“Hope Terk enjoys the ride.” Thel had a wicked chuckle. “I remember sneaking you on the Fox same way a time or three. Seems to me you complained of bruises.”
“Terk’s tough.” Morgan took a bite of his fish.
You didn’t order up a docking tug before you’d finished loading and secured your cargo; shipcities everywhere leveed stiff penalties if one of their tugs was kept waiting in an aisle. If traffic control made a mistake in your favor? Well, no one minded that.
Morgan watched, riveted, as Thel sent the docking tug around the final turn to the Scat starship, feeds catching an incoming freight-servo in the opposing lane. “Now that’s good timing,” she declared, speeding the tug a notch to claim right-of-way through the intersection. The train was forced to pause as the much larger—and slower—tug passed, then started up again, its five cars powering in turn.
Thel closed in the vid, but their loads were too well-wrapped to make out more than the shape of crates. “You know which one?”
“Terk does.” The enforcer should have a clear shot—Morgan cursed under his breath. “We’ve a problem.”
“I see it.” Widened out, the feed revealed the flesh-and-blood driver operating the servo. All Morgan could discern in the slashes of light and dark provided by the tug’s warnoffs was a humanoid. Auordian, best guess. Burly and doubtless well-armed.
And in perfect position to see the access panel of the tug open on Terk and his stunner.
Morgan lifted the com. “Hold.”
“More company,” Thel announced as a groundcar, low and sleek, came up from behind, accelerating past both freight and tug. “Busy night. What do you want to do?”
Get down there himself. That being impossible, Morgan thought quickly. “Push them, Thel. Put the tug right in their snouts and tell them you’re on time.”
“And why aren’t they ready. My pleasure.” As she maneuvered the tug closer, Thel opened a channel to the Scat ship. She began at full volume, “Get that junk out of my way! I’m here to pick up your ship . . . Don’t give me that, I make the damn schedule, you miserable excuse for—”
Morgan didn’t bother listening to the ensuing spit and hiss of infuriated Scat, busy watching the groundcar stop at the ramp leading into the Scat ship. Three figures got out, standing in the spill of light from the now-open port above. They weren’t spacers, by their portcity garb. The groundcar sped away.
Passengers as well as cargo? Unusual for Scats. They’d well-known difficulties dealing with species that refused to eat live food.
“Could be on the menu,” Thel commented, nodding at the screen, then resumed swearing enthusiastically at the captain. The ship loomed larger and larger in the screens. By now, the passengers and the Scat guards were looking toward the tug. Three more Scats appeared from the shadows, one waving the freight-servo to hurry. Two darted up the ramp, opening the cargo port. The passengers were hustled to one side of the ramp, out of the way. One was protesting.
“What’s going on?” Terk, in an aggrieved whisper.
“Hold till I give the word,” Morgan told him. In the organized chaos, the driver climbed out to argue something with a Scat—presumably payment. Hands went to weapons. Mouths opened in shouts. The tug continued to close in, its flashing lights disorienting— “Now!”
Terk eased out of the tug, dropping to the ground as he angled for the best shot—
Only to be blocked as a piece of night descended to hover across the ramp. The massive aircar’s roofing shield peeled back to allow dozens of little white Drapsk to spill over the rails. Armed Drapsk.
Heading for the cargo.
“Don’t engage!” Morgan shouted into the comm.
“You think?” The enforcer scrambled back into the tug.
Thel slowed and stopped it, turning off the Scat captain—who’d know shortly he’d a bigger problem than traffic control—mid-hiss.
Together, she and Morgan watched in silence as the Scats on the ramp abandoned their cargo and passengers, running into the ship and closing the port behind them. Their erstwhile passengers—and the driver—disappeared into the night.
The Drapsk focused on the cargo, quickly and efficiently hooking anti-grav units to each of the five cars, then tethering those to their aircar. Done, they swarmed back on board and lifted away.
“Well, now,” Thel observed. “Don’t see that every day.”
Interlude
“SIRA.”
