Fifteen
I thrashed in the dark sea, paddling but going nowhere against the thing that held me.
My eyes swelled and burned. I had reenlisted. I had traveled halfway across the known universe. I had jumped out of a perfectly intact starship a hundred miles high and fought a swamp monster for her. It was bad enough that I would never see her again. The worst was that she would never even know I had tried. I punched a wave and struggled harder. “Goddammit!”
“Stop kicking, you stupid bugger!”
I rolled onto my back. A dark silhouette loomed against the purple twilight sky.
I floated alongside an open boat under sail. The boat carried two human beings who were tugging at a grapple that was hooked around my boot.
Splash.
The smaller of the two humans let go of me, poked a pitchfork-sized trident into the waves, and discouraged a rhiz.
Then I relaxed, let them reel me in, and extended my good arm. The larger man hooked a hand under my backpack and tugged me as I kicked my boots; then I tumbled over the gunwale into the boat.
I rocked in the slop that sloshed the boat’s bottom while I stared up at the two silhouettes and coughed. A rhiz, silver and thrashing and as long as I was tall, thrashed in the boat’s belly, clamped ineffectually to my armored calf. The smaller man pounded the fish with a club until it let go, then watched as it thrashed slower and slower, until it lay motionless and gasping.
The boat was thirty feet long, with square cloth sails. Just an open wooden tub with a tiller aft and benches and lockers along its sides. Iridian lober boats, and lobers, who fished for trilobites and lobe-finned fish, hadn’t changed much in a thousand years.
The smaller figure turned to the one who had pulled me in. “You think this is one of them?”
The voice squeaked. A girl, not a man.
“Who else would he be?” Deeper voice.
“There were supposed to be two.”
“All these rhiz? The other one’s bait by now.”
I raised my eyebrows and didn’t bother to switch on my translator. Apparently one thing had changed in a thousand years. I resented the tidal wave of Earth culture that swamped the rest of the Human Union as much as anyone raised on an outworld did. But Terracentrism had its virtues. At this moment the Trueborn mission schools, and cowboy holos and comic chips that had made Standard the language, even in literal backwaters like this one, sounded pretty good.
Rhizodonts twice the size of the one for which I had been bait thumped the open boat’s hull planks. The man who had pulled me aboard was lean, with a gray beard and Iridian-green eyes, and wore a lober fisherman’s leather armor. I cleared my throat. “Thanks.”
The bearded man snorted. “None returned. Your bomb’s attracted half the rhiz in this bay.”
“It attracted you, too. I had to do something.”
“We were where we were told to be! You weren’t.”
“I’m sorry. You turned out to be too small a target from a hundred miles up.”
The man snorted again. “Iridia’s always too small for the Trueborns.”
I sighed inside my helmet. Decades earlier, Earth tilted against Iridia and toward Tressen to end a bloody, stalemated war between them. The Tilt ended the war, alright. But the Tressens turned their victory into a campaign to eradicate Iridia from the face of this planet.
Earth didn’t like genocide any better than the next smug, patronizing superpower. But Earth had its hands full saving the human race from the Slugs. So Earth imposed isolating sanctions on Tressen, then washed its collective hands of the Iridians. No wonder Kit had to go in here friendless. And no wonder these two weren’t overjoyed to see me.
But they were the closest things to allies I had.
I sat up in the boat and popped my visor. “I’m Jazen. You?”
The man just stared at me.
I eye-rolled. It was possible to overdo operational security. “Look, I need to call you something.”
The gray-bearded man shrugged. “I’m Pyt. The girl is Alia.”
I squinted at the smaller Iridian. Her strawberry-blonde hair was pulled back, and her shirt hung on an eleven-year-old’s board-flat frame, but girl she was.
I nodded. “We need to retrieve my baggage, Pyt.”
“Why?”
Because without it I’m just an ignorant stranger. With it I’m an ignorant stranger armed to the teeth. “Because that’s where the diamonds are.”
Pyt fended off a rhiz with his trident, then jerked his head shoreward. “We need to get away from this bait shop anyway. How far?”
I shrugged and punched up the Equipment Drone’s locator, then pointed over the gunwale. “Thousand yards inland. That heading.”
Two dark hours and two scorpion encounters later, the little boat creaked and rolled as it sailed away from the Barrens with my stuff aboard. We were bound south, toward the rock-bound Iridian coast.
The moon had risen, and reflected off the waves like a rolling carpet of silver coins.
