A Princess of the Aerie (24 page)

Jak shuddered. “You know, there are people who say they could never bear the regimented society of the Hive, and that the
idea of being a wasp makes them ill, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so homesick.”

“Just remember that at least half the metal the Hive is made out of came from here. And now you know how they get it. I’m
glad you all live better there—really I am—it wouldn’t help us for you to be poor. But don’t think this place has nothing
to do with you.”

Dujuv was staring blankly, as if looking for something to say, and finally he just choked up and let tears run down his face.
Kyffimna looked at him in amazement.

“Since you had heard that panths were supposed to be dumb,” Jak said, sarcastically, throwing an arm protectively around his
old tove, “didn’t you hear that they’re also supposed to be unnaturally sensitive? It goes with their big hearts and deep
loyalty.” He turned to comfort his friend, putting Dujuv’s face against his neck, as he had learned to do when they were young
teenagers and a viv or a movie got to his friend.

“I’d never heard that,” Kyffimna said, “but … well, there are lots of panths here. You’ll see plenty. And because they’re
valuable for the kind of work we do, the banks have a real tradition of pushing them into peonage if at all possible. It’s
the same with simis and kobolds and just about any other breed that does well here. A lot of women get out of peonage by agreeing
to carry three or four fertilized panth ova to term; since they’re born while their mother is a peon, they are automatically
peons too; she goes free and they’re peons till middle age or so. But … no, nobody ever told me panths were sensitive. Toktru,
mostly people just tell them what to do.”

Jak felt Dujuv’s hot tears dribbling into his collar, and held his sobbing friend’s shoulders. The vault where they were standing
was mostly empty except for some tents made up of old wrapping plastic. It was lit by a dozen wavering fuel-cell lamps that
were clearly at the end of their lifetimes and had just been left here, on top of piles of similar dead lights. A group of
kobolds ran through the vault, carrying boxes, and the one unmodified human woman with them was the only one wearing a purse;
Jak specked what that must mean. “You know, I really think they’ve sent us to hell.”

“That’s right,” Kyffimna said. “To meet the newest, meanest devil here.”

On airless Mercury, a rocket is just a nozzle, below a spherical thermos tank full of very high-pressure liquid sodium, below
a wide disk-shaped cab, all held together with a minimum of struts and girders. Vented to vacuum, hot high-pressure sodium
makes a fine propellant, and since sodium is so common and abundant in the surface regolith of Mercury, and apt to clog and
contaminate separator plates, it is given away free just to get rid of it. The rocket stays plugged into the electrical mains
to keep the sodium hot until the moment of launch; it takes off in one burst of sodium and lands tail-down in another. The
sodium in the tank stays more than hot enough, for a ballistic flight to the antipodes takes only fourteen minutes.

In this case, the flight was less than two hundred kilometers, and the time was less than a minute; the little ship kicked
hard once, they were weightless for a short period, and then it kicked hard again and they touched down. The landing area
was just a broad, flat space within Hamner, a ten-kilometer-across crater where the main krilj of the Eldothaler Quacco had
been for seventy years.

A strange-looking tractor rolled up to the rocket, towing a sodium hose and a power lead. On top of it was a small passenger
cab in the middle of a large, bare gridded platform, about three meters off the ground. Underneath, five trusses formed a
pentacle of long arms, each ending in two big wheels of open steel mesh. “Pop brought the ten-wheeler,” Kyffimna said. “We
can all ride inside.”

The little rocket didn’t have an airlock or an elevator, just an air capture to depressurize the cabin, a door that opened,
and a permanently mounted ladder and fireman’s pole; Jak and Shadow opted for the ladder, Kyffimna and Dujuv for the pole,
and they dropped the fifteen meters onto the mirror-bright smear of freshly frozen sodium. Kyffimna trotted up to the ten-wheeler,
and they followed. The big woman reached over her head to grip one of the big steel mesh tires, and climbed up it to the truss,
then on top of the upper member of the truss and across the platform to wait by the cabin.

Around them, the crater walls loomed high and steep. Frozen falls, curtains, and spouts showed where waste magma had been
dumped.

