Under Cover of Darkness (29 page)

“We are like mortals,” the woman says. “Yet unlike them. We are more like you. Beings who have transcended death by invitation of the Weavers.”

“Will you work for us?” the leader asks. “Help us keep the tapestry of history woven as it is supposed to be?”

“I want . . . I want to see you first,” I say.

Suddenly, they appear before me. Two men and a woman. I recognize their faces instantly. In my world, each was famous in their own way.

“What do you say?” the woman asks. She is strikingly beautiful, with blonde hair and wide hips and lips the color of cherries. Long ago, she was an actress.

“Will you join us?” the man says. He is tall, with a Boston accent. He was in politics before he was killed in Dallas.

The leader reaches out a hand and I take it. He is overweight, with a piercing gaze and a direct voice. He, too, had been in politics. In Britain, during World War Two. “Please,” he says. “There is much still to be done. There always will be.”

I look at them and ask, “Are there other Weavers? Others like you?”

“Yes,” the woman says. “There are many of us, though not all are as notable as we are.”

I try not to stare, try not to feel anything, to focus on the import of this decision. It is a choice of death or undeath, a type of living that I have never before imagined or experienced.

“Damon Graves,” the leader says, “time is passing outside the nexus sphere. We would have your answer, sir. Will you join us?”

I speak one word. “Yes.”

They all smile and the nexus sphere changes colors. Now it is a rainbow and there is not one doorway, but hundreds.

“You have made, I think, a good choice,” the leader says. He gestures at the doors. “Where did you want to go next?”

 

—for Monica, first time, last time and
every
time

Janny Wurts

 

 

T
HE BIRTH NAME she used to swear in as a WorldFleet recruit was Susan Amanda MacTavish. She appeared to be no one remarkable, then. Just another stick-figure teen with dishwater-blonde hair, fidgeting in line with the gangling mob of predominantly machismo applicants. Neatly dressed, her taut posture reflecting her grounder origins, she accepted the scan-link to verify honesty. Her monitored bio-signs showed routine anxiety. Nothing to flag the notice of oversight, as she filled out the induction forms with her stylishly fussy script.

The surgical mind unveiled by her psych tests brought a specialist's assignment to Cultural Liaison. There, her alert manner and linguistic fluency drew the acquisitive notice of covert intelligence. The burning ambition that insisted on making a difference brought Private S. MacTavish a promotion to junior officer within the first year. Now a skinny intellectual with a military buzz-cut, and her spacer's blacks creased like honed knives, she blazed through her mid-twenties in a meteoric rise of upwardly mobile determination. When she cracked the ranks of the higher brass, everyone from WorldFleet's admirals on down thought they knew her, inside and out. Their probes had her vetted for classified status. The exhaustive dossier on her private life neatly filled in her career profile of reports and statistics.

Yet the name under which she committed high treason was Jessian, without any surname or title.

The morning that upended the straight course of her fate also started without undue incident. Regulations allotted all WorldFleet officers a brief recreational leave between postings. As S. MacTavish, she leaned toward lazy. That meant waking up in the sheets of a pleasure house, warmed into a daze from the athletic attentions of her past night's partner. That gorgeous, male creature was nowhere in sight, which suited her loner's preference. She rolled over, content. The breeze through the window smelled of warm sea and jungle, not the gritty industrial taint of the orbital station left behind with her last assignment.

For the moment, spun free of her dual identity, she was a vigorous young woman with an appetite for luxury, who rang for a sumptuous breakfast. Food raised under sunlight, rooted in dirt, and not synthesized inside a shipboard gel tank, or processed from municipal waste matter. She stretched, her mouth watering in anticipation.

Soon enough, the house matron herself bustled in, bearing a laden tray. She seemed the usual, grandmotherly woman, whose smile was tailored for comfort; but not today.

Crisp, without sentiment, this madam said, “Jessian.”

