The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (239 page)

Someone was walking toward him, stepping unhurriedly over the burned earth in front of the gateway, making no attempt to conceal themself. Vic didn’t need confirmation, he knew who it would be, but his visual sensors zoomed in anyway.

He stopped ten meters short of Tarlo. The Starflyer agent wasn’t using any of his wetwiring, his inserts were inert, power cells switched to inactive mode. He simply stood there in a glossy suit of semiorganic fabric refracting a moiré shimmer; his blond hair swept back and held in place with a small black leather band.

“Vic, right?” he asked the hulking armor suit. “Gotta be Vic.”

Vic switched on the suit’s external audio circuit. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Cool. How’s Gwyneth?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“Part of me, man, yeah.”

“She’ll be okay. Why did you do it?”

Tarlo’s handsome face gave a sympathetic grin. “It’s what I had to do. Man, that Paula Myo, what a ball-buster. I always knew she’d be the one who blew me.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“Both of us, I guess. My part is over, so it doesn’t care anymore. It’s just waiting for you to kill me.”

“You failed, though. The Guardians got through.”

“The Guardians got through. I succeeded.”

“It was a trap.”

“What do you think?”

“I think I’ll take you back for a memory read.”

“Man, it’s too late for that; Qatux has gone through with the rest of them.”

“How did you know—” Vic’s suit sensors showed one of Tarlo’s inserts powering up. He fired his ion rifle, which blew Tarlo’s body in half.

All the trees in the forest were identical, elegantly rotund, and rich with red-gold leaves that reminded Ozzie of New England in the fall. This, though, was high summer, with a bright sun high overhead, and warm dry air gusting through the branches. Ozzie had stripped down to his T-shirt and a pair of badly worn shorts; not that it stopped him sweating hard from the effort of carrying his pack. Orion was wearing cutoff pants and no shirt; his expression martyred as he lumbered on in the grinding heat of the afternoon. Tochee seemed unaffected, its colorful fronds flapping loosely as it slid along.

Ozzie was pretty sure he knew where they were, though his newfound pathsense wasn’t quite as precise as a satnav function. He’d started to pick up on a few signs in the last half hour. This path was now quite neat, the kind of track that you’d get when someone took care of it, rather than just a route that people and animals walked at random. There were no dead branches lying across the way, and remarkably few twigs. Several boggy puddles had been filled with gravel so travelers didn’t have to detour. Then he even saw where branches had been cut on trees close to the path; they were long healed over now, just knobbly warts in the sepia bark. All the things a government land management agency would do to keep the path open for walkers.

His insert functions were slowly coming back on-line, which gave him a very positive feeling as he strode onward. Ever since they’d left the gas halo, his bioneural arrays and inserts had reverted to the usual erratic basic operational ability that characterized the Silfen paths. The day after they’d talked with Clouddancer he’d picked up a path right in the middle of the forest that cloaked the reef. That was four worlds ago. It wasn’t that Ozzie knew where to go; rather he could now sense where the paths would take him. Several times he’d started off down one only to turn around and discard it, searching for another, one that would take him closer to the Commonwealth. There was no mental map, more a simple awareness of direction.

The graphics in his virtual vision were strengthening with every step forward. Processing power increased in tandem. Signal strength between his inserts and his handheld array rose dramatically. Then the array detected another signal.

“This is it,” Ozzie yelled out. He started to run forward.

“What is?” Orion asked. “We left the end of the path a while back.”

The forest began to thin out, revealing a rolling landscape of gray-green meadows. Alien bovine animals with six fat legs and an amber hide were grazing indolently. Sheep mingled among them, unperturbed by their strange stablemates. He saw hexagonal metal troughs filled with hay. Long lines of wire fencing divided the land up into huge pasture fields. Beyond them were some crop fields, their green wheat shoots just on the cusp of ripening. Hills rose up in the distance, mottled with the gold-brown shading of extensive forests.

Ozzie’s inserts interfaced with the planetary cybersphere. Achingly familiar unisphere icons popped up into his virtual vision. The shock of seeing them again after so long was like an ice shower.
I’m home.
He turned to his companions who were just emerging from the small wood without any sense of urgency. “We did it,” he yelled. His legs gave way and he sank to his knees. A wicked vision of early papal visits to the worlds he and Nigel first opened filled his mind. He bent down and kissed the ground. “We fucking did it,” he yelled up at the blazing sun.