The tops of the crater walls formed a jagged rip in the black sky; with sun glinting from his helmet, Jak could not see the
stars, but presumably at night, or from deep shadow, they would be as numerous as they were from the dark side of a spaceship.
Long low dust piles lay at the feet of the crater walls.

Kyffimna’s father dragged the sodium hose over to the rocket and plugged it in, then hooked in the power lead.

In less than a minute the light over the rocket’s sodium connection glowed green. He unhooked the sodium hose and dropped
it; it went dragging back toward its unseen origin, bouncing and slapping over the dusty, pitted surface. He left the power
lead connected and tucked the cable so that it ran under the nozzle; whenever the rocket got a passenger or a call and took
off again, it would signal the station to shut off the power, then burn away the cable as it took off.

Then he climbed up the wheel and the long arm of the ten-wheeler and joined the group, gesturing for them to follow him into
the cabin; the door irised closed behind them, and a moment later the green pressure-okay came on. He removed his helmet and
clipped it to his shoulder strap; everyone else followed suit.

Jak thought the man must be close to three hundred. His hair had probably once been whitish-blonde like Kyffimna’s, but now
it was a messy mix of yellow, white, and gray; his watery eyes were ice-in-gin blue, his skin streaked with red patches and
little exploded veins, and the imperfect symmetry of his strong-featured face suggested that he had been the practice partner
for either a not-quite-proficient plastic surgeon or an all-too-proficient boxer.

“My name is Durol Eldothaler, and if you don’t mind, our order of precedence is such that I call everyone else by first name,
which means you are Shadow, and one of you is Jak—”

“That’s me.”

“So you are Dujuv.”

“Right, or Duj, informally and with friends.”

Durol Eldothaler nodded. “You can call me Chief, Boss, or Eldothaler-san. Clear?”

They all nodded.

“I noticed you looking at MLB’s main base, there.” He nodded toward the central pinnacle. It looked like the tower of the
evil enchanter in a mediocre fantasy viv. Impact craters form with a splash, more like a pebble thrown into a bathtub than
a rock against a wall, for at the speeds and energies involved, the distinction between liquid and solid is shadowy. As the
spherical spreading wave in the ground encounters resistance, either at its outer edges or far below, a portion of the energy
is reflected back, where it sometimes erupts onto the surface, hurling rock and soil upward in a heap. Just as a crater wall
is a frozen wave in the surface, so a central pinnacle is a frozen backsplash. Old Eldothaler said, “It’s not much of a pinnacle—a
crater this small hardly ever even has one—but enough to make a fortress, or a prison watchtower, eh? Anyway, that’s the problem
to be coped with.”

“Pop,” Kyffimna said, “I guess I better tell you before we have to tell all the others. These three are all that’s coming.
Either all my messages never got through (which I don’t believe for one second) or more likely what’s going on is that Greenworld
Intelligence is not really intending to help, but they sent us three agents that they’d just as soon be rid of—no fault of
the agents, nothing wrong with them, I don’t think.”

“Thank you,” Shadow said, with immense dignity.

“So we have to break the news to the others,” Durol said, rubbing his face with his hand. “Well, this is a blow. I don’t suppose
any of you is a military genius, a trained saboteur, or a commando?”

“Well,” Jak said, “Dujuv and I are agents in training, and Shadow is a warrior, so we’re not helpless. But no, we aren’t like
the teams-of-heroes they send into the situation in the intrigue-and-adventure stories. For your sake, I wish we were.”

“So do I. But you’re who we have, so we’ll have to make the best of you, and ideally find a way to like you while we’re doing
it. I don’t imagine that will be too hard, really.”

The ten-wheeler jounced along in the low gravity. Kyffimna brought them up to big steel doors set in the side of a steep cliff
in the inside of the crater wall. They passed into the dark shadow and Jak had just an instant’s vision of stars overhead
before the big doors dilated in front of them, and they rolled through into the krilj’s airlock. Bright lights came on overhead,
the pressure light turned green, and a small mob of Mercurials—old and young, kobolds and simis among them—rushed toward the
ten-wheeler, all chattering excitedly. “This is not going to be my favorite speech of all the ones I ever give, I just know
it’s not,” Durol muttered, as the cabin door dilated.