I knew the voice—recognized the face. How could I not? Yihtor, the lawless, powerful Clansman who’d set out to build a new Clan empire on Acranam. Yihtor, who’d murdered his own kind and worse. Who’d tortured Morgan and tried to force Choice upon me.
Only to fail. I’d last seen him after the Clan Council had reduced him to a mindless, drooling nothing, their foul plan to use Retian technology to breed the two of us and ensure the Power—my Power—would pass into a future generation.
The Clan Council no longer existed.
Drooling husk or glorious Singer, Yihtor had no right to exist here in my reality. I focused on a vine painted with tender accuracy. “Get out.”
“We need you.”
As if I’d find that more palatable from him? “Go before I destroy you.” And I could. There were rules here.
All of them mine.
“Look at Rael. Look at me.”
“Go now—” Even as I spoke, I involuntarily shifted my gaze to my sister.
Something was wrong with her projection. Lines grew at the corners of her eyes, eyes that lost their brilliance. Her lips thinned and cracked. Bled.
I gasped as her lustrous, living hair, that hallmark of a Chosen Clan—or rather Hoveny, for that was what we’d been as flesh—vanished, replaced by a coarse stubble no longer than the last joint of my smallest finger.
And where she’d forgotten arms and legs—where her torso had been mercifully indistinct—all became solid and clear, and I wanted to weep.
Punctures tracked her arms and legs. Holes, regular, of specific size, gaped in her throat, chest, and abdomen, opening on the slick shine of mesentery and organs.
“Now me.”
Gladly, I looked away from Rael, but what I saw next was worse. Yihtor had been handsome by any humanoid standard, exceptional even for Clan.
His thick blond hair had been shaved to the scalp. His eyes—his eyelids were shut, top and bottom marred by rows of tiny punctures. The same punctures lined his lips, kept tight together. His body was marred by holes, larger than Rael’s, but his arms were clear. His legs—
The kneecaps were missing, the bone below exposed, slivered tendon jutting outward.
Though I no longer ate, I twisted to retch over the side of the bed.
“Our Vessels haven’t died,” Yihtor said, his voice hollow. A voice that couldn’t come through those lips. “Their flesh still binds us.”
Lips and eyelids sewn shut. Holes where tubes would be inserted. Needle marks. The knees—I didn’t want to know.
“Sister, we need you.”
Reluctantly, I sat up on the bed, arms tight around my legs. Rael had blurred her projections once more, but the reality couldn’t be unseen. “You’re in stasis.” I’d been drugged and put into a stasis box once, but there hadn’t been this mutilation.
Then again, Symon had wanted me to arrive in perfect condition.
Rael nodded. “They were too quick for me. I tried—” with abrupt passion, “—to die first.”
I glanced at Yihtor and away again. My sister’s face was easier to bear. “Why force yourself on me?” Stasis units were safe, reliable tech—and in Trade Pact space, another reality altogether. “There’s nothing I can do.” I didn’t bother saying what both would know: they’d only to wait. The units would ultimately fail—power cells didn’t last forever—or those bodies would be awakened and die from whatever was being d
one to them.
“We don’t need help—” Rael started to say.
“NothingReal does,” Yihtor interrupted. “Your precious Trade Pact and its aliens—and your Human—are at risk because you didn’t finish what the Great Ones asked of you.”
“I wasn’t ‘asked,’” I corrected, very quietly. I found I could look at his face after all, taking a distinct pleasure in its scars. His body, mine? Should never have existed. Our ancestors had been made by the Tikitik: an experimental blend of Hoveny—whose unborn could lure Singers inside—and Oud, who’d innate Power Between. Why? To produce us, living keys able to breach what protected AllThereIs from NothingReal.
To produce me, a Founder who, like a fool, reconnected Hoveny technology to the null-grid.
The first such breach had destroyed an empire; the second, mine, had almost ended billions of innocent lives. I’d made sure there wouldn’t be another.
