Rift in the Races (41 page)

He laughed. “Yes, I can. But best left for younger and firmer butts than mine,” he said, smiling. “I am happy for you.”

She lost herself in the thought of it for a time.

“Be useful, Orli,” he said. “Make sure you earn your keep down there. I know you aren’t officially an ambassador anymore, but you are still a representative of us all. Our two peoples still have a long way to go toward developing a strong and mutual trust, and tensions are high right now.”

“Well. if Captain Asad would stop insulting everyone every time he opens his idiotic mouth—” she began.

He raised his hand, stopping her. “He is still captain, and while I know he annoys you, he does what he thinks is best. Show some respect while on his ship.”

She frowned. She hated when he did that. Always straddling the line between the fleet and humanity.

“Orli,” Doctor Singh began, his voice gentle again. “The captain speaks what many people fear.”

“It’s ridiculous. He thinks
Citadel
is the Queen’s ultimate Hostile, for crying out loud. Don’t you think that if she wanted to destroy the fleet, she would have done it ten months ago?”

“You may be right—”

“May?”

He smiled, indulgent. “You probably are. But that doesn’t change anything. People are afraid. People are not rational when they are scared. And these people are tired. Twelve years in space is a long time, Orli. You know it better than anyone. We’re starting to show the signs of wear, all of us. The edges are more than frayed.”

“All the more reason to go home.”

“We’re not going home. Not now. Not with victory at hand.”

“Victory? I’m not sure getting half the fleet wiped out counts as ‘victory at hand.’”

“But we have the location, and we have
Citadel
. Nothing is missing now but a tight plan and a few minor details. You’ll see.” He checked his watch. “Now you better run along. I’m going to miss you, but I look forward to seeing you out there in three months’ time all rested up, right before we end all of this.” He pointed through the bulkhead toward the distant and presumably Hostile sun.

“Sure,” she said, the weight of her earlier funk pressing down again. “Three months.” She looked back into the pink fluid in which Altin floated, suspended in what was going to be a long, recuperative sleep.

“It will go fast,” the doctor promised. “Now go. And be a good ambassador.”

“I will.” She hugged him.

He hugged her back tightly, holding her until she finally pushed away. “Go on,” he said as she stood staring into Altin’s tank. “You’re going to miss your ride.”

She got to the shuttle in time to get a seat near the front. Roberto was already sitting at the controls. “What’s up, woman?” he greeted as she threw her duffle down.

“Not me,” she said.

“Somehow I would have thought you’d be happy to get off this ship.”

“Three days ago I would have been.”

The best friend she had in all the world, he didn’t have to ask her why. “Aw, don’t sweat it. It won’t be that long.”

“Three months,” she said. “Doctor Singh said it’s three months.”

“Yeah, well it would have been at least a year if they’d done it the old-fashioned way. Be happy for him. He would have been miserable.”

“I could have spent time with him if they’d just used the stem cell scaffolding. This was on purpose. Captain Asad did it to get rid of Altin for a while. I guarantee it. Nobody goes into an amniotic tank for a missing arm. You know it as well as I do.”

“Look, even if you’re right, so what? Tytamon and that monstrous blob of a doctor down there both said he wouldn’t cast again without an arm. As far as the fleet is concerned, Altin’s advice is far less valuable than his magic, and we are in a hurry after all.”

“That’s because the fleet is full of selfish assholes. And, for the record, they said he
might
not cast. That he’d have to relearn a lot of things. He would have, though. He’s not a quitter.”

“Maybe not, but that’s not the point. The point is, he’ll be back and in full health. And, better, ready to go at the same time as
Citadel
. That was the reason they did it. A few months now—big payoff later.”

“Lonely months,” she said.

“Wow,” he exclaimed, shaking his head and looking around as if for someone else to talk to. There was no one, so he spoke to the air instead. “Will you look at this?” he said. “She finally gets her way, finally gets to go planet-side for a long-ass time, and now she’s going to bitch about it.” He turned to her with a melodramatic expression of disgust that was only about eighty percent in jest. “You are such a chick.”

“And you are such a chauvinist.” She forced a smirk, but didn’t feel it. She slumped in her seat. She knew he was right.

“Whenever you call me stuff I can’t spell, I just laugh at you. You know that, right?”

Exasperated, she could only laugh, a half-hearted one, but still, better than where her mood was spiraling to when she’d come aboard. She was on her way to Prosperion. Roberto was the second one trying to point that out to her in less than an hour.

“Go have some fun,” he continued. “Go meet people. Have a night out on the town. Have ten or twenty of them. Besides, you know we’re
all
leaving as soon as they figure out the teleporting thing, and that means you and
Citadel
. So go enjoy yourself. It’s going to be over fast.”

“They haven’t even successfully teleported a shuttle yet. I think you might be jumping the gun on that. And none of the teleporters they’re using have traveled beyond the edge of their solar system yet. You’ll be lucky if you aren’t killed. You were stupid to volunteer.”

“Dude, they have some seriously hardcore magicians down there. Altin isn’t the only guy down there who can do fancy tricks. Plus, they work together. Lena told me on my last leave that one of their ‘concerts’ can make way bigger jumps than Altin can. She says those conduit guys are hardcore. Once they get the bugs worked out, I’m telling you, the shit is
on
!”

“On? On what? You’re going to hop on over to the Hostile system and … what? Try to sweep away ten thousand of those giant stone battering rams they throw at us? A hundred thousand? You and the remaining half of the fleet? I’m not sure why you are in such a rush for that.”

“We just have to get close enough to nuke those bastards and this is done. With those guys in the dresses casting us right into orbit around the Hostile world, the stony fuckers will never even know what hit them. They’ll just wake up dead one day.
Bam
! We go home heroes.”

