Spear of Light (15 page)

He did, but only the tiniest bit.

She practiced control until she lost it entirely right along with him, their breath mixing, their bodies joining.

They lay side by side, her head pillowed on his arm and one of his legs crossed over hers. She lay there for a long time before forcing herself to find words for the news she had to give him. “I can't stay in Hope.”

He pulled his arm away and sat up, looking down at her. “What do you mean?”

“I have to go to Manna Springs. Move there. For a while.”

To his credit, he didn't try to tell her how dangerous it must be. He just asked, “Why?”

“I came partly to be a bridge between Manna Springs and the Deep. Satyana is trying to do the impossible and unify the Glittering. I need to be sure the spaceport stays open and that we don't have a war down here.”

He frowned. “How are you going to do that?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. But I can't do it from here.” She trailed her fingers up his arm, wishing they could talk of other things. That they lived in other times. “Besides, you and Manny need someone inside the town on your side, if just to gather information.”

“People won't trust you if you're with me. They might kill you anyway.”

“With everything going on, most people won't be paying attention to me. I should be able to get in. I'll buy someplace to live in. I'll try to buy a guard, too. Set myself up as the formal ambassador from the Diamond Deep to Lym.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you?”

“Satyana said she'll make it so. I'll go in the morning.”

He looked contemplative for a long moment, and then he nodded a reluctant acceptance. “I may not be able to come to town without being conscripted like Jean Paul.”

“I understand. But surely I'll find ways to get here.”

He touched her belly, ran a finger up toward her chin. “I hope so.”

“I came to be with you. That's all I wanted.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SATYANA

Satyana would have run down the plush hallway if it weren't for the fact that this particular dress fluttered around her ankles and might trip her if she moved quickly. She swore to remember to dress in useful clothes until this crisis was over. What if she were kidnapped by some idiots like the Shining Revolution crowd again and she happened to be wearing a piece of fluff designed more for entertaining foreign dignitaries than for actually walking? She'd hardly slept in the two weeks since the mutiny on Lym, and it showed in her mood.

The guard outside of Dr. Neil Nevening's office let her in with a nod. The security systems recognized Satyana as a frequent visitor.

Dr. Nevening himself was dressed in a comfortable-looking, off-white kaftan, with beige ribbons along the hem that almost matched his hair. As usual, he looked professorial, but she noticed small fatigue lines near his eyes when he smiled at her. “Sit down, dear,” he said in a soft, easygoing voice. “I made you tea.” He poured from a teapot the color of a sun.

She loved that teapot. He greeted all of his guests with it. It was thousands of years old, as thin and light and breakable as an eggshell, even though it held the weight of hot water with no problem. She knew he considered it a badge of his office as the Diamond Deep's Historian. She reached for the tea and sniffed. “Mint.”

“Yes.”

It was, of course, exactly what she needed. “It didn't go very well,” she said. “Horace won't commit. I think she's afraid of being overthrown from within. She said that half of her people want to hare off and join Vadim and his bloodthirsty wife. The other half is torn between tucking tail and hiding or heading for Lym and begging to live forever. I suggested she just tell these last to go ahead, but of course there aren't enough entrance visas to Lym for even a small station to send its dissidents down.”

Dr. Nevening pulled up a screen between them, showing Lym and a hundred or so dots around it, most of them converging. “They're almost out of airspace. Some want to land, some want to fight the Next. It's all against the laws about Lym, laws the whole damned system agreed to honor.”

“How do they plan to fight them
there
?”

“I don't know.” Neil sat back and sipped his tea. “Lym might not be the best place to fight them anyway.”

“It's where most of them are.”

“And it's where they
expect
to be hurt,” he said. “So they're very well defended.”

“That damned Wall.”

“Every conqueror of a people who don't want to be subjugated builds a wall. It's entirely predictable behavior. Could you tell what Horace herself wanted?”

Satyana grimaced delicately. “She's way too good a politician for that.”

“Perhaps you should rest. You could sleep in here if that would be better than going back home.”

The
Star Bear
was two hours of travel time away from the Historian's office. “I'll take you up on that. Just a minute.” She took a long enough break to order up something soft to sleep in and something comfortable, including flat shoes, for the next day. When she was finished she looked up at him. “That'll save me two hours. I'm meeting with Justinia from Two Arrows in the morning.”

His eyebrows shot up. “In person?”

“No. The station's too far away. But they've got an embassy here, and I'm meeting with her minion for stim. I think she'll join the coalition. I met her once, and she seemed quite reasonable. Two Arrows is a ship-manufacturing station. If they join Vadim, they'll probably be expected to give their ships away.”

“Good. Any more tomorrow?”

“I'm handling one more station and two ships, one of which is actually here.”

“I have one remote meeting. So does the Economist.” The Council handled the biggest and most important contacts. Satyana and three others were managing the next rung down, and another team had a list of thousands of small players.

Satyana turned her empty cup over and over in her hands, running her fingertips across the smooth, unbroken surface. “I knew the Glittering was big, but I didn't know how big until we started this process.”

He laughed and took the cup from her, refilling it. “We'd do more tomorrow, but we have a joint meeting about military objectives for internal peacekeeping all afternoon, so that's all I can manage. My assistants have a tally now. Out of the top four hundred ships and stations, we've talked to twenty-four. Five joined the coalition. Ten promised they would, but they haven't yet. And seven have told us to leave them alone.”

She smiled. “Thanks. That many actually standing up to us is bad, isn't it?”

“The smarter course would be to string us along like the others. They clearly have internal pressures that are greater than their fear of offending us.”

She sat back, feeling every lost hour of sleep anew. “We should have used all of the years the Next were gone to build this coalition.”

