who would have thought something more plant than animal and shaped like a furry ball could have a sense of humor? She hugged him with a grin. “Okay, maybe I’m being a little paranoid. But better that than spendthrift.” Lifting her head, she frowned. “Come to think of it… the engine noise’s changed, hasn’t it?” She leaned over and hit the intercom. “Hey, bridge!”
Sascha’s voice: “Hey, Boss!”
“Did we make it?” Reese asked.
“We did. Kerayle awaits.”
“Great,” Reese said. “There should only be one town. Set us down in walking distance. And I mean ‘close enough not to give me panic attacks about being able to see the horizon clearly.’ ”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Reese squinted. “Something wrong?”
“The view’s a bit underwhelming,” Sascha said. “It doesn’t look like they get much traffic out here.”
“That’s fine,” Reese said. “It means they’ll be happy to see us.”
“This is a pretty strange idea of ‘happy to see us,’” Sascha opined as he followed her down the deserted lane in the middle of town. The tigraine had his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets, and his tail was low and twitchy.
Reese couldn’t blame him. They’d been to a few too many worlds with too-quiet towns—well, two, but even one was too many when they’d both turned out to be pirate hang-outs. She said, “We surprised them, I guess.”
“Oh, sure,” Sascha said. “A merchant ship shooting through the atmosphere and touching down a mile away. Doesn’t give them much time to prepare a welcome party.”
Reese eyed him and he subsided, or at least, he pretended to.
Hirianthial, at least, was quiet. He was always quiet, though; it made her nervous, not knowing what he was thinking when she knew he could read their minds. Ever since she’d asked him to stay he’d been keeping out of her way. Maybe he knew she hadn’t decided yet if she’d forgiven him for reaching into her head and pulling out her carefully unexamined fears.
Or worse, maybe there was no “maybe” about it. Maybe he’d read her mind about that too.
For most of her life, Reese had wondered about the mysterious Eldritch, had read about them, had occasionally dreamed of meeting one. They were tall and beautiful and tragic and courtly and their esper abilities were portrayed in all her romance novels as magical. She’d had no idea, once she’d been saddled with one, just how infuriating the species could be. Tall and beautiful did nothing but make her feel ungainly and inadequate. Tragic and courtly turned out to be a pain in the tail rather than romantic and pitiable. And the magical esper abilities, while fascinating in fiction, were frighteningly invasive in real life; the fact that Hirianthial had never intentionally read her mind only made it more frightening, because if he couldn’t control it that was much worse than if he could and chose not to... wasn’t it?
But for no reason she could really understand, she’d asked him to stay and he had, and the worst part was that he could probably tell her why she’d made that decision.
Blood in the soil, it was enough to make anyone crazy.
Still, she didn’t object to him tagging along. If she could handle a pair of Harat-Shariin twins, she could handle one Eldritch, no matter how frustrating.
Besides, he was occasionally useful.
“There,” he said now. “At the end of the lane.”
Reese was about to ask if he’d sensed something but, no, there was someone stepping out of the house there: a Hinichi wolfine in a long shift, the fabric thin enough to show a silhouette of his lanky body. He was padding toward them now, so Reese stopped to let him approach. He was smiling, at least, and his ears were perked.
“Welcome,” he said when he was close enough. “We weren’t expecting traders.” He inclined his head. “I’m Saul, assistant to the Kesh of Kerayle. Won’t you come out
of the sun, tell us what you’ve brought to sell?”
“We’d be glad to,” Reese said. She glanced at the buildings. “It seems... quiet?”
“It’s the heat of the day,” Saul said. “Most people are napping.”
“Oh!” Reese said, relieved. “Right. It is hot, isn’t it.” She offered her palm. “Reese Eddings, captain of the TMS Earthrise.”
“Pleased,” he said, covering her hand. “Let me show you to our place of business.”
The wind in Kerayle did not cool, Hirianthial thought; it blew the heat onto one’s cheeks and throat, with stinging spatters of dust as an encore. He found it pleasing after months of the dry cold on the Earthrise, but he could only imagine how Sascha was finding it with his dense pelt, and Reese had been born to controlled climates and was already sweating.
