The Pilots of Borealis

by David Nabhan

  Rittener let a few seconds pass; he was collecting his thoughts. “I’m sorry to tell you that I don’t remember the particular event; that probably makes it worse. I saw action at Chettinad, and unfortunately burned many ancient palaces and mansions. I ordered many awful things to transpire there. I truly wish it could have been different.”

  Sadhana had changed the look on her face. She wasn’t listening to Rittener’s response, her eyes instead were signaling that this was something much, much more important than a lost tea plantation years ago on another world. She had desperation and fear in her eyes, of that he was sure. He could recognize it better than a shark senses blood in water. Ethan Van Ulroy also was talented in that realm. He was the Terran magistrate hosting the function—even as he’d neglected the official talks—and reacted to the commotion before it happened, as soon as he’d caught sight of Dr. Ramanujan. He was cutting a path through the crowd to the scene as quickly as he could.

  “You’re two-faced.” She said it strangely, even more oddly than the words themselves. “No, actually with your excuses, you’re three-faced.” Van Ulroy was yards away and nearly knocking over highborn party-goers when Sadhana gave her last rebuke. “There’s no place for you under the Sun.” She then turned and took the arm of the aide-de-camp who’d just arrived, breathing a little harder and his hair for once a bit disheveled. There was nothing for Van Ulroy to do but escort the distraught scientist away from the fuss. Sadhana had lost her appetite and insisted on going home. Van Ulroy also had a damper placed on his, but had no choice other than to smile and compliment the dishes throughout the whole of the evening. Clinton Rittener, on the other hand, acted as if nothing at all had happened. He was so gregarious and engaging that even the Terrans selected to sit next to and across from him couldn’t help but surrender to enjoying his company. There was a reason for his excellent mood. He realized he might have already accomplished the hardest part of his mission from the minute Sadhana had stormed off, and was calling on a stunning talent he’d managed to groom like few men alive. He’d put it right out of his mind, literally.

  Rittener knew that every breath, every heartbeat, every involuntary dilation of his pupils, every single of his words and deeds would be recorded and dissected for the slightest information it may reveal. Nothing could block the illegal but frighteningly intrusive surveillance of one’s very persona—if Terra decided to bring to bear every electronic tool at its disposal to focus on one single individual. And, there had never been a person of interest like Clinton Rittener. He imagined—correctly—that everything from the chemical content of his urine to the timbre of his voice as he laughed at jokes was to wind up on a screen, somewhere, with a team of experts at the ready to determine what it meant. Clinton Rittener, though, was actually a living, breathing example of something even the Terran Ring’s specialists couldn’t crack. The tales about pilots from the Outer were true.

  Rittener had command over those things that most humans simply assumed were beyond their control. He wasn’t the only one alive who could do it. Anyone willing to spend years on Titan in the company of the most dangerous assassins in the Solar System could have a chance to learn it. A certain and tremendous inner strength was required though to attain one’s yanta. There were pilots, indeed, whose breathing, concentrating, and other severe talents made them fairly impervious to scanning. Clinton Rittener wasn’t just one of them, he was a most remarkable example of the best of them. He knew immediately that Sadhana had said far more to him than her literal words, and every indication of his surmisal—surprise, satisfaction, anxiety—was buried too deep to find, no matter how many knobs were turned on any number of machines.

  The Terrans at his table warmed by the end of the evening, giving in to the once-in-a-lifetime chance to cross wits with the legendary mercenary. None dared to breathe a word of impending wars or extraterrestrial prizes, but not unlike many other talks around many other tables, the subject turned to military matters. Which were the warriors who were the best in all of history? Each in the company gave an opinion. Spartan hoplites, Japanese samurai, and Teutonic knights had already been put forth when it came to Rittener’s turn to voice his choice.

