by Kate Elliott
Kyosti hooked his hands behind his hair and leaned back into the cushions of his chair. He smiled. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it?”
“My thought, exactly,” replied Jehane. Although his voice was gentle, the threat was clear.
Jehane’s wrist-com beeped, and a breathless woman’s voice spoke.
“Comrade Jehane! Please return to the bridge!”
He lifted his wrist. “Is there some trouble? I thought at last tally that all was in hand.”
“We have a new ship, comrade. It came in at oct quadrant, where there isn’t even a charted window. And she’s—Void bless us, comrade”—even over the thin speaker, the tremor in her voice was obvious—“she’s huge. I’ve never seen a hull that size. She doesn’t answer to comm. So far cautious fire has made no penetration whatsoever.”
“Has the cavalry arrived at last?” Kyosti murmured obscurely.
“What the Void is ‘cavalry’?” Lily demanded, shaken out of her stance by the sudden instinct that she knew who had just arrived.
Jehane lowered his wrist and raked them with his glance. “Come with me to the bridge,” he ordered.
Kyosti shrugged, and rose as if it would be too much trouble to resist, but the gesture was lost on Jehane because he had already turned to walk to the door, expecting their compliance. Lily followed him silently, Kyosti at her heels.
The atmosphere on Boukephalos’s bridge was taut with uncertainty. As they entered, the man on scan looked up.
“Comrade.” His face was creased with worry. “I’ve had tac running through all our records. Central’s battle fleet has nothing this big listed in our files.”
“Status?” asked Jehane as he sat down in captain’s chair, slipping on his headset and levering out the chair’s console and screen to display over his lap.
“The ship has halted at the following coordinates.” Scan reeled off a list of numbers. “She’s currently making no movement whatsoever, hostile or friendly.”
“No response to our overtures on any channel,” said the woman at comm.
“We’re scattershooting fire from three ships, close enough to warn but not to hit. There has been no reply or action of any kind,” added the officer at weapons.
“I don’t think,” said scan abruptly, “that ship cares one whit about us. We could just as well be flak on entry: something just to fly through.”
Jehane’s face was a study in disapproval crossed by the intense interest with which he studied the specs unfolding on the screen before him.
Beside Lily, Kyosti sighed and shifted his weight from one leg to the other.
Jehane glanced up. “Do you know anything about this?” he asked mildly.
“Is there some reason I ought to?” Kyosti retorted lazily.
Jehane sighed, as ostentatious a gesture as any Kyosti ever used, but toned down for all that into an expression of long-suffering patience. “I won’t bother to insult your intelligence by replying directly to that question, comrade. I somehow doubt that you are unaware that we met, albeit not personally, at Nevermore Station some time ago. I haven’t time to fence as I’m in the middle of a rather large and important engagement.”
As if on cue, comm spoke up. “Aberwyn reports that the cruiser Singh has taken a disabling hit and officially withdrawn from the action. Suffrage reports that the cutters Manticore and Gryphon are in retreat, heading for a quince quadrant window, and Forlorn Hope reports the cruiser Lion’s Share dead in space, and its attendant Zima Station is in full pursuit of an unidentified cutter-class ship. Nova Roma reports it has sustained irreparable damage to its weapons systems. Bitter Tidings reports it is evacuating the merchanter Disenchantment, whose hull has blown.” She paused. “Shall I go on?”
“No. Let comrade Kuan-yin coordinate the data for now.” He returned his attention to Kyosti. “Now, do you?”
Scan swore, a long, obscene oath. ‘Another ship just appeared in oct quadrant. It’ll take time to analyze its spec, but we’ve got no immediate match on our long-range—”
“Comrade!” Comm broke in. “I have com traffic on a narrow beam between the incoming and the resting vessel. Transmitting both ways.”
“Can you break in?”
She shook her head. “It’s too tight a channel. We’re too far away in any case. I’ve got—I’ll put Nova Roma on it. They’re closest.”
Lily took a step forward. “Comrade Jehane. Let me try. I think I can get a reply from the first ship.”
