by Diane Carey
He’d never driven a ship in his life. There were always peons around to do those things for him. He’d spent all his years being smarter than the mice with menial skills, so they’d always done things for him. By letting people know he was smarter, he’d always gotten the benefit of the doubt. People always assumed he knew more, and they did things for him because of it. Get them to relax, then start pulling the strings until he had what he wanted.
Stall, mostly, was what he wanted right now. If he didn’t get past the next couple of minutes, the Orions would kill him. Or worse, enslave him.
The Federation wouldn’t do either of those things. The Federation would put him in prison, but what difference would that make? Any clown with two brain cells and a toothpick could figure out how to slip out of that. Two years, let them “rehabilitate” him, they drop their guard, and poof.
Best bet number one—get to the lightship and surrender to Jimmy the Sledge. Come up with something on the way.
He had, of course, no idea what was out there, no more than anybody else did. A lightship and a sledge-hammer heading toward it. Tu didn’t know anything either. Orions never thought of what was beyond their space.
Not so hard—he had a goal now. Later he’d get another one.
“Okay, here’s the backup plan,” he said when he felt the timing go sour. “You got high warp on this bucket, don’t you?”
Purple skin blistering, Tu raged, “Of course I have high warp speed!”
Maidenshore spread his hands. “Turn around, then. Head in the other direction. Go around those stumbling bumpkins and out to that lightship. What’re you afraid of?”
“We never go so far.” Tu turned burgundy with both fury and fear. “How will we find our way?”
Maidenshore shifted from one foot to another and gave Tu a you’re-stupid look. “What else in all the kazillion miles of nothing out in that direction is broadcasting a Federation signal? Follow it.”
Tu caught the disparaging tone and reacted. “You tempted us out here, human! You gave us this undigestible loss!”
“Nah, nah, forget about those other ships. What do you care about them, anyway? Open your brain! Think big! Listen to Uncle Billy . . . Instead of just one Conestoga, how would you like to go home with, oh, say, ten of them? Uh-huh . . . that’s what I thought. Put your helm over. Let’s kick this pig.”
Chapter Seventeen
Belle Terre
“SO THIS is the planet they covet. ‘Belter.’ I don’t see the usefulness.”
Green-gold meadows of wild plants and twittering insect life made a glorious nest of nonconstruction around them. The rolling hills bristled with gold-topped flowers in great sprawling fields, shot here and there with a spear of blue or red, and millions of brittle stalks topped with brushy purple hats. Not very appealing for a construction engineer.
Good bedrock, though. And those mountains read of heavy ore.
Shucorion had never been on any planet other than the Blood homeworld. This place smelled different. No sulfur. No dust. No scent of redirected runoff.
And there was a breeze. Shucorion was more used to wind, if air moved at all.
“Look around, Dimion. Is this a place that makes a civilization cross a wasteland of open dangers? What would cause people to do such a thing when they’re safe at home? If they already have safe place, why come so far, through such strife?”
“Our people have thought of moving from our world,” Dimion commented. “In the depths of time, we thought of it. When we explored, all we found was All Kauld. We stopped looking and started fighting.”
“Ever since, that has been the way.” Shucorion paused to feel the ground with his foot. “We work and fight, then work again to fight again. Shallow to the bedrock. Good building land.”
“Vellyngaith thinks so,” Dimion commented.
“You’re afraid of him, aren’t you?”
Dimion nodded. “I would run if I could. Come back later with more fighters.”
“You’re very prudent. Vellyngaith is intelligent and strict. He also knows his own limitations and our advantage with navigation. He’s not an arrogant man. The combination is deadly for our people. We have no one with such skills in battle. We have to fight him some other way.”
“Why did you call to meet him again? We don’t have to meet him so much.”
“We do.”
“But why? Every time, they could change their minds and slaughter us.”
“And every time, we can edge nearer to advantage for ourselves. He needs us, our abilities, our skills.”
“Why have Kauld not invented the skill to navigate the Blind for themselves?”
