“Let’s hope,” Sascha said.
“Trying to break the new engines?” Bryer asked through the intercom.
Reese leaned on the button. “Pirates, Bryer.”
“Unexpected.”
“So say we all.” Reese switched to the all ship and repeated, “We’ve got pirates. If Sascha starts twisting the ship into knots, you know why. Sit tight, we’re going to try to slip past them to our destination.”
“Gee, get them all hopeful, why don’t you?” Sascha muttered.
“You can do it, fuzzy,” Reese said. “If I have to I’ll pet your arm myself to help you concentrate.”
Sascha laughed. “No, no, don’t do that. I’d be too distracted by the novelty. Just let me work.”
In the following half hour, Reese glared at the plot on the station next to Kis’eh’t’s, waiting for the red blips of the ships to do anything more threatening than glide in place. They never changed course, riding herd on their cluster of asteroids.
“Have they missed us?” Reese wondered. “Or do they just not care?”
“They might not be able to see us,” Sascha said. “You just upgraded our scanners, remember? And pirates aren’t typically that well equipped.”
“Maybe cleaning the hull made it so sparkly it burned out their sensors,” Kis’eh’t said.
“I don’t think the ship was that shiny even when it was new,” Sascha said.
The Earthrise continued its approach to their destination, an unprepossessing planet on an irregular and distant orbit from Demini Star. The plot showing their trajectory and the assumed paths of the pirates continued to bore, though there were points Reese thought would give the pirates a full view of them.
“I knew I was forgetting something,” Reese said.
“What’s that?”
“Guns,” Reese said with a scowl.
“No use now,” Kis’eh’t said. “They don’t look too hostile, though.”
“They might be waiting for us to do all the work,” Reese said. “How long before we grab orbit?”
“Three hours, twenty minutes. And it’ll seem a lot longer if you don’t start blinking occasionally.”
“Yeah, why don’t you go get something to eat?” Kis’eh’t said.
“Food’s the last thing on my mind,” Reese said. “I’ll go organize our landing party. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“With all the bad luck we’ve had lately we’re bound to have some happy soon,” Sascha said.
“We’ve had bad luck?” Kis’eh’t asked.
“Don’t answer that,” Reese said. “I don’t want to tempt anything that might be listening. Call me if something changes.”
“Don’t worry,” Sascha said. “If something changes, you’ll know.”
The instructions she’d received after signing the contract had been specific to the point of monotony. In accordance with the exhaustive requirements, Reese had purchased three five-foot by three foot by three foot boxes made of steel, each with a cushioned layer and five layers of insulation. They looked like coffins and handled just as clumsily on the mechanical dollies the contract specified, probably out of a paranoid fear that anti-gravity sleds dropped their loads if their power failed. Reese leaned on the intercom.
“Bryer? Could you come by Bay 2?”
“Coming.”
While she waited, Reese flipped through the maps supplied with her information packet. The areas that had been designated as “harvest sites” were on plateaus too small for the Earthrise to land. They’d have to set down on one of the lower stretches and climb to the top. She’d bought block and tackle to lift the boxes to the harvest site, but the entire task struck her as more manual labor than she liked. She hadn’t picked her crew based on how many pounds they could lift or how severe a climate they could survive.
The Phoenix arrived and eyed the boxes.
“I need them moved,” Reese said. “Out to Bay 5.”
He eyed the boxes. “Five?”
“It’s got the biggest airlock,” Reese said. “The less we jostle these things, the better.”
Bryer flexed his coverts, something Reese usually interpreted as a shrug. “Fine.”
They approached the first box together. Bryer took one end and she braced herself at the other. “Ready? Now!”
They lifted it with barely enough clearance to make it onto the dolly bed, a maneuver that required them to shift their feet and pivot together. Reese’s shoulders and arms were shaking, and before they could begin the turn Bryer set his end down.
“Hey!” Reese said.
“You will break something,” the Phoenix said.