“I brought the Clan home. It’s done. Go.” I dropped my forehead to my knees. “And don’t come back.”
“Done? Then where are my heart-kin?!” More wail than words. “Where are the ones who were my House, my family?! You left them behind in NothingReal!”
No. It couldn’t be. “Ask the Watchers,” I told them, not raising my head. “They counted the dead, not I.”
All at once, I felt a voice, no voices, deep inside. Hollow, echoing, HARSH. <
Voices that were here.
My sister and Yihtor.
Watchers themselves. Or, I thought with some self-pity, they’d brought Watchers trailing into my cabin like lint in nonexistent pockets.
Watchers were trouble. They were Singers consumed by the desire to protect AllThereIs, maintaining an awareness of Between, the M’hir, and alert to any connection through that to NothingReal.
They weren’t always sane, in my experience. Too much time in that seething Dark when they should be singing.
I lifted my head. “If there are Clan alive in the Trade Pact—”
<
Unfair. Even here, it hurt when they shouted at me. I glared at Yihtor, finishing with, “—There’s nothing I can do about it. Being dead.” In case they’d forgotten that, too. I shrugged. “Besides, without knowledge of the null-grid, or any device to use it, what harm can they do?”
<
“The Watchers have seen,” Rael answered, her eyes flashing their old fire. “The rise of the M’hiray affected more than the Balance on Cersi. We harmed Between.”
Deluded, I thought with some pity. The link to their damaged bodies—
<
As if he’d heard the voice, or been it, Yihtor’s blind head nodded. “From the start, ’porting has sliced through Between like a knife through skin. Some wounds heal, but passages cut too deep. They’ve begun to rot.”
“We’ve weakened Between, Sira,” my sister continued. “Continue to weaken it.”
The roiling deadly Dark of the M’hir—Between—was beyond vast, beyond understanding, but it had been ours. I’d been proud of my abilities there. Resented the Drapsk showing me the Clan weren’t the only life to be part of it. Been outright offended to discover worlds having their version of sex there.
That I—and others like me—had been causing it to rot? I liked this view least of all, not that my opinion mattered.
Nonetheless, I offered it. “Then be grateful any Clan in the Trade Pact are the last.” I didn’t look at Yihtor. “It doesn’t matter if Acranam’s exiles escaped. They’re too old to breed again.” Clan genealogy had been my obsession; this group had earned my special, unflattering attention. “No more Vessels. Once the exiles die, no one left to ’port. The problem ends.”
“My mother has other plans.”
Wys di Caraat. Of course, she did. I wanted to spit, but my mouth no longer held moisture. I settled for a shrug. “Let her try. The end will still come.”
<
I grimaced at Rael. “Immortals. Eternity. Why the rush?”
“The Great Ones remain uneasy. They hear silences in the Song.”
<
“So they listen harder. Grow more unsettled. Sira, we can’t let them reach out again. Above all, not to the Trade Pact. It’s the part of Between we’ve damaged the most. It’s become unpredictable. Riddled with rot. If the Great Ones enter it, force themselves through—”
<
It wasn’t as if any force or persuasion existed to stop what were the equivalent of stars and planets in that other reality. While a topic I’d have enjoyed discussing with my Human over sombay—
It being safer to think of that—
Safer than remembering a world scoured and ruined, a moon plucked from its sky, a civilization ended—
Than to think it could happen to the thousands of worlds comprising the Trade Pact—
—to Morgan.
FURY! FEAR! I lost myself as they fed one another, those all-consuming emotions, clashing to rise in giant waves of turmoil and despair.
What little of me remained in control knew the danger: in this place, where a Singer’s Song became part of the Dance?
If they heard mine, the Great Ones wouldn’t be “uneasy.”
They’d respond.
I fought for control. The projections of Rael and Yihtor flickered—a warning this was a battle I could lose.
No. I refused the possibility. Stopped fighting. Instead, I thought of Morgan. Of nothing but Morgan.
How, if he were with me, I’d feel his belief in me; of how I’d draw upon his bottomless well of strength and resolve.
