Linesman (6 page)

Ean was reminded just how obscene the shirts were. The tiny piece of almost noncloth made him extremely aware of the body beneath it. He looked away.

“The cloth is designed to make you look,” Abram told him. “A clever piece of engineering, don't you think. Which reminds me,” to Michelle. He dug into his pocket, pulled out his card, and dropped it onto the screen. “But only just,” he said. “There were three others.”

“Why do you think I said three?” Michelle said. “One thing I do know is fashion.”

She knew a lot more than that if the people Ean had spoken to tonight were any judge.

A bell chimed on all panels. Ean didn't need Abram to say, “They're making the jump,” because he could hear line nine clear and loud. They were in the void.

Ean stood up hurriedly. He'd only crossed the void once. From Lancia to join Rigel's cartel. Back then he hadn't understood the lines at all, hadn't known what to expect, and he'd been in his cabin when line ten kicked in. He'd thought he was going to be dragged through the void forever.

“I might go to bed,” he said.

He was too late.

The high, clear notes of line ten moved through the deeper notes of line nine, tightened, then wrenched and went impossibly high and pulled and twisted line nine into another path. It only took seconds, Ean knew, but for him it lasted forever.

When it was over, he was kneeling on the floor, hands over his ears. Abram and Michelle were just beginning to react.

Abram reached him first.

“No.” Because he could hear line nine still strong in his head. They were going to make multiple jumps. Nobody made multiple jumps that close together. Except a really good captain who knew and trusted his ship and wanted to hide where they went. Ean got that from line one, he didn't know how.

Abram didn't listen. He reached out and touched Ean just as line ten twisted the void line again. The vibration rattled through their bones, on and on.

When it was over—seconds again, but it felt like another lifetime—Abram pulled away and fell to the floor, dry-retching. Michelle put an arm across his shoulders.

“Don't touch him yet.” Line nine was still clear and strong. But it was too late. Line ten twisted out again and tweaked them into another space and Abram, still vibrating from the last one, must have felt it. And so must Michelle, touching him.

After that, the noise subsided.

No one moved for twenty minutes, but after three jumps it felt like only seconds.

Abram eventually rolled onto his knees and from there shakily hauled himself up. “No wonder so many linesmen go crazy. Is it always that bad?”

Ean didn't answer. He lay on the floor and rested his face on his arms so that he didn't have to look at them. For a while tonight, he had dared to hope in a future that was more than just repairing lines. That he would be part of something new and exciting.

That wouldn't happen now.

Michelle accepted Abram's help up. “I've jumped with other tens. Even Rebekah Grimes once. On this ship. We were at dinner. She didn't seem to mind although she did notice.” She came to stand over Ean and offered a hand to help him up. Her blue shoes were made of the same silk as her skirt.

Ean shook his head and got up the same way Abram had, by rolling over onto his hands and knees first.

“I'm going to bed.” His voice was hoarse again, but what little there was shook with disappointment. He should have gone there straight from the function, whether the invitation to sit had been an order or not. At least then they would have just had him for insubordination; now they simply thought him crazy.

He couldn't even walk straight; and he could feel them watching him. He heard, and almost saw through line one, Michelle half step toward him and Abram put out a hand to stop her.

They waited until he was gone before they said anything, but his whole body was vibrating with the lines and he heard—clear as anything through line one—“Did you get the music?” before he deliberately blocked the lines out of his mind by repeating nonsense rhymes in his head.

JORDAN ROSSI

THE CONFLUENCE WAS
a perfect sphere 4,172.36 meters in diameter. Infinitely small on a galactic scale, yet if you asked most linesmen how big it was, they would say, “Huge as space, as big as the galaxy,” and their voices would be full of the truth of just how enormous it was.

To Jordan Rossi, the confluence made him feel important and insignificant at the same time. It made him realize how vast the universe was and how small a part of it he was. The confluence was huge and glorious. It made him want to sing. It made him want to fall to his knees and dedicate his life to it. Every time he was near it, he was filled with something akin to joy and felt his heart would burst just being near the greatness of it.

Jordan Rossi hated it.

He'd always been a man who controlled his own life. From the five-year-old boy who'd insisted on taking the line tests, to the seventeen-year-old who'd
known
he was ready to be certified, all the way up to the powerful, influential ten he'd become. He'd been in control all the way. The confluence took that control away from him. Worse, he couldn't just walk away because the confluence wouldn't let him.

He stood at the viewing platform sipping a glass of wine—not generally allowed, but he was a ten, and who was going to stop him—and watched the nothingness that made it.

“What do you think it really is?” he asked Fergus.

Fergus had been his personal assistant for twenty years. They worked well enough together that when other linesmen came poaching, House of Rickenback always matched their offer and raised it, which made Fergus not only one of the longest-lasting assistants in any cartel but higher paid than many lower-level linesmen. He was worth every credit, if only for the way he could ferret out information from anyone. Not that Rossi ever intended telling him that.

