THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 11: Forces
“It’s not the job of the police to convict a man. That’s the lawyer’s job. We just make sure he gets to the courthouse to face the law.”
– Heon Cerro, Prian police officer (229 PA)
“In three, two, one… Alright, take us out.”
At Tiberius’ cue, Duaal pulled gently back on the controls and punched the large square button that dropped the Blue Phoenix out of superluminal flight. The multicolor kaleidoscope of SL lurched and gave way to the star-studded blackness of space. Fewer stars than the luminous skies of the deep core, Duaal noticed, and the blue-gray shape of Prianus loomed between the stars, a gunmetal crescent in the light of the pale primary star.
Prianus. I never wanted to come here again.
“Duaal!” Tiberius shouted.
“What?”
Duaal searched wildly. A huge, roughly oblong white object was hurtling toward the Blue Phoenix, pocked by craters and flashing with bright red and orange warning lights. They were closing on the rocky moon fast.
“Shit! Where did that come from?” Duaal shouted. He jerked back on the control yoke.
“What were you looking at? I told you to watch it! Trinus has an unstable… Damn it! Pull up!” Tiberius jabbed at buttons to regain primary control of the ship, but the moon was hurtling up to meet them too quickly.
“You told me when to drop!” Duaal cried.
“Just pull the hells up!”
The moon’s gravity yanked on the Blue Phoenix, jerking it to one side and tugging hard opposite the internal gravnet. Duaal’s stomach leapt up into his throat and he couldn’t breathe. He shoved and strained against the moon’s pull, but could not break free.
“I can’t get us out!”
“Turn into the gravity well,” Tiberius shouted. He yanked at a red-striped handle in the ceiling. “Turn!”
Duaal stopped pulling and jammed the yoke down. The Blue Phoenix jerked, rolled as it aligned with the gravity, and then finally smoothed out. The Prian moon’s jagged surface raced along close beneath. Tiberius took a deep, rasping breath.
“Come up at twenty degrees,” said the captain. “Fine. Now bring us up out of the well. Hold your vector. Don’t fight the gravity.”
Duaal did as Tiberius instructed. It seemed easy enough now. The Blue Phoenix arced gracefully around the moon and toward the dim gray disk of Prianus.
“I… I’ve got it,” Duaal said.
The radio popped suddenly and a voice hissed with static over the channel. “Unidentified ship, this is Prian Orbital Control.”
“Call it in again, POC,” Tiberius said.
“We read a little trouble over one of the Trinus sensor outposts. Is everyone intact out there?”
Tiberius gave Duaal a pointed look before answering. “This is the Blue Phoenix. Sorry about that. My copilot was a little wobbly on the drop and we came in right over a moon.”
“Hear that, Blue Phoenix.” The woman on the other end of the connection had the same accent as Tiberius and seemed to recognize his in spite of the poor connection. “Are you on your way home, captain?”
“Not today,” Tiberius answered, then had to repeat himself. “Not today. We’re inbound to the northern Kayton Mountains. We have some passengers from Tynerion.”
“Tynerion? I’d love to hear that story, if there was time. Your closest landing to the north Kaytons is going to be Pine Spire.”
“Pine Spire? What’s wrong with Pylos?” Tiberius asked.
“Quakes. They’re still digging out the landing field there, but Pine Spire will only put you a little further south.”
“Hear that, Control,” Tiberius grunted. “When can we land? We only need a few hours to unload our passengers and help get their equipment up into the Kaytons.”
“It’s going to be a while,” said the other Prian. “We’ve got a backlog of intersystem traffic.”
“Is it that busy?” Duaal asked.
“No, but with Pylos down, we’re flying into problems. Sorry, but they’ve got priority. I can put you down in Pine Spire in about two hours. Until then, keep a high orbit.”
“Wilco, POC,” Tiberius said.
He closed the channel and Duaal drew another breath to point out that the captain had, in fact, approved their flight plan, but Maeve appeared in the door. She rubbed a darkening bruise on the angle of her jaw.
“Our passengers are curious if they should prepare for their impending deaths,” she said. “Can I tell them that they will not so easily avoid their work?”
“Everything’s fine,” Duaal answered quickly. “You can tell them that we’ll be setting down in about two hours.”