  “I think the best that ever were are still the best that are today.” He gave a look over his shoulder at his guard. “A British colonel during the Second World War asked his Gurkha adjutant for volunteers to be airlifted and dropped behind enemy lines to destroy a bridge. To his amazement he was informed by the shamed adjutant that not one Gurkha would step forward. Never having witnessed cowardice from the battalion he led, the colonel flew into a rage, ordered the men assembled, and gave them a stern dressing down. Within the hour he had his volunteers. As the squad boarded the plane the colonel noticed that none of the men had the slightest look of unease. They seemed as ready and eager for battle as ever. He called the adjutant over and demanded an explanation. ‘Oh, the men are in high spirits, Colonel,’ he answered happily. ‘They’ve been issued parachutes and now understand their use.’”

  The youngest one at the table, an honors mathematician seated across from Rittener in case the conversation should go that way, was the first to understand the punch line. “You mean the men volunteered to jump out of an airplane, thinking they’d simply hurtle to the ground, before being told what a parachute was?”

  Rittener didn’t need to answer. Ram Dahadur did it for him. “Those must have been Magar or Tamang Gurkha. I am of the Limbu hill tribe. Limbu would never have hesitated.”

  Now the young mathematician was genuinely impressed and wanted to know. “Have you ever met men like that, Mr. Ambassador?” Rittener was a credentialed envoy. This was the first time anyone on Terra deigned to accede to it. Rittener had. He’d be flying against some of them tomorrow.

  “No,” he lied. “Men like that don’t exist anymore.”

  THE PILOTS OCCUPIED PADS on a circular start wheel, each equidistant from the zero-G line that ran down the center of any section of the spinning Ring. Up here the gravity well was already quite weak, diminishing greatly the pilots’ weight. Terra’s best, Demetrius Sehene among them of course, would be making for and claiming a place on that line. Insiders were whispering under their breaths to watch Quince Xavaris, the newcomer to Terra. He didn’t seem like quite that much, until one had a closer look. Xavaris was one of those men who Nature had deemed from the start to be lean, hard, and wiry. This particular flyer however, of the most extreme brand of Titanian pilots, had taken his profession to its limits. He was tight skin, rock hard bone, steel cable muscle—and nothing more. Clinton knew him, but only too well, from his years in the Outer. They both learned their yanta from the same master. Pilots on Titan had their own radical and secretive association—tracing their line supposedly back through yogis, knights Templar, hassassins, and back to Egyptian masons and beyond. Xavaris’ mind and spirit therefore had to be as formidable as his body, the proof of which shone through extraordinarily piercing eyes.

  When the flyers alit from the start there was to be assured a classically violent scrum. These super-fit gladiators pushed forward on almost weightless bodies in the Terran heights with the most powerful muscle engines in the Solar System. The fact that all of them possessed personalities more like Xavaris’ than not, that all of them spent at least half their training time devoted to martial arts, guaranteed that the beginning of the match was world-class, no holds barred, close order combat—but among centaur-like creatures from mythology, half human and half eagle.

  The Terrans began cheating immediately. One after the other came at Nerissa in angles that made no sense other than to put her out of the running. She gave the Terran audience a show of how she defended herself when the gloves were off, whirling and kicking almost too quickly to follow with the naked eye. The first Terran took a vicious foot to the Adam’s apple and plummeted out of the sky. The second had his nose broken so badly that the spray of blood blinded him, causing him to inadvertently block the third. Her shoulder, if ever injured in t
he last match, was obviously much improved.

  Clinton was cheating too. He was flying doped on cartazene. Just prior to the match, Ram Dahadur had approached him and blandly handed him the dose. “Dr. Stanislaus ordered me to make this available to you.” When the Gurkha saw the look of evident reluctance on Rittener’s face he followed through. “Dr. Stanislaus also has a personal request: protect his niece.” Clinton still wasn’t convinced.

  “But there’s no way to get away with this,” he protested.

  Ram had a perfect answer. “Only the winner is tested, sahib.” He looked down for a moment out of respect. “You’re too old to fly, sir. You have no chance. Everyone knows that.” Then he bucked up and gave him a look straight in the eyes.

  “Remember your code, sir.”