T
hat went better than I was dreading,” Jak said, quietly, to Dujuv, as they scrubbed for dinner, sharing the sink in the little
chamber they had been assigned with Shadow. Kyffimna had explained to them that all bathrooms here were arranged to pressurize
instantly as needed, but in any other room they would be expected to wear their pressure suits at all times with the helmet
always to hand, “especially when you sleep.”

“I don’t know, Jak, yeah, they accepted it coming from him, thank Nakasen and every Principle that he had that much authority
and respect, but I don’t think they’re happy at all. And you’re singing-on right, this place is hell. How come in gen school
all they ever did was show us pictures of miners standing around machinery, and at the PSA all they do is talk about making
sure that Mercury never ends up controlled by any nation unless of course someday the Hive is in a position to grab it?”

Jak shrugged. “That’s what it’s convenient for us to know. Same reason anybody lies or shades the truth, I guess.”

“Yeah, but … well, how come I never knew there was a place like this? Did you hear what that little kid asked his mother when
we passed in the hall?”

“Yeah, I did.”

A small boy, maybe seven or so, had audibly asked his mother if Dujuv was Jak’s peon.

“You
dak
that? Most panths they’ve ever seen are peons. And these people
despise
peons. No matter how somebody ends up as a peon, they assume it’s a character flaw or something. It’s like something out
of the industrial half of the Middle Ages, back when they thought that regional skin color variations meant things. I’m starting
to realize something—it’s not all that different with breeds.”

Jak could think of nothing else to say, so he changed the subject. “I’m about as clean as I’m getting without a shower. How
are you doing?”

“I’m there. Let’s dress.”

In the dining room, all of the children, from about the age of fourteen down, were piled on Shadow, sitting on his lap, staring
a few inches from his face, and spraying questions at him. Under the pile of children, Shadow seemed to be enjoying it.

They asked amazingly rude questions, ones that Jak would normally have expected to see make a Rubahy’s rage spines spring
out, but Shadow on the Frost mostly made the bubbling noise, explained that that was a laugh, and answered. Yes, he could
feel it if they pulled a feather, so please not to do that. No, he didn’t really look much like a terrier dog and he didn’t
know why people called Rubahy that. Yes, he had a very large family, and he didn’t always get along with all of them, but
some of them were very nice and they were all family. (He glanced up at Jak and Dujuv and bubbled after that one.) No, his
teeth were very sharp and scary, but he had never used them to bite a human, and he had no idea what we tasted like.

“I hope you will
never
see my rage spines,” he said to one little girl. “I know what they show in the movies, but we don’t have them permanently
sticking out of our backs—how would we ever sit in a chair, eh? And we don’t really control them. When we’re angry and need
to fight, they just pop out. And I don’t like being angry or frightened, any more than you do.”

“You never smile.”

“There are no muscles in my face; I can’t move it.”

“And you whistle when you talk.”

“That’s because my voice box is shaped like one of your old-fashioned slot-flutes. Yours is shaped more like the noisemaker
in one of your whoopee cushions, which is why it buzzes.”

One of the older boys laughed and said, “When we talk, do we sound like we’re farting, to you?”

Shadow made the bubbling noise so hard and loud that it sounded like the metallic bucket might shatter, a weird burst of blooping
and clanking that seemed to delight the children.

“And are Rubahy ticklish?” one little boy asked.

It turned out they were. After a while, Jak and Dujuv rescued Shadow, gently reminding the kids that though fun, their tove
was not a toy.

“I’d have thought, with the way your people emphasize courtesy,” Jak said, “that our kids would make you miserable or furious,
since it takes us a long time to learn manners.”

After catching his breath, Shadow said, “Oh, if they were adults I’d have eviscerated a dozen of them, but they’re
children,
Jak. Bright, funny, brave, and harmless—like kittens.”

Dinner was served, and just as Jak’s SSE text had warned was customary, they all got bowls from a common pot rather than individual
orders. It was a pleasant gooey mess of chunks of beefrat and vegetables in thick broth; Jak specked it to be “stew,” the
stuff they were always eating in fantasy vivs. Those elves knew what they were doing.