There would be water, he thought; no culture that lived in such heat would fail to offer. Nor was he disappointed; it was the first thing Saul presented to them in ritual courtesy, pouring from a sweating pitcher into a bowl by the door and handing it to Reese. He was glad the Hinichi had offered to her first; he suspected she would have balked at drinking from anything he’d sullied with his mouth. It had been several months since she’d asked him to stay, and he couldn’t read her—couldn’t tell her if her ambivalence was terror, dislike or something more positive but still nascent. And though she refused to believe it, he would never pull it from her mind without her permission. Since she wouldn’t talk to him, he remained as confused on the matter as she was, and so he did his best to avoid provoking her.
There were days he wondered why he’d stayed...but he had gone through too much alongside the crew of the Earthrise to easily turn his back on them now.
Reese handed the bowl back to Saul, who gave it to Sascha. The Harat-Shar drank without reservations, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand, then passed the bowl to Hirianthial. It was shockingly cold to his fingers: when he drank, the water was so frigid it numbed his lips and throat. Even here, he thought, at the most remote corner of the Alliance, there was technology to shame his own species. Cold water from a pitcher left out in the heat...
The inside of the building was airy, with large windows and gauzy curtains lining the arches in and out of rooms in lieu of doors. The walls had been plastered and then painted a pale, cool blue and lined near the floor with brown and white tiles. It was beautiful, he thought, and far too comfortable to be natural. Some sort of climate control, most probably. The three of them considered the room while Saul went to see if his lord was awake.
“Quiet town,” Sascha said to Reese.
“He said himself they’re all sleeping,” Reese said. “If I lived in this heat, I would too.”
“Harat-Sharii’s this hot and we don’t all nap during the afternoon,” Sascha said. “Most of us, maybe, but not all of us. There are at least a few people on the streets.”
“Your hometown’s a lot bigger than this one,” Reese said.
“Maybe.”
Reese eyed him, grew an aura to Hirianthial’s sight of irritated sparks in copper and orange. “You might as well get it out before he gets back.”
“This looks fishy, boss,” Sascha said. “The last time we ended up in a town this sleepy we got harassed. A lot.”
“I remember,” Reese said, growing more agitated. Before her mood could develop, Hirianthial cleared his throat, drawing both their gazes: Sascha’s dark amber, and Reese’s startling blue.
“The odds of us earning such harassment three planets in a row are surely astronomical. And a new colony is bound to be smaller and quieter than one of the Alliance’s Core worlds.”
“There, see?” Reese said. “Even the resident mind-reader thinks things are fine.”
The Hinichi interrupted them, peeking into the room from the hall. “Won’t you come with me? The Kesh is awake and eager to meet you.”
The Kesh was a human man—not what Hirianthial had expected from a Pelted subordinate. A relatively young one, also, to be charged with the administration of a colony world. Hirianthial was not familiar with the procedure Alliance citizens were required to follow to earn the right to colonize a world, but he couldn’t imagine it being a simple matter. Still, the man reclining on the pillows in the room the Hinichi led them to... he had an air of confidence entirely suited to someone accustomed to command. And the way he looked at Reese—Hirianthial didn’t need to read the sleek red stealing through his aura to know just what he thought of her. The Kesh rose with alacrity, came to her with a long stride that set his robes swaying, and captured her hand to kiss it. Only her astonishment prevented her from jerking it away, he thought, and Sascha apparently agreed; the Harat-Shar was trying not to laugh.
“Captain Eddings of the Earthrise,” the human said. “How wonderful to see a new face!”
“You know my name,” she said, flustered, and glanced at Saul. “Ah... your assistant told you?”
“He’s very able that way,” the Kesh said with a grin. “Please, sit, sit. Saul! Have wine brought, the special vintage, for our guests! And fruit, fine cheeses! Let us entertain our guests!”
“That’s...” Reese stopped, then said, “Ah... fine. Thanks.”
Hirianthial found a pillow and had a seat. His last assignment had involved protecting Reese from slavers, a task he’d taken on his own recognizance. She hadn’t requested his aid, nor even known he was qualified to give it... and had not, he thought, entirely appreciated it; she’d known little of violence before meeting him, and when they’d been acquainted he’d been made known to her as a doctor.
