Under Cover of Darkness (30 page)

The hunch to the sister-initiate's shoulders all at once sagged with defeat. “You haven't guessed? Or worse, the order itself hasn't warned you?”

“Warned me? What for?” Jessian stared. “WorldFleet command handles PanTac's dirty ops without oversight. It's self-serving logic. Genocide makes the short list, for bad press.”

The contact gave that glossing over short shrift. “Don't fall for appearances. No one's launching this rescue for the humanitarian spin.”

Jessian stopped, speechless. “The stake's raw intelligence?
On both sides?
You're twisting my leg!”

The headcloth's weave fluttered as the sister-initiate shuddered with outright unease. “Esoteric knowledge,” she whispered, afraid in the open street. “Magic. These tribefolk possess the ability to evoke the paranormal. Miners' gossip on that has run rampant for years. Strange encounters nobody wants on the record, but prospectors' probes get knocked clean out of orbit. Personnel and machinery have been wiped off the grid by inexplicable, unseen forces. I'm not the only one standing who's witnessed the eerie proof.”

Save us all!
Jessian snapped down her faceplate to mask her sudden alarm. Elite training and the order's strict discipline kept her outward conclusion flat calm. “Then my official assignment hasn't been driven by PanTac's overweening hypocrisy.”

The sister-initiate shook her head, still rattled beyond decorum. “I won't go back out there. Unless your trained talent ranks higher than mine, you'll be royally cooked if you try. I tell you, those uncanny creatures are too reclusively savage to tame.”

Which surely meant
WorldFleet
desired them alive as a clandestine research experiment, Jessian raged behind her dark visor. Kincaid's vengeful defection made Scathac's fey tribefolk far more than a weird curiosity. Surely, they sparked someone's desperate hope that their mystical powers might offer a last-minute countermeasure. The snagging crux loomed, that the sisterhood's precepts would demand her outright intervention to spare a free people from rank exploitation.

 

The terrible speed of unfolding events permitted no chance to prevaricate. Entrained in two roles, the young woman charged to pursue an uncataloged culture paced as she dictated her needs. Up and down base supply's dingy office, her tigerish tread shed caged energy.

“Compass, with satellite tracking. Topographical charts. Yes! On paper!” she snapped to the middle-aged loser wedged behind his chipped desk. “Boots,” she continued, annoyed by his raised eyebrows and posture of inert complacency. He and his staff would be dead as dust, if WorldFleet's intelligence failed to deliver.
Boots;
she chided herself, inwardly driven to resume her lapsed concentration. “Ones with miner's soles. An ore prospector's outfit and field kit.”

The desk jockey rode over her, heedless of rank; oblivious to looming ruin. “You can't be crossing this terrain on foot!”

“Hostile, is it?” The steel glare Jessian whetted for bureaucrats cut his protest off at the knees. “Walking. I've said so. The tribefolk do likewise. In flimsy rope sandals. They travel that way all their miserable lives, and no fool's about to earn their respect, invading their turf with a skimmer.”

“Damned stupid, if you think to be messing with them.” The man rubbed his pink forehead, his jaw nestled into his creased neck like a turtle. “They'll turn your head. Spin waking nightmares or set your compass drifting in circles.” Each resentful stab at his keypad rapped through her clockwork steps.

“Emergency rockets,” she stated.

While she circled, he snapped in contempt, “Shall I add a tent shelter? Survival rations? Wristband with a button locator? The prospectors wear dogtags, as well as a pin beacon lodged in their bone marrow.”

“All those things. Yes, on the locator. No beacon.” Her voice sounded crisp, despite chafing dread. Her talented resource outmatched his technology. If she fell to mishap, no party of searchers would be sifting through Scathac's ashes to find her remains.

“Won't matter anyhow,” the requisition man sniffed. “Idiots who tangle with wandering tribefolk tend to vanish without any trace.” His leering glance swept her whipcord-lean frame, with its downplayed, even delicate, femininity. “I'm under your orders. Ignore smart advice, it won't be my balls strung up for getting you lost. Shall I put you down for the hovercraft's route? That's if you're the brass bitch to the bone, determined to leave in the morning.”

His victim smiled, a flash of bared teeth. “I leave tonight. Since I've ordered the clothes, I might as well ride with the resupply for the miners.”

“You're sweet flesh, to those sharks,” came his last, parting jab. “That crowd of roughnecks aren't gonna balk at snatching the opportune pinch.”

Jessian froze. Her slate-colored eyes kept their bite through charged quiet. “Will they so?” Then her brazen façade cracked. “Bring them on, let them try.” Still cheerful, she laughed. “What earthly use is a fully grown stud who flirts like a beardless virgin?”

Sunset glared like a huge, bloodshot eye above blackened peaks of vertical rock. As hardened as her promise, Jessian swayed to the lurch of the next outbound crawler. She traveled masked in a working man's head-cloth, jounced as the vehicle's treads scraped across scoured hardpan. Out-country, the jagged, solidified lava would have torn balloon tires to shreds. The burly miners wedged on either side offered her no harassment. Their sunken expressions reflected bored stupor, never due to her military status.

A sister-initiate sworn in for raw talent, Jessian had been schooled to project her focused power of suggestion. To uninformed senses, a person was present, but not interpreted as a female. The miners perceived what her clothing implied: another gaunt prospector, bound into the waste for a routine ground survey.

The reweaving of esoteric energy sealed Jessian inside of a tight ring of solitude. Confined by the arduous grind of the crawler, she had too much time to dwell on her endangerment, now the secret demands of the sisterhood entangled with her career.
Both factions wanted a closed, tribal culture removed to secure its survival.

