Spear of Light (5 page)

By the sea.

He pushed his body, head down, leaning into the run, thinking only of each and every movement of every muscle and of his other self beside him. Another joy—clarity of focus far deeper than he'd ever managed, even in meditation.

He stepped off the running path and slowed to a fast walk. Yi Two matched him stride for stride. They folded down to sit cross-legged. In front of them, the controlled surfaces of Nexity gave way to rocky shore and then to sand. Sound passed through the field barrier, and the rhythmic crash and susurration of water on the shore calmed Yi. Seabirds called and screeched.

They linked arms and fell into each other's inner selves, abandoning being alone in favor of sweet, sweet connection. Braiding. Becoming one. There was no new heartbeat to feel, no breath to match, but there remained an essence, a self so intimate and so deep that touching it made his soul quiver.

Within a few moments, they did not have to talk to each other because they were each other, one being as well as two, the contradiction impossible to resolve.

Yi loved it, and he loved Yi Two, and he loved that being each other made them far greater than being alone in ways that were completely ineffable.

They began, as always, catching up. Yi now remembered Katherine telling him what she'd found, saw the worry in her eyes, the upset crease in her brow, and heard the small catch in her voice. Katherine, the defender of anything in trouble. If there was a fight, she didn't back either party, but instead wanted the fight to end and everything to be well.

The Jhailing Jim, as always, appeared inside of them as soon as they called, a presence they could hear. It was more intrusive and less intimate than braiding, and always slightly jarring. While Yi and Yi were like each other, they were not like any of the Jhailings.

What can you tell us about the dangers to town?
they asked.

Manna Springs is in danger of falling. We may be forced into defensive measures.

Can't you keep the people you negotiated with safe? Charlie? Manny?

The agreements are all recorded. This is why we built the Wall.

Yi fell silent, communing again with Yi Two, both realizing the same thing.
You will not help because it will be seen as meddling. This is the approach that you took to Chrystal's murder.

We are not allowed in town.

But we are!

One of you at a time.

What about Charlie? Where is Charlie? Nona?

They are going to Ice Fall Valley and will join the fighting there.

They will be targets.

Yes.

Yi and Yi stared out over the water. Only one of them would be able to go, and one Jason.

They both knew the land, but Yi One had lived the last visit. There might be a small advantage in that, a visceral body knowledge.
I will leave in an hour.

You can't harm humans,
the Jhailing warned them.
Not even if it means you must die.

The trade-off that Chrystal had made. Life for life.

I understand
, the two Yis said at once.

They let themselves separate, a slow languid process. Each found the ability to play with their own perception of time fascinating.

Will we be as different one from another as some of the Jhailings are?
Yi asked.

Yi Two responded.
If we live so many centuries.

They crossed the exercise field, walking quickly and side by side, the residue of the braid clinging to them, binding each energetically to the other.

CHAPTER FIVE

SATYANA

Satyana stood up from her desk in the very heart of the
Star Bear
and closed the screen in front of her. She stopped in her private privy and brushed her hair and pinned golden earrings into her earlobes. Her blue dress matched the bright unnatural blue of her eyes. She tugged at the hem to get it just right across her shoulders.

Gunnar would be here any moment, and she still hadn't decided what to say to him. The information she'd just heard wasn't going to make it any easier, either. She returned to her office and paced.

She stopped and stared at the picture of Ruby Martin that she kept on the wall above her desk. The red-headed woman stared back at her with a triumphant expression. The photo captured one of Ruby's early concerts, when she was just realizing that she could captivate—and change— a huge crowd. It had been taken before the sickness that eventually killed her, when she still looked beautiful and fierce.

“Easy for you to look that way,” Satyana whispered to Ruby's image. “You're dead. All you had to do was teach us not to be cruel. I've got to teach the whole damned Glittering not to be afraid.”

Ruby on the wall failed to answer. Nevertheless, Satyana stared at the picture as if it could talk. Ruby had been her greatest creation. Oh, Ruby had been flesh and blood, and downright naive when Satyana first met her. Almost irritating in her single-mindedness about fairness and equality, in her desire to change everything she didn't like about the Diamond Deep. Ruby had more fire and more passion than any ten women Satyana could name. The picture had stayed in her office all of this time, had even been cleaned and restored twice. Even though she had created the buzz that made Ruby famous all of those years ago, Ruby had given her purpose. Satyana often used her memories of Ruby's reactions to moral dilemmas to help guide her own choices.

Ruby would be most unhappy with the current state of affairs. In addition to freeing the poorest of the poor, Ruby had been the first to befriend a Next.

There were no windows in Satyana's inner office, but she could feel the ship around her. When it was new, she had piloted the
Star Bear
through adventures. For the last hundred years, it had been a small, still part of the behemoth that was the Diamond Deep. It had been her home, a stage for her performers, and the first stage Ruby the Red sang on. From here, Satyana had built an entertainment empire. She knew every piece of metal, every bolt, every strut, every communications system.

All of it was at risk right now.

For years her physical world had remained basically the same. Her own power had waxed slowly, and certainly the wild young ship's captain who had docked the
Star Bear
at the Deep all of those years ago wouldn't recognize—or even like—the woman she had become. It had been a slow change, a good one, full of risk and hard work.

One of her current risk factors burst through her office door, ducking and turning slightly sideways to manage it. Gunnar Ellensson bulked four times her size, dark skinned and dark eyed and full of so much power that most people acted cowed around him.

Satyana didn't suffer from the same nerves he brought out in most people. She rose and glided to him, using every piece of training she'd ever had in both control and seduction. He took her in his arms, folding himself around her from the sides and the top until she nearly suffocated in the scent of his musky soap and the rich pile of yellow and gold that counted as his shirt of the day.