“They think it’s mystical, what we can do in space. Of course, there’s no magic about what we do. It’s nothing more than science, patience, accuracy. Kauld have always been fortunate to do things quickly. They have no patience. Vellyngaith is an example.” Shucorion smiled and added, “I must admit, I felt for him in his embarrassment. He overcame much to contact me.”
Dimion strode at Shucorion’s side another ten steps, then paused. “Do you like him?”
“Like him? Like him . . . I loathe him. He is Kauld. Everything I have always had to fight. They are an aberration of Blood. The same skin, the same hands, eyes, but different. They had the advantages of our binary stars, we had the disadvantages. All Kauld became strong in one way, Blood Many in another. We grew apart.”
“If we were ever together.”
“The scientists say we were.”
“In the dimmest of pasts. Do you think they’re right?”
“Yes.”
Dimion shook his head and stepped over a mound made by insects that flew in a disturbed pink cloud behind him. “I can’t see it. I don’t see them in us or us in them. Why did you want Vellyngaith to meet us on this planet?”
“I wanted to look at the planet.”
Behind them, six Blood guards strode in complete confusion. This business of going to a planet, some strange place, this itself for any Blood was bizarre. Going to meet with an enemy, just meet and talk? There was no suggestion in their past of this kind of behavior and from their glances Shucorion had the idea they were more and more certain their avedon’s brain was slowly turning to feathers.
He had heard the whispers. Sensed the fears.
“I’m afraid too, Dimion,” Shucorion admitted.
“Avedon,” Dimion interrupted. He put out a hand to stop Shucorion from moving forward. No longer walking, they faced each other. “I’m wary of him. I’m frightened of you.”
Although the words forced themselves out, Dimion suddenly could no longer meet his avedon’s eyes. He looked down, into the flowers and insects, following one across the other as if the expedition mattered.
Shucorion said nothing. He stood still. The breeze tugged at his bound hair, wagging it between his shoulder blades like a pendulum. Terrible, the silence.
Over there, the six Blood guards had stopped and were squinting into the breeze, waiting. Gazing over Dimion’s shoulder at them, Shucorion saw that they knew what was happening. Was Dimion speaking for them? How long had this been going on?
Dimion blinked and scoured his innards for courage. Usually courage wasn’t Dimion’s problem. Shucorion found the struggle fascinating to watch.
Dimion looked up, finally ready to speak, but his eyes were instantly distracted from Shucorion’s. He looked instead over Shucorion’s shoulder to the landscape.
“There they are,” he said.
Shucorion turned.
Coming over a stony hill, cloaked and armed, were the Kauld battlelord and twenty soldiers. They could easily kill Shucorion and his little field of men. Twenty Kauld. Shucorion’s chest constricted. He hadn’t been cautious enough.
As the two groups drew near, Vellyngaith’s anger showed in the flush of his face and the bitter set of his mouth and eyes. He stalked through the knee-high meadow. The flowers bent before him, cracked, and were crushed.
Drawing to
a stop, Shucorion caught Dimion by the wrist and pushed him behind, then motioned for the other men to halt many steps back. Appearing ready to attack couldn’t serve today.
Could it? Or could it . . . No,no,keep to the course set.
Vellyngaith’s heavy boots carved a path to Shucorion. “More talk?”
Shucorion held his hands between them in a settling gesture. All his possibility for success teetered on this moment, on being able to control these few seconds when the risk he had taken might go sour.
“Battlelord,” he began, “you know Blood never rest when there is work to be done. We have survived against your Kauld strength for centuries by simply outworking you. Yes?”
Vellyngaith scowled. “What about it?”
Resisting the urge to glance back at his own men and at Dimion, all of whom were about to be delivered the shock of their year, Shucorion drew a breath and held it. He kept his eyes focused on Vellyngaith’s.
“To make your fortress ready all the sooner,” he said, “we Blood will send five hundred skilled blast technicians, geologists, construction engineers, architects, and structure men to help you build your fortress. When you are ready to transport it to this planet, we will go with you. I will organize another thousand Blood workers to help you finish it.”