“We’ll need to be ready for some ground travel to get them to their site,” Tiberius said.
Maeve nodded. “I will inform Professor Xen. I suppose it was wise to check over the security of their equipment.”
When she left again, Duaal sullenly released the controls and let Tiberius guide the Blue Phoenix down toward Prianus.
The skypads were a network of patched landing platforms all suspended between the sharp mountain crags above the city of Pine Spire. As Tiberius and Duaal set the Blue Phoenix down on one of the platforms, Gripper connected to the local mainstream and put in a call for the rented trucks to wait for them down in the city.
The crew met Xen and his team in the hold. Gruth shook his claw at Duaal for the rough SL drop, but the Lyran was still in a much better mood than he had been the whole trip. Together, they unfastened the cargo nets and loaded everything back onto null-inertia pallets.
Tiberius opened the airlock and lowered the ramp. A bone-chilling wind raced into the ship, carrying a few flecks of ice. Maeve waved to Gripper and Enu-Io as they guided the pallets down the ramp. Tiberius whistled for Orphia, who fluttered to a scarred pad of leather strapped to his shoulder.
Outside, the landing platform vibrated under their feet like a struck drumhead. Gruth looked queasy again.
“How do we get down from this damned thing?” he howled over the wind.
“We just need to get over there,” Tiberius said.
He pointed across a trussled bridge to another platform bolted to the stony mountainside. A huge gondola ferried passengers and cargo away from the skypads, swinging and bumping down a cable as thick around as Maeve’s waist.
“Why don’t you people just use null-field lifts?” Gruth asked.
“Too expensive,” Tiberius answered.
There was a long, cold delay as they waited for another group to load up their boxy gondola cart. When the next one arrived, a long-faced overseer hauled the squealing door open and — for a modest fee — helped the Blue Phoenix crew push and pull the equipment inside. The attendant slammed the door shut behind them.
The gondola lurched into motion. Cracked seals around the windows and doors let in gusts of icy wind. Maeve couldn’t stop shivering. There was nothing like this frigid cold anywhere in the White Kingdom. She had dressed that morning as best she could for Prianus: two layers of pants, high socks and boots, a long-sleeved thermal shirt with a sweater and a long gray felt coat over that — all sliced up the back to make room for her wings. And she was still freezing.
Maeve stared out the gondola window. From high above, they had an impressive view of Pine Spire. Though the view was impressive, the city was not. It was small, even by Arcadian standards, but close-packed and densely populated as a beehive. Streets and gray-black buildings all crammed between sharp mountains and rivers that ran so swift and forceful that they were milky blue-white with trapped air.
At the bottom of the mountain, another rawboned Prian man took their names and told them that their rental trucks had been delayed. They waited on a sort of long porch made of cracked concrete until a caravan pulled up to the curb, cursing and shouting at other drivers. A dark-haired woman signaled them from the lead vehicle and didn’t offer to help their customers load the trucks.
Xen handed out printed maps to the Kayton dig site and then the teams scattered, piling into each of the trucks. At his request, Maeve went with Gripper. She was the Arboran’s second choice, but Xia wanted to spend these final hours with Xen, before the Blue Phoenix carried them all back into space. As they climbed up into the last truck, the driver winked at Maeve and then stared wide-eyed at Gripper.
“Bloody hells, what is that thing?” he asked Maeve, who struggled to find a comfortable place for her wings.
“An Ixthian experiment,” she answered. It wasn’t the first time she had used that particular lie. “Grown from an artificial redprint.”
The driver whistled sharply. “Ain’t never seen anything like it. Musta been one hell of a tube they grew you in, big fella.”
“Uh, yeah,” Gripper said forlornly.
“That what happened to your face? You get smashed up against the side?”
“Huh? What’s wrong with my face?”
“Nothin’ at all.” The Prian driver fell strategically silent.
They followed the rest of the truck caravan through Pine Spire. Outside, Prians wrapped themselves in long coats, thick hats and scarves tucked into their collars. They squinted across their city streets with fear and suspicion as their birds wheeled through the faded blue sky overhead. Deep violet shadows lay over Pine Spire as Prianus’ small white sun struggled to rise up over the needle-like mountains. Gripper, who had never been to Tiberius’ homeworld, stared out the windows.
