Though he’d like to think he hadn’t been pondering the future, he knew he was kidding himself. When it came down to it he’d probably carry on Jarek’s mission, even if that meant staying with Nual. She might not rule his choices any more, but that didn’t change the fact that there was nothing for him in Khesh - and, more importantly, he hated the Sidhe. Shit and blood, he hated them more than ever now. Sometimes he thought he hated Nual, because she’d fucked him good, and hurt him bad, and she was pure Sidhe, then he’d catch a glimpse of her, or hear her voice, and realise he could never in a thousand years hate her, no matter what she’d done, or did do, to him.
They’d reached a strange unspoken agreement where neither of them said anything to criticise or hurt the other one. For the first few days after he let her break their link, they were tender and careful around each other, like distant relatives brought together by loss. After a while Taro felt the numbness start to lift. There was still pain, but he was sure it would fade in time. He took to testing his ability to survive without Nual; not exactly avoiding her, but not going out of his way to find her either, and focusing on other people whenever she was around. Clearing up alone in the kitchen one night he looked up at the same time as she walked in. She stopped dead in the doorway, then turned on her heel. He started to call out to her before realising that he had no idea what he’d say. After all, if he was staying clear of her, he could hardly blame her for doing the same to him.
Sharing a room was hard, so they altered their sleep patterns, he coming to bed after she was already asleep; she rising before he awakened. When, despite all their efforts, they did find themselves alone they talked business, never anything personal.
For the moment, they were getting by. Taro was looking forward to the day when they’d be over the whole love thing and ready to restart their friendship.
All the while Taro was getting his head straight, Nual was actively pursuing their mission, spending time in Anau, getting to know the locals. Her cover story, that she was studying their culture, combined with her own innate abilities to ensure doors quickly opened to her. Nual befriended the old and the young, who were around during the day when most people were working at the resorts. She soon discovered that there were islands that weren’t marked on the tourist maps, though not even her unnatural powers of persuasion could find the locations, for the locals themselves didn’t know. She did get close to an old lady whose grandson was a security guard on one of the islands owned by Tawhira-
ngai
; if he knew what went on there he had never told her, but he had let slip that whilst some of the hidden islands were for the
ngai
execs and their families, others, like the one where he was based, had research facilities - built underground, to avoid aerial surveillance. He was due back on leave in a couple of weeks, and after Nual had planted the idea in his grandmother’s head that there might be a good match to be made here, she agreed to introduce Nual when he came home.
Taro listened to her findings and tried to ask useful questions, though two weeks felt like an improbably long time in his current state. When he asked if there was anything he could do to help, she shook her head.
‘Enjoy yourself while you can,’ she said. She sounded like she meant it.
He said, with a grin only slightly forced, that he’d got that covered.
The evening before his birthday he went with the others to the bar in the nearest resort, where they met a girl, on holiday with her sister and her sister’s boyfriend. She was out for fun, and she wanted Taro to be part of that fun. So when the others left to catch the last bus, he stayed, thinking that if he didn’t get lucky, he’d have a long journey back - though he could always fly home. In fact, the idea of flitting across the darkened sea was quite appealing.
When it came to it, he didn’t need to worry. She didn’t plan on letting him go before dawn.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The first databreaker Jarek hired had told him that the encryption on the files was like nothing he’d ever seen before, and there was no chance he could break it. Another, more expensive, operator gave him the same response, leaving Jarek with only one alternative, though he was wary of it. He’d initiated contact, but given his previous dealings with the individual in question he expected to be waiting a while for a result.
Meanwhile, he might as well see what he could unearth in the Alliance archives. Sifting data wasn’t his idea of fun, and he wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for, but he didn’t have anything better to do right now. He’d delved into the Freetraders’ records before, following up leads to current Sidhe activity, but this time he focused on the past. Unfortunately, so much had been lost when the Protectorate fell that the past was a real mess. Human-space was like the shadow of a greater empire; an empire that had not, contrary to popular belief, been dead and gone for a thousand years.
Some of the information he needed was stored at Freetrader offices in other hubs, and getting those records took time, and there was a charge for files that had to be beeveed in. His other main resource - which was also eating up time and credit - was the Salvatine Archive. The church prided itself on being the force that had saved humanity from descending into chaos after the Protectorate fell, though Jarek suspected they’d spun their own place in history to suit their needs.
He checked up on the contacts used by the
Setting Sun,
as extracted from the pilot by Nual. They were a mixed bag of traders, minor functionaries and - by far the largest group - corporates, which supported a long-held suspicion. It made sense for the Sidhe to use corporations rather than civil administrations: commercial ventures were likely to be more efficient than any planetary government, not to mention more susceptible to greed and paranoia - and hence easier to manipulate. He also discovered an unexpected bias away from hubs towards planet-based groups and individuals.
He found himself briefly distracted by references to something called zepgen, a term he’d come across once or twice, but never before followed up. Zepgen - zero-expenditure-generator - was a legendary power source, both compact and limitless, allegedly created by the male Sidhe. It was thought to draw its energy from shiftspace - or possibly even another universe. Some of the companies he came across had invested in - apparently fruitless - research into this area. From the look of it, if zepgen had ever existed then the secret had been lost with the fall of the Protectorate.
Talking of lost . . .
He turned his attention to Serenein. There were plenty of legends about uncharted systems, but concrete information was predictably lacking. Certainly no world of that name appeared in any records he could access. He was pretty sure that Serenein was outside human-space, because their unusual night-sky didn’t match anything in the
Judas Kiss
’s comp. Not that its location mattered greatly; the mapping between realspace and shiftspace was highly illogical: systems only one transit apart were sometimes many hundreds of light-years distant from each other, and others in relatively close physical proximity might be at the opposite ends of transit-path chains.