“I will not,” Reese said, annoyed. “It’s only a few seconds while we get the things onto the dolly and that’s it. I can do it.”
“You will break something,” Bryer repeated. “Get the man.”
“Sascha is busy,” Reese said. “I’m not taking him out of the pilot’s chair while we’re sneaking around a system full of pirates.”
“The other man,” Bryer said.
Reese snorted. “You want me to believe an Eldritch is stronger than me? If we need help, I’ll call Irine.”
“Irine is too small.”
Reese glared at Bryer. “We can do this. We will do this.”
“I will not.”
She frowned and straightened, folding her arms. “What’s wrong? You’re never this obstinate.”
“You require this.”
“Excuse me?”
He canted his head and studied her with one eye. Phoenixae had blind spots directly in front of their faces, but she’d never quite grown accustomed to having Bryer look at her sideways. Kis’eh’t had more legs. Irine and Sascha shared unmentionable acts. Bryer staring her down like a real bird somehow struck her as more viscerally alien.
“You require this,” Bryer said again. “Your sight is clouded.”
“Clouded,” Reese repeated.
“By the Eldritch,” Bryer said. “He closes you to the Eye in the Center of the Void.”
Reese opened her mouth to argue and then stopped. It was useless to argue with someone whose religion considered visible emotion evidence of sin. “I don’t see it that way.”
“That matters less than how it causes you to act.”
Full sentences out of Bryer were rarely a good sign. “I don’t see that I’m acting much differently.”
“You wouldn’t. You are closed to the Eye and its omniscient truth.”
Her head started to throb in time with her shoulders. “And if I call him down here to help you, everything will be better?”
“A start,” Bryer said.
Anything was better than discussing her fitness as a practitioner of an alien religion. Reese went to the intercom with alacrity and called for the Eldritch. She stood next to the wall and fidgeted until he showed up... which he did. Dressed in a brown leather jerkin and pants, with a wool shirt and leather gloves tucked into his belt.
“Captain?”
At least he was using the right title. “I’m not sure if you can help, but Bryer requested you,” Reese said. “We need to get these boxes to Bay 5.”
He eyed them.
“They’re heavier than they look,” Reese said.
“They have a sinister mien,” Hirianthial said.
“I noticed,” Reese said as he walked around to the end of one of the boxes and glanced at Bryer. The Phoenix stationed himself at the opposite end. “Look, you don’t have to do this. I know about surgeon’s hands and all that—”
They lifted the box onto the dolly. A few moments to synchronize and the thing was replanted. Reese gaped.
“A surgeon’s hands are useless if they can’t be used,” Hirianthial said. He wheeled the dolly through the door and vanished down the corridor until even the click of his boots on the deck plates faded.
“How exactly is this unclouding thing supposed to work?” Reese asked.
Bryer directed his eye at her. “You must look more closely.�
��
So she slouched against the wall with her arms folded over her ribs and did her best to observe everything. She was used to the sight of Bryer’s body in motion, a strange collection of feathers and scales and muscles moving at unexpected angles and with a choppy abruptness that surprised the eye. She’d never seen him in full flight and her attempts to imagine his wings outstretched had never yielded a coherent image, but at least his stiff metallic feathers were familiar, sprouting all the way from the base of his smallest finger to his arm near the pit. She supposed he had muscles like everyone else, but watching him on his end of the box she had to guess: she couldn’t see anything past the scales.
Hirianthial moved enough like a human that his grace disconcerted her. No one should disturb the air so little. As he gripped the edge of the second box, his hair swirled against a shoulder but didn’t foul his grip or his legs; somehow, knee-length hair never got in his way, and that was the most apt way to describe him moving. Every part of him ended up exactly where it should, no matter how difficult or how much strength or focus it required. She expected him to show strain but he didn’t. She expected him to act weak but he never did. Eldritch were supposed to mince. They were supposed to be weak and fragile and fussy. All the books said they were!