“Look up there! I’ve never seen mountains like those,” Gripper said. He rubbed his shortened ear. “Is there anything at the top? Look at the trees. They stop only halfway up.”
“Only one-fifth of Prianus is capable of supporting human life,” Maeve told him.
“That’s still more than Hyzaar, right?” Gripper asked.
Maeve shrugged. “Perhaps, but Hyzaar is a more temperate and hospitable world.”
“No one ever called Prianus the bright spot of the galaxy,” their driver agreed. “What brings you–?”
He shouted in alarm as a small, dented airplane dropped out of the sky, roaring down over the busy road. Thick black smoke trailed from one sputtering engine and the battered sides were scored by laser burns.
The airplane swooped to one side and grazed a tall starscraper. The wing tore through windows, spraying the city below in broken glass, then caught on something more substantial. Metal and bystanders shouted as the plane slammed into the side of the building and tumbled down toward the street.
Something metallic glinted in the billowing smoke. A battle-scarred Raptor fighter flew down from the shadow of the mountains and fired huge magclamps on thick cables. One of them arced off target, but three more slammed into the side of the falling plane.
The Raptor climbed sharply, yanking the other craft skyward. But under the tension of the clamps and cables, the plane’s hull was peeling away like paper. It was never meant to be carried like this and was falling again, tugging the Raptor down with it.
Another pair of police Raptors dropped out of thin clouds and fired smaller, more carefully aimed clamps. These found secure anchors on the exposed frame and tugged the faltering airplane skyward again. As quickly as they had appeared, the three Raptors and their snared prisoner flew away again, vanishing off into the distance.
Maeve didn’t realize that she had been holding her breath until she made herself relax and slumped beside Gripper, who was still staring in slack-jawed wonder at the aftermath of the scene. Their driver shook his fist and swore in equal measure at the police and their target.
The delay in traffic cost them another twenty cenmarks in fees, but by late afternoon, the trucks were out of Pine Spire and climbing up into the Kayton Mountains. The jagged spine of granite and green serpentine speared high into the clouds. Steep roads wove up into the clinging cold, through emaciated but tenacious forests of fir and aspen trees.
After a sidelong glance at their driver — who was absorbed by navigating the steep, icy mountain roads — Gripper twisted as much as he could in his seat, turning to face Maeve.
“I didn’t get to give Silver the polytomograph,” he whispered.
“I heard,” Maeve said. The Blue Phoenix was a small ship.
“She came looking for it before I was done.” Gripper rubbed his long ear nervously. “I’ve got to try something else, Smoke. What do you think?”
Maeve considered, chewing her lip as she thought.
“What about flowers?” she asked.
“Yeah, flowers!” Gripper forgot to whisper and brightened visibly. “That’s great! Everyone loves sweets.”
The Arboran licked his lips, suggesting that he was a perfect example of this universal truth.
“That… is not quite what I meant,” Maeve said. “Even if it were, you may have to wait. I do not think that there are many flower sellers in the Prian mountains.”
“I guess not…” Gripper looked out the window.
They were up above the trees. Some pale-leaved shrubs pushed tough, ropey roots through the rocks — and in a few places, the road — but little else grew so high in the mountains.
At the edge of the road, the ground dropped away steeply into the distance. Far below was the skirt of firs and pines, dark green and gray. Beyond that was a narrow, jagged valley, full of cluttered, blocky gray shapes. The city of Pylos, larger than Pine Spire but no more attractive.
At least the traffic up here was an improvement. In fact, Maeve had seen no other vehicles for hours. Not on the ground, at least. Like the birds they so loved, the Prians seemed to prefer flying to crawling over the ground. Gripper had his face glued to the window and pointed out another Raptor-styled fighter that flew overhead.
“That looks just like Coldhand’s ship,” he noted with obvious excitement.
“He stole it from this planet,” Maeve said.
The truck driver gave her a strange look, but had to keep most of his attention on the aging, crumbling road.
There were no trees or plants of any kind now, only greenish lichen that covered the stones in dark, frondy blotches. Blue-white glaciers lurked in crevices and ravines like great, pale leopards, beautiful but deadly to the unwary traveler.