Jehane cocked his head to one side to examine her. The careful line of his mouth lent his stare a preciseness that seemed piercing. “Ah.” One side of his mouth quirked up. “You’ve finished observing our little sparring match and have decided to act, I see. Thank you.”
“Lily,” said Kyosti in an undertone that spoke volumes.
“Someone has to tell her about Heredes,” replied Lily. “I intend to do it—in person, if comrade Jehane will let me.”
Jehane smiled and waved her toward comm. His eyes sparked with interest as she walked across to the station and, after waiting for the woman to set her channel, leaned closer to the mike and spoke.
“I am calling from the—the—” She hesitated, trying to recall Heredes’s words on the tiny bridge of the Easy Virtue, caught in an isolated backwater of space facing an imposing ship which they could not possibly outrun. “The region of the summer stars. I am calling for La Belle Dame.”
For a long moment only the hiss of the channel answered her.
Then, her voice.
“Who is this?”
Jehane’s eyes narrowed as he took in the brevity and unself-conscious authority of the question.
Lily glanced at Jehane, returned to the mike. “This is Taliesin’s daughter. I have a personal message for you, if I have your permission to come aboard.”
“Wait,” commanded Jehane. “I want to know who you are speaking to, and what intentions they have here.”
“Who I am does not concern you, Alexander Jehane,” said La Belle, across the channel, as if Jehane had spoken directly to her and not to Lily. “My intentions have nothing to do with your revolution. You need not fear that I intend to interfere in any way. I am merely here looking for someone.”
Lily felt with sudden numbing certitude that she knew who La Belle was looking for: Heredes.
“That is all very nice,” said Jehane conversationally, “but what assurances can you give me that it is true?”
La Belle laughed, shattering the crackle of static. “I don’t give assurances. But neither do I expect my word to be questioned.”
If Lily had not been glancing that way at that moment, she would not have seen the look of absolute, utter fury that transformed Jehane’s face for an instant. Then she blinked, and it was gone, obliterated into his usual bright, controlled intensity.
“Go, then,” he said calmly. “Give her what information she seeks, and return. Your robot will remain safely with me, here, while you go.”
“I don’t think—” objected Lily, and stopped. After all of her protestations of not knowing League space, she had just given him ample reason to disbelieve her—and to distrust her. There was no room in his revolution for a La Belle Dame. Lily still had responsibilities to the people on the Forlorn Hope. So if Jehane chose to hold Bach as hostage for her safe return—
Signing off comm, she gave Bach brief instructions to remain behind and, with a salute to Jehane, left the bridge. Kyosti followed her.
“What are you doing?” she asked as she waited for the elevator.
“Going with you.”
“Did Jehane give you permission?”
“I wasn’t aware I had to ask for it,” he said languidly. “Ought I to?”
“Well, he didn’t stop you,” she muttered, “so he must know what he’s doing.”
Kyosti laughed. It was not a complimentary sound. “Jehane is seething with rage in there, my heart. If he hates me because I am nothing he can control, then what do you suppose he feels about La
Belle, who could blast his revolution out of the sky with her single ship?”
“But La Belle isn’t interested in the revolution.”
“Very true,” he agreed. “But La Belle is a link back to the League, and if the League rediscovers Reft space officially, and arrives here in all of its advanced technological glory to welcome the Reft back into the community of humankind, then where is Jehane?”.
“Maybe he’s exactly where he wants to be.” Lily frowned at Kyosti, too angered by his presence to admit that she had had the same thought herself. They stepped inside the elevator and she keyed in the sequence for the shuttle bay. “If the government of the League is as representative and equal as you claim it is.”
“Oh, yes,” said Kyosti with a tone much like sarcasm in his voice. “Oh, it is. That’s why they hunted down people like me and Heredes and Wingtuck. They dislike being reminded of what humanity once was, before the golden age: ‘villains, vipers, damn’d without redemption. Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man.’”
