‘Have you tried to find him?’
‘We have made some effort, though we will not exert ourselves overmuch in pursuit of a traitor. He no longer has the means to harm my
ngai
. To pursue him purely in the cause of vengeance would be both dishonourable and indicative of weakness.’
‘I need you to give me everything you have on Olias Kahani, including the results of the enquiries you have made so far.’
Marua found herself turning back to her computer and searching out the relevant files. As she set the download running she looked up and asked, ‘What will you do if you find him?’
The Angel just smiled.
When the download was complete Marua picked up the dataspike and held it out. The whole encounter felt surreal, but something about it was beginning to nag at her, as though she should recognise what was going on here.
As she took the dataspike, the Angel gave her a long, hard look. Marua’s sense of dislocation grew—
A door slammed, somewhere below. The pressure in Marua’s head intensified, and for a moment she thought she would pass out.
‘Still working hard, my sweet—Marua, are you all right?’ She looked up to see her husband standing in the doorway, looking concerned.
‘I’m fine,’ Marua heard herself say. A glance towards the balcony showed that the two of them were alone. Had someone been here?
‘Are you sure? You look tense.’
‘No, no. Everything’s fine.’ And it was, she thought. Just fine.
The next morning she wasn’t so sure.
In the bright light of day Marua thought at first that she had dreamt the strange night-time visitation. But the more she thought about it the more she suspected it hadn’t been a dream at all. The Angel had come to her and—
—and what?
After breakfast, she rescheduled a couple of non-urgent meetings and walked around the caldera to another house, a little smaller than the one she shared with her husband and children, but equally well-appointed. She found her mother in the garden, tending her orchids. Marua wondered what her own focus would dwindle to when her time to retire came. She knew that in twenty or thirty years her mother would be dead and she’d be living here, burnt out by the stress of running one of the most powerful organisations on the planet. It wasn’t a bad fate, provided the succession was assured, the future guaranteed. Family mattered more than any one individual.
‘Hullo, Mother,’ she said.
Her mother turned and smiled, a vague but genuinely happy expression, very different to the astute, careful smiles Marua remembered from her own childhood. ‘Ah, it’s you! What a lovely surprise! Can you stay to take tea?’
Marua smiled in response. ‘I’m sure I can find time to share a cup with you this morning, Mother. But I also need to talk to you.’
‘Of course, sweet. What about?’
‘The
hine-maku
.’
Her mother frowned. Marua knew that frown: not one of annoyance, but of mild confusion. Her mother’s memory was not what it had once been. But perhaps Marua had not been as clear as she could have been; she had used the islander term to avoid the name that every human, in any culture, knew, a superstitious touch she felt vaguely ashamed of.
Then her mother’s gaze sharpened. ‘Ah,’ she said gently, ‘you mean the Sidhe.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
When the water splashed up over her knees, Nual decided that she needed to find somewhere to stop and rest. It had been twenty-four hours or more since she’d last slept - those few snatched hours with Taro, before the disastrous extraction. Getting out to Ruanuku-
ngai
’s island headquarters had involved a seven-hour skim-boat trip to a tourist island in the rough vicinity, then a six-hour flight over open water. Her implants were designed to return her gently to the ground if she passed out, but out here there was no ground to return her to, so if sleep did overcome her, she’d end up in the sea. She pointed her toes and rose above the water again, up into the warm, moonlit night.
She had programmed her com to navigate back to the tourist island, but she would never make it that far, so instead she set a search for the nearest scrap of land, however small. She tried not to weep in relief when the tiny glowing screen showed a chain of uninhabited islets about ten klicks south-west of her current position. They would do nicely.
Paradoxically, knowing that she would be able to rest soon woke her up a little and as she made her way towards her new destination she considered her encounter with Marua Ruanuku. After years stifling her powers in order to get by amongst humans it had felt good to exercise them fully. She was pleased and surprised at how quickly her abilities were developing. But she was not entirely sure she had acted wisely . . . her plan had been to go in, get what she needed, then edit the woman’s memories to remove any recollection of what had happened, leaving her peacefully asleep at her desk. She had considered the more drastic option of killing her, but to murder the head of an
ngai
was asking for trouble. Besides, when she’d read the house she had picked up the sleeping minds of three children; she preferred to avoid killing their mother unnecessarily.
If her probing had revealed that Medame Ruanuku was to blame for what had happened to Taro, she might have changed her mind. She was tempted for a moment, when her scan revealed that her
ngai
was the one she and Taro had been looking for all along. But to kill her as punishment for having dealings with the Sidhe would have been petty, and pointless.
How very un-Sidhe her reactions had become, Nual thought. She was developing an almost human conscience. A true Sidhe would not have hesitated to commit murder rather than risk being interrupted . . . but a true Sidhe would not feel this all-consuming need to rescue her human lover either.
