At this rate it might take a century to send the message.
Ellis worked furiously. The codes and the frequency wouldn’t correlate, and then, for some mysterious reason, the benighted transmitter’s trigger would only accept voice. Voice? How stupid was that? That’d been geriatric in Ellis’ day. Finally, more by luck than judgement, the codes kicked in and the plea for help sped away, free and flying.
A war-time operative, Ellis was far from happy. An innate caution said any signal carrying an identifiable vocal frequency was bad news. Though, of course, there was no one left to recognise Ellis Matheson of Typhin. Too many years, too many battles…
Giddy with relief, she sagged, catching her breath.
Some slight noise from behind warned her and she whirled to face the door.
Chapter Seven
“How long before we hit the outer rim?” Mark eased himself into the second’s (co-pilot’s) position and sparked up the sector map. He’d spent the first hours of the journey barricaded in his cabin and HStJ was willing to bet he’d been trying to make contact with the other Donn. It was just about par for the course and, to be honest, Jenson would’ve been disappointed if there had been an explanation available. Harth Norn? He’d never heard of it, not even the ghost of a whisper, but he could find any needle in any haystack. He glimpsed Mark’s screen and smirked. Trade traffic? Following Traders in? Crafty move, that.
“Bylanes? Couple of days,” he replied, nodding at Mark’s terminal. “Any luck?”
“Pretty big Commercial Trader,” grunted Mark. “Victual-barge. Sweet.”
“Any news on the ether?” Jenson accepted Donn methods without understanding, he always had, but if you didn’t ask you didn’t get. And sometimes he won.
“No, nothing from Harth Norn.” Macluan pressed home a final command and swung upright. Catching Jenson’s expression, his austere features transformed into a surprisingly mischievous smile and he sat back down. “All right, let’s talk. I did discover, H, there is more than one Donn out there, though I think the other is only a kid. He’s linked to this affair too, I don’t know how yet. His voice, the images were completely unformed, totally random... Not like the other one, the other one is different.” He stopped. The tiers of Donn mindspeak were virtually impossible to explain to a non-Donn, so he didn’t try. The woman was special, a darker, firmer speech, only he could hear her, he was sure. The boy was on the wider mode, anyone could pick him up. “There was long, low tundra and fences...” He trailed off.
No sign of his own species for so long and then two virtually simultaneous contacts.
There was no explaining how he felt, so he didn’t try.
Nor did he need to. “Not alone,” said Jenson softy. “So, so and so.”
“Not alone,” agreed Mark. “No more alone.”
* * *
Life was tough when you settled on one of the seven moons of Belthan.
Fencing was the worst job that Sam ever did, it was lonely and fiddly. It wasn’t Soren’s first choice to occupy his ward but there were always broken fences to mend. The electronic partition fences got frisky after one of Belthan Six’s minor quakes dislodged a watch-stake. It was the most boring job imaginable and Sam was nobody’s mechanic, he had all the engineering acumen of a rock. Neither did it help when his tools were almost as scruffy as his wind-coat. A freak tunnel-gust tugged his straggling brown hair away from his sharp features, pricking his eyes to hot tears under ancient goggles and the thin scarf that protected his face flapped like a gag. Once or twice he stopped and stared up at the looming giant of Belthan’s main planet dwarfing the horizon. Sam was used to feeling like an insignificant speck in the midst of the whispering mauve foothills but today was different.
A ghost perched on his shoulder.
Some stranger had tiptoed inside his head and peered out of the corner of his eyes into the fine wires and circuits he was aligning. It was a ghost who’d been searching for somebody else but who’d found Sam. An inquisitive ghost. Sam wasn’t sure that he was giving satisfactory answers to the barrage of questions that he sensed but not quite heard.
It was a ghost that required a salute and Sam wasn’t the military type.
Splitting his concentration between the ghost and the fencing hadn’t improved the boy’s chances of re-jigging the watch-stake securely so it would broadcast, and the wild reaches were treacherous. Now and then he shook his head free and checked to ensure that his personal defence fields were operational and the ghost seemed to appreciate that he had to do it, for it waited fairly patiently until he was done. But then it started up again. And again.