“And murderers.” Lily closed one hand into a fist and set it with deliberate weight on the wall beside the elevator keypad, turning her head away from Kyosti. The thought of what that miner’s body must have looked like, after death, impinged with awful clarity on her mind. She shut her eyes. Evan. Evan something. Still—still—she could not remember his entire name. That only made it worse.
“Lily.” The word seemed forced from him. “Lily?” The door opened and he followed her out of the elevator. “At least let me try to explain.”
She kept walking, did not turn even as she spoke: “You should have explained a long time ago.”
Kyosti said nothing. Continued to say nothing the rest of the way to the shuttle bay, on the boarding, the detach, the long trip to La Belle’s ship. Lily whistled under her breath, wishing Bach were here to talk to—but he was not.
Kyosti shifted, with an almost inaudible sigh, in the seat behind her. She realized that although she could not hear his breathing, she could feel it, like the pulse of her own heart and breath. She had not spent so long a time in such close proximity to him since Unruli Station, and she cursed herself for letting him come along now, when there was no reason for it.
Duty impelled her to tell La Belle face-to-face about Heredes’s fate. Duty, and her instinct that Heredes would not want his Bella to discover this truth in any cold and impersonal manner. But there was no reason for Hawk to attend her, except to pretend that he was finally going to explain what he had all along avoided explaining, in order to dissolve her adamancy.
No reason for him to sit so close and with every slight movement remind her of his presence, his soft breath, the feel of his skin and the light, clean scent of his hair, and the satisfied shuttering of his eyes while—
“Damn it,” she swore. Behind her, Kyosti chuckled, the way he did when he—
She clenched her hands on the chair rests and held on tight for the remainder of the flight.
Adam met them at the docking bay. He welcomed them graciously, even gave Lily a brotherly hug, but a suggestion of a frown tightened the lines at his eyes and mouth, and he seemed preoccupied.
“Just in time,” he said obliquely, glancing at Kyosti, as he led them to an elevator that took them somehow straight to the bridge. Lily remembered how far they had had to walk the first time, and she wondered if La Belle’s business was in fact not what she had initially expected it to be: not news of Heredes, but someone else—and this hurried shortcut to the bridge an indication of a preoccupation that extended beyond Adam to the entire ship. Whose ship had come in behind her? And she remembered that Yi had been looking for La Belle, on his “hunt.”
As the doors sighed open onto the bridge, Kyosti took a step out after Adam, stopped, and took an audible breath in, as if he were scenting the air. “Just in time for what?” he asked sharply.
To their right, a second elevator door opened and a man tumbled out and rushed forward to fling himself at the foot of La Belle’s dais. “I’ve worked for you—good service!—for seven years!” he cried. “It’s your sworn duty to protect me!”
The man’s stark fear permeated the bridge like a rank smell as La Belle’s chair swiveled slowly around, revealing her: face set as in stone, black hair braided tight and lapping in its fall her knees. She regarded the man at her feet in awful silence.
“What did he do?” whispered Lily.
Adam shrugged, answering her in a low voice. “It’s the typical story: asteroid miner comes in to some station on leave, runs across a sweet adolescent je’jiri girl in full raging heat who’d slipped her clan for a night on the prowl. And of course all intelligent people are avoiding her like the plague, and trying to get calls through to whatever ship has hired out her clan. But people like him usually figure that as long as the je’jiri isn’t already mated, they’re safe. Brainless idiot. And then of course once he realized he was marked, he ran—and tried to cover his trail by pretending it had never happened.”
At last La Belle spoke. “You lied to me.” Her anger was bone deep and implacable.
“Oh god, oh god,” the man wept. “What else could I do? I had to leave. They were on my trail already.”
“You knew the law.” Her voice hardened with each word she spoke. “‘No human will mate or have intercourse in any sexual or sensual fashion with je’jiri.’ Code ex-eleven-oh-four of the Codified Law of League space. Which even a privateer acknowledges.”
He stammered something incoherent, lifted a hand to his hair. His forehead bore a brilliant red scar, like a brand, puckered across his dark skin.
