Spear of Light (14 page)

He squeezed her paper-dry hand. “I'll be back soon.”

She managed a thin smile of thanks.

He took Cricket. No one else on the entire station had a pet of any kind. Thus, Gerry knew he was coming long before he got there. She opened the door and waved him and Cricket in.

The dispatch room was comfortable, with chairs and couches and a small kitchen and smaller privy. The room had four workspaces, even though neither the station nor the dispatch function had needed that much staffing for decades. The colors were all purples and reds and golds, hues designed to keep people awake and alert.

Screens filled three walls. One showed a crowd of people putting out a fire in Manna Springs, the smoke a dark brown smudge against a blue sky. Another showed empty streets in another part of town, and a third was centered on the spaceport and the gleaming Wall behind it.

He stared at the Wall. It looked taller already.

Gerry looked half asleep even though it was only early evening. Her muddy-blond curls were limper than he'd ever seen them, and her pale skin paler. Even her green-gold eyes seemed drained of color, adding to his general impression that she had somehow shrunk. “Are you okay?”

“No one's come to relieve me for twenty-four hours.” She smiled. “I could use some sleep.”

“I can stay for an hour. At least keep you company.”

“Thank you.” She was already drinking a cup of stim, and she went to her hotpot and poured him half of a cup. Probably all she had.

“Thanks. Tell me what happened?”

“The idiots burned down part of Manna Springs. Two hotels, six houses, and everything of Manny's. The house and the gardens and all of it.”

The loss stunned him.

She panned around the compound on one of the screens, showing him the stark truth of it. His chest tightened. The garden had been decades in the making, and he and Manny had built Cricket's shed by hand. Ash and rubble, now. “Was anyone hurt?”

She waved her hands at a written list on yet another wall screen, which was full of notes and pictures displayed in a semi-organized fashion by time. “One of the protestors twisted an ankle. A mile south of town, there was a fight that resulted in a concussion and a broken finger. There are twenty-one missing persons reports, but most of them probably just ran off, trying to get away from the fighting.” She looked over at him with the even eyes of a dispatcher. “Three people are reported dead. Two townspeople and a loader at the spaceport.”

“You know Manny got away?”

She blinked at him. “He's in Hope. It's a refuge.”

“I thought it was for people who want to be Next.”

“Apparently the Next protect anyone there.”

He leaned back in his seat. Her story and Yi's matched. “Who's in charge of the city?”

She shrugged. “Some dolts from the farms.”

“Hey!” he bristled.

“Sorry. Oh, and the Port has extended Martial Law. They've conscripted every ranger they can.”

That snapped him alert. “Was that a blanket order? Or just related to the rangers who went to town?”

She immediately understood the implications. “I don't know. Jean Paul is caught up in it. He got tapped as soon as he and Nona got there.”

“Do you know where Nona is?”

She shook her head. A yawn escaped her.

Poor kid. Here she was, looking out for everyone else and no one was doing the same for her. “Can I get you a nighttime breakfast?”

She smiled with real gratitude. “Sure.”

He used the common mess to create a makeshift meal for Cricket. While the tongat ate, he washed up some fresh fruit and made Gerry toast with a protein spread on it. When he got back to the dispatch room with the plate of food, she was sound asleep on the couch, snoring softly. He stared at her for a long time, contemplating waking her up. But there was no room in the skimmer, and she wouldn't leave her post anyway. She'd been working dispatch at Wilding Station for at least forty years, and it was her comfortable place, her competent place.

He put a cover over her breakfast to keep it for her and reset the screen that was showing the Wall to a blank notepad and typed a note out for her. “We're going to Hope. You're alone, and no one will relieve you. Take every other shift off. Please.”

He left the food and took Cricket for a short walk, moving quickly to give her a chance to stretch her legs. She hadn't been able to move fast or far for quite a while, and he didn't want the muscles in her legs to weaken.