He sipped his tea without looking at her. She wondered how much sleep he'd been getting. “No one would have listened to you,” he said.

“We don't have time now.”

“No one ever has time for war.”

That shook her up. “Do you think it will come to that?”

“It depends on how much time we can buy.”

“A meeting about internal peacekeeping sounds innocuous, but it's not, is it?”

He shrugged. “Our internal campaign is pretty good. But there are still factions. I'll learn more this afternoon.”

So he wasn't willing to really tell her anything. That meant it was worse. She'd have to set some traps out in the socweb and see what she could find.

One of the Historian's assistants came in with her clothes, and she excused herself to get dressed. When she came back, she found Neil at the sink, hand washing the sun-colored tea set. The couch she'd been sitting in had been transformed to a bed, complete with pillows and a comfortable, and very boring, set of sheets and blankets.

Satyana sat down on the bed and waited while he meticulously dried the tea pot and put it away neatly. He looked toward her, at the couch. “I suggest you lie down.”

She complied, and, to her utter delight, he covered her up and planted a soft, dry kiss on her forehead.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

NAYLI

Nayli sat in the control room with the ship's AI and a few crewmen in minor positions moving around her. She laughed to no one in particular. She was back on her favorite ship, the
Shining Danger
, she was in charge for the moment, and she was hunting. It made her feel lighter than she had in years, full of a simple purpose.

Kill the Next.

Some day they would kill her. She had always known that. But not today.

Far to her right, a man so bland she never remembered his name watched for unexpected signatures of debris or asteroids. On the other side of the room, to her left, a thin stick of a woman, incongruously named Round, flicked her eyes through the myriad tell-tales of the ship's dashboards. At the moment they were all green and purple and blue, so everything was good.

Nayli had named the AI's avatar Stupid years ago. Maybe decades ago. The commander she had become would have given it a more dignified name, but she had never changed this one. Vadim grumbled about it, he had never changed it either.

At the moment, Stupid looked like a tall cleaning robot, complete with a billed hat and a silver buckle and a silly tool belt full of things it would seldom use on a starship. Stupid was virtual, but she always set it to have a holographic body, and from time to time she changed its clothes or even its size. She waved a hand at it. “Show me our target again.”

Stupid displayed a green square in the air in front of Nayli. On the far edge, the bright blue light that symbolized the
Shining Danger
glowed steadily. A line showed her trajectory toward a major dock-and-shock station, a place where ships of all kinds stopped for repair, or to exchange cargo, crew, or vast amounts of money.

Every station had its own banking system, and Star Island Stop had one of the best. Most important, the station staffs were known for their expensive willingness to keep secrets. There were four stations like her in the Glittering, and Nayli and Vadim had used them all multiple times. So did every other enterprise that was trying to stay hidden or dark or independent.

Star Island Stop was big. Nothing like the Diamond Deep, of course, but big. Ships didn't stay here; there was no permanent community except the owners and the crew. It was truly unusual to get permission to dock for more than three to five days. Even now, at least two ships were leaving and three or four were coming in.

Stupid had drawn incoming ships a lighter blue than the
Shining Danger
. Outgoing ships were black, with likely destinations written below them.

Since the invasion began, Next ships made up a full ten percent of the traffic to and from Star Island Stop. They claimed to need repairs, but Nayli doubted there was a single thing they couldn't make on the fly. She'd watched the videos of the various Next as they made what amounted to first contact in three locations, and she'd seen the kind of materials science they had mastered. The almost-magic of transmutation.

She suspected the Next used Star Island Stop to gather secrets and to tell their stories. For whatever reason, the robots had been actively recruiting humans since they passed though the Ring of Distance and came in to reclaim their place in the sun.

Nayli couldn't tell why the Next wanted to transform humans any more than she could imagine why any humans would give up their own flesh and blood to become robots.

The Shining Revolution and the Next occupied two opposite poles of thought, and most people aligned with one or the other. Become the Next, or destroy them. Nayli found some comfort in knowing the “destroy them” camp had more people by far. A few—the scared, the old, the ones with resources—took a middle way. The Diamond Deep did this, which explained their absurd willingness to “help” the Next. That could be forgiven, chalked up to lack of backbone. But taking the metal way? No. They were in a race for souls, she and the robots.

Every person she won away from the robots mattered.

On the air-screen in front of her, all of the ships currently at Star Island Stop were named. There were three Next ships.

All of them were far larger than the
Shining Danger.

Nayli and Vadim had used her for every kill they'd made for decades. She had clever weapons and hidden speed. Not to mention good electronics—they could pretend to be some other ship in their class easily, which was how they had hidden the
Free Men
after the attack on Diamond Deep.

The
Free Men
had been built to attack stations. The
Shining Danger
was meant to destroy Next ships.

Nayli lifted her arm in front of her face, admiring the three tiny pink roses already tattooed on her inner wrist. A tally that she ran for herself.

This would be harder. She and Vadim had surprised the Next they'd taken so far. Now the robots would be expecting attacks; they probably watched for the
Shining Danger
or ships like her.

Still, neither Nayli nor the ship had ever failed.

A hand settled on her shoulder, heavy and demanding. She turned her face up and drank in a deep kiss. “My love.”

“Choosing targets all by yourself?”

“We have a target.”

It was his turn to laugh. “Tell me about it.” He handed her a cup of hot stim and a food bar.

She took them but set the food bar aside for now. It was better to hunt hungry. “Thank you. Stupid has been showing me the possibilities. There are three. The
Robotic Dreamer
is already set up to take off. We won't catch her. The
History of Metal
is too big by far. Probably way too fast. But there's a ship that just arrived yesterday, the
Next Horizon
. We can take her.”