Suddenly a door cracked open and he distinctly heard a voice ask who he was.
Sam, said Sam, inside his head, in almost words.
“Sam,” he said out loud.
Who? demanded the ghost, also in almost words. Who? Where are you?
Without warning the world moved under Sam’s feet. The boy staggered, clutching a post for balance as Belthan Six’s unsound surface rippled and he tumbled to his knees.
When it stopped shaking and he stopped gasping, the ghost had gone.
“Goodbye,” Sam whispered despondently. “Good luck, whoever you are.”
And he was lonely again, really alone, as lonely as the thin, dispirited wind.
It had happened. It had. To make it truly real he wanted to tell someone but there was no one to tell. Soren would write it off as a daydream and Hannah wouldn’t understand.
“Crap,” snarled Sam. “I’m going home.”
He bundled up the sad pile of tools and wire and scraps of electronic gewgaws that he barely knew how to use into his backpack. Firing up his decrepit Utility-bike he pointed its blunt nose towards supper and a date with Hannah Morlstin. Wondering if her parents would be home that night, he soon forgot his ghostly experience. Sam didn’t look back, didn’t check his work, he never did. It was a bad fault. It drove Soren mad, because, so he said, the boy’s mind was always fixed on some point on a far horizon that he’d never reach.
As the cloud of billowing dust settled behind him, the pillars of Sam’s two final stakes stretched a V-shaped gesture against the swollen amber globe of Belthan Prime. It was old, ancient, older than ancient, an archaeologist’s paradise stuffed with the signs and symbols of long dead civilisations. Its recently colonised system of unstable moons, supporting only invited migrants, swung around it like a jangling bracelet.
Night crept over the reaches, the old world dipped low on the horizon.
The repaired watch-stakes quivered with frantic energy.
The trembling plains burped and thrashed.
Shocked stakes catapulted up and crash-landed, rolling into new-formed gullies.
By the time the quake subsided, just before dawn, they were smashed to smithereens.
* * *
“She did what?” Aghast, Tye Beven stared around his room, his private study and his personal things and mentally ticked off each precious item one by one. Nothing was missing, though you never knew what’d been touched. “She should’ve just set up and gone.”
“You know what she’s like. She’s a creepy little thing.”
“You did ask her? You did ask what the hell she was doing,” Beven poured a generous shot of liquor for Minon, principally to oil a notoriously tight mouth. It was the only reward Dandy was likely to get. Beven, as closed as Minon, was as tight as a tick.
“I asked all right.” Minon tossed the alcohol down his throat and suppressed a grimace of pure horror. Fortified A-vine brandy was vastly overrated. “I did that.”
Tye, a self-professed connoisseur, likewise winced at Dandy’s cavalier treatment of fine spirits. Settling down in his threadbare armchair he wriggled his bulk into a position where he could watch Dandy as well as the frightened girl sitting to attention on the couch opposite. The girl-child gazed back with the glazed eyes of a stunned animal facing certain death. Beven liked his women with more meat on their bones and some sass but she was a
sweet little thing. She reminded him of the blonde in his bar-room Tri-D, only not quite so busty or, probably, friendly with an over-endowed Dimitrion and a Psamin, and he intended to use her mostly as a go-for. She looked good and he was the boss, he deserved a Domer servant. This was her sixth consecutive hour enduring Beven’s training and something inside had lifted off for a parallel universe. Occasionally she shuddered, rocking vacantly.
“Dyssa!” snapped Tye. She really should learn to concentrate.
Rebellion gargled deep in her throat, but finally her dazed stare focused on him and stuck and she whimpered and shivered. With a sigh, Tye returned to grilling Minon.
“You asked,” he reminded impatiently, “and the Drudge said?”