It was the same question Rossi had asked every day since he'd arrived. Fergus had two standard responses—no answer, or a diatribe about its being a line sink, which Rossi always ignored. Fergus hated the confluence, too, but that was because he couldn't feel the lines and wanted to be back in the comfort of the cartel house rather than here on station.

Today, Fergus just shrugged.

A crowd of tourists flooded onto the viewing deck. A shuttle must have arrived. They recognized the uniform, saw the bars on Rossi's pocket, and left him room. One or two nudged each other and pointed him out. Rossi ignored them.

For most of them, this trip would be a waste of time. Even now he could see one disappointed tourist turning away with a disgusted, “That's it.”

Rossi didn't care. If you couldn't feel the lines, Confluence Station was nothing but a spartan space station out in the middle of nowhere. Sure there were a few restaurants, and a nightclub—there always was when there were tourists and linesmen—but there was nothing else, and in two days, when the shuttle was ready to depart, most of the tourists would be ready to leave with it. Good riddance to them, too.

He was more interested in the linesmen who had arrived with them. This new batch was mixed. Two from Sandhurst, two from Laito, and four from Rigel. Rossi frowned at that. This was the second Rigel-heavy batch. Cartel Master Rigel was spreading his people much further than he should. Rossi was going to find the idiot who ran the service contract and have words.

The linesmen stood apart. They hadn't noticed him yet; they were too busy looking toward the confluence, awe on their faces. Not that there was anything to see.

Or anything showing up on the instruments the scientists loved so much, either.

Linesmen didn't use tools. They used their minds, that innate ability that scientists had speculated about for as long as the lines had been around. They didn't need instruments to know there were lines at the confluence.

The scientists weren't satisfied with that, of course. They'd sent in experts—as if anyone could be as expert in lines as a linesman; and their instruments—as if an instrument that couldn't even measure a regular line would be any use out here; and then the military had arrived with
their
instruments. As if any of it was any use when the linesmen couldn't even pick it.

In fact, the discovery of the confluence had reignited the old debate about what line ability was. Was it psychic, and if so, did humans have other as-yet-undiscovered abilities that no one knew about? Was it something natural that all humans had in some measure, like the ability to draw or to retain a tune? Or even a sixth sense they'd had since the first creature had crawled onto land but that had mostly died out because until recently—evolutionarily speaking—humans had no use for it?

Rossi wished the scientists and the military would all go away and leave the confluence to its true owners. The linesmen.

He'd suggested it once, and Dr. Apted, the scientist in charge, had the cheek to laugh at him. At him, one of the most powerful linesmen in the galaxy, if not the most powerful. Just remembering it now made his hand grip tight around the stem of his glass.

“That would be a joke,” Apted had said. “All you people do is stand around and push thoughts at it. Which is doing a lot, isn't it.”

“You have no idea how a linesman works,” Rossi had told her.

“One thing I know.” And she'd poked a finger at him, so hard and abrupt that he'd had to step back. “You people can't
even work together. Each of you off thinking your own thoughts at it isn't going to do anything. Why don't you try working together?”

They did work together when they had to. But Apted seemed to forget that higher-level linesmen were rare and used to working alone. You couldn't share the burden of fixing line ten with anyone else. There wouldn't be enough linesmen to go around. With less than fifty tens galaxy-wide, working alone was the norm. Personally, Rossi preferred it that way.

Gate Union military representatives had arrived three months after the scientists. The military scientists were as bad as the nonmilitary scientists, but at least it had given Apted someone else to fight with and got her off Rossi's back. Although some of that might have been due to Fergus's doing his job of keeping people away and leaving the linesman to do what he did best.

Rossi didn't want to think about scientists or the military. He turned back to the confluence.

If it hadn't been for a ship going missing midtransmission, no one would have even known the confluence was there. But you could feel it, and there was something magical about feeling it for the first time. Just remembering it made Rossi's breath catch.

“Fool,” he muttered to himself. Then the Sandhurst seven turned to look at him, and his breath caught again. The girl was tall and curvy, with a face that could have modeled meyan-ware. The way she smiled at Rossi showed that she knew it, too. She murmured something quiet to the other Sandhurst, the five, who turned to look as well. One didn't have to be a lip-reader to know what they were saying. “Jordan Rossi. House of Rickenback.”

Rossi inclined his head—the half nod granted to a lesser line—and turned back to the Plexiglas window.

“You want me to invite her to your rooms tonight?” Fergus asked.

Rossi was tempted. His habits were known. The cocky young thing would expect it. “No. I'm dining with that bitch Rebekah Grimes.” He didn't know what she wanted, but she liked him as much as he liked her, so when either of them had to talk to each other, it was line business and important.