“Did what?” Orion asked curiously.

“We made it, man.” Ozzie struggled to his feet and hugged the startled boy. “Look around you, man. Don’t you see it? Sheep, fences, farmland, I think that’s a load of barns over there. We’re home, we’re back in the good old Intersolar Commonwealth.”

Orion gazed around curiously, a tentative smile on his freckled face. “Where?”

“Er, ah, good question. Hang on.” His virtual hands danced over icons, pulling information out of local systems. “Bilma. That’s in phase two space. Haven’t visited before, and it’s out of range of my wormhole. Never mind. We’re on the Dolon continent, other side of the planet from the capital. Nearest town Eansor, population twenty-two thousand. Seventy-two kilometers”—he spun on his heel, a huge smile on his face, and shot an arm out, pointing over the hilly land—“that way. And there’s a road three point four kilometers”—he turned again—“there.”

“Friend Ozzie, friend Orion, I am delighted you have completed your journey.”

“Hey, man”—Ozzie laid an arm over Tochee’s back—“my house is yours. And I’ll apologize in advance for people making a fuss over you and generally behaving badly. You’re going to be quite a celebrity. The ambassador for your whole race.”

“I believe the translation routine has made an error there, but I thank you for the caution. What do you propose doing now you are home?”

“Good question. One: a bath! Two: decent food. Maybe switch that around.” He took another long look around the bland farming landscape they’d emerged into. One thing really bothered him with the unisphere icons: the date. According to the display, he’d been away from the Commonwealth for over three years, whereas in his personal timescale he’d been walking the Silfen paths for eighteen months. “Okay. I need some time to check up on what’s happening. According to Clouddancer we’re in the middle of a war. We also need to organize some transport, especially for Tochee. So let’s see.” He began to pull information out of the unisphere, as slowly as any beginner who was just getting to grips with inserts and virtual vision for the first time. A list of local vehicle hire companies materialized. He ran down their inventories, and settled on a Land Rover Aventine, which had enough room to take Tochee if ten of the fourteen seats were folded down. He paid for it, and loaded instructions into the big four-by-four’s drive array. “Let’s head for the road, guys. Our car’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

“Ozzie,” Orion asked cautiously.

“Yep?”

“This town, Eansor, has it got, like bars and such in it?”

“Of course, man.” He’d just pulled the town’s commercial register out of the unisphere to find the best hotel.

“So, tonight”—Orion squinted up at the sun, which was in the last quarter of the sky—“are we going to visit a few places, you know, social places, ones that have girls in them?”

“Oh, right, not a bad idea. We’ll definitely hit the town over the next few days, I promise.”

“That’s good. I’ve remembered all the pick-up lines you gave me.”

“You have?”

“Yeah, I still think I can pull off the heaven one.”

“The what one?”

“When you look at a girl’s collar and read the label back to her, and tell her—”

“She’s made in heaven. Ah. Right, I remember now. Sure. Look, man, those kinds of lines are strictly last resort, okay. Your big advantage is going to be telling them what we’ve been doing and what you’ve seen; no other kid can compete with that, you dig? You’re going to be the hottest brightest dude on the block. The chicks’ll need sunscreen just to stand near you.”

“Okay.”

“But first, you need a decent scrub and some flash clothes. We can sort that once we’re relaxing at the hotel.”

“I don’t understand why you need verbal trickery to ensnare a temporary mate,” Tochee said. “Are you not attracted to each other by what you are?”

Ozzie and Orion shared a glance.

“Our species tend to amplify things a little,” Ozzie said. “No harm in that.”

“You speak an untruth to potential mates?”

“No, no. It’s not that simple. This is like a ritual.”

“I believe the translation routine is insufficient once again.”

“Is Tochee going to come with us to the bars?” Orion asked.

Ozzie glared at him. “Probably best not.”

“I would like to see all aspects of human civilization. From what you have told me, it is richly textured and steeped in artistic culture.”

“Oh, brother,” Ozzie muttered.

They sat on the side of the road for ten minutes before the Land Rover Aventine pulled up in front of them. It was a dark metallic red four-by-four, with curving windows of mirrorglass along both sides. The broad malmetal door at the rear flowed apart, and Tochee wriggled itself into the back.

