Coalition 02.5 - The Kingbird (8 page)

“Oh. Those drawings,”
Shaina
said, sounding disappointed.

“Respect, my girl,”
Dax
said. “Those drawings were by the hand of King Galen.”

“Oh.” Her tone was instantly very different. She looked at Dare. “I’m sorry. They were really done by him?”

Dare smiled at her genuine contriteness. “Yes.”

“What are they supposed to be?” This from Lyon, who had clambered into his father’s lap to get a closer look.

Again, patiently, Dare explained. And ended as before, wondering what the design was supposed to utilize to produce the power it clearly was meant for.

“Why is this with it?”
Shaina
asked, pointing at the sketch.

“Another thing I don’t know,” Dare said.
Dax
wondered if there was another royal anywhere so honest as to freely admit such a thing.

Lyon was staring at the drawing, frowning. “Wait,” he said, and scrambled down. He dashed for the stairs, making as much racket as the two of them had coming down.
Dax
looked at
Shaina
, who shrugged, clearly claiming ignorance of what her companion was up to.

Moments later Lyon was back, a fist-sized rock in one hand, and something else
Dax
couldn’t see in the other.

“See? This is that.” Lyon set the rock on the table next to the drawing. And it was clearly the same sort of rock, complete with the dark splotches shown in the sketch. Except
Dax
could see now that the dark spots appeared much different than the surrounding stone. Even as he thought it Dare reached out to touch it, pressing a finger down on one of those spots.

“It gives,” he said.

Dax
followed suit. The dark blotch indeed gave slightly beneath the pressure of his finger.

“Strange,” Dare said.

“They must be connected,”
Califa
said. “The stone and the design, I mean. Why else would he have stored them together?”

“I agree,” Dare said. “But why, I have no—”

“I do!”

Lyon’s exclamation silenced them all. He lifted his other hand and showed them what had been hidden before. Now that
Dax
could see it, his brows rose. “Now that’s an old piece of work.”

“What is it?”
Shaylah
asked, looking at the small metal device.

“An old
holo-filmer
,” Dare said. “One of the first hand-sized ones. I’m not sure I remember how to work it”

“I figured it out,” Lyon volunteered. “Here, I’ll show you.”

The boy picked up the device, twisted a small knob, then balanced the thing on end, on the table.

“I had to use the power cartridge from the lights upstairs to charge it,” he explained. “I was afraid it wouldn’t, because it’s so old, but it worked.”

Dax
drew back slightly, then glanced at Dare, who looked as impressed as he felt at the boy’s ingenuity.

“Dallying with
Paraclon
clearly has its good side,”
Rina
said with a laugh.

Lyon steadied the device, then pushed a button on one side. A small image appeared in the air a few inches away. An image of a rock that was clearly the same kind as the one on the table now, the one in the sketch.

For a moment nothing happened. And then another, much larger stone, in fact a small boulder, fell into the image. It had clearly been dropped from above. It struck the small stone with the black sections, crushed it.

The small stone exploded with a force clear even in the soundless image. A force that seemed much too large for its size. The boulder shattered, flying in every direction. Apparently including toward the
holo-filmer
, for the recorded image vanished.

Everyone except
Shaina
and Lyon, who had clearly seen it before, drew back sharply, startled.

“See?” Lyon asked anxiously. “That must be it, where the power comes from.”

Dax
, suddenly aware he was gaping, snapped his jaw shut. Just moments ago he and Dare had been handling that rock as if it were just ... well, a rock.

“A bit of warning?” he suggested wryly. “Hard to fire the
flashbow
with fingers missing.”

“But I’d already poked it,” Lyon explained calmly, “so I knew touching it wouldn’t set it off.”

That boy,
Dax
thought with a sigh, was sometimes too smart—and curious—for his own good. There was a fine line between protecting and smothering, and
Dax
was never quite sure exactly where it was.

His mate, on the other hand, merely grinned at him. She was much better at moving past possibilities that never actually happened.

“If that could be controlled ...”
Califa
began.

“That must be what this is,”
Shaylah
said, gesturing at the diagrams.

“Do you think he found a way?”
Rina
asked, paying the drawings more attention now.

“I don’t know,” Dare said.

“
Paraclon
could figure it out,” Lyon said eagerly.

“Perhaps he could,” Dare said as he picked up the stone to give it a closer look. “But ... I wonder where this came from?” Dare mused aloud. “I’ve not seen this kind of stone on Trios before.”

“Nor have I,”
Dax
agreed.

“I have!”

Shaina
had been quiet longer than usual, as if she’d been waiting for this moment.
Dax
wouldn’t doubt it. His girl had a knack for good timing.

“Where?”
Dax
asked.