“She was dancing, you know how weird she goes?” Dandy shook his head to clear it of a strange fuddle. He’d caught the Drudge poking around Tye’s room but memory insisted that he’d also seen another woman superimposed on top of her, a skinny waif, taller, younger, bushy red hair, and far less ugly. Something had clipped him, a sickening fizzle, he’d blinked, and when he’d opened his eyes there’d just been that revolting little Drudge.
Swaying to the music filtering in from the stage and the bar.
Did Dandy want to dance? Did Dandy want to dance with the Drudge?
“Then what?” prompted Beven.
“I showed her what we do to snoopers.” That he remembered. He remembered the crunching of her cheek bones and the soft flesh of her lips catching on teeth. She hadn’t screamed. The Drudge never did. Damn her. That was weird. She should’ve screamed. Next thing he knew Sheek, worried about his tardiness, had burst in and ripped him off.
Tye Beven had already heard Sheek’s version and seen the results.
He was not impressed. Bloody Tokkers, killers born and bred, bad to the bone.
Beven raised his goblet to his thick lips and nodded meaningfully at Dyssa. She made a small noise and one thin hand fluttered helplessly as she cringed.
“Yeah, you did, Minon, and the Drudge’ll need more time out before she goes back on the floor. I don’t like my people marked up, remember that. I need them to work. No harm this time, only the Drudge, but – future reference – you remember that.”
* * *
On the bridge of the ZR-3 Jenson cleared his throat and gave up respectful silence. It never got him anywhere anyway. He nodded at the pilot’s control board and its mysterious additions. “I should understand this without having to ask questions, shouldn’t I?” Gluing a pained gaze to it. “Please note the somewhat controversial configurations on this control panel. Shall I hazard a guess? Or are you actually going to tell me what’s what?”
“Guess,” Mark invited generously. “Give it your best shot, I always enjoy those.”
Jenson rapped his control panel. “Don’t start, Macluan, and don’t try the old UC need to know stunt, I need to know. This is no ordinary ZR-3. If I’m right her energy potential means she’ll finish the race before most ships in her class start. Are we even legal?”
“Krystie’s idea,” shrugged Mark. “C-AE Lister’s very own design. Sneaky, isn’t he? Apparently he’s been cosying up to Terrin Stanson and we all know what that means.”
“Stanson’s my boss,” sniffed Jenson, who didn’t but wasn’t likely to admit it.
“Just wondered if you remembered what devious folk you work for.”
Time for play was over. Jenson rippled down several controls and brought up some glowing command cones. “Shield capability? Motion recall? Is this a Crystal ship?”
“They don’t exist since the Autocracy died. SC ships were junked.”
“I read that too.” There was a world of cynicism in the tone. “I also heard that we harvested the Crystal because the Autocracy played out the source mine and lost it.”
“Did you really?”
“I did.”
“She’s pretty,” Mark tried. “Nifty. All kinds of tweaks. I told you you’d like her.”
“We thrashed the Autocracy for using Sentient Crystal Tech.”
“Yes, we did, didn’t we? Perhaps it’s not what you use but the way that you use it.”
And that was a direct quote from the boss. Mark wasn’t sure if he believed it but SC didn’t feel dangerous to him, quite the reverse, it felt like an old friend waking up. Life on the ship’s cramped flight-deck went on hold while the strange notion was processed.
Abruptly Jenson inhaled sharply. “What are we doing? What does Krystie want?”
“Strictly speaking there is nothing official about this trip.”
The pilot scowled. “I am not stupid.”
“No. So listen. We’re quietly tracking down a beacon that UC-III uncovered.”
“This is too big for UC-I?” That was bad news, very bad news.
“No, they already sent in UC-I. All the team got out was a Coded Roll and that was pretty frayed. Krystie’s sending in the reserves. It suits me, it’s where I need to go.”
“The reserves?” Jenson blew a silent whistle and slumped in his seat. “And it suits you because it’s where the mega-mystic come-get-me calls are from. Is there anything else I need to know before we risk our necks trying to track down something that has already smashed up one UC-I team? Do we suspect any lurking paranoid megalomaniacs?”