Cartel houses looked after the everyday business of training linesmen and managing their contracts, but the Linesmen's Guild looked after the welfare of the linesman. If a linesman had issues with their House, or felt their contract was unfair, they went to the Grand Master, head of the guild, who sorted it out for them. The Grand Master was the only official member of the guild—the cartels took care of most line-related issues—but there was an unofficial committee who advised him or her, and it wielded a lot of power. That committee consisted of Jordan Rossi and Rebekah Grimes—the two judged most likely to become the next Grand Master—and Janni Naidan, a behind-the-scenes manipulator who didn't normally come out into the open for line business but had as much power as Rossi and Rebekah.

The current Grand Master, Morton Paretsky, had collapsed with a heart attack soon after arriving at the confluence and hadn't regained consciousness since. Personally, Rossi wasn't surprised. Paretsky was a big man, and most of his bulk came courtesy of the perks provided to someone in that position. The big surprise was that it hadn't happened earlier.

Rossi planned to keep up his exercise and weights when he became Grand Master.

Meantime, Rossi, Rebekah, and Janni Naidan were doing all the work.

If Apted wanted to claim they didn't do any work, maybe she should have attended a few guild meetings. They still went on. And on. You couldn't get away from the damned things, even out here, where petty business shouldn't intrude.

Rossi turned back to the confluence. Sometimes, when he'd had too much to drink, he came out here and lost himself in the magnificence of it. It was the only time he could bear to lose control of his emotions like that. He finished his wine in one long gulp and handed the empty glass to Fergus. “I'm off to get ready for la Dame Grimes.”

•   •   •

IT
wasn't Rebekah Grimes who waited for him in the private dining room. It was Janni Naidan, the ten from House of Laito.

Rossi raised an eyebrow. “Whatever Grimes wants to talk about must be important.”

“Or she's setting us up,” Naidan said.

He knew what Naidan meant. Since Paretsky's untimely illness, la Dame Grimes had taken to sending other Sandhurst tens as her representative. House of Sandhurst had fully 30 percent of the tens, and they were actively recruiting. The day would come—soon—when that cartel tried to take over.

Not if he could help it.

Naidan was an abrupt woman, not given to small talk. “Linesman Grimes informs me she has taken another job.”

He wished he could leave like that. Sometimes he thought the confluence was a drug, keeping them there.

“It must have been some offer.” He poured himself a glass of wine, ignoring the disapproving look from Naidan. It wasn't for the glass he'd poured—she already had her own glass of finest green imported from Lancia—it was for the four glasses he'd had before he'd come.

“It was.” Her face was grim. “Lady Lyan.”

“Ah.” He held the wine up to salute the confluence. There was something poetic about drinking Lancastrian wine when talking about a Lancastrian princess. “Did she want a ten?” Gate Union would do anything to get a spy onto Lady Lyan's ship, even to asking someone to pretend to be a lesser linesman. He hoped they wanted a six or a seven. Rebekah would hate that.

“Lyan is studying the confluence.”

Rossi perused the menu set into the table so he didn't have to answer immediately. He keyed in his selection—Naidan had already chosen, he noted—pressed to order, and took another careful mouthful of wine, before he said, “Has anyone told Lady Lyan she's not welcome here?” She'd be stupid to come anyway. Lancia was affiliated with the Alliance. Gate Union and the Alliance weren't officially at war, but it was only a matter of time.

It felt as if half of Gate Union's military fleet was here at the confluence right now. Putting Lady Lyan in among them would have the same result as a horned rickenback jumping into a lynx sett. The lynx would have dismembered the rickenback before the foolish creature had even realized it had jumped into danger.

Although one never knew with Lady Lyan. She could do
some gutsy stuff. Maybe this was her way of kick-starting a war. Maybe Gate Union should be worrying.

He thought about the news vids he'd watched over the past two weeks. At least he still watched the vids. Some of the linesmen were so focused on the confluence, they even forgot to do that. “Isn't she getting married?”

To businessman Sattur Dow, if the media were correct. Even on the news, Dow had looked sour. If Rossi had been marrying Lady Lyan, he'd be looking much happier than that. Lady Lyan now, she could look gloomy. The man was twice her age, and he'd already buried three wives.

Funny that he always buried them, never separated.

If he'd been Lyan, Rossi would have been running very fast the other way.

Naidan dismissed those rumors with a flick of her hand. “Lady Lyan will get married when Lady Lyan wants to get married. Not when her father tells her to. But it is a problem because there are representatives from every Alliance world coming to her wedding. And if she comes here, they'll come, too.”

So was she getting married or not? Emperor Yu arranged marriages for his children—both legitimate and illegitimate—for political expediency. It was hard to imagine what political benefit he could gain by marrying his oldest daughter off to a fellow Lancastrian, no matter how rich that Lancastrian was.