“I’ll show you!”

She raced for the door, Lyon at her heels.

“So much for our restful, quiet morning,”
Shaylah
said with a laugh.

They followed as the pair headed into the thick trees behind the cabin. They had been playing there yesterday,
Dax
remembered.

“
Trou-ble
,”
Rina
trilled a few minutes later, as they passed the boundary of acceptable play and crossed into the area the children had been warned to stay away from.

“Indeed,”
Dax
said dryly. “Not that that would stop them.”

But he said nothing for the moment, just kept following. They reached the reason for the warning, a spot where Coalition explosives had done the only damage in this otherwise pristine place. A yawning crater many yards across, ringed by trees felled by the blast, the rim still blackened after all these years.
Dax’s
jaw clenched reflexively, as it always did at the evidence of the wanton destruction wreaked upon his once peaceful world.

“See?”
Shaina
said, pointing into the pit of the crater.

The blotchy rocks were everywhere. Some had clearly reacted to the explosion as the one in the
holo
had, and lay apparently fused and useless, but many more had apparently been broken loose by the shock wave. A layer of the rock several feet thick was bared, some twenty feet below the surface.

Dax’s
gaze shifted to Dare, who glanced back. It was clear his mind was racing with possibilities, just as his own was.

“How much of this rock do you think your new ship could carry?”

“Enough to keep
Paraclon
busy for quite a while.”

“I think our respite just ended,”
Califa
said.

“Does this mean we’re not in trouble for passing the boundary?” Lyon asked, wearing that slightly-too-innocent look they all knew well.

“It means, cub,” Dare said, ruffling his son’s hair, “that you and your cohort here will be carrying a lot of rocks shortly.”

Shaina
grimaced. “Can’t we just go down and throw them up?”

“That’s silly,” Lyon said. “They might explode.”

“Don’t call me silly,
cub
,”
Shaina
said fiercely, hands on her hips.

“I didn’t. Wouldn’t. I called the idea silly. Let’s go.”

That quickly the contretemps was forgotten and they were scrambling down into the crater.

“I see our son has his father’s knack for peacemaking,”
Shaylah
said with a laugh.

“Good,”
Dax
said, watching them go. “He’ll need it.”

* * *

DAX HAD FLOWN them home with two massive crates of the stones in the cargo hold, the test of the water landing system postponed for the moment. Dare had kept his father’s drawings in his own pouch, to be turned over to
Paraclon
when they arrived. The inventor’s first two efforts had ended up with the lab in nearly the shape those two imps had left it in with their rocket experiment. Seeing the destruction,
Shaylah
was thankful for
Paraclon’s
uncharacteristic awareness when he had then scanned the diagrams to be projected on his work screen, and returned the originals to Dare. There was little enough of his father left to him, and every bit was treasured.

She had thought as the days passed that Lyon would gradually forget about the project, but he never failed to report to
Paraclon’s
lab, even long after he had been freed from penitence there.
Shaina
hadn’t been quite so diligent about it, so wild was she to be free from the duties their recklessness had earned them. But still she came frequently, until
Dax
had laughingly called them
Paraclon’s
best inducement to succeed.

Tonight she had found Dare looking at the drawings, as she had several times before. Whether to see if he could divine the proper function—or where
Paraclon
was going wrong—or simply to touch something his father had touched, she didn’t know.

She stood behind him, resting her hands on his shoulders, drawing strength and warmth and pleasure from this simplest of contacts.

“If this should work ...” she began tentatively.

“It would be close to a miracle,” Dare finished.

“Yes.” She leaned forward to look once more. “I am no designer, but does this not seem as if it should work? Yet it does not. Or
Paraclon
is not getting it right.”

Dare sighed. “I worry about him. He is brilliant beyond anyone, but sometimes ...”

“Sometimes the eccentricity seems ascendant.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps when
Pavel
finishes his schooling, he can help.”

Dare gave her a sideways smile. She knew he would always have a soft spot for the young man who had, as a boy, been the first one to find them when they had returned to Trios. Nor would she ever forget the gentle way he had allowed the “scout” who had barely come up to his elbow to “capture” them and take them to the surviving
Triotian
rebels. The boy had been the first proof for Dare—Wolf then—that he was not the only one of his people left alive.

And at the time, she’d had no idea of who her companion, the man she had already lost her heart to, really was.

She saw in his eyes the memories were flowing through his mind as well. She knew the bad ones—the memories of being a slave, of the collar that had controlled him body and mind—had haunted his dreams for a very long time. But eventually the enormous job he had to do here took over, and his exhaustion helped him rest more peacefully. And the old memories, the harsh memories had been replaced with those like the day a young boy led him through the rubble of his world and showed him he was no longer alone.