“Always a possibility.”
“Megalomaniacs? Mystics? Betcha any money it’s a Tokker nest.”
Mark shrugged.
“Oh goody, goody, I’m so glad I work with the last Donn,” Jenson informed a front-screen as unimpressed as he was. “It’s so thrilling. Here we go again chasing your feelings into nowhere behind a broken down UC-I team who also knew sod-all.”
“Behind a handy Cargo Convoy, down the Trade Lanes to a real Spaceport so you can land this very valuable ship gently, getting us safely down in one undamaged piece.”
“Different,” snapped the man often accused of flying like an angel and landing like a rock. He simmered for a moment or two. “Who was in the last team? Anyone we know?”
“Leader was Tam Harris, second was Sim Edger. I’d never heard of either.”
Jenson frowned and then one name stood up and waved. His face cleared. “I don’t know Tam Harris, but Sim Edger? Sim Edger is famous. He should never have been let out of the crèche without nappies. I heard his daddy paid for his service finals. He probably blew up his own ship landing it. If you’d said it was Sim Edger before I wouldn’t’ve worried.”
Chapter Eight
Emir Carolli’s sleek XT-1 cruiser had dropped out of the web of hyperspace Bylanes a long way short of its eventual destination. For the past twenty-four hours it had parked at a strategic position, approximately mid-way between Imperious and the outer rim systems that included Belthan’s irregular sweep and the one Harth Norn called home. During that time a high-action interceptor net had been deployed, tilted at just the right angle to trap any message headed for Imperious from either of those two locations. For a while the net caught nothing but T-1s and the XT-1 wallowed sleepily in its real-space bed.
Suddenly three signals darted into the net virtually simultaneously.
One a query from Belthan, the second a plea for help from Beven’s transmitter and the third from deep within the diplomatic suites on Imperious confirming bad news.
An hour passed.
The ship roused. The net cracked on the leeward side and fired out a curt confirmation as well as a plethora of hideously complex instructions and orders to agents on Belthan. A long-awaited countdown began, early, pushed forward by an accidentally activated beacon tower on the far periphery of Harth Norn’s system. It didn’t change very much. The plan had already entered its final phase and it was only the final details that would be rushed.
The XT-1 slumbered on.
Deep inside her brains and belly, the Baron sat and fumed. He fiddled with the warm curves of his cane for a while and then replayed the second message. In icy shock he listened again to the transmission, the impossible voice an
d the clear tones that hurled him back to his last days on Typhin and a woman who had been confirmed dead; counted missing in action over two hundred standardised years previously. Kai Matheson’s daughter was gone and his line died as the siege of Typhin was broken and the Autocracy burned the world back to original rock. Carolli, with great glee, had personally ensured Matheson’s execution.
The Donn were dead. They had to stay that way.
The Autocracy had culled the species with typical thoroughness but for one. That problem was in hand; when the time came Macluan would be out of play. There could be no inconvenient racial regeneration, either, for Donn genes didn’t take unless matched with a compatible mate of the same species, so none of Macluan’s children could ever be full-blood, only half-bloods, Latent. There would be no children. Producing Latents had been a crime and Macluan had the kind of cut-glass personality to respect laws even when there was no one left to care. It must’ve caused him agonies of lonely pride. No one understood that better than Carolli. No one savoured the intensely private sorrow with quite so much relish.
Carolli loathed the Donn almost as much as he envied them.
His hatred would never die for he conserved and nourished it. He locked it in a white-gold casket and opened the lid now and again to bask in the pearly glow. Hatred was his greatest gift. Emir Carolli could hate hotly or coldly, dispassionately, absolutely, from a distance or close proximity. Hate sustained him. A Typhion half-caste, he’d inherited Typhion longevity to such an extent that he had forgotten how old he actually was. A thousand years? How much hatred had he amassed? Not enough. Never and not ever enough.
The Horseshoe Nail (The Donn Book 1) Page 5