Unless she failed outright and opted for suicide, she must decide which of two powerful factions her operative choice would betray.

WorldFleet, panicked and snatching at straws to close its breached line of defense; or the sisterhood, which
also
pursued arcane practice, and whose philanthropical service to civilized humanity was already taxed to the bittermost edge. Hung at the verge of annihilating warfare, uncounted
billions
were poised to die. If Jessian openly chose for the order, the high-profile scandal of her defection would fling their hidden covenant headlong into the predatory arena of politics. An imperative,
justifiable
breach of held trust, given that reason must argue for mercy: those peaceful regimes granted the sisterhood's backing
perhaps
stood a chance to endure through the fragmenting turmoil.

Hands clenched, Jessian coughed out the alkali dust stirred by the stiffening breeze. Scathac's days were inferno; the cruel nights, yet more murderous as the temperature plunged toward the other extreme. Unlike these rough men, aware of no worse than their next brutal work shift, the young woman poised on the razor's edge wrestled her outraged nerves.

Why had
she
been given the burden of drawing humanity's line between certain death, and the imperative drive for self-determined survival?

The crawler's gears ground. Brakes squealed, and the lumbering vehicle jerked to a stop. The driver waved toward a thorn-studded ravine, that wound toward a bottle-necked canyon. “Better make camp underneath of those rim walls, before the weather beats you to shreds.”

Jessian nodded, unable to speak over the concussive roar of the engines. She brushed off the miners' kindly farewells. Half-crushed by her mission, and unwilling to hazard how these separatist shamans might repel yet another outsider's invasion, she unhooked her safety belt, shouldered her gear, and stepped off into the trackless unknown. WorldFleet intelligence gave her eight days before Scathac got blown to oblivion by Kincaid's radical cohorts.

 

The stars blazed down, pinprick cold, on a hostile landscape veiled under darkness. Thorns, shattered rock, and piled hillocks of crushed pumice grated under Jessian's boots. She carried no light, just the phosphorescent gleam of a hand-compass, with the winking display of the locator's readout. The clank of the crawler faded away. The sweep of its headlamps vanished behind, eclipsed by the distant outcrops. Gusts roared down off the volcanic heights, bitter and burning with chill. Jessian tucked in her facecloth. Ripped her pant leg
again
, on a serrated cactus. At each step, she felt as though Scathac itself rejected her trespassing presence. Accosted by the relentless terrain, she wondered how any sentient human dared to give birth and raise children here. Did other eyes see wild beauty where hers perceived nothing but desolate rock and despair? Had she grasped the tortuous ethnic language with enough comprehension to forge understanding?

By WorldFleet's tactical directive, she must. Else wider societies than this one must perish without a last hope of reprieve.

Doubt gnawed, in the shadows. The sisterhood's covenant itself could be swayed. Before such sweeping peril, even the order's humanitarian ethics might fail to sustain their firm character. Crisis could ruthlessly pressure the option to bolster their overstretched resource. Jessian quashed her fretting. Reined in the paranoia that out-raced current fact as she stumbled atop the next rise. These tribefolks' safe harbor must be won, first. Already, her lungs burned. Chalk grit rasped her throat. That asshole at base could have been right to mock her decision to hike. She might wander for days and find no one. Only cold ashes and the stripped bones of killed game, left in long abandoned encampments. These tortuous mazes of crooked ravines could swallow a tribal band whole, even without any arcane tricks to mask themselves from discovery.

“I'll find them,” she muttered, unwilling to quit for the whine of a haunted conscience. “I swear by my willing oath to the order, no innocents will die in our war zone!”

Yet more likely these savage, inimical hermits would lurk in concealment like wraiths, laughing as she blundered about, grumbling and circling thorn plants. The image raised a bark of grim laughter. Bad odds were her business. She'd handle these stubborn reclusives with the ball-busting self-assurance that always had landed her back on her uncertain feet.

The gusts strengthened. Pelted by whipped gravel, Jessian reached the sheltered cleft of the rim rocks before she became buffeted to a standstill. Despite tired calves and an ache in her chest, brought on by clogged air and exertion, she chose not to camp. The fissure cut the brunt of the elements, and every lost minute mattered. She could sleep well enough through the heat of the day. The gale shrieked above the narrow, slot canyons, raking off dust like fine powder. Whipped into gyres, the fine particles built charge, flinging off static electricity.

Jessian pushed forward under flickering storm light. She tested each step, and listened, as well, trained senses enhanced through her talent.

No warning foreran the jolting fall, as the hardpack gave way underneath her. Ripped off balance, she plunged downward, stung by tumbling gravel, until she slammed into a hidden crevice. Lodged in the cleft, knocked breathless, with one ankle twisted to agony, she spat inhaled grit. Her first thought was the button on the locator beacon, strapped to the wrist pinned beneath her. She wrestled to move, but could not shift position. Her shoulders stayed wedged. Fear was not an option. Forced to survey the extent of her setback, she noticed the woven lattice of plant fiber, burst through by her passing weight.

She had not come to grief, except by design. Worse, the scale of this trap was too large to be fashioned for Scathac's undersized game animals. The desert tribes had defended their ground, despite all her specialized skills.

Jessian cursed. Still dazed with shock, she measured her difficulty. Bodies dropped into a crack in the earth might be lost, but not due to the practice of lethal magic. Since the reclusive hunters who had darted armed troops were unlikely to rescue their victims, she was left with a straightforward predicament she'd have to solve on her own.

Her presumption proved flawed. A wave of sucking dizziness swept her. Too late, she fought back, as her mind became clouded. Hazed out of her senses, she slipped into dreams that spun her under as if she were drowning. . . .