Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (3 page)

A hundred other people and even passing vehicles halted to stare at Gripper. Some were stunned into silence, but others whispered to each other or shouted at the strange alien. Traffic had ground to a slow trickle and threatened to stop entirely. Nervously, Xia gave Gripper's arm a tug. He blinked his huge eyes, shook his head and then followed as the Ixthian hurried over to Tiberius, Duaal and Maeve.

"Did you see that stuff about the Nihilists?" Gripper asked as soon as he neared, falling in beside the fairy. She had to jog to keep up with the longer stride of the taller alien.

"The Alliance church has outlawed their religion." Maeve raised her voice to make herself heard over the cacophony of echoes ringing back from the city's distant ceiling.

"Yeah! And the CWA is putting a bounty on them, too," Gripper said.

Maeve had not heard about that. She wanted to ask after the details, but Tiberius slapped his fist into his palm.

"That's business for bounty hunters," he said, and then looked at Xia. "Not us! Did Armon have any work for us?"

"No," the Ixthian answered with a shake of her head. Axis' recycled air stirred her short white hair.

"Nothing?" Duaal asked.

"Salvage has been pretty thin and he's got nothing else to move."

"Bloody hell!" Tiberius growled.

Xia held up her hand to forestall further outburst. "I did manage to find us some work. Armon didn't have anything, but I checked my messages on the mainstream and there was one from an old college friend. I thought you might be interested."

"A job?" Tiberius asked, still bristling but curious now.

"Yes. Carrying passengers and some small cargo out to Prianus."

If Xia expected a smile, she was disappointed. Tiberius scowled.

Duaal sighed theatrically. "Prianus? What in the name of God could they want all the way out there?"

"Xen didn't say," Xia said.

They reached a huge silver column of lifts. The metal was stenciled with a huge, flaking number 4. Duaal bumped his hip against a glowing call button.

Tiberius looked skeptical. "What does this hawk of yours do, exactly? I'm not flying anything illegal or dangerous out to Prianus."

"Xen's a doctor of archeogenetics," Xia told him. "He's head of the department at Vostra Nor University. I don't think he so much as experimented with chems when we were in college. Not outside the laboratory, anyway. But he didn't leave any details in the message. If you want to know more, we'll need to fly out to his office on Tynerion."

"Go out there on speculation?" Duaal asked skeptically.

"Tynerion isn't that far away from Axis. We probably would have gone further to pick up anything for Armon. No one can afford to keep anything on Axis. CWAAF keeps too close an eye on this planet."

That was not the detail that Tiberius had latched onto. "A professor? The Blue Phoenix is a cargo bird, not some fancy science vessel!" he protested.

The lift on their right chimed and the light flashed from orange to blue as the doors slid open. A stout Lyran business woman pressed herself against the back wall as the group filed into the lift canister and her bristling tail curled against the back of her legs. Gripper delicately pressed the close button with one huge claw.

"Please stand clear of the doors," instructed a politely sexless computerized voice. "Please stand clear of the doors."

No one spoke as the elevator seal hissed shut and slipped into smooth motion, falling down deeper into Axis. On Level Five, it stopped and the Lyran squeezed out, avoiding the eyes of the strangers who had shared her ride. When she was gone, Duaal jabbed the door controls again.

"I don't know how picky we can be about work," he said. The mage gave Maeve an accusatory look. "Since
she
spent all of her money on that damned bounty, we don't have anything to fall back on. We've got to work, Tiberius."

"Hey, it was her money!" Gripper cried. "Smoke never asked for any of yours!"

"It was a lot of money, and she blew it all on that stupid bounty just to get herself killed! Where's all that color now? In the pockets of the Gharib police, right when we sure could use it!"

"My money bought your salvation on Stray, too," Maeve reminded Duaal. She narrowed her gray eyes at him. "Your infantile temper and weak spells did little to combat the Nihilists when they came for us!"

"Easy, Maeve," Xia said. "He was terrified of Gavriel. It was very difficult and very brave of him to do anything at all."