The Kauld leader, famous for his canny assessment of his enemies, stared at him with narrowed eyes. Shucorion gripped his hand with the other to keep it from trembling. Would Vellyngaith believe that a Blood avedon would send tireless Blood workers to build a Kauld fortress, to house a Kauld fleet?
Complex, complex.
Vellyngaith shook his head. “I feel as if I am being somehow directed by you. Why do you offer such a wealth of resource?”
“Because these agreements will someday serve to protect the Blood,” Shucorion said.
“Protect how?”
“By building your fortress with Blood workers, we will be able to finish much sooner and be ready to join forces against Federation when they arrive here. By the time Federation comes to threaten us, I want the Blood and Kauld cultures so intermingled that there will be no more incentive to shoot at each other. We’ll slaughter Federation instead, and they’ll stay away forever.”
Like the fall of equatorial night, the Kauld battlelord’s whole manner changed. Over it went.
“How?” Vellyngaith asked. “We know so little about them, their strengths. . . .”
Shucorion paused, pretending to be thinking, making this up a step at a time. Very strange, this business of trickery. He had to pretend to be falling for Vellyngaith’s proposals, while pretending not to fall for them by demanding conditions and offering concessions. Like a game. But in the end, one or the other of their peoples would be destroyed.
“I’ll go to their outpost,” he suggested. “Meet them, and try to hurt them.”
Vellyngaith shifted. “What outpost?”
“They have a monument in space, at some distance. Our navigators have discovered it.”
“How do you know what it is?”
Shucorion shrugged. “We know a signal beacon when we see one. . . . At this outpost, an encounter will be far enough from their worlds to be beyond help, and far enough from ours that they can’t easily blame us.”
He stopped talking. At some juncture, talking would no longer serve to propose, but only to confuse. He waited. Stood very still. Envisioned a vicious slaughter of an unwitting enemy who in fact was a tool against another enemy.
That fortress had to be built. It had to be built!
“In the combined fleet of the Blood and Kauld,” Shucorion went on, “you will be the supreme military leader. I will be second.”
“You do take risks,” Vellyngaith uttered.
“This is no risk. This is a precaution. If you want our navigation skills, this is the only way. Your soldiers will answer to me. Mine will answer to you. The future is on us, Battlelord. Blood Many accept changes very quickly. We will throw in our lot with Federation or with you. This is what I want in order for it to be you.”
Vellyngaith’s expression neutraled almost to unreadability. He had regained a warrior’s skill for not letting himself be deciphered during negotiations. Shucorion had absolutely no idea whether negotiation should be done this way, therefore had no expression to hide. Only his disgust for All Kauld needed to be cloaked. Throughout the generations of Elliptical Wars, Kauld had never allowed Blood a moment’s rest from eternal squabbling. Only now that someone else was coming did they reach out.
As the breeze ran around and the cloud of pink wings stirred up by Dimion found them and swooped between Shucorion and Vellyngaith, the two factions might as well have been on separate moons. Was this chance falling apart? This delicate balance Shucorion believed, perhaps blindly, that he could strike? Had he taken one risk too many and destroyed his chosen status? Abused it?
His men’s faith in him was crumbling. He had plucked too many pebbles from the stone.
Suddenly he was shocked out of his thoughts by Vellyngaith’s step to one side. Was the battlelord positioning himself to strike? Lop off Shucorion’s head?
The Kauld warriors backed away, as if to give room. Shucorion stood his ground. At least he could show his men that his wild actions had some root in conviction. If he died here, they would question their own curses.
“I agree.” The battlelord’s words came abruptly, and were abruptly finished.
Vellyngaith whirled around—that was why he had stepped to his side—and his cloak batted Shucorion’s legs.
Without looking back at all, the Kauld contingent stalked over the ridge, into the thick overgrowth at the edge of the meadow, and disappeared.