The islets came into sight: five dark shapes gilded in moonlight. She chose one of the two with trees on and landed on the beach. The sea whooshed and rushed gently all around her, and insects made a surprisingly loud racket for such a tiny patch of vegetation. She sat down on the sand, above the high-tide mark. It still retained some of the day’s warmth. She pulled her cloak around her and curled up. Despite the hard surface and a vague concern over whether the islet was home to anything that might bite or sting, she soon dozed off.
She had hoped to dream - and she did . . .
The process of dreaming was more ordered for the Sidhe than for humans, though in essence the same thing was happening: the subconscious exercised itself while the body rested. But when a Sidhe dreamed, she could decide to watch the dreaming process, observing the images and sensations as they unfolded, or ignore it and return to true unconsciousness; she might even choose to join in, participating in the dream, directing its course. A Sidhe who lived in unity was most alone in her dreams; dreams were contained purely in the dreamer’s head.
Usually.
Nual knew that the seers, those amongst her people blessed - or cursed - with prescience, sometimes used dreaming as a tool to trigger their abilities. She had no idea how to do this, and no one to guide her, but now she tried to bend her will to this end, to direct her dreaming mind to show her the course of action she needed to take in order to rescue Taro.
The result was not what she expected.
No images or insights came; instead, she was aware of a familiar presence in her mind. Even as she recognised Taro, the pain broke through.
This wasn’t a dream. This was happening to Taro,
now
. She was sharing his experience.
The pain was low-key, a disturbing background constant. His thought processes were muddled by it, or perhaps by something he’d been given. She tried to work past the distracting physical sensations and into his heart.
She sensed his query as a wordless, distant cry of hope. She responded, and after a moment felt her own name forming in her head:
Though it was highly unlikely the Sidhe had him, she had to be sure.
Nual felt a surge of relief: she was only facing humans.
The contact was fading. She reached out to him
The sense of him receded into darkness. Rather than follow it, she opened her eyes to the star-dusted night sky. The world’s primary moon was just setting. She lay there for a while, wondering if the shadowy men who had Taro had any idea what a big mistake they were making.
It was a good job he’d tidied up the living quarters on the
Judas Kiss
when Nual and Taro came aboard. Jarek didn’t think Orzabet was someone who’d put up with a mess.
She’d already insisted on taking a shower, though that was fair enough; she must’ve got pretty hot and sweaty in that crate. Though Jarek had occasionally transported paying passengers this was the first time he’d taken on someone who’d had themselves delivered to his ship as freight. Still, if it was what she needed to do . . .
It would take them four and a half hours to reach the beacon radius. Hubpoints were located at low-temperature dwarf stars, so the orbit shared by a hub station and its beacon was tighter than in most planetary systems, and the distance between them consequently smaller. Orzabet announced that she would use the time to get some rest, though from the sound of it she was pottering around in the rec-room. She was obviously nervous about going into transit awake and unsedated, but her plan relied on her being fully conscious at the moment they entered shiftspace. Jarek was apprehensive too. Orzabet’s scheme was an elegant one, but it unsettled him.
He found himself thinking about his life on the
Judas Kiss
, his home for the last fifteen years. It was the longest time he’d lived in one place, even if that place did move around. He’d been happy with his lifestyle, though he’d always been on the look-out for causes to support. And now he’d committed himself irrevocably to the one he’d been dabbling in for seven years. He’d managed to buy a couple of dozen reels of nanoweave cable from Tarset, hoping to sell it on Kama Nui - it could be used for shipping and adventure sports - but he’d bought the cargo as much to keep customs happy as because he expected to make much of a profit on it. Trade was no longer his priority.
‘Sirrah Reen?’ Orzabet had stuck her head through the hatch onto the bridge.
‘Come in. Listen, given we’ll be travelling together for a while, why don’t you call me Jarek?’
‘All right. Jarek.’ She hesitated. ‘And you can call me Bez if you like.’ She looked away, and Jarek wondered when she’d last let anyone use that name. Her discomfort lasted a moment, then she said, ‘I need to patch into your main comp now, assuming we’re still on schedule to go into transit in twenty minutes?’
‘We are.’ He carried on with the pre-transit checks and initiated a modified version of the system shutdown routine while she settled herself on the floor and spread her tech out around her. Giving a relative stranger access to the systems on his ship’s bridge made Jarek uneasy, but he squashed his fears: he’d decided to trust Orzabet -
Bez
- and that was that. He preferred the diminutive; it sounded more human.
Her plan required split-second timing, allied with her unique expertise: she intended to use a mirror-worm, a message impersonating another, which would, she told him earnestly, set off a data-cascade at the receiving system. Jarek nodded intelligently, although he had only a vague idea what she was talking about.