The Wind After Time: Book One of the Shadow Warrior Trilogy (23 page)

The buildings were low, no more than three stories at the highest. Their plas was anodized a thousand cheery colors, but not, Wolfe noted, sea-green.

He paused at the entrance to a small square. Across the way was a bar with an open terrace.

Emptiness … void … all things … nothing …

The three Chitet were looking at him. One frowned, searching her memory.

Emptiness … nothing …

Wolfe felt warmth from the Lumina in its pouch hidden behind his scrotum.

One Chitet turned to the frowning woman. “Shouldn’t we be hurrying? I think we’re late.”

The other’s frown vanished, and she checked her watch. “No,” she said. “We have more than a sufficiency.”

“My apologies. I misestimated. It is this strange ‘sky’ we are under.”

The three went on.

Breathe … breathe …

“I think,” Wolfe said softly, “someone besides myself may have outthought Mister Javits.”

He crossed the lane and went through the outside tables and into the bar.

There was one man inside, his head on a corner table, snoring loudly. The three women at the bar spotted Wolfe. The blondest and fattest got up and came toward him, chiseling a smile through her makeup.

“Afternoon, big man. Are you as dry as I am?”

“Drier,” Wolfe said. “What kind of beer do you have?”

She began a long recital. Wolfe stopped her after a few brands and chose one. She went to the bar, reached over it, touched a sensor. A few seconds later the hatch on the bar opened, and a glass with a precisely correct head on it appeared.

“I’m partial to champagne,” the woman said, trying to sound throaty.

“Who isn’t?” Wolfe agreed. “Buy what you really like. I’ll pay champagne prices.”

The woman chuckled. “I drink beer, too. But it’s perdition on my hips. Easy on, hard off.”

Paying no attention to her wisdom, she tapped the sensor and drank thirstily when the beer emerged.

“So you’re with Sitka?”

“How’d you guess?”

“There’s nothin’ out-system due till tomorrow, and gen’rally, this close to the port, we get ‘em first thing. How long you been loggin’?”

“Three weeks.”

The woman looked disappointed.

“Something wrong with that?”

“I shouldn’t say … but the longer you been topside, bein’ chased by lizards, the readier you are to do some serious carryin’ on.”

“And the more credits you have to do it with,” Wolfe suggested.

“That, too, honey. That, too.”

Wolfe took a drink of beer.

“Who were those three prune faces that came past?” he asked. “Hard to believe they’re in a place with Tworn Station’s reputation.”

“Hell if I know. They call themselves Chitet. Some kinda straitlaced bunch from back toward the Federation. Dunno if they’re a religion or what. There’s a whole cluster of ‘em down here. Along with their leader.

“I read somethin’ on the vid says they’re here investigatin’ the possibility of settin’ up their own dome. More gold to ‘em, but I can’t see what they’d spend their time doin’ down on sea bottom.

“ ‘Sides poundin’ their pud. They surely ain’t the sort interested in ballin’ the jack, man or woman. I could have more fun with a vibrator.

“Damn dull. How many of you come from topside?”

“No more’n twenty,” Wolfe said.

“Damn.” The woman made it into a two-syllable word. “That ain’t enough for a circle jerk, let alone any kinda party. Hope to hell the liner’s got some hard-chargin’ folks aboard.

“So what’s your pleasure, mister?” She smiled hopefully. Her breath wasn’t the freshest.

“Another beer … and could I use your vid? I haven’t been paying much attention to the world lately.”

The woman looked disappointed. “Should’ve guessed something like that.”

She brightened a little when Wolfe handed her a bill. She got him another beer and the slender plas block he’d asked for. He found a corner booth where he could see the door, sat down, and keyed the vid.

• • •

The man’s expression was calm, assured. He was bald, looked to be in his early fifties, and appeared to be no more than a successful businessman. Wolfe looked more closely at the thumbnail on the vid. There must have been some glare from the camera, he decided, that created the strange glitter in the man’s eyes.

He touched the sensor for
PRINT
instead of
SPEECH,
then the tellmemore.

Wolfe touched a sensor, and the screen cleared. He keyed
CALENDAR:

He hit
PAUSE
and reread the last entry carefully. He thought for a time, trying to decide if the trap was for him or for larger game.

Leaving his beer half-finished, he put the vid down, got up, and left the bar.

The heavy blonde watched him leave, a sad expression on her face. The man in the corner was still snoring.

• • •

Wolfe counted four Chitet around the main entrance to the prefab building that had been erected on the tarmac next to the ship and guessed there’d be more.

Breathe … breathe …

His soul divided.

Fire … burn low … burn quiet … embers only … ready to flare …

Nothingness … void … less than space … all matter is here … there is nothing … no particles, no sensation … the soul is vacant …

A knot of tourists came down the wide avenue leading to the docks, saw the color-flashing holobanner, and crossed to the entrance booth. Wolfe was unobtrusively among them.

He fed coins into the slot and entered.

• • •

An Al’ar in combat harness appeared in the darkness. Its mouth gaped and it spoke, but the words were not the real speech but instead a simulated garble. The purported translation hissed into Wolfe’s ears:

“You of the Federation … you have spent too long in your lazy ways … now we of the Al’ar have come to challenge you, to destroy you.”

Wolfe’s expression was blank.

• • •

“Little is known of the Al’ar ways or their culture. Only a few men and women learned their language, and even fewer were permitted to visit their worlds.