He was a doctor. But it was a profession he’d only lately learned. The bulk of his centuries had been spent with his hands on a sword.
So, while she’d signed him on as supercargo and not as a healer and certainly not as a bodyguard, he still felt responsible for her safety. And the Kesh, from the haze of his aura and the poem it wrote with his body language, was no killer or slaver or pirate. The only thing Reese had to fear from him was his advances... God and Lady save them both.
Finding a human in the Alliance struck Reese as strange despite knowing—obviously—that humans did venture out of Terra’s solar system. But there were a lot more Pelted than humans. A lot more Pelted worlds than human. More Pelted were well-off enough to travel off-world, or work there; more Pelted worlds had economies sufficient to fielding space-born industry and commerce. It was why she’d left Sol to run cargo in Alliance space: far more lucrative, if you could make it work.
She’d been expecting to find seeing a fellow human more pleasant. Instead, it made her wary. She’d suffered a lot more cruelty and treachery from humans than she ever had from the Pelted. And if she wasn’t mistaken, this man... liked her.
Liked her.
He didn’t even know her yet! She snorted. His interest wouldn’t live through that process, she was sure. “So, Kesh—”
“Shamil, please. Do call me that.”
“Uh, right. Shamil. I take it we’re the first merchant crew to come by?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “We’ve only been established five years! This is a true delight. And we’re so far out... we were sure it would be at least a decade. Ah, Saul, thank you for bringing the tray. Join us. Captain, do introduce me?”
“My pilot, Sascha... and my supercargo, Hirianthial Sarel Jisiensire.”
“Charmed,” the Kesh said. He glanced at Hirianthial. “An albino?”
Reese’s brows lifted. There were people who hadn’t heard of the Eldritch? She glanced at Hirianthial, then said, “All of his people are like that.”
“Very exotic,” the Kesh said. His own skin was olivine, tanned dark but still several shades lighter than Reese’s coffee-brown. He took a glass handed him by Saul and offered it to Reese. “Wine, captain?”
“Thanks,” she said, wondering if it was what she was looking for. She sipped it and found it very sweet, almost syrupy—she was no connoisseur but she couldn’t imagine this was so special a few Fleet
officers several sectors away would bother talking about it. “Nice. So, Kesh—”
“Shamil.”
“Shamil,” she said, trying not to grimace. Did he have to look at her like that? It reminded her uncomfortably of the sort of looks Sascha and Irine exchanged as preludes to activities she didn’t want anything to do with. “Maybe you could tell us what sorts of things your colony needs?”
“Straight to business,” the Kesh lamented.
“I hate wasting a client’s time.”
“This is not wasted time!” he exclaimed. And laughed. “But you must forgive me, captain. We get so few visitors. But very well, on to business.” He leaned forward. “Do you have access to leather?”
The choked sound from her right was Sascha trying not to laugh. Reese thought her cheeks were burning and was glad her skin was dark enough to make that difficult to see. “Leather?”
“It sounds ridiculous,” Saul said from beside the Kesh, “but we haven’t found a native animal yet with a hide we can reliably skin.”
“And what do you need leather for?” Reese asked, not really wanting to know the answer.
“Saddles,” the Kesh said. “And bridles.”
“Okay,” Reese said, starting to rise. “Not my department—”
“For horses,” Saul said. Both he and the Kesh stared at her as she paused. The Hinichi frowned, puzzled, and said, “What did you think?”
“It certainly wasn’t horses,” Sascha said for her. “Who in the worlds keeps horses these days?”
“We do,” the Kesh said, fervent.
“You have horses?”
Reese glanced to her left. Hirianthial was always composed; he moved so little that she sometimes wondered if he’d spent his childhood pretending to be a statue. And he wasn’t moving now. But something in the way he was sitting felt like avid interest: the slight lean, maybe? She could only tell he’d moved because his hair was moving slightly against his throat. For Hirianthial, that was positively broadcasting enthusiasm. But...horses?
“We have the best horses in all the known worlds,” the Kesh said with relish. “You won’t find their equal anywhere else, because we have made ourselves the stewards of all of Earth’s most ancient breeds.”
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