The trucks labored through the thinning air. Engines coughed and wheezed, slowing their progress to a crawl. At her driver’s request, Maeve radioed up to Xen in the lead vehicle.
“Are we nearing our destination?” she asked.
“We should be there in about half an hour,” Xen said. “I think. The signal is a little scattered this high up.”
They carefully crossed an arched bridge over a deep crevice. It creaked ominously and swayed in the wind. Maeve looked down over the bridge’s edge at the wisps of clouds that raced below and flashed with veins of white as they unleashed spitting flurries of sleet into the distant river.
Finally, the caravan came to a stop in a flat moraine of grainy gabbro. A row of heavily insulated white tent domes hunkered in the middle of the glacier-carved plain, alongside a pair of work-worn trucks and a scratched red and green car. The last of these was stenciled with large block letters: POLICE.
Maeve sat up from her tired, cramped slouch. What were the police doing up here?
When the caravan pulled to a stop and parked in a semicircle, Maeve and Gripper gratefully climbed out of their truck. The fairy slid on a patch of ice and beat her wings for balance, but the air was too thin. She fell to the frozen ground just as Duaal emerged. He took one look at Maeve and burst out laughing. A moment later, he was coughing as he tried to breathe at this high altitude and Maeve couldn’t help a tiny smirk.
Xen walked toward the tents and put his hands to his mouth. “Doctor Kemmer Andus? Are you here?”
“First tent on the right!” answered a muffled voice from the indicated dome.
“Panna, will you take care of unloading?” Xen asked.
His assistant nodded. “Sure, professor.”
Gripper remained to help Panna, but the rest followed Xen into the first tent on the right. Closer now, Maeve could see that it wasn’t the domes that were white, but thick layers of frost that covered them. She touched it and came back with powdery, feathery ice on her gloves. Doctor Kemmer must have been up in these mountains for some time.
There were two human men inside, one dressed in the same sort of long coat and boots Maeve had seen back in Pine Spire. The other wore a long-sleeved uniform in dark blue with a Talon laser pistol on his hip. With the man’s short blond hair and narrowed Prian eyes, Maeve felt a jolt of recognition like an electric shock.
Logan…?
But it wasn’t Logan Coldhand, of course. This Prian man was older than her hunter and a burn scar along his cheek tugged one corner of his mouth down into a perpetual frown. There was an aged shield-shaped badge pinned to his chest, the brass even more scarred than the cop who wore it.
Either Kemmer Andus kept an incredibly messy house, or else something terrible had happened. The tent was full of overturned tables and datadexes scattered across the floor, many with screens spiderwebbed in cracks or entirely snapped in half.
Kemmer slumped in a folding chair, rubbing his eyes. Though he was probably about the same age as the police officer — somewhere in his late thirties — he wore his age much more handsomely. Kemmer had a square jaw and high cheekbones, roughened by a few days of stubble. His hair was a dark brown turned bronze at the tips by the sun. He looked up at the newcomers.
“Ah, you must be Professor Xen,” he said in the increasingly familiar accented Aver. “I hope you brought a lepton microscope.”
Xen blinked his colorful eyes. “Yes, I am. And we did.”
“Good.” Kemmer stood and smoothed his shirt.
“Why? Don’t you have an L-scope here?” Xen asked.
“We did. It was stolen earlier this morning — along with some other equipment — while the rest of us were down below,” Kemmer said. He went to one wall of the tent. There was a small hole in the insulation and a spray of dried blood around it. Kemmer wiggled one finger in the puncture. “They shot one of my diggers.”
Xen paled. He couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.
Tiberius sighed. “Don’t know what exactly a lick-on microscope is, but it sounds expensive. It would be worth a trip up into these mountains to snare it.”
“Yes. This is Captain Cerro,” Kemmer said. He gestured to the blue-uniformed police officer. “He’s taken my report, but he can’t be bothered to stay to protect my dig or my base camp.”
Cerro didn’t flinch at the archeologist’s bitterness. “We’ll recover your equipment and bring in the guilty party as soon as we can, sir, but I’m afraid we can’t spare the personnel to post a sentry. We have all of Pylos to protect.”
“Welcome to Prianus,” Kemmer sighed.