"Great. Thanks, Xia," Duaal mumbled, blushing.

"She's just trying to help, Shimmer," said Gripper, always eager to leap to the Ixthian's defense.

"She doesn't know how to help anyone but herself!"

Duaal thought that Gripper was talking about Maeve. Xia opened her mouth to correct him, but Tiberius interrupted them all.

"Enough!" His voice thundered uncomfortably in the closed confines of the elevator. "Maeve's money and what you all did or didn't do on Stray doesn't matter anymore! Since we flew out of here with Kessa and ducked the Axis police, we're criminals on this planet. Damnably petty ones, but still criminals."

"I'd just like to point out that Maeve brought Kessa on board, too," said Duaal.

"Hood that, Duaal! What's done is done."

"He's right. There's no money and it's been hard to find work. Times have been a little rough and lean." This was from Xia, who looked at Tiberius with arched antennae. "But we've got a solid lead now. Yes, it's academic work, but Xen says the money is good and we really can't afford to be picky."

Gripper stood behind her, fidgeting uncomfortably as the others argued. He gave his captain a crooked smile. "Besides, you get to go home, Claws. That's great, right?"

Tiberius' only response was a terse grunt. The rest of the long ride down into Axis' lower levels was spent in silence, leaving Maeve little else to do but think. Seven months had passed since Stray, since stealing the infant Baliend back from Gavriel and his Nihilists. Since facing Princess Titania –
No, she is Xartasia now. The dreamer of death.
– under the desert graveyard.

She forgave me for the death of our people. My cousin would be queen of the White Kingdom, if she would but take up the crown. And Xartasia has forgiven me.

Maeve looked down at her hands, at the wrists sticking out from her more or less clean sleeves. The skin was still scarred by battle and chem abuse, but even those marks were beginning to fade.

Am I absolved? Do the gods forgive me for the millions I delivered into death?

Seven months since Logan Coldhand. The bounty on Maeve was paid – into the hands of the Gharib police, as Duaal complained – and so the hunter had left. The chase was over. The loss still weighed strangely heavy on Maeve.

But she was tired of being self-absorbed and pathetic, tired of everyone around her paying the price for her indulgence. Maeve clasped her hands in front of her and turned her attention to her companions instead. Her gaze wandered inevitably to the shortened length of Gripper's long, mottled left ear. The Arboran noticed her looking and rubbed the shiny scar self-consciously.

The events of the last year seemed to have done nothing to change the unflappable Xia. Sometimes it seemed that her sweet and motherly – if slightly aloof – nature was the only thing keeping the Blue Phoenix crew from falling apart entirely.

Beside her, Duaal leaned against the curved wall of the lift, eyeing Maeve balefully through braided locks of bleached hair. Though the surly teenager's clothes remained needlessly expensive and elaborate, he no longer wore the charms and magical symbols – moons and stars and angular knots – that he once did. Back on Stray, Maeve had told him that such things were the tools of only the youngest, least experienced spell-singers and the news had deeply shamed the proud Duaal.

Only a child is insulted to be called a child,
Maeve thought. She pinched her arm angrily. By the standards of her own people, she was still young, too.
But still old enough to destroy the White Kingdom…

Tiberius just looked tired. Maeve's stomach twisted into a tight, guilty ball again. Tiberius scratched his cheek and sighed, lost in his own thoughts. The last of his pewter hair had gone entirely white and he had not shaved in days.

The large 9 beside the lift door lit up and the speakers chimed, announcing their arrival. When the doors opened, Maeve followed the rest of the Blue Phoenix crew out into the streets of Level Nine. A gang of young men with shaven heads piled into the vacated lift. Glowing lines of color pulsed beneath their skin. Xia's eyes shone a faint red color, full of disgust. The glowing subdermal implants were almost as disfiguring as cybernetics, at least in the compound eyes of the purist Ixthians. One of the rough-looking males stuck his surgically lengthened tongue out at Xia just before the lift hissed shut again.