“Did he agree?” Shucorion croaked after they were gone. “Is that what he said? Did you see him when I offered him Blood workers? His eyes were actually sparkling. Wonderful to make someone else so happy.”
Dimion did not answer, and didn’t approach him. He was looking at the ground again. The breeze picked at his unbound hair and blew it across the top of his shoulder as if to brush away dust.
This couldn’t go on. Shucorion stepped past Dimion, who made no movements, and spoke to the six guards.
“Go back to the lander,” he ordered. “Make sure the way is clear and Vellyngaith hasn’t plotted an ambush.”
Speechless, with trouble in their eyes, the guards didn’t even make an acknowledgment. They turned like stricken children and stomped down the hill, forced to follow their hand-locators because they had no idea how to track their way through unfamiliar land. On the Blood world, nobody bothered to go to land he didn’t know. There were always guides. No one explored.
Shucorion watched them go, then turned and did not think of them again. “What’s the matter with you, Dimion?”
“He didn’t kill you,” Dimion murmured.
“Did you think he would?”
“I hoped he would.”
Still Dimion didn’t look up.
“Why would you want me dead?” Shucorion asked.
“To spare you from this. What you’re doing. Avedon . . .”
Dimion hesitated, and visibly shuddered. His trembling hand came forward from his side, holding a charged glaze-blade.
“Avedon . . . I think I have to kill you myself.”
Chapter Eighteen
THE ENERGY KNIFE buzzed between them, its energy ready to arc as soon as it touched Shucorion’s body.
“Dimion, this is unlike you.” Shucorion kept his shoulders and arms relaxed. To tense could be a sharp error. “You’ve been with me since the night I discovered I was different.”
Dimion shivered visibly, and pushed the glaze-blade forward half an arm’s length. His face worked with inner sufferings making their way out without much resistance from him.
“I won’t defend myself,” Shucorion proclaimed, and thereby stopped all motions completely.
“Why are you doing these things?” Dimion rattled. “Helping them . . . giving us to them . . . will you wear bea
ds next?”
The glaze-blade buzzed with unbalance as Dimion gripped it so tightly that his knuckles turned to white dots against his blue fingers. The weapon sang louder, fighting against gravity, as he raised it higher until the blade murmured near his own heart. His breath came in gulps. His eyes no longer blinked, but watered and suffered as he stared at Shucorion, watching his personal belief shatter.
“Dimion?” Shucorion stiffened. “What are you doing? Kill me, not yourself.”
His voice a crumble, Dimion rasped, “You know I never could. This is all I can do. I can’t live with these risks.”
“Dimion . . . you’re about to be very wrong.”
Shucorion reached out, rather slowly, and caught Dimion’s arm with both hands, pushing the glaze-blade upward against Dimion’s shoulder. The weapon sang and cried in both their ears.
Dimion wept, “Kill me. . . . You kill me.”
“No, no. Let go of it.”
For a long time Shucorion had been the avedon of the Plume. Dimion was used to taking his orders. He let go of the glaze-blade and sank to his knees. Shucorion stepped back and glared down at him.
“I’m not working for Kauld. I’m playing a game. There are things you don’t know. I have to make Vellyngaith believe that I want our cultures to merge.”
Gasping with emotional torment, Dimion blinked up at him with one eye almost shut. “You don’t want us to . . . to . . .?”
“I’m no dreamer, Dimion. Eventually there will be only one planet. Blood Many will exist or All Kauld will exist. Not both.”
“Then you don’t think we can merge?”
“With them? Only if we kill every last one of the adult Kauld and raise all their children as Blood. Any other way is hopeless. There is no truce. He’s making a myth. I told you that before.”
“But I don’t understand,” Dimion whimpered. “You’re helping them build a fortress that they will use against us. Promising him Blood workers! We’ll dig our own tombs!”
“If I don’t commit Blood workers and Blood soldiers, Vellyngaith will sense that something is out of balance. He knows the truce he offered to me is perfectly silly and all in his favor. What would he think if I accepted without conditions in return?”