He wasn’t here, and I’d no help. Still, memory resonated. As you love me, we’d said to one another. I remembered. And there it was.
That love.
Rael and Yihtor became solid. Both were tense and broadcast fear of their own, but it was over, and I gestured apology.
“What,” I asked then, fragile myself in the aftermath, “do you need me to do?”
Chapter 6
“I’LL SAY THIS FOR YOU, lads.” Thel Masim sat back. “You do liven up the place.”
Terk’s craggy features collided in a ferocious scowl. Before the enforcer could say anything Thel’d make them regret, Morgan passed him the last of his fish sandwich. “The Heerala hasn’t lifted,” he pointed out. Whatever the Drapsk were up to, it was more complicated than robbing the Scats.
Who hadn’t reported any theft. Who’d, in fact, requested a docking tug—please—and would traffic control—we insist—accept a bonus for their prompt service? Thel had assured them, with choice adjectives, it’d be Auord’s pleasure to see the last of their ship.
Terk had been stuck inside that tug for the duration of its task: picking up the starship and, with excruciating slowness, trundling down the long aisle with its burden to the landing field, setting the starship in place, then returning home to its spot in line. Suffice it to say the experience hadn’t improved his mood.
Accepting Morgan’s peace offering, the enforcer took a huge bite, eyes promising this wasn’t over.
Which, of course, it wasn’t. “Thel, play it for Terk.”
She nodded and flipped a control. The main screen showed the Drapsk aircar descending in slow motion, flashes from the tug’s warnoffs absorbed by its black hull, instead of reflected. Terk grunted in acknowledgment of what that meant: not an average vehicle, not with that stealth tech.
“Now watch the ramp,” Morgan told him.
The driver dropped to the ground and ran away.
At first, the passengers seemed too stunned to move, their reactions comical, mouths flapping, arms waving—
Then one fragmented, components scurrying over the sides of the ramp and away—
—as the other two vanished from sight, wit
hout taking a single step.
Terk stared. Swallowed, hard. “Got to be a mistake. Problem with the vid.”
“My equipment’s prime—”
“No mistake,” Morgan said heavily. The Assembler? Given the source of the cargo, he’d have been surprised not to find one or more involved. As for the others?
“Don’t take this wrong, Morgan, but I thought the Clan were extinct,” Terk grumbled, as though this shift in his universe was a personal affront. “Thought the Assemblers made them extinct. We were sure.”
“We were wrong.” Morgan rose to his feet. “Thel—”
She sniffed. “Go on, then. Shipcity’s full of those who want work. Daresay most’ll do a better job.”
He had to smile. “Thank you.”
An impatient wave dismissed him, her small eyes back on the screens.
Terk climbed to his feet, rubbing his backside. “What now?”
“The Drapsk have what we want.”
The enforcer grimaced. “I was afraid you’d say that.” But he headed for the door.
Morgan was about to follow him through when Thel said very quietly, “Jason.”
He turned. “What is it?”
“You and your pretty bud are all hot about this batch of cargo.” She tipped her head back over her seat, luck beads dangling, to regard him upside-down. “For what it’s worth, Scats didn’t lift empty. Took deliveries yesterday and the day before that. Foodstuffs. The usual dregs.” She made a face. “Shouldn’t be doing enforcer work, mind, but I don’t like pirates.”
Morgan strode forward and planted a kiss on her forehead before she could evade it. “Keep safe, Thel,” he told her. “What you’ve heard—”
“Out of the air lock,” she scolded, sitting up and rubbing her forehead. “Get. Lock the door on your way.”
But he could hear the pleased smile in her voice.
Constable Russell Terk could express his deepest, direst doubt as to the wisdom of an idea without saying a word. He did so now, looming like a cloud as he walked beside Morgan, his breath coming out in machinelike rasps. The effect was, admittedly, diminished by the cheerful slap of his sandals on the cobblestones of the portcity.
To Guard Against the Dark Page 7