Pyt sat in the boat’s stern, the tiller pressed between his arm and torso, while he shucked a raw trilobite with a lober’s hooknife. The girl slept, wrapped in blankets, in the prow.
Pyt nodded at the sea and smiled at me. “Beautiful, no?”
I hung my helmetless head over the gunwale and dry heaved for the second time. I gasped and spat at the waves. “I hate water.” The rhizodont alongside me banged its tail against my belly. “Can we throw that thing out? ’Cause I’m not eating it.”
Pyt shook his head. “Never waste something you can cut into bait.”
“And I thought you were keeping me around just for the diamonds.”
That finally coaxed a smile from Pyt. He said, “You Trueborns don’t sail, then?”
I wiped drool off my chin, dug out a motion-sickness cap from the meds kit, and gulped it dry.
My shoulder throbbed. While I was in the meds kit, I punched in the details of my brachial injuries, selected the two caps the screen prescribed, and swallowed them. The sedative in the first one would knock me out. The second contained nano machines, activated by stomach acid, that would swim through my bloodstream and repair my arm damage.
Pyt watched in silence as I played doctor.
Finally, I answered him. “Some Trueborns sail.”
Kit had a rich kid’s shelf full of yachting trophies, not to mention a boathouse full of day sailers, at her parents’ beach place in the Caribbean. One weekend on leave down there she had tried to teach me the difference between a jib and a bowline. But we were alone together, and we ended up, uh, distracted. Well, I was distracted and she had let me be.
I gulped a breath and said to Pyt, “But I’m Trueborn by blood only. My parents were born on Earth. I was born and raised downlevels on Yavet. Like living in the bottom of a layer cake. I never saw an ocean until I joined the Legion.”
He frowned. “The Legion? I agreed to guide a Trueborn military officer. Not a hired murderer.”
“The Legion was a long time ago. I am a Trueborn military officer. I’m also a saloon owner on holiday.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Look, I didn’t abandon Iridia. The diplomat assholes who did that retired before I was born.” But I was sent here by the diplomat assholes who replaced them. “My partner’s already dead.”
Pyt stiffened, started to say something. Then he turned his face away and stared at the shore.
I, in turn, stared out across the empty sea. My partner? Somewhere out there the white-bread junior case officer who I had barely met was already two separate chunks of rhizodont bait. I didn’t know whether Weddle sailed, like Kit did. I didn’t know his parents any better than I didn’t know my own. When I tried to picture his face, all I could see was the bloody stump of his spinal cord flapping out of his helmet as it tumbled through the sky. I dry-heaved over the side again.
I wiped my eyes. My two allies seemed in no hurry to get to know me any more than I had been in a hurry to get to know Weddle. So I studied them. Both wore brown leather-plated armor. The case brief said the Iridian lober culture was a littoral-zone subsistence economy.
Family units hand-fished for needle-toothed, lobe-finned fish and trilobites. Trilobites were millipede shellfish, some with back spines that would make a porcupine jealous.
Pyt looked to be fifty, broad-faced and lean, with hair that had once been brown. The girl, Alia, couldn’t have been older than eleven. Unlike Pyt, she had delicate features and strawberry-blonde hair. But she cocked her head just in the way that the man did. A daughter who favored her mother?
Pyt had lost the little and ring fingers of his right hand at the first joint of each. Digital amputation was one of a lober’s many occupational hazards. The rule of thumb, so to speak, was one finger joint lost for each five years fishing. The girl still had all ten fingers.
I saw a watertight locker in the stern that was the right shape to house long guns, but the Iridians weren’t hunters by nature. They weren’t killers, either. Like most partisans, Pyt and Alia hardly looked the part. But they had fished me out of a mess. I had to trust them if I was going to accomplish anything.
I also had to heal. My shoulder muscles spasmed as the drugs began working.
I rolled onto my side, helmet faceplate open, in case I heaved again. Then I counted back from a hundred, waiting for the cap to settle my stomach, the sed to knock me out, and the nanos to sail my bloodstream like microscopic hospital ships.
The boat rocked, the crew snored, and I hadn’t slept since before the pre-drop briefing.
The last number I remembered was eighty-six.
Kit’s finger traced my lips as she smiled down at me, smelling of lemons. I smiled back as I took her finger between my lips.
Then the smell changed as she leaned down and whispered. “Are you a knight?”
I woke with sun in my eyes and the girl staring down at me through my open faceplate.