Tiberius grinned broadly at the younger cop. He extended his hairy, calloused hand. “Captain Cerro, is it?”
“It is.” Cerro took Tiberius’ hand firmly.
“Tiberius Myles. I was captain of the Blacktails before I retired.”
Cerro smiled with half his mouth. “From the Oaks?”
“Those are my hawks, my fine hawks. I’ve been off-world for a few years now. How are they doing?”
“I don’t get a lot of news all the way from Oak, but I’m sorry to say that the Blacktails got shot down last year. Only three of them survived. Actually, I sent one of my pilots out to shore up the new squadron.”
Tiberius nodded heavily. “The hawks will keep flying, through high heaven and hollow hell.”
Kemmer had been listening to the exchange with frank interest. “Captain Myles, if I understand this correctly, you used to serve in the Prian police. Right?”
“That’s right,” Tiberius answered.
“This isn’t the first loss we’ve suffered and this expedition can’t take much more,” Kemmer said. “Captain, would you be willing to stay on to provide security for my project?”
Professor Xen tore his eyes from the blood on the tent wall.
“Yes,” he added quickly. “I would be happy to pay you for your time. Please stay, Captain Myles.”
“I don’t know…” said Tiberius.
“We could use the work,” Duaal told him. “Just fuel and food ate up a lot of Xen’s money.”
“Duaal’s right,” Xia said. Her antennae twitched. “And if Doctor Kemmer just lost a digger, I’d be happy to fill in.”
“Do you have any experience?” the Prian archeologist asked.
“Only a few classes,” Xia admitted with a shake of her head. “I don’t have any field experience.”
“Xia’s a surgeon,” Xen told Kemmer. “She’s a fast learner and a light touch.”
“If it means Captain Myles will stay, then I’ll take it,” Kemmer said. He ran a hand through his dark hair and looked at Tiberius again. “Well?”
“Maeve?” Tiberius asked.
She thought for a moment, considering the terrain outside. “You said that the crime was committed while you were down below. Where is your site, Doctor Kemmer? It seems that you have two locations to protect.”
“That’s correct,” Kemmer answered. “There’s the base camp up here, and then the actual dig site. It’s sub-surface, down inside the mountain.”
His tone became suddenly guarded. His eyes took on a glacial coldness that Maeve was all too familiar with. The Prians were a hard people, as stony as their homeworld.
“Protecting two fronts will be difficult, but if one of them is underground, it may make the task achievable,” Maeve said. She counted off on her fingers. “We have to our benefit three combat-ready members of our crew.”
“Three?” Tiberius asked.
“You, Duaal and myself.”
Tiberius frowned and cast a sidelong glance at the Hyzaari boy. So did Kemmer, confusion written plainly across his face. Duaal straightened.
“Alright, but I want the two of us to handle most of it,” Tiberius told Maeve. His tone brooked no argument. “Duaal, you’re backup.”
“Then you’ll stay?” Xen asked intently.
“For…” Duaal said, hesitating as he twisted one of the golden buttons on his cuff. “For another four thousand cenmarks.”
Xen and Kemmer exchanged a look.
“That would exhaust my remaining budget,” said the Ixthian. “And then some.”
“I have even less of an operating fund than you do,” Kemmer snorted. “I can cover five hundred colour, and even that is going to come out of my pocket.”
“We can pay three thousand cen, then,” Xen said.
“That’s fine,” Tiberius agreed.
“When I’ve verified his identity, we can coordinate our efforts through Captain Myles,” Cerro offered. “Mind if I get your badge number, sir?”
Cerro pulled a small datadex from a side pocket and scribbled down the number that Tiberius gave him.
“I’ll call back as soon as we’ve got anything on your thieves,” Cerro said.
The com on his belt buzzed insistently. Captain Cerro excused himself and went outside to take the call.
Kemmer glanced around the tent and put his hands on his hips. “Welcome to the team, Professor Xen. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Let’s get started by bringing in your equipment.”
“We’re going to have to tell Gripper that we’re staying,” Duaal said. “No trees and we don’t have a coat that fits him. Maeve, I nominate you to break the bad news.”
“I hope you are braver if thieves return to this camp,” she said.
But as they stepped out into the cold once more, Maeve called out to Gripper.