If he accepted that there had never been a beacon at Serenein then the next step was to find out if there was any way to transit into a beacon-less system without slipstreaming another ship. Although the Sidhe could obviously do it, he could find no record of any ship travelling between two systems that way.
He remembered a story from the Book. He’d been forced to study the Salvatine holy text at school on Khathryn, and had promptly forgotten most of what he’d learnt, but this one story had stayed with him because it was about space, which had fascinated him even then. The beacons that allowed humanity to navigate around the stars had been seeded by angels, according to the Holy Book: not the flying assassin kind, the religious messenger kind. The more devout Salvatines who believed in the literal truth of the Book claimed that the Almighty, appalled at the blasphemy of the Sidhe in setting themselves up as divine, had actually created the beacons for humanity’s use. The more rational saw these ‘angels’ as the freedom-fighters who overthrew the Protectorate - under God’s direction, of course. The general consensus was that these heroic, divinely blessed individuals had subverted the Sidhe beacons for humanity’s use, transporting some of them to unexplored ember-star systems where they set up the hubpoints, which then became the focus for human resistance.
But he now knew that the Sidhe didn’t need beacons to get around. So if there hadn’t
been
any beacons before the fall of the Protectorate, perhaps they weren’t Sidhe artefacts at all - but if the Sidhe hadn’t made them, who had?
Taro caught the first bus back in the morning and found the others waiting outside the blockhouse. Nual was with them. He felt a sudden stab of emotion, which he quickly suppressed. He had nothing to feel guilty about.
Mo leapt onto the bus and threw Taro’s swimming gear into his lap. ‘Almost thought you were going to miss your own party there! Good excuse though, eh?’
‘The best there is,’ said Taro, who could actually have used some sleep before they got going.
Mo sat next to him; Nual sat by herself two seats forward. She’d told the others at the blockhouse that she was interested in studying native customs and they’d accepted this as her reason for not joining in with them. As the bus rattled off Mo nodded towards her and said, ‘I reckon she’s been working too hard, so I got her a ticket too.’
‘Thanks,’ Taro said. He was glad Nual was here; she deserved some fun. ‘How much do we owe you?’
‘You don’t. It’s a birthday present.’
‘Thanks, Mo!’
‘No problem.’ They found themselves looking at the back of Nual’s head. She’d cut her hair in Stonetown, and the long plait was gone, replaced with a short bob. ‘Is she all right?’ asked Mo. ‘Last night when we got back from the bar she looked like she’d been crying.’
Taro felt his jaw tense for a moment. He’d thought she was doing fine; she certainly acted like she was around him. ‘Like you said, she’s all work and no play,’ he said. ‘This’ll do her good.’
They got off the bus at Anau, where a smartly turned-out boat waited by the landing stage. The native couple who owned it greeted the visitors with self-effacing warmth and the boat set off around the coast, keeping inside the lagoon. Once out on the water, Taro forgot how tired he was.
The morning started with a shallow-dive. The Captain (‘You won’t be able to pronounce my real name, friends; and you can call my wife the boss-lady!’) came down with them to point out underwater wonders they’d otherwise miss, and told them all about the history and legends of the reef. Taro recognised a practised guide working his audience, though in his experience - giving, rather than receiving, the tourist spiel - there would be a grain of truth in most of what was said.
For the second dive of the morning, slightly further out in the lagoon, the Captain issued them with spearguns. He apologetically got them to sign waivers before showing them how the weapons worked. Then he said, ‘Time to catch lunch,’ and plopped backwards over the side of the boat.
Catching lunch turned out to be fun, but far from easy. The ‘boss-lady’ came in with them this time, watching their backs to make sure no one pointed their speargun near anybody else. Her husband showed people how it was done. He seemed to concentrate on the female members of the group, and Taro suspected his wife was there partly to watch him. Predictably he started with Nual; equally predictably he wasn’t with her long before something persuaded him to leave her alone. At the end of an exhausting and exhilarating morning Taro had caught one small spiky beastie with an unappetising mass of tentacles around its mouth, while she had managed to land a fat rainbow-scaled fish.
They took their catch to one of the uninhabited islands that edged the lagoon. The Captain lit a fire and set up a grill over it, then left his wife to do the cooking. Lunch was delicious, washed down with cold beers and nips from an unlabelled bottle that the Captain produced ‘for the birthday boy’. The sweet spirit evaporated straight from Taro’s tongue into his brain, and for a while the sea sparkled brightly enough that even with his shades on he kept blinking.
Back on the boat, the Captain was all smiles. ‘The news is good,’ he said, ‘we have a big group of
ahuatai
heading this way soon.’ The
ahuatai
- spirit-rays - were huge, gentle beasts with their own personal light-show. When the tides were right they came in from the deep sea to skim along the outer edge of the reef. The tides were perfect, said the Captain, and the
ahuatai
, the oldest, wisest creatures in the sea, were happy for people to swim amongst them when they visited the shallows. Getting close was fine, but to touch was
tapu
- forbidden. Mo caught the Captain’s eye and his grin widened. He pointed to Mo and said, ‘You know the best part, then, my friend?’ Mo nodded eagerly. The Captain continued, ‘The
ahuatai
are the children of the Lord of the Sea. They are thinking creatures, like us, and they know when other thinking creatures are among them. Their love will enfold you.’