Bryer took the next box down the hall. Reese wished she’d bought another dolly.
“You sure this isn’t bad for you?” she asked the Eldritch despite her better judgment.
He shook his head, and for a moment she saw the dangle; it was indeed in the unlikely location the twins had reported when they’d told her in detail about its presentation. Several times over. The entire crew had glee about the twins’ having petted an Eldritch. “What will we do when we land?”
“We’ll all exit through the Bay 5 airlock with the boxes. I’ll take Bryer and Sascha up the cliff to pack them. I’d like you and Kis’eh’t to remain at the base of the cliff to steady the boxes on their way down, and then get them inside; don’t wait for us, the sooner you get the things put away, the better. Then we’ll head out of here as fast as the refits will take us.” She glanced at the leather. “You’re wearing that under a thermal suit? It’ll be warm enough without layers.”
“It’s barely warm enough in the ship,” Hirianthial said with a laugh, and turned the lapel to reveal a fuzzy white layer. “Even lined with fleece. Don’t worry, Captain. I’ll be comfortable enough.”
“You laughed,” Reese said.
He looked at her and cocked an eyebrow, but even that expression seemed different, a little looser somehow. “I didn’t laugh before?”
“Not like that,” Reese said.
“Ah,” he said. “I suppose not.”
It wasn’t fair of him to go changing. She wanted him to stay aloof and old. Laughing made him too accessible. How could she stay irritated at him that way? He looked almost merry.
Bryer returned and they loaded the remaining box. Hirianthial toted this one away, leaving Bryer to glance at Reese. “Did you look?”
“Yes,” Reese said. “He looks happier.”
The Phoenix’s wings mantled, a ripple of motion and hissing sound that flowed all the way through his long tail. “Not look at him. Look in you.”
She’d annoyed a Phoenix—truly an accomplishment. “You didn’t say that.”
“Truly,” Bryer said, “You are occluded.”
Two hours later Sascha set the Earthrise down on a world marked as “Selebra” on their star charts with no more fanfare than, Reese imagined, a puff of frost at the landing struts.
“I guess the pirates weren’t interested in us,” the Harat-Shar said on his way to suit up.
“I still think they’re waiting for us to do all the heavy lifting,” Reese said. “Meet us in Bay Five.”
“Right.”
Bryer had already opened the interior airlock door when she arrived, revealing a world of ice through the window... ice and bleak darkness.
“We’ve got lamps, don’t we?” Kis’eh’t asked, rummaging through their supplies.
“The Earthrise has emergency lighting, yes,” Reese said, standing on the airlock ledge and staring at the frozen world.
The Glaseah padded up next to her. After glancing at Reese, she peered through the window. “There,” she said, pointing. “That dot is Demini.”
Reese said nothing.
“You forgot to buy us lanterns,” Kis’eh’t said.
“Think of it as a challenge,” Reese said.
The Glaseah shook her head and headed back into the bay, calling, “If you’ve got lamps or lanterns or personal lights, you’ll want to go get them.”
Reese rubbed her forehead. She should have realized Selebra was far enough away from Demini Star to not have a day but celestial mechanics wasn’t her strongest subject. She hated planets. Give her the clean, broad plane of space any day. Or even the calm nothingness of folded Well-space. At least the blood-cursed rock didn’t have a grabby hold... gravity here was even lighter than Mars.
“Rock-climbing ice cliffs in the dark,” Sascha said cheerfully. He had already pulled his thermal suit’s hood over his head and ears. “It’s the newest frontier in sports!”
“We’ll be fine,” Reese said, turning from the forbidding vista and joining them at the piles of backpacks and supplies. She hunted through them until she found the ship’s single telegem, which she affixed to her ear before dropping her mask around her neck. “We’ll just have to take it slowly.”
“I’m all for slow,” Sascha said, shouldering his pack and brandishing an ice pick. “Ready when you are!”
“Stop waving that before you put out someone’s eye,” Reese said.