In spite of the warm hug, she wasn't comforted. Their relationship was built more on balance and lust and need than on comfort. She pushed back away from him. “I understand you're bargaining with the Next.”

He smiled. “Of course I am. Weren't you the one who first taught me to think of them as something other than pirates?” He went to her sideboard and poured them each a glass of red wine from a deep blue decanter decorated with opals from his mines on Mammot. He had given her both—the decanter for their tenth anniversary as lovers and the wine from his private stocks just last week.

He handed her a glass. “I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm meeting two Jhailing Jims at Pearl Gate in two weeks. It's just at the right place in its orbit to be directly on the way to Mammot.”

Mammot. His personal planet. More accurately, his bank. While no one could own the planet itself, Gunnar owned most of the mineral rights. She found it hard to trust him on matters of money. “I heard they've agreed to give you some of the secrets to that flowing metal that they use for robot bodies.”

He raised the wine glass. “To a series of good trades.”

“Anything we get from the Next needs to be for everyone,” she declared, keeping her glass in her hand and close to her stomach.

He raised an eyebrow. “I'll share. For a fee. Besides, that's not what I want at all. Well, I do want that. Who wouldn't? Although we have materials almost half as good. I think they stole the idea from us.”

She laughed at his expression. He could almost always make her laugh, the bastard. “Could be.”

“What I really want is their navigation AIs. That and the algorithm for the Wall on Lym. You've heard about that?”

She didn't have time to let a wall distract her. “You know we need the other stations. We've got to hold the peace.”

He cocked his head to the side, his expression suggesting he was playing dumb. A deep anger crawled up inside her. “We need something to give the others. Not something to sell to them. You already have more credit than anyone else in the Glittering.”

She could see that stung him; he blinked and turned away. True to form, his discomfort only lasted a moment. The man was born to wrest a great business deal out of every breath he took. She followed up on her barb. “Can you think about something more than yourself?”

He scowled at her. “I'm thinking about every ship and station we have. I'm thinking about all of them being safer and all of them getting where they need to go more precisely. I'm thinking of a self-healing, selfdirected navigation system that takes any change in the whole system into account, so a flap of a butterfly's wings on Mammot doesn't blow the Diamond Deep an inch out of its original orbit. I'm thinking about getting unmanned ships wherever they need to go.”

She sipped her wine. Bitter and good. “You're thinking of making a ton of credit.”

“Since when do you comp people who can't afford tickets into the concerts you run?”

She stood on tiptoe so she could look more closely at him. “I have been. I've been streaming them all for everyone. You still have to pay to be here. But I've lost millions of credits since the attack. People need hope and diversions and to work together. You and I and the rest of this damned station have to stop caring who's the most powerful human until we've dealt with the Next.”

He turned his back to her and poured himself a second glass of red wine. “Dealt with?”

“Assimilated. Gotten used to. Stopped being scared of or fascinated by. Until they finish whatever they're doing down on Lym and we know what it is so we have something to understand that's not a rumor. People are scared. Frightened into making bad choices. We have never—
never
— been threatened by beings so far beyond us.”

Gunnar teased her hand and her glass away from her stomach playfully, his energy a counter to hers. He whispered, “It will be okay. It really will. They are not aliens; they are us. They are what we will all eventually become.”

“You're eating their propaganda.”

“I'm drinking my wine.” He started some music playing and picked her up, dancing with her in the wide open space in the middle of the room, while the picture of Ruby looked down on them both. “It will be okay,” he whispered again. “The stations will come to us; they have to.”

“And you're doing what to help?”

“I have to
have
a deal before I can decide whether or not to give anything away, you know.” He twisted right and spun, amazingly light on his feet given his size.

She kissed his cheek. “You should put me down.”

“I will.”

“When?”

“Soon.” He nibbled at her ear and turned the other way and she felt soft and vulnerable and warm in spite of her frustration with him.

They filled the space, they and their music, and she closed her eyes and felt the rocking motion of his carry, the slide and dip of his feet. She remembered that year they started dating when she used to run on the inside track and chant in her head.
Gunnar Ellensson loves me. Gunnar Ellensson loves me. Gunnar Ellensson loves me.

Even now it was possible to re-create that secret awareness, that amazement.

CHAPTER SIX

CHARLIE

Charlie shivered. Cold wind sheared around the skimmer as he drove and pinked Nona's and Jean Paul's cheeks. Nona had found an old coat of his and pulled it on, but her legs were still bare and must be cold.

He banked left to follow the contours of the northern Resort Mountains. They flew halfway between sea level and the tree line, and twenty minutes out from Ice Fall Valley. Jean Paul's last two calls to Manny had gone unanswered, and Amfi hadn't picked up calls to her vid since she first contacted them back at the spaceport.

He and Jean Paul were rangers, not military. There had been no need for anything more exotic than catching smugglers for hundreds of years. The rangers did that fine, accepting the least possible help from the Port Authority. The tools he was accustomed to were designed to catch someone trying to hide or to deal with close combat once you found them. The Port Authority had better training and software, but he had never been allowed to use it. They even had battle-robots, although he wouldn't want one of those now. Some fool would think they were Next.

“Flying into Ice Fall Valley blind is just plain stupid,” he mused out loud.

Cricket gave a low growl, probably a response to his tone of voice. He glanced at her, worried, to find she was leaning into Nona as if her life depended on it.

Jean Paul sat back in his seat with a heavy sigh. “I'm trying Wilding Station again.”

“Good idea.” It had grown late enough that the forests were shadowed by the mountaintops, although the sky above was still a deep blue.