Tiberius and his crew walked close together along the dirty road. Vehicles here rode low on poorly maintained null-inertia fields, rumbling past and kicking up clouds of shredded plastic and crumpled mycofoam. Lumapaint tags marked each corner as the territory of one gang or another. The lights shining down from Level Nine's ceiling flickered fitfully and left entire city blocks steeped in darkness.

"You know, considering what we did in Gharib, we should get to land up in the nice fields on Level One," Duaal complained. "Even Logan got to put his ship up on the surface!"

"God damn that bounty hunter!" Tiberius grunted, but offered nothing more.

"Maybe we can fix this someday," Gripper suggested hesitantly. "You know, clear our names."

"As far as Axis Control knows, we're char," said Duaal. "We tricked them. They're not going to be happy if the Blue Phoenix shows up on their boards."

They stopped at a tall black wall that blocked off half of the road. Tiberius pressed a button on the bottom of a control box welded to the gate. It buzzed and then a voice crackled over the speaker. "Who is it?"

"It's Captain Myles, Blake. We're ready to get out of here."

"Surely, captain. By the way, your supplies arrived. They're waiting at your berth."

"They better not be light, Blake."

"I didn't take any of your stuff, you old coot. If your crates are light, it's not my fault."

The gate lock thunked and Gripper pulled it open. Beyond was a pitted expanse of engine-burned blastphalt that probably used to be a factory before someone leveled it to make way for Blake's illegal landing field. The remains of huge ducts and shafts hung down from the level's ceiling. Long ago, they vented air and waste gasses up to Axis' surface, but now they provided discrete entry and exit for ships small and desperate enough to fly through them.

The Blue Phoenix crouched among a pack of other grounded ships. It was clumsy-looking and covered in bristling sensor spars like a grumpy metal hedgehog. A stack of crates sat behind the Blue Phoenix, just beside the closed loading ramp. Duaal tapped the security code into a keypad. The airlock cycled and hissed, then the ramp lowered and clanked on the ground.

"Maeve, Gripper, get everything loaded and tied down," Tiberius ordered. "Xia, make sure nothing's missing. Blake's a bastard and a criminal. I wouldn't put it past him to steal from his own clients. Duaal, give him our vector and let him know when we're ready to get out into the black."

"Which is? Where are we going?" asked Duaal.

"Tynerion. We'll go take your teacher's work, Xia."

"Great. Hey, captain? Can I fly us out of here?" Duaal asked. The copilot pointed up at the massive, corroded old ducting. "It's going to be a sharp ride."

"Maybe next time," Tiberius said. He made his way up the ramp and into his ship, patting the wall of the airlock as he passed.

Duaal jogged after him. "That's what you said last time!"

Shaking her head, Xia followed the two human men. Gripper pushed a loading jack down the ramp and helped Maeve lift the crates of food, water and filters. When it was full, he activated the NI field and the jack floated up off the uneven ground, light as a balloon. Gripper guided it back into the ship's cargo bay.

Inside, he turned off the null-inertia projector and the jack thumped heavily to the Blue Phoenix's fibersteel floor. He pulled an orange net down from hooks on the wall and tossed one end to Maeve. She flew up into the air, caught the corner and dropped it down over her side of the stack. As Maeve tied the net down to a row of magclamps on the floor, Gripper leaned against the crates.

"Smoke, are you worried about the Nihilists?" he asked.

"I have been thinking about it since I saw the Nihilist name on the news," she admitted. "I worry, yes, but I do not know if it is the same as your worry."

"You don't think they're going to… come after us or anything?" he asked.

Maeve shook her head slowly. "No, I do not believe so. The Cult of Nihil will have their own worries. They are far more sought-after criminals than we are, and they have their own goals. Even if he lives, I do not think that Gavriel will not concern himself with us."

"Really?"

"Only the gods know for certain."

Gripper blinked his big, boyish brown eyes. "Thanks, Smoke. I guess."