“Awww.”
“Don’t mind her,” Kis’eh’t said. “She’s just grumpy because she forgot that planets don’t automatically have day and night just because they’re planets.”
“Wouldn’t that be convenient?”
Bryer rumbled.
“Is he laughing?” Sascha asked.
“Augh!” Reese exclaimed. “Let’s just get going. Bryer, wheel the boxes out to the base of the cliff. Sascha, you and I are following him. We’ll call when it’s time to lower the boxes.”
“Understood,” Hirianthial said.
Reese pulled the suit up over the back of her head, catching a few of her beaded braids in the collar and headed into the airlock. Sascha and Bryer followed her. They did suit checks and mask seal checks before closing the interior door. Once outside, Reese paused to let Bryer pass her, pulling the boxes on sleds. She waited for her agoraphobia to erupt, but having a bubble of air of her own and a suit that hugged her with her own body warmth, she couldn’t quite believe she was outside. She couldn’t even hear the crunch of her footsteps on the ice. With a shrug, Reese followed Sascha and Bryer to the base of the cliff, where she and the Harat-Shar performed safety checks on the climbing harness and ropes.
Bryer stopped beside them and ruffled his feathers. Unlike the suits made for the rest of the bipedals, the arms on his suit only hugged the bare parts. Long spars stretched from the edges into the feathers, warming them within some kind of shield Reese wasn’t enough of an engineer to understand. It looked like magic to her and was probably as astronomically expensive.
“Ready?” she asked him through the suit intercoms after double-checking his harness.
He nodded and took the end of the rope, flexing knife-like talons on the end of his feet that the suit only barely sheathed. She waited for him to trudge away—surely he needed a running start?—but he simply stood between her and Sascha, staring at a fixed point near the top of the cliff.
Then with a muffled rattle of feathers, he simply leaped into the air, wings flaring bright gold just before they passed out of range of their lanterns.
“Wow,” Sascha said, the intercom placing him much closer than he was actually standing.
They could no longer see the Phoenix, only hear his wings beating the air, great metallic thrashes that penetrated the suit’
s insulated cover. Reese had never heard anything like it.
The rope tumbled into view. Reese tugged on it, then yanked as hard as she could. It held.
“Looks good. Let’s go.”
Halfway up the cliff, Sascha asked, “Captain?”
“What?”
“What do you think’s so valuable about these crystals anyway?”
“They’re art objects? I don’t know. I didn’t ask any questions. I just took the money.”
“Rich people are strange.”
“Yeah,” Reese said. “I hope that’s all it is.”
At the top of the cliff they stopped to rub feeling back into aching muscles before hauling up the boxes. It wasn’t until all three boxes had safely arrived that Reese turned toward their goal, set a-fire by the light of their lanterns. The top of the rise was encrusted with long columnar spikes, faceted so sharply they seemed to cut wounds that bled bright red onto their planes. Eye-watering blues and shocking purples flickered in the corners of the crystals, broken beams of light fractured against their edges... hundreds of them, some as high as her own waist.
“Blood and Freedom,” Reese whispered.
“Nice,” Bryer agreed, an observation that caused both Reese and Sascha to start.
“Seems a pity to have to hack at them,” Sascha said.
“Yeah, well, that’s why we’re here,” Reese said. “Let’s get to it.”
Bryer opened one of the boxes, withdrawing the three pairs of tongs. He took one and applied himself to the nearest specimen with his customary detachment.
Reese shrugged, took up the second pair and went to work. It took her several tries to figure out how to use them to apply enough pressure on the narrow bases of the crystals to separate them from the ground, and her muscles ached by the time she’d cut a half dozen.
“We should have brought lunch,” Sascha muttered.
“Fill the boxes and you can eat,” Reese said, bringing her armload to the first and setting them carefully inside. The instructions had included a stacking diagram and a scale to weigh each specimen. There was nothing her employer hadn’t thought of... excepting the pirates.
Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) Page 26