  The cartazene helped put Rittener into the leading pack and allowed him to give some support to Nerissa himself. Even with the dangerous chemical working its magic, Clinton couldn’t make a cut to block a fourth swooping attack on Nerissa. It was countered however—by Demetrius Sehene. He obviously hadn’t liked the way the last match had ended, and hadn’t appreciated the aspersions that had come with it. The Emperor flew fairly, would take on all comers face to face, and hadn’t any use at all for gutter tactics. As it was, and as he’d said many times, he admired Nerissa. The check was expertly effected, in as gentle a manner as possible so that Sehene could keep his forward impetus, dipping under the attacker and ripping up while shrugging him off to the side with his bull’s shoulder. Rittener was close enough to hear what the Emperor cried out to his team-mates, “This is to be a race!” As if on cue, the pilots took the advice in unison. The contest was on.

  The most dangerous piloting matches could only take place on Terra. Only on Terra did pilots fly in zero gravity. Here they could attain killing speed. But the great draw for the audiences on the Ring were the water obstacles—amazing and beautiful, perfectly spherical globs of millions of gallons of precious water suspended along the race course, quivering delightfully as they hung in the gravitational null zone. A torrent of pilots spilled either above, below, or to the sides of them, forming human slipstreams around this string of dazzlingly blue pearls floating in the sky.

  Rittener was still in the thick of the pack of front-runners at the first, second, even at the fifth water obstacle. Flying with the most superlative pilots to be found though was an impossible task. Clinton was a good pilot, maybe even very good. Nothing though—not even if he willed it to his death—could prevent him losing ground against these flyers. So he didn’t see himself how it happened. One of Terra’s own pilots, none other than Quince Xavaris, was the cause of it, initiating a tangle with Adem Sulcus at the very circumference of the penultimate water obstacle and sending him face first to “belly flop” into it. The splat made a sound Rittener could hear, so he knew someone was in trouble. Sulcus was in more than just trouble. Hitting the surface tension of the water at such a speed rendered him unconscious. His body, slowed down by the abrupt and sudden halt, nonetheless retained enough inertia to thrust him completely within the liquid orb, his wings trailing behind him like a mosquito trapped in a globule of amber. As Rittener glided under he could see him twisting languorously just below the surface, knocked cold, subject to the chaotic currents of his own impact, and drowning. It was plain the Terran pilot would be dead in short order without assistance, and none, strangely, seemed to be forthcoming.

  Before slipstreaming around the next obstacle Rittener dipped his right wing and gave another look back, catching sight of the rescue shuttle as it finally arrived on the scene. He had his misgivings about the reasons for its tardy appearance.

  The distraction cost Rittener. He missed an unparalleled struggle at the sprint between the Emperor and Nerissa—all clean, all fair, a classic ending between two incomparable competitors. The official markers were being displayed. Nerissa had broken the line first—by .0003 of a second.

  The Borelians were rejoicing wildly. The Terran audience was clapping politely, having witnessed something that could require nothing less. Then news of another blow came for Terra. Adem Sulcus was dead, expiring from a broken neck and other shocks. Rittener breathed in just such a way, and began meditating, flooding his mind with motifs learned from the great deceivers, and yet with room enough to answer when his fellow Borelian pilots came breathless with the report. Quite a number of enemies of the Terran state had coincidentally expired due to “shock” and Rittener deemed that his neck was likely as not broken in the shuttle while unconscious. That’s not what Rittener said though.

  “Poor fellow. He flew a good race. This is a dangerous course; it’s really all too bad.”

  To anyone listening, for anyone monitoring his alpha wave patterns, for any army of amanuenses that might ferret out a different inner meaning, there was nothing but that: “Poor fellow. He flew a good race.” Clinton knew better, of course. Sulcus was the operative with whom he was to rendezvous. The Borelian Council had risked Rittener’s life to intercept the intelligence the Terran would now never share. If all were lost Rittener however now did something strange. The entire Borelian team went off to celebrate. All save Clinton, that is. He went straight to bed.

  FOR THE NEXT FEW hours Ram Dahadur and Tam Dahadur took turns sleeping, dressed in full combat assault gear—including incongruous kukris sheathed at their waists—sitting in uncomfortable chairs on either side of Rittener’s bed. Rittener was in meta-sleep, half meditation, half sleep. Neither had seen anything like it.