Twice, he got Cricket to a big enough clear space that she was willing to lope ahead of him and back in big, testing circles. Seeing her run lifted his spirits in spite of the loss of what amounted to his second home. Even on three legs, Cricket was fast. When she started panting for water, he whistled her in and scratched her rump. “That's great girl. Shall we?”

He hadn't been gone an hour, but to his surprise the repairbot had scuttled off into a corner and shut down. Amfi had fallen asleep. Yi was nowhere to be seen. Jason's foot looked fine, and Losianna was perched on the arm of his chair, talking to him in low flirtatious tones. Charlie was pretty sure he heard reciprocating notes in Jason's voice. He chewed on his lower lip, wondering if he should let it bother him.

He'd seen Jason and Yi naked numerous times. They didn't have any male body parts whatsoever. Losianna might be in for an unpleasant shock at some point. “Come on,” he said to her. “Let's wake everyone up and go.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

NONA

Nona sat at a gleaming metal table in the crowded patio just outside of Hope's Despair watching waitbots wander between tables with trays full of drinks. Hope looked better to her now that she'd showered, slept, and eaten. Even her clothes were new; she'd found a shop that printed her up a pair of blue pants and a light gray shirt, both soft and pliable and made to her measurements.

She sipped at a sweet green drink Manny had bought her before he went in to lie down for an hour before dinner. It was ever-so-slightly laced with alcohol, which made it feel like a fitting tool to help her contemplate the conclusion she'd come to after her last conversation with him.

It pleased her that he expected so much competence from her.

Demanded might be a better word.

It would be hard to do what he suggested.

Lym seemed like the Deep: a highly capable civilization until you scratched at her with claws of fear. Then she fragmented into myriad dangers, many of them not very well thought out. People were fighting to get here, and the ones who succeeded were happy and frightened at once. It was very human to want to be right in the middle of the action, until you were.

The locals weren't any smarter. Manny could have run Manna Springs better than whoever had burned him out of home and garden. This had been a revolution of reaction and fear, not one with a plan of any kind.

The first paroxysm of rebellion had been the same on the Deep, except it had failed there.

Were people were fighting each other because they couldn't fight the Next?

And then there was Hope. Almost all of the beings around her were human, although there were a handful of soulbots like Yi and Jason. She spotted them easily; they were too beautiful.

Most people in Hope had come in from the stations and the cargo and merchant ships of the Glittering. In general, they were some of the strangest denizens of the Deep and beyond, people already willing to push the laws that defined humanity. Body art, colored skin, elongated limbs, robotic prosthesis. Exaggerated costuming such as strange glasses, metal clothing, working display screens painted on the backs of hands. It looked like someone had gone through the entire vast Glittering and plucked free the humans least willing to be human.

The energy of the town reminded her of a gambling bubble, everyone desperate to hit a jackpot but not sure what to do with sudden riches if they got them. It was early evening at best, but the tables around her were packed with people drinking more toxic stuff than the pleasantry she was sipping her way through.

Someone touched her shoulder. She turned to see Manny, back after less than the hour he'd told her he was going to take. “Charlie's here,” he whispered.

She finished off the drink, feeling lighter than the bit of alcohol it contained could possibly have accounted for, and hurried after him.

She spotted a small crowd in a corner of the spacious lobby of the Eternal Hope, the hotel next to the Hope's Despair. Nona scanned the faces; everyone from Ice Fall Valley seemed to be there except Jean Paul, who Manny had suggested might be trapped at the spaceport. Even, she noted with a smile, Cricket.

The tongat sat stoically next to Charlie until Nona was a meter away and then stood and bumped into her gently, demanding a touch. Only after she got it did she let Nona in close to Charlie, who looked like a rumpled and worn version of the man Nona had met the day before. He wore the same clothes, and he smelled like he needed sleep. She grabbed his hands, wishing she could fling her arms around him. “I'm so glad to see you. I was worried.”

He touched her cheek near the jewel, the tip of his finger rough. “I worried about you, too.”