“‘In dreams you hunt your prey,’” murmured Kyosti in an expressionless voice, “‘baying like hounds whose thought will never rest.’”
But Lily, glancing at him, saw that he was strung so tight that the merest touch might shatter him. The usual bronze of his skin had washed out to a ghostly pallor, accentuated by the unearthly color of his hair.
“But she was still an adolescent—and she consented—” the man gasped. His gaze darted to the elevator doors, halted for a frozen heartbeat on Kyosti’s still, taut form, and skipped back to La Belle.
“Then you are either uncontrollably libidinous or simply stupid. The je’jiri are not human, man. Their ways are not our ways.”
“They’re savages,” muttered Adam under his breath. “Little better than animals.”
“You have violated every tenet, the very foundation, of their culture, as admittedly alien and atavistic as it may seem to us. Yi took the hunt on, and now they have caught up with you. I cannot stop it.”
He lay in crumpled anguish at her feet, weeping with noisy and awful terror. The bridge crew stood utterly silent, watching him without compassion. “But you are La Belle Dame,” he sobbed. “You could stop them.”
She stood up. “I am La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” she said with the bite of diamond, “and I do not suffer fools gladly.”
To Lily’s left, the third set of elevator doors opened.
23 Je’jiri
IN THAT FIRST INSTANT, she could have believed that Kyosti had somehow moved from her side to the elevator without her knowing, and emerged again onto the bridge; a kind of vivid double entrance made possible by some quirk in his character.
He took two sprung steps out of the elevator and stopped. He had the same tall, slender form, crowned by startlingly blue hair. Then he turned, and she saw his face.
The shock of the absolute inhumanity of the man’s—the alien’s—features shook her: first, the strange, unearthly pallor of his skin matched against brilliant green eyes pierced by an acute and vital intelligence. The features of his face had a delicacy that lent it an almost angelic cast, a beauty that might be said to surpass human beauty, but for—
But for its contrast with the alien’s behavior. He froze, like any hunting thing, and cast his head about, eyes half-shuttered, as if he were smelling out the room, scenting and placing each individual. The movement repelled her: it seemed grossly primitiv
e, as violent as Unruli’s unpredictable storms, tied by tide and wind and gravity, and the unbreakable bond of the gross senses to the cycles of earth, to the unforgiving grip of the deepest, oldest part of the brain.
The man on the steps of the dais had ceased weeping and now groped up to a crouch, gathering himself in like an animal driven to its last, desperate fight.
More of them emerged from the elevator—two, four, seven in all. Each scented the room. The male who had first come in had locked his gaze on his prey, and he trembled, as if the wait was unbearable. He lifted his hands. Lily saw that each finger was tipped with a pale, sharp claw.
A strong, bitter smell permeated the bridge: their scent.
Except for the trembling male, the rest, having finished their scenting, stood stock-still. One stepped forward—Lily thought it was a female, although it was hard to tell.
When she spoke, she spoke directly to La Belle in a voice deeply accented with alien sounds. Her teeth were a carnivore’s teeth: pointed and deadly.
“Do you contest the kill?”
La Belle did not move. “No,” she replied.
A sigh rippled through the je’jiri. The male lunged forward.
Beside Lily, Kyosti gasped, a strangled sound, and collapsed to his knees.
The man fought, at first—some instinct for survival that humans had never lost—but ranged against this inhuman lust for the kill it did not avail him long.
The je’jiri male set claws into his face and chest and ripped open the man’s throat with his teeth.
Blood pooled out and dripped in streams down the steps of the dais. The last rattling sigh of the dying man echoed across the bridge.
Adam swore under his breath.
Lily felt her knees sag as bile rose in her own, intact, throat. She put a hand out to grip Kyosti’s shoulder, to steady herself, but he was shaking, trembling, and he had thrown a hand up over his eyes as if it could protect him from what they had just seen.
Someone in the far reaches of the bridge was vomiting. The noise cut off abruptly as, escorted by two other figures, they fled out another door.