  “What’s that? What’s he doing?” Tam asked his brother.

  Ram frowned and motioned with his head that Tam should turn away. Ram didn’t know either but realized it was inappropriate for them to look on. “He’s a pilot—from the Outer. He’s preparing.” Then he added in a chiding way, “Obviously.”

  “What’s he preparing for?” Tam asked.

  “Anything,” Ram snapped.

  That made sense and the subject was closed. A moment later Tam muttered back some good advice though. “He should have done that before the race.” He then sidled back and rested his eyes. Tam didn’t drift off though; there was another inquiry.

  “Do you think he knows what that thing is?”

  “What thing?” his brother asked. Tam gave a look in the direction of where he thought space would be. On the spinning Ring though those types of nods couldn’t miss.

  Ram scolded his brother. “We’ve been given orders not to even mention that word. That’s for Borelian diplomats.”

  “I didn’t say ‘Object,’ I said ‘thing,’” Tam protested.

  “Yo jhakana!” Ram cursed under his breath. The rebuke was cut short though as Rittener’s body made a short, quick jerk, released a few seconds of tremors, and then fell back quiet. Tam was watching wide-eyed, absorbed. His brother, the clever, intelligent one, was still unconvinced.

  “He can’t know that. No one does.”

  CLINTON ARRIVED AT NERISSA’S quarters utterly refreshed. Every single member of the Borelian team was making a time of it in the opulent accommodations the Terran Ring had respectfully provided, celebrating and breaking a significant number of rules. They’d been at it since the electric finish.

  Without even congratulating her he instead made a lunatic request. “I’d like to invite you to see some Terran sights with me below.”

  For his Gurkha guard from Earth and himself too, a “dirt crawler” for most of his life, a foray off the Borelian levels to the Deck itself and into the 1.08 g’s of standard Terran gravity would be a slightly uncomfortable outing. For Nerissa it would require everything she had to endure it for long. She was though now officially, for the moment, the pre-eminent pilot anywhere, so Rittener deemed her up to it.

  “On the Deck?” she asked.

  A stunned silence came down like a tarp. It was as if interrupting a party to ask the guest of honor to accompany one over the falls in a barrel. He certainly had dressed for the occasion, giving anyone watching the scene—or recording it�
��the impression that he fancied his invitation might actually be accepted. He’d shown up in a ten thousand credit, impeccably tailored, form-fitted bodysuit. Over his shoulder lay a matching sash, very impressively festooned with rarely achieved emblems, among them his badge as Borelian envoy.

  Nerissa gave him a prolonged stare, during which time he said not a word, sufficient to convince that no matter the preposterous request, it was given out seriously. Then she looked herself up and down.

  “And with me looking like this?” She bit her lip, wrinkled her forehead, and drew his eyes to the kimono she was wearing, a beautifully embroidered pure silk kimono, but still just a wrap. “I didn’t pack anything for that.”

  Rittener stepped right in front of her, took her hand, slowly raised it to his lips, and kissed it.

  “Please, we might never have this chance again.” He was indeed making such a fool of himself, but his manner was so . . . unnaturally natural. She took her hand back and put it to her mouth, swept away.

  “Such daring! But you’re a previous high marshal of the coalition of Jiangsu, Shanxi, and I forget the rest. How could I refuse?”

  Nerissa had some daring too. She reappeared wearing the only thing she could: the same flowing formal wear from the previous state dinner.

  “Do you think anyone will notice?” she asked, biting her lip again.

  It wasn’t as simple as changing clothes though. A large, elite squad of Terran troopers immediately fell in around the couple as they left the compound. They weren’t meant for the “envoy”; they were assigned to Nerissa’s movements. Rittener had taken his frowning guard along too, so all in all the mixture was like gunpowder. When the destination was learned—down to the Deck—along with the identity of her escort, it put fire to the fuse. The Terran captain wasn’t prepared for this tourist outing and didn’t like it at all. Nerissa came on like a tiger at the right moment of indecision on his part.