Breath froze. MacTavish's heart skipped a beat, before racing. Fear and discipline warred, while she held herself watchfully still. By one secret name, awarded at oath-swearing, all sister-initiates were summoned to serve.

“You're well rested?” The house madam prattled on without pause as she placed her steaming burden on the side table. “Good. You'll need your mind sharp. WorldFleet orders will shortly dispatch you to Scathac. You'll find other instructions sent from the order tucked inside of your napkin.” Hands clasped, something more than professionally reticent, the old woman finished off, shaken. “You're sent to salvage a tense situation. The first sister given this mission has failed. Our race against time is now critical.”

The young officer kicked herself clear of the coverlet and snatched up the dressing robe hung by the bed. Stunned by the shocking break from strict form, she blurted, “Don't tell me our worst fear has happened?”

The old woman clamped her jaw with reproof. But she answered. “Yes.”

Ugly news was given no instant to settle.

“Enjoy breakfast, sweetheart. Then be on your way. Your tab's been squared as a gift from a relative, and your officer's dispatch is already packeted from WorldFleet hub's relay. You'll be on active duty inside an hour. Even your high security clearance won't give that the balance of power is broken.”

No more dared be said. The senior initiate bowed herself out, reverted to matronly character.

As Jessian, she dressed, unnerved as though hit by an ice-water dousing. Already, the horrific nightmare began. Brilliant, irascible Calum Quaide Kincaid had made no idle threat, when his private research team had been bullied by lies, and then commandeered under mandate. Before letting their break-through concepts become the snatched prize of corrupted politics, the scientist sold out. Tossed his lifework, and that of his six genius colleagues to the volatile, underdog fringes. Applied as a weapon, their explosive new leap in development would swiftly upset impossible odds. Rip apart the blood-sucking, stalemated war that had raged for decades between PanTac Trade, and two rival empires of conglomerate governments.

Shattered by dread, Jessian crossed the quaint floor tiles and snatched on her discarded clothing. The wafted fragrance of the rich food hit raw terror, and unsettled her stomach. She sat, fingers shoved through her stubble of hair, while anxiety trampled her, roughshod.
Whole worlds would see ruin
. The covenant of compassion that founded her order must intervene
now
, before entire civilizations went down in fury and flames.

“Save us all from ourselves!” Trembling, Jessian unfolded the napkin. She accessed the message embedded on flash-sheet: time and location to make her rendezvous with the sister-initiate named as her contact. She would receive no further instructions until after her drop onto Scathac.

She went, wide awake to the personal danger imposed on her WorldFleet persona; and idealistically, fatally blind to the impact her choices might stamp on the future.

 

Scathac was a mottled mudball from orbit, gleaming with pockets of bitter water, clouded to opal by alkali tailings. Groundside, the planet was a brutalized wasteland. Worse than back country primitive, barely more than a dusty supply depot upkept to service the enclaves of miners that canyoned its surface.

At noon, local time, the dirt streets were empty. As Cultural Branch Officer Susan MacTavish, she strode through the huddle of prefab buildings, coated and drab under powdery dust, and snagged hoary with air-feeding lichens. The verges were scattered with thorny plants. Also rustling fauna with venomous barbs, scaled hides, and murderous teeth.

Hands protectively gloved, she snapped back her helmet's dark-tinted faceplate and squinted through UV- laced glare. The view redefined the concept for desolate: WorldFleet was raping this world for its minerals, essential for the outer skin shielding that armored all star-faring ships. The irony scalded: that each gaping scar on this savaged landscape was covetously defended as a military asset.

Noon sun drove the base residents inside. Nothing moved in the bleak, punch-cut shadows. Past the slab-sided warehouses, beyond gravel flats sculpted to ridges, the cones of a broken, volcanic range notched the heat shimmers at the horizon. Tribal folk lived there, a feat of stark resilience that defied imagination. Stymied reason, in fact, since WorldFleet brass now pitched their brightest young talent to crack their crazed pocket of local resistance. Scathac's pack of primitives actually thought they could beat a PanTac mandate of enforced eviction.

