Revolution's Shore (10 page)

“Thank you.” If Lily's tone was dry, her face hid it, and the Mule chose to ignore it. “But I can't just call you ‘the Mule.' You must have another name.”

“No. I was cast off the moment the nature of what I am was discovered.” Lily did not school her expression quickly enough, for the Mule's mane lifted slightly, in sad parody of a sta's glorious crest of rage. “Don't pity me!” it hissed. “How I despise your pity, all of you who are whole and blithe in wholeness.” It turned its back on Lily and repacked the entire contents of the duffel bag before it turned around again.

“Let's go,” said Lily quietly. They left, but she was bitterly aware of the soldiers' curious stares, of laughter behind hands, as she passed with her new companion. The Mule said nothing, showed no emotion, inured to such display.

They walked into chaos at level 1, the medical personnel and patients being ferried up in lots to the waiting transports. She found Kyosti at last beside the stasis couch that held Yehoshua, who was now without a right arm. White swathed his shoulder and chest. He was unconscious, but Kyosti spoke in a low voice to his cousin, Alsayid. Hawk's white medical jacket was speckled with the almost familiar colors of human suffering.

Lily waited, impatient, checking her wrist-com, until Kyosti finished and waved to a group of soldiers, who wheeled the couch out of the complex, Alsayid following. She watched as he glanced around the empty ward, as if he were looking for something, until his gaze stopped on her.

He smiled.

Glanced at the Mule beside her, and his eyes widened in surprise. The Mule made a strange, strangled
tsshs
with its tongue. Lily looked over to see it regarding Kyosti with a similar surprised, but intent, scrutiny. Abruptly, as if with common consent, they dropped their gazes and Kyosti walked smoothly over to them as if nothing had interrupted his smile at Lily.

He kissed her chastely on one cheek and turned to her companion. “How do you do?” he said urbanely. “You must be the Mule. I'm Hawk.”

The Mule acknowledged him with a little hiss of sta-ish laughter.

“We have to go,” said Lily. “I need to find out how we're leaving the system and when I'm meeting Jehane.”

“Callioux already told me,” said Kyosti. “They want me on the hospital ship, so we'll travel with them until the rendezvous point. I need to check the last ward before we go. Come with me?” He gestured toward an open door.

“Excuse us a moment,” Lily said to the Mule, and went with Kyosti. From the doorway of the ward, she watched him move from couch to couch, adjusting tubing at one bed, massaging a leg at another, shaking his head over the motionless form at a third. At the end of his tour, he spoke for a long time with the technologist supervising the twelve patients. Then he returned to Lily.

“We're leaving these. They're all guards and too badly hurt to live through a window. Two technologists to watch them. Central should send people in soon enough.”

Lily stared up at him. His face had an impassive, but intent, expression as he spoke, considered and at ease. Quite the same expression he had when he had shot dead the two guards on level 9.

“I don't understand you,” she whispered. “How can you kill people with one hand, and heal them with the other?”

He blinked. “How can I not?” he asked, not understanding the question.

“How can it be so easy for you to take life, and yet so important for you to save it?”

The passion of her question seemed to give him pause and, curiously, he glanced past her toward the patient, waiting figure of the Mule at the opposite side of the empty ward. “‘Roses are planted where thorns grow,'” he said, “‘And on the barren heath sing the honeybees.'”

“I don't understand you,” she repeated, her voice constrained now as if with weariness, but she turned and led them to the elevators and up to the shuttle where the others were waiting for them.

“I
SAID NO STRAYS,”
said Lily, looking first at Jenny and then at Rainbow, who had strapped herself in beside Paisley, evidently finding refuge in the fellow Ridani.

Jenny shrugged, punctuating the gesture with an ostentatious sigh, but did not answer.

“I reckoned my chances, all sides of ya pattern,” said Rainbow in a soft voice, not pleading, “and I reckoned I be best off with you, min Heredes, being if you'll have me.”

“Hoy. All right. I'm too tired to fight this out. But you're Jenny's—min Seria's charge. Understood?” A nod. “Jenny. She's your responsibility then.” Jenny, too, nodded, but a tiny smile, only half-mocking, broke the surface of her lips. “Good. Now I'm going to take a nap until we dock at
Hospital
. Unless one of you has another surprise?”

Given the tone of her voice, no one volunteered any.

She slept until they were slung into the vast cargo hold of the merchantman renamed
Hospital
, stayed awake long enough to be assigned a four-bunk cabin with Jenny, Lia, Gregori, and Bach, and went back to sleep.

If they passed through windows, she neither woke nor had strange enough dreams to account for it. When she did wake up, she found Kyosti asleep on the narrow bunk with her. Long intimacy had allowed him to find a way to fit in beside her without waking her, or even pushing her too close to the edge of the bunk. She shifted carefully, but he remained asleep. The cabin was empty, except for Bach. The robot floated unlit next to the ceiling. Lily lay quiet for a while on the thin foam pad and watched Hawk.

His breathing had a slow, regular pulse that reminded her abruptly of a Bajii Ransome aunt's astronomical studies: she was a crazy old woman, lodged in an orbiting science lab for so much of her life that visits to the closed vistas of Ransome House left her almost hysterical with claustrophobia, but she had once in her ramblings claimed to have discovered, or glimpsed for one all-too-brief hour, the pulse of the distant heart of the universe.

Then Hawk smiled and opened his eyes, breaking the illusion.

“You slept through two meals,” he said, “and unless you're quick you'll miss this one.”

She sat up. “I'm starving. Where are we?”

“Some godforsaken backwater with only a pygmie-manned Station orbiting a white dwarf.”

“The rendezvous point,” she guessed, and stood up to smooth down her clothing so that it did not look quite so slept in.

“Callioux left a message,” Kyosti went on, watching her slightest movement with unnerving thoroughness. “You're to rendezvous with the
Boukephalos
at oh-eight-oh, fleet time.”

“
Boukephalos
—that's Jehane's ship?”

Kyosti chuckled. “I wonder what he'll come up with next,” he murmured. “You're to go alone.”

“I expected that.” Lily considered Bach thoughtfully, whistled.
You will remain here and let no one but our people enter this cabin. You can control the lock?

Affirmative, patroness. I will voice code it to thy specifications.

“Good. Be very cautious, Bach. You're my—”

“Ace?” suggested Kyosti.

Bach responded with a rippling arpeggio.

Lily merely rubbed her face with her palms. “Hoy. Where's the washing cubicle?”

“Down the hall.”

She gave a last tug to her sleeves. “What time it is? And where's the mess? And everyone else?”

He swung off the low bunk and stood up, the light tips of his hair almost brushing the ceiling. “In the mess. I told them I'd get you there by oh-six-thirty.”

She checked her wrist-com and grinned. “Bless the Void. I have time for a shower. Meet me there.”

Jenny had assembled everyone at a long table in the far corner of the mess hall, isolated from the other diners by several empty tables. Lily had some trouble counting, however, as she came up to the table: it was almost full. Jenny sat with Gregori and Lia; on the other side of the table sat the brilliant Ridani contingent, Pinto, Paisley, and Rainbow, taking strength in numbers, with the Mule sitting stiffly beside Paisley. But there were two more—

“Finch! What are you doing here?” With some surprise she greeted his sister, Swann. “I'm glad to see you got off okay. Your mother?”

Finch, looking mutinous, did not reply immediately, but cast a pointed and hostile glance at the three Ridanis. “
She
said,” he nodded toward Jenny, “that
they
were meant to be here, but I can't believe you'd have us sit down to table with tattoos.”

“Finch,” whispered Swann, looking embarrassed.

Paisley regarded Finch with interest, but Pinto and Rainbow had, as if allied, fixed stares of equal contempt on Finch's angry face.

“Hoy.” Rather than sitting down, Lily leaned her hands on the table and forced Finch to meet her gaze. “I never took you for a bigot, Finch. I thought you were above that.”

“It's got nothing to do with bigotry,” began Finch. “The fact is, it's well known the kind of foul diseases—”

Pinto started up out of his chair and grabbed across the table for Finch's shirt.

Finch jerked back, banging his chair on the chair behind him. “Is this another one of your lovers?” he asked sarcastically, out of range.