Ozzie sat up at the front, and loaded some new orders into the drive array. It was strange being in a technological artifact again. Even the smell surprised him, the pine-bleach cleaning fluid and polished leather scent of a vigorous valet service.

“This is fast,” Orion said as they set off.

“Uh huh.” They were doing under a hundred kilometers an hour. The road was just a simple strip of enzyme-bonded concrete, a minor route linking isolated rural communities. Same the Commonwealth over. “How old were you when your parents moved to Silvergalde?”

“Dunno. Two or three, I think.”

“So you don’t like remember much about the Commonwealth, then.”

“No. Just the stuff people brought to Lyddington. Not that much of it worked there.”

Since they left the Ice Citadel, Ozzie had conveniently forgotten the kind of parental responsibility he’d assumed when he allowed Orion to tag along. He was going to have to look out for the boy as much as he was Tochee. Both of them were excited by the car journey, asking questions about the farms and other vehicles they passed. It was like having a couple of five-year-olds to contend with.

When the road finally turned onto a two-lane highway that took them into the town and the Land Rover Aventine really built up some speed, Orion whooped like a roller coaster passenger. Tochee inquired if all human vehicles were so fast. Ozzie knew enough now about their big alien friend for its body language to tell him it was nervous. He limited the car to a hundred eighty kilometers an hour.

Eansor was a pleasant enough town, though hardly spectacular by anyone’s standards except those of Orion and Tochee, who were mesmerized by the buildings and roads and people. The highway wound through the industrial parks on the outskirts, over bridges in the suburbs where the best houses lined the river, and finally dipped into the gentle rumpled valley where the city center colonized the slopes with big stone and glass buildings.

Ozzie directed the Land Rover around the back of the Ledbetter Hotel and parked it in a delivery bay. “Wait here,” he told the others. “Seriously, guys. I need a quiet day to catch up. I don’t want to cause any scenes here, okay?”

“Okay,” Orion said amiably.

Just to be safe, Ozzie locked the Land Rover doors as he left.

The Ledbetter’s high-ceilinged lobby had an extensive central display of exotic alien vegetation, with the plants carefully graded so that as you walked through them their leaf colors progressed through the rainbow. Ozzie, who had endured enough wondrous alien vegetation along the paths to last his next five lives, walked straight from the revolving doors to the reception desk completely ignoring the lush surroundings. There were a lot of glances from the other patrons shooting his way, usually followed by a nose wrinkling in disapproval. That was why he just kept staring right ahead; he knew exactly what he looked like as his boots trod field dirt into the plush royal-blue carpet.

He reached the slate-topped reception counter, and slapped his hand down on the polished brass bell. Two largish assistants from the concierge desk were moving into place behind him. The duty receptionist, a man in his late thirties wearing the hotel’s gray blazer uniform, gave Ozzie a reproachful look. “Yes.” Pause. “Sir.”

Ozzie smiled from inside his extravagant beard. “Like, gimmie the best suite you’ve got, man.”

“It’s booked. In fact, all our rooms are booked. Perhaps you should try another establishment.” He looked over at the two assistants, hand rising to beckon.

“No thanks, dude. This is the only five-star in town.” Before the receptionist could stop him, he reached over the counter and pressed his thumb against the i-pad on the hotel’s credit array.

“Listen, pal—” the receptionist began. Then blinked as the hotel system registered Ozzie’s bank tattoo and identity certificate. “Oh.” He swayed forward slightly, peering closely. “Ozzie? I mean, Mr. Isaac, sir. Welcome to the Ledbetter.”

The assistants froze. One of them actually smiled.

“About that suite?” Ozzie said.

“My mistake, sir, our penthouse suite is available. We’d be honored to have you stay here with us, sir.”

“Glad to hear it, man. Now, about this penthouse; I expect you get a lot of important people here, people who don’t want everything they do splashed on the gossip shows.”

“I believe you’ll find us most discreet, sir.”

“So far, so good. Is there a service elevator to the penthouse?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even better. Now listen carefully. There’s a very large alien sitting in a car in one of your delivery bays out back. I want it into the service elevator and up into the suite without any fuss and without anyone seeing. I do not want to look out of my window tomorrow morning and see Alessandra Baron or any other media dudes camping outside.” He shunted a very large gratuity to the Ledbetter staff general account. “We cool on that?”

The receptionist’s eyebrow rose a fraction. “I will make your request quite plain to the other members of staff.”