“You hope it’s that easy.”

He nodded, his round face for a rare moment grim. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do hope.” He swiveled his pilot’s chair to look at her. “What else is there?”

She wanted to retort, but she had none. He was right of course. What else was there?

Three more people arrived then, a middle-aged commander and two petty officers Orli did not recognize. They plopped down in seats near her, and the commander began grilling Roberto about preparation details for the upcoming teleport test.

Orli leaned back and let their voices drift away. Three months. What was she going to do alone on Prosperion for three months?

Chapter 27

O
rli didn’t have to wonder what she would be doing for long, for it was Tytamon who met her at Little Earth, and from the droop of his hood and the rivulets of water running down his cloak, he’d been there for a while, waiting in the rain.

She hugged Roberto goodbye, told him to be careful during the teleportation test and then stood near the weathered old mage as the shuttle lifted off again. The roar of the gravity engines made her squint and turn her head, as if somehow that would dampen the noise, though it never did. She watched the ship until it was out of sight, then turned to Tytamon, blinking rapidly each time a raindrop struck her in the face. They helped conceal the tears.

Tytamon stared down at her, his deeply lined and weather-worn face at first a stern mask of hawkish intensity, but as he watched her twitch and flutter her eyes with each new droplet, his grim solemnity gave way to a warm grandfatherly grin.

“You’ve never been out in the rain, have you?” The grin widened.

“No,” she said. “Not that I remember.” More blinking and just one sniffle. “Maybe as a child, but I don’t remember it.”

She looked around, looked up into it. Had time to now. Clouds swelled from horizon to horizon, ponderous and lugubriously gray. She had to squint while staring up into it, somehow it managed to be bright enough for that. The air still had warmth to it, a lingering humidity. It wouldn’t get really cold for another two months. She took time to breathe in the smells of the wet soil, listened long enough to hear the raindrops pattering a damp hiss against the thatched roofs of the wooden buildings that made up the Little Earth village not so far away. Tension, at least some, washed from her as she took it all in.

Tytamon let her. He stood silently and allowed her to adjust. Adjusting himself, in his own way. Patience was friend to them both just now, despite the urgency of his task. Her arrival was an unexpected boon.

“It’s beautiful,” she said at last, looking around, taking in the mud puddles and the tiny teardrop diamonds that fell from everything. “Who would have thought?”

He nodded, the motion pitching little gouts of accumulated rain like waterfalls from the dimpled wool of his hood. “Having you here will remind us all to appreciate these things, a variety of contentment so easily lost in the business of the everyday,” he said. “For that, I will thank you. Hopefully one day soon.”

That made her happier. She found herself warming rapidly to this assignment. Like Roberto said: it’s only three months. And Altin really was in the most capable medical hands anywhere.

With a long breath to steady herself for this leg of her journey, as it were, she grinned up at him and said, “Okay, so now what?”

“Now what,” he replied, “is that we have work to do.”

The way he said it prompted her to ask, “
We
as in you and me, or
we
as in all of us, in the big-picture kind of way?”

“
We
as in us, you and I.”

That wrinkled her brow some. “I’m supposed to be at
Citadel
to check in with Aderbury at fifteen-hundred hours.”

He laughed, shaking his head and ejecting more gouts of water from the intermittent fountain of his hood. “You’re on Prosperion now, my dear. There is no such thing as ‘fifteen hundred hours.’ There aren’t that many in a day, for one thing. And for another, we sorcerers have a much less rigid sense of time than you military people do, strictly speaking.”

“I don’t want to start off on a bad foot,” she began, but the merry expression on his face stopped her.

“Aderbury knows I have come to escort you personally,” he said. “I assure you, I have suitable authority to detain you as long as I like from that. He’ll be perfectly satisfied to have you ‘check in’ at precisely the moment you arrive, whenever that may be, and he won’t be expecting you a moment sooner. You may put that concern to rest.”

Her eyebrows came down, but the corners of her mouth went up, the net effect of curiosity and joy. Not for the first time, she found more and more reasons to love this world, for its own sake, outside of the existence of Altin and his dragon, and quite despite the existence of the orcs. No world was without its dangers, and Earth was certainly not without its own endless list of wars and cruelty. Despite the danger of the battle for Calico Castle, she couldn’t help think that dealing with the orcs was a far simpler thing for the forces of the Queen than the Hostile problem was going to prove for the combined strength of two worlds. Which made her wonder what it was that Tytamon had in store for her.

“All right,” she said, in keeping with that curiosity, “so what are we, you and I, going to do?”

His face reclaimed the stony façade she’d seen when she’d first arrived. So quickly did it return, it startled her.

“What?” she asked when he did not reply.

“It can’t be spoken here.” His gray-eyed gaze suddenly darted to the buildings, then back to the knee-high grass around them, scanning the area as if there might be eavesdroppers lurking anywhere and everywhere nearby.

He turned back to her, his face absolute solemnity. No glint of the sweet grandfatherly man resided there now. He looked every bit the stern lord of Calico Castle at war. “Are you ready to go?”

She blinked more from bewilderment than raindrops this time. She bent and picked up her duffle from where she’d let it drop, nodding. He held out his arm. She knew from her times with Altin that she didn’t need to take it for teleportation to work, but she took it anyway. He was being polite.

They appeared in a small, bare chamber of stone that reminded her of a shower back on Earth, three unadorned stone walls and a fourth nearly unadorned but for a small rack of shelves built into the stone, which she could see through into the room beyond, and a narrow doorway a few feet to the left of the rack. At first she thought it actually was a shower, which seemed appropriate given that she was soaked.