“Pinto, sit down,” snapped Lily. “Finch, shut up. Hoy.” She regarded the two men with disgust, but after a few long moments during which the other diners in the cafeteria whispered and glanced around and subsided back to their meals, both men did as they were told.

“Where's Hawk?” asked Jenny in a low voice before an uncomfortable silence could grow.

“He's supposed to be here.” Lily glanced toward the door, then at Finch, who was too busy glaring at Pinto to be aware of this exchange. “Keep an eye out for me, Jenny.”

Jenny nodded with quick understanding and shifted her chair just enough to give her a good view of the door.

“I don't have much time,” said Lily, “so I'm going to make this short.” She paused to survey the group, waiting until all of them watched her attentively, even Pinto, who nevertheless lapsed at frequent intervals with quick, bitter glances at Finch.

Lily let her gaze settle first on Swann. “Your mother?” she repeated.

“In
Hospital
,” Swann began.

“We came with her,” interrupted Finch. “We can't go back to Unruli. You know that.”

“Yes, I do,” replied Lily. She sighed, thinking for a moment that the closed corridors of ships were not so different from the underground tunnels of Ransome House. “I don't have much time,” she said again. “I think you all know that I'm going to meet with Jehane. To offer him my services—and the services of those of you who are willing to throw your lot in with mine.”

The Mule hissed, a slight but penetrating sound. “And why should this Jehane, being so powerful, want your services as anything more than another soldier?”

“I have several things he wants, and I mean to negotiate with those to get what I want.”

“Which is?” asked Jenny.

Lily grinned, a private understanding between her and the mercenary. “I'm not sure yet. But I want to keep this group together, all of you who want to stay with me. You don't have any obligation to me. You can join Jehane's forces in any capacity you wish, or not. But if you do stay with me, you have to accept that I will use whatever talents you have as part of my bargaining, and you have to accept whatever assignment I choose as best suited to my goal.”

She waited, but no one spoke. Pinto stared down at the geometric patterns decorating his hands, and she guessed that he surely must be thinking of his father, of the way Senator Isaiah had utterly rejected his once-loved son for the sin of being half-Ridani. Pressing her lips together, she chose and cast off words in her thoughts, not wanting to say the wrong thing.

“I'm not specifically a Jehanist,” Lily continued quietly, aware of Lia's eyes going wide at the declaration. “I support his goals. I had the privilege of working with a man named Pero, on Arcadia, and I learned a great deal about selfless passion from him, and about our rights and duties as citizens of the Reft. He made me understand that we need reforms in the government of Reft space. I want to see Pero in a position to bring those reforms to the people, because I know he will. That's one reason I'm joining Jehane now. Because Pero
is
a Jehanist, and speaks for Jehane and his goals.”

She considered this a moment in silence. Paisley gazed at her with rapt attention.

“But I'm really not a reformer either,” she went on. “Whatever my personal feelings about Jehane or Pero or anyone who
does
work for reform, I have to admire their zeal, but I can't emulate it. So you must understand this: The main reason I am joining Jehane is to revenge myself on the people, the government, in Central, who killed my father.”

“But Lily—” Finch began, while Swann, who also knew Sar Ransome, simply looked bewildered.

“Sometimes other ties are as thick as blood,” said Lily softly, but with finality. Finch subsided. Swann still looked confused.

“Sure,” said Paisley, enlightened. “Kinnas be ya bond as strong as ya family, if it be owed, like I owe to you. Ya man, he be ya one we meant to scam off ya spook ship, bain't he, min Ransome?”

“It's Heredes now, Paisley. It wasn't them. It was Central.” She had to stop, feeling a mask of stark anger and sorrow harden on her face.

“Well, Lily-hae,” said Jenny cheerfully into the silence. “You know I'm with you.”

“I am too,” said Aliasing, beside her, so faint a voice that it was almost lost in the harmonic buzz of the mess hall's other conversations. Gregori was playing a mathematical game on the com-screen that Lily had prudently brought along for him, and had long since ceased paying attention to the adults' discussion. Finch and Swann had their heads bent together in a whispered conversation, so Lily shifted her gaze back to the Mule, who hissed in the affirmative, casting an ironic gaze at Paisley's determined face.