“Sane people don't commit cultural suicide!” the special-ops officer blurted aloud.
What fanatical sect would trade their lives for a forsaken, mass grave in this place?

“Believe it, Jessian,” a cautious, unaccented voice answered her explosive thought. The sisterhood contact she waited to meet emerged out of shadow, wearing a reflective jumpsuit and a grimed head cloth, apparently native. “Never underestimate the tenacity of the human spirit.”

“I don't, usually.” MacTavish, now Jessian, regarded her sister-initiate with a dissectingly measuring stare. “You're Adrianna?” Given a nod, she resumed with dry venom, “Even on paper, this bunch seems extreme.”

“Worse, actually.” The contact's anxious glance flicked aside. “I learned the hard way. If you can't find the opening to mend my mistakes, these people will die without leaving a trace.”

Jessian stiffened. “Our order would spare them?”

“That's your mission, my dear. Enjoy the party.” Before hearing more questions, the sister-initiate gestured ahead. “I'll give you the gist at the Base Port's bar. That way.”

Disturbed beyond
thought
that her secretive sisterhood dared to work her in parallel with WorldFleet's assigned objective, Jessian strove to sound matter-of-fact. “These oddballs refuse to relocate again. Why? They've backed down from morbid conflict, before.” In fact, their erratic history had colonized other worlds, prior to this one. Choice habitats, worthy of taking a stand; not the bare, poisoned vista PanTac's combined governments had made of this scorched patch of hell.

“They've balked at the formality of refugee processing, then skirmished when WorldFleet stepped in and tried armed coercion. There were casualties. Troops hit bang in the eye with damned darts, and nary a tribal hunter in sight. No one died. But the woundings were ugly enough to force a stand down.” The sisterhood contact glanced sideward, evasive. “A reactionary deadlock, except that appearances don't pierce the surface. You've read what's on file?”

“The whole lunatic theme.” A matrilineal band of rugged individualists had chosen this isolate waste to save their culture from sweeping conformity. Another whacked breed of zealot, that decried mechanized technology as boogeyman. Coughing the taint of buffeting, scorched air, clogged with the harsh grit of minerals, Jessian conceded, “One has to admire these settlers for their bloody-minded persistence.” For generations, the killer climate had been deterrent enough to preserve their wonked ethnic lifestyle. Until WorldFleet's imposed regime of martial law, and wartime demands overran their pioneer rights. The strategic value of Scathac's rare ores dumped their world on the hot list of enemy targets.

“I told them straight out that their lives were at risk!” More than defensive, the sister-initiate qualified, “They won't understand. Refuse to listen. Their entrenched beliefs have no place for the concept their home grounds are no longer safe.”

“
‘Ah'ket tens vhehico?' ”
Jessian questioned, ice-water cool.

A spat oath affirmed the astute guess drawn from hours of linguistic homework. “That's just what their wizened spokesman declared!” Arms crossed as though chilled, the sister-initiate ran on with the concept's translation, “ ‘This place is one Word, and all other Words, living, contain the whole Arc of Eternity.' ”

“Well, that may have been the going truth yesterday,” Jessian snapped under her breath. She dared not unveil the hideous truth: that overnight, a single, leaping advance outstripped Scathac's costly defense grids. Kincaid's weapon would be aimed here first, one blow to cripple PanTac's monopoly on the light-speed class hulls that made starships. Before the pause lagged, she masked driving worry. “I should have expected the order's involvement.” Their mission protected minority cultures, and sheltered whole gaggles of at-risk children. “It's the unwarranted ferocity of
WorldFleet's
brass, scrambling, that's got me pushed to the edge.”

“You're officially dispatched to shepherd these ornery tribefolk to safety?
As well?”

Jessian's scowl gave answer enough. To task her here—a specialist sent in on classified priority to co-opt an obscure batch of nomads—hoisted a glaring red flag: