THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 3 — HAMMER OF TIME
Chapter 2: Mir
“Needing advice doesn’t make you a fool, but ignoring that advice might.”
– Xia (233 PA)
Tiberius Myles hummed the fragment of song to himself. He couldn’t remember the whole thing, just that single line. And even that didn’t sound right. Was that really how Bristler’s Call was supposed to go?
His off-key song bounced and echoed through the Phoenix’s cockpit. Orphia lifted her gray-feathered head from under one wing and fixed a cloudy eye on Tiberius. The old hawk squawked at him — a squeaking, rusty-sounding noise. Tiberius wasn’t sure if she was joining in or reproaching her master. Either way, he fell silent.
The last echoes faded away and silence fell over the empty Phoenix. Tiberius flew on. Orphia went back to sleep, leaving the old Prian captain very much alone.
“You can’t be serious!” Duaal shouted. “We saw them!”
“We have only your word for that,” Ralison said.
The CWAAF submajor sat back and inspected a datadex in his hands. His office was as impeccably clean as his own dark green uniform. The room smelled sharply of soap and harsher disinfectants. Maeve couldn’t look anywhere in the room without facing her own angry reflection.
“No, you don’t!” Duaal pounded his fist on the polished black tabletop. “You have reports from the Prian police, too.”
“Not very many of those,” Submajor Ralison said He wrinkled his nose as though he could smell something unclean in his perfect office. “There are… three reports in total? That’s not very much to go on.”
“Because everyone else is dead!” Maeve cried. She tried to keep her voice quiet and civil, but fury tightened her throat and her words were a strangled cry. “The Devourers tore them apart and left not even remains enough to mourn.”
Ralison put his datadex aside and avoided Maeve’s eye. Instead, he looked out one of his windows. The office was located on the two hundred eighty-seventh floor, halfway up the starscraper where thousands of offices maintained the Alliance apparatus on Mir.
“That’s convenient, isn’t it? These Devourer things are supposed to have been gone for a hundred years.” Ralison said. He risked a brief glance at Maeve. “If they ever existed at all. Why would they return?”
“We have already been through all of this with the authorities on Tynerion,” Maeve said. Her head throbbed and her voice was rising again.
“Where are these Devourers, then?” Ralison asked in a tone that made it clear he didn’t expect an answer. He ran a finger along the gleaming surface of his desk and inspected the results with a frown. “CWAAF has received no reports of anything like your smoke monsters anywhere in the galaxy. Surely somebody would have noticed something like that.”
“I already told you, I don’t know where they went,” Duaal said.
“Yes, you banished them,” Ralison sighed. “Using a Waygate of which there is no record. And using magic that cannot be scientifically verified.”
“Kemmer kept the discovery a secret while he studied the Pylos Waygate,” Maeve protested. “It–!”
“And the Prian police buried it in the mountain,” Ralison interrupted with a wave of his striped hand. He glanced over at Duaal. “And you used this conveniently undocumented device — of which none have ever been seen in the core — to send the Devourers away. By your own report, you don’t know where, but you are somehow certain that they’re still a danger.”
“They are!” Duaal insisted. He jumped to his feet beside Maeve, cheeks darkened.
Ralison gazed impassively at Maeve and Duaal.
“And they’re allied with this–” The officer checked his datadex. “–Xartasia, an Arcadian princess. Why exactly would she work with the creatures that supposedly destroyed her own civilization?”
“We do not know,” Maeve answered. “But my cousin sacrificed many lives in the pursuit of her unknown goals. Whatever use she has for the Devourers will cost us all in blood. Why will you not listen to us?”
“He is listening,” Logan Coldhand said. He leaned against the wall next to the door. He fixed ice-blue eyes on the submajor. “He just doesn’t want to believe us.”
Ralison’s lips pressed together into a thin line, but he didn’t look at all embarrassed. Outside the perfectly clear window, pale wisps of cloud raced across the blue sky. Far, far below, the city gleamed, almost as clean as the submajor’s office.
“No, I don’t believe any of this,” Ralison said. The tall Mirran submajor checked the time on his computer and stood. “I’ve wasted enough time with this. Look, Miss Cavainna, we have plenty of real problems to deal with. My loyalty is to the citizens of the Alliance, not to some wandering fairy princess making a plea for attention at best, and a grab for power at worst.”
“Power?” Maeve asked. “What power do you think I could seize by this… this madness?”
Logan stepped closer to Maeve and put his hands on her shoulders. The cybernetic fingers of his left hand were cold and heavy.
“See? Even you call it madness,” Ralison said with satisfaction, then looked at Logan. “But you’re the one with credentials on file. You arranged this meeting. You haven’t said much, though, Mister Centra. Surely no one with a background in proper law believes any of these fairy tales.”
“I do. I’ve seen the Devourers,” Logan answered. “I was at Pylos. Which you would know if you had actually read the reports. But even if I hadn’t encountered them myself and even if I didn’t believe Maeve about it, I would listen.”
“Wait, what exactly–?” Ralison began.
Logan didn’t wait. “Maeve is warning you about a threat to the entire Alliance. Even if she was wrong about it — which she isn’t — you should take every threat seriously.”
Ralison stood up and crossed his long arms over his chest. The mask of stripes around his eyes contorted as he scowled at Logan. “An E3 license grants you many privileges, Mister Centra. Privileges and freedoms that depend upon you maintaining a good standing with the Central World Alliance Armed Forces. CWAAF trusted your past experience and training would guide you in execution of Alliance law.”
“Trusted?” Logan repeated, emphasizing the last syllable.
“You’ve clearly been compromised,” Ralison said. “CWAAF can’t have its own employees inciting panic, Mister Centra. I’m revoking your bounty hunter’s license.”
“I am not compromised,” Logan said in a voice like cracking ice. “You can’t revoke my permits unless I’ve committed a felony offense or failed a psychological evaluation.”
The submajor snatched up his datadex, tapped the screen a couple of times and then threw it back on the table. “Which you just did. Now get the hells out of my office.”
“Why are you–?” Maeve asked, but Duaal grabbed her arm and towed the fairy away.
“Don’t make things any worse, Maeve,” he hissed. “The Alliance doesn’t want to listen. We’re on our own.”
Duaal led Maeve out through the open door of Ralison’s office. Logan followed a step behind.
Gripper, Panna and Xia waited for them at the Hanjirrah library, just a few blocks away from the huge CWAAF starscraper. They sat on the steps of the polished blue dome, in the shade of a colorfully striped awning. Panna set down the datadex she had been reading and Gripper jumped to his huge feet.
“How did it go, Glass?” he asked, calling Maeve by her newest nickname. “What did they say?”
Maeve waited for a middle-aged human in a smooth brown suit to brush past — primly ignoring the Arcadian — and then sank down on the steps beside Xia.
“You’re back early,” the Ixthian said. “I doubt that bodes well for your success.”
Duaal threw his hands into the air. “They won’t listen! CWAAF thinks we’re crazy, or else that we’re trying to start a panic.”
“Submajor Ralison suggested that this was all some sort of ploy for attention,” Maeve added miserably. “Though even he could not say how.”
“And then that idiot revoked Logan’s license,” Duaal finished. “I didn’t even know he could do that.”
Every last eye turned toward the bounty hunter. The ex-bounty hunter. Logan Coldhand stood on the edge of the tiled sidewalk, arms crossed. He met each shocked gaze in turn until the others looked away. Except Maeve. Logan didn’t look at her.
Panna picked up her datadex and turned it over in her hands without reading the screen. “What now? We came to Mir because it had the largest military presence in the core. Except for Axis, of course.”
“We can just try again, right?” Gripper said, his plaintive voice ridiculously belying his huge, ogreish appearance. “We can talk to someone else. Someone in another city? Or maybe on Hyzaar?”
“We cannot,” Maeve said more sharply than she meant to. She hated to upset the young Arboran, but what else could she tell him? “Without Logan’s authority, we cannot make our words heard! Submajor Ralison met with us this morning based only on Logan’s rank.”
“But… but…”
Gripper had no other ideas, but obviously didn’t want to give up. Maeve shared his painful frustration. They had been through all the same arguments and fights on Tynerion, first with the local board of Poes Nor University and then with the global regents.
No one believed them. No one wanted to believe the Devourers could ever come to the core. The huge, smoky monsters were a century-old story from a race of people the coreworlders ignored as a matter of course. A hundred years was a long time to the Alliance, Maeve reminded herself as she stared down at her hands. Generations. There were still some alive who remembered the first appearance of the Arcadians, their flight from the Devourers, but they were few now. And even those had only heard stories of the Devourers. Only the Arcadians had seen them.
Only we remember, Maeve thought. But what did that matter? It wasn’t her own people that she was trying to convince.
“We should get back to the Blue Phoenix,” Xia said. “Staying in Hanjirrah has been expensive and we can’t afford to be here longer than it’s useful.”
“But we don’t know where to go next,” Panna protested.
“Wherever it is, we can figure it out and get there in the Blue Phoenix,” Duaal said. “Let’s get the hells off Mir.”
No one had any new objections, so Gripper keyed up the mainstream from a dented and claw-scarred computer he carried in one oversized pocket and ordered a large taxivan. It took almost an hour to arrive at the domed library and then for all six to squeeze inside. Gripper’s weight made the vehicle bob a little on its orange-tinted null-field. The stripe-skinned driver looked over her shoulder at the strange alien, but said nothing.
No Mirrans had commented on Gripper, Maeve thought. Not where she had been able to overhear, at least. When Maeve whispered her observation to Panna, the wingless Arcadian girl nodded.
“Mir has a greater number of predator species capable of taking down humanoids than any other core world,” she answered in the same hushed tone. “The ancient Mirrans survived because they hid from their predators, and they still have that prey mentality. I doubt any Mirran will go out of their way to attract attention from anyone as big as Gripper.”
The driver darted another look over her shoulder at Maeve and Panna. Xia’s compound eyes turned an amused blue-green color. She smiled at the Arcadian women with shiny silver lips.
“And they retain their ancestor’s sharp ears,” Xia said. She didn’t bother to whisper.
Maeve’s face went hot and she quickly turned her attention to the window. They were driving through an older part of Hanjirrah that looked nothing like the glassteel needle rising up into the clouds where they had met with Submajor Ralison. Most of Hanjirrah looked like shelves of pottery. The endless plains of Mir contained little stone large or strong enough to quarry and even less in the way of useful metals. As a result, other than the Alliance starscrapers, almost everything on Mir was built from brick, ceramic and tile.
Maeve’s view was of arches and domes in a hundred sizes and colors, all covered in tile mosaics or painted with depictions of plants and animals that Maeve didn’t recognize. Most of the people in the doors, on the sidewalks or driving past were Mirran, all tall and long-limbed. Their green and brown stripes reminded Maeve of grass. As they were supposed to, she guessed.
A wall loomed ahead as the taxivan glided over the crest of a hill toward the edge of Hanjirrah. It towered over the city. Not as high as the Alliance starscraper, but the wall had probably been the tallest thing in Hanjirrah until its construction. Maeve craned her neck. She assumed that the gigantic wall encircled the whole city. Some of Hanjirrah had spread beyond the wall, but most of that was the skyport, landing fields like the one where the Blue Phoenix was now, and not many Mirrans lived there.
The wall was old, tall and very thick. Its patterned surface was mottled by centuries of repairs. At a huge gate, a customs officer asked a few questions — there were a number of substances legal on Mir that were not on most other Alliance worlds — but no one had bought any of them and the taxivan slid quickly through the checkpoint.
Unlike the relatively uniform inner surface of the wall, Hanjirrah’s towering edifice was painted with vast murals of strange serpentine creatures, all covered in impressive spines as long as Maeve was tall. Looking back over her shoulder as they drove through, she could make out the huge, dark-hued scales painted in meticulous detail. Not loving or artful, she thought, but as though perfectly depicting the great lizard was of the utmost importance to Mirran artists. But no wall — even if the monsters painted on them came somehow to life — would be enough to keep Hanjirrah safe from Xartasia and the Devourers.
“What are those?” Maeve asked, pointing to the paintings.
She only wanted to think of something other than her cousin, but Panna’s pretty face lit up. She had been an ardent student of archeology and anthropology before all this began. Even Gripper and Xia looked up, curious.
“There are similar walls around most Mirran cities,” Panna said. “They predate the Central World Alliance by hundreds of years. Traditionally, they serve to keep out wildlife, predators that hunted primitive Mirrans for millions of years.”
The taxivan was close to the landing field now. A great, flat sea of pale green grass rippled all the way to the horizon, broken only by the angular silhouettes of grounded starships. As if to punctuate Panna’s lecture, a snarling howl echoed across the landing field, just audible over voices and the distant grind of ship engines.
Gripper shifted his impressive weight uncomfortably, making the seat creak in protest. He came from a race of herbivores, of prey, too. The Arborans lived high in the trees of their homeworld. It wasn’t so different from building great walls to hide behind, Maeve supposed.
“The paintings vary by city and local mythology, but I believe that these big guys–” Panna twisted in her seat to point to the train-length monster in the mural. “–are called sosurrians. They’re a sort of dragon. The pictures are supposed to scare predators away. In some stories, Mir itself is a sosurrian egg. The Mirrans say that the world will end when the great wyrm inside finally hatches. Later, in Union of Light texts, the sosurrian became one of the forms of the devil.”
Ripples of pale cloud reflected the bright Mirran sunlight and Maeve squinted at the sosurrian. Despite the hot and humid day, she shivered. Panna followed the princess’ gaze and bit her lower lip in a frown.
“It does look a bit like a Devourer, I guess,” she said. “With all the black scales and spikes and such.”
Maeve’s stomach knotted until she wondered if she would be sick right there in the taxivan. The Devourers were terrible enough in nightmares, as monsters of myth and history. But they were back.
And Xartasia had made some kind of alliance with them.
Ralison was an idiot, but the man was right about one thing. Why would any Arcadian ally with the Devourers? It made absolutely no sense, but Xartasia had done just that. Summoning the deadly aliens seemed to have been her entire purpose in joining Gavriel and his Nihilists.
But why? Xartasia couldn’t plan to use the Devourers simply to wreak destruction on an unjust galaxy. That was what Gavriel had wanted. If she had wanted the same thing, why kill her one-time student at all? He would have done Xartasia’s work for her.
Was it pride, then? Was her victory only worthwhile if she led the suicidal charge herself? Maeve didn’t think so. Xartasia lacked that sort of mad hubris. Something was badly broken inside her cousin, Maeve knew, but she didn’t think that Princess Titania had lost her mind. No, Xartasia had some careful and probably clever plan. What it was, however, Maeve had no idea.
She didn’t realize that the taxi had stopped until Gripper was rocking the entire van as he squeezed out the door. Logan offered Maeve his hand. He hadn’t said a word since leaving Ralison’s office. As the tall Prian helped her down, Maeve searched his face for any sign of what he was thinking, but found nothing. Logan Coldhand felt passionately and deeply — as they had both discovered — but whether he wanted to or even could express all those emotions remained to be seen.
The Blue Phoenix squatted on top of a sun-bleached concrete pad, sensor spars bristling out in every direction. Many of them were bent and several were broken. Gripper had repaired them as best he could, but the old freighter needed replacement parts. Parts that cost money its new young captain didn’t have. It was expensive enough just to keep the Blue Phoenix flying and its crew fed… A crew that no longer included Maeve, she reminded herself. She and Logan were passengers aboard Duaal’s ship, dependent upon his friendship and generosity in their battle against Xartasia.
“Let’s get some lunch,” Duaal said as he unlocked the streaked gray airlock. The door thunked heavily and swung open. “Maybe we’ll be smarter on a full stomach.”
Xia, Gripper and Panna followed him into the starship. Maeve lingered in the pale sunlight. Logan stopped beside her, his pale blue eyes fixed on Maeve.
“You want to talk to me,” he said.
“I do,” Maeve admitted.
She couldn’t help smiling at her hunter. Even if he was hard to gauge, Logan had no difficulty reading her. He always seemed to know what Maeve was thinking. But this time he was wrong.
“Without my bounty hunter’s license, I’m doing you no good,” Logan said. “I can probably challenge Ralison’s decision, but that will to take time. More time than we have. I can’t help you anymore, Maeve.”
It had been a long day. A long year… And a long century before that. Maeve was tired and had trouble following what Logan was saying. But when she finally did, she scowled up at her hunter.
“You think that you have failed me,” Maeve said.
“I have,” Logan answered, expression blank. “Now I’m just another mouth to fill and you don’t have much money.”
“And so you will… What? Remain here on Mir while I fly away?” Maeve asked.
“If you want me to,” Logan said. His tone was flat and pragmatic. “There’s not much point in me going with you.”
How could he think that? Maeve took both of Logan’s hands in hers. The left one was as steady as ever, but the right one shook. Not much, but she felt the delicate tremor like a heartbeat.
“You are not some tool to me,” Maeve said. “You have not served some purpose after which I would discard you.”
Logan went very still and said nothing. Maeve strained up onto the tips of her toes, stretching her wings out behind her for balance, and still couldn’t quite reach the human’s stony face.
“I am not a queen,” she said, “and you are not my vassal. You are my lover and I would not be parted from you.”
“But–”
“As to the cost of your food and lodging aboard the Phoenix,” Maeve interrupted. She smiled at Logan. “You share my room and Duaal will gladly suffer the loss of food in exchange for keeping me out of his way.”
Logan Coldhand actually blushed at that and lifted Maeve into his arms, finally giving her the kiss that she had been reaching for. His illonium fingers were cold against her back, even in the warm Mirran sun. Maeve shivered and smiled. There was no touch quite like her hunter’s.
“But I… we did fail today,” Logan said when he had breath again. “Xartasia and the Devourers are still out there.”
Maeve shook her head and kissed Logan again. She had no answers for him, and no idea what to do next.