Manny asked, “Hungry?”

For a moment, she thought he had made a mistake, but then here in Hope it wouldn't be awkward to show up at a restaurant with the soulbots. It must happen all the time. Sure enough, they found a nearby cafe where the waitress had a harder time with the tongat than with Yi and Jason. She gamely found an outside table that Cricket could lounge under, and wagged her finger at Charlie. “Don't let her bite me.”

He smiled a tired promise. “I won't.”

“Or anyone else.” She took their order quickly and from a bit of a distance.

Nona sat next to Charlie and watched his face grow angry and still as he heard how Manny had been pulled from his house after it was set on fire. A full-blown Jhailing Jim Next had come for him. They'd been shot at as they escaped.

Nona shuddered. It was easy to understand why this would make the people who had started the protests and eventual revolution unlikely to trust Manny again.

Manny pointed out the same conclusion. Charlie asked, “But wouldn't you be dead if the Jhailing hadn't saved you?”

“Of course. But that doesn't change the fact that the damned thing might as well have branded me.”

The anger on Charlie's face faded to pain as he told them about Kyle, and about shooting his friend in the foot. Manny looked fascinated and horrified.

As much to distract as inform them, Nona told her own story about Amica and the children, and about the Next who carried her to the gates of Hope but hadn't been let in.

Yi, who had stayed quiet up until then, spoke slowly, almost carefully. “I think they could come in, but they don't. They only send people like us.”

People like us. She smiled. “I suspect you're right.” Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Losianna holding Jason's hand and felt a brief but deep sense of vertigo. “We should go clean up.”

Manny stood up. “I arranged three more rooms right after I got here. Nona is in one. How do you want to split the other two? Soulbot and human?”

Amfi immediately said, “Yes,” which earned a quick glare from Losianna. That settled, they crossed the busy street back to the hotel.

As soon as Nona got Charlie into her room, she took his face in her hands, running her fingers along his cheekbones. “I'm so sorry about Kyle.”

“He'll be okay.”

Regardless of his words, she sensed the doubt clinging to him. She whispered, “This is the first moment we've been alone since I landed.”

“I know.” He hesitated, his eyes on her face. “The day didn't go like I planned.”

She laughed, and he laughed, and the mood between them lightened.

She sat beside him, grateful for the chance to relax as they filled in more details from their time away. He raised an eyebrow when she explained what it meant for her to be chosen as the Voice, to be a spokesperson for thousands of people on the Diamond Deep in a dark hour.

“You really helped make the decision about the Next? For the whole station?”

She laughed, glad to be distant from the experience. “It scared me.”

“But you don't regret it?”

“Of course not.”

He told her how Amfi had drawn him into negotiations.

He must have hated that. She reached over and twisted her pinky through his. “How did Manny react?”

“He was pissed off.”

“But did you have a choice?”

“I didn't think so.” He smiled wistfully. “But I'll never know, will I?”

“No.” She squeezed his hand. “I bet you want a shower.”

“I do.”

She remembered a few painfully awkward moments on the ships they'd shared passage on and decided to avoid them entirely by following him into the shower and scrubbing his back. Instead of dressing, he lay naked on the bed. She turned him on his stomach and rubbed lotion into his back. His muscles were like small hills, tight and difficult to work the knots out of. She ran her fingers along two deep scars. “How did you get these?”

“Wrecked a skimmer chasing a poacher.”

“How long ago?”

“Twenty years. I used to think poachers were the worst thing imaginable.”

He didn't have to say that a worse thing had come. She used her thumbs to press hard on the long muscles beside his spine.

He rolled over, his hands big and warm. Lying beside her, he traced the outlines of her limbs with his palm and fingers, trailing heat on her skin and bringing her heartbeat up loud enough that it thrummed in her ears.

It felt like it had on the ship the one and only time they'd allowed themselves this before, as if she had been starved for him for all of her life and he would never be able to touch her enough to fill her.

“Slow down,” she whispered.