“Of those few, most were diplomats or traders, and unfortunately all too many of them were caught up and went to their deaths in the first days of the war.”

Figures ran across the screen. Wolfe lifted his hand until it was silhouetted. It was trembling slightly. He watched it as if it belonged to someone else.

• • •

“After the first surprise attack,” the narrator said calmly, as if the spinning, shredded Federation ships in the middle of the darkness did not exist, “and the total loss of four Federation battle fleets, humanity was put on notice that there could be but one victor and one loser in this war.

“So man girded his loins for the greatest battle that would ever be fought …”

• • •

There was a field of bodies.

“The Al’ar did not realize, or did not care, that these men and women were trying to surrender.

“But there was a worse fate than death. Some humans were captured by the Al’ar. No one knows what tortures they were subjected to, for only a few were rescued or managed to escape.”

The screen showed a slumped woman. Involuntarily, Joshua flinched. Twelve years before he had led the team that had rescued her and three others.

Breathe … breathe …

• • •

The red blotches on the starchart shrank and shrank.

“Little by little,” the narrator went on, “we drove them back and back, off the worlds they’d conquered, back from their outpost planets, and we attacked what the Al’ar called their capital worlds.

“The Federation came in for the death stroke. Huge fleets, thousands of ships, many millions of fighting men and women closed in for the final assault on the Al’ar sanctuaries.

“And then … then the Al’ar disappeared.

“No one knows where they went. The ships offworld exploded as one, as if they’d all had bombs aboard, fused to detonate at the same time.

“The handful of Al’ar we’d managed to capture simply disappeared. No prison camp sensor showed any sign of where they could have gone.

“Similarly, when reconnaissance teams were sent down onto the Al’ar capital worlds, they found nothing.

“There are tales that food was found on tables, that Al’ar machinery was running, that their weather control apparatus was in operation.

“These are all false. In fact, it was as if the Al’ar had decided to leave and, before their departure, had cleaned, shut everything down … and then simply vanished.

“Where did they go?

“Why did they go?

“There are no answers.

“The Al’ar are gone … and they took their secrets with them.”

The starchart vanished. There was blackness, then the lights came up. There were only a handful of people in the circular theater with Wolfe. One of them was a Chitet who looked at Wolfe but did not see him.

“You are invited to visit our museum behind this chamber,” the synthed voice said. “Also, on your way out, we welcome you to our gift shop and hope you will recommend our exhibition to your friends.”

“Not bloody likely,” one of the tourists who’d entered in front of Joshua grumbled. “Secrets of the Al’ar … by Mohamet, I thought we’d find out how they screwed or something.

“This is just like friggin’ school and history shit!”

His friends laughed, agreed, and went out.

• • •

Joshua lingered in the narrow corridors of what the voice had called a museum, paying little attention to the mostly false relics, the battle souvenirs, the holopics, which were as tacky as everything else in the show.

He
felt
something — he didn’t know what.

Not fire … not water … not void … not earth … not air …

His hands were curled, held slightly away from his body. He walked strangely, each foot sweeping in, almost touching the other, then out into a wide-legged stance.

There was something …

There was nothing …

He came to a passage, looked down it, took a step.

A wall fell away, and the Al’ar came at him, its grasping organ blurred in a death strike.

But Wolfe wasn’t there to accept the strike.

He ducked, stepped in, and stood, launching his own attack. But the Al’ar had stopped in midstrike and spun away.

Time found a stop.

Wolfe was the first to speak.

“Taen!”

The Al’ar’s head moved slightly. His hood was fully flared.

“You have ‘seen’ me, Shadow Warrior.”
The Al’ar changed to Terran. “And I recognize you, Joshua Wolfe.”

Neither relaxed.

“Have you come to kill me?”

“I was hired for that task … not knowing it was you I would find. But it is not a duty my body shall fulfill.”

The Al’ar slightly lowered his grasping organs. “I should have known that if you survived the war, you would be the one to find me.”

“How did you live?”
Wolfe asked.

“Better to ask why,” Taen said. “Although that is a question I do not know the answer to. Please speak Terran. For the moment I do not wish to be reminded of what is in the past.”

“Sentiment? From an Al’ar?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps that is why I was … left,” Taen said. “Perhaps I had become tainted by my interest in the life of groundworms. Perhaps I was deemed unworthy to make the Crossing. Or perhaps there is another meaning I have not yet discovered.”

“You know you’re in one hell of a trap,” Wolfe said. “And now I’m in it with you.”

“Those men who dress like
hanthglaw?”

“Yes. They call themselves Chitet.” Wolfe half smiled, remembering the Al’ar primitive creature who kept the colors of whatever he slid across.

“I first
felt
someone was on my trail some time ago,” Taen said. “When I
felt
you enter my realm, my exhibition, I thought you were the only hunter. But now I can
feel
the others out there.

“It is truly an excellent trap, well laid to take us both, here beneath the water, inside this dome. I fear we shall have to abandon this craft. Not that it matters. I have Federation monies to build a hundred more like it and know the location of many derelicts.

“But that is for the future, and their plan will not be set in motion for a time, so we may speak of the past and determine what actions must be taken next.

“It will take some cleverness for us to escape this snare of theirs. Unless you wish to reverse your intent and attempt to continue the task you were first set and grant me the death. I will warn you, I do not think you can accomplish it, even though your movements are far better than when last we exchanged blows in learning.”