By sunrise, no intruders remained to watch an elf back butt first from the bowels of the dreaded snowbeast. Tired, trembly, but able to contain herself no longer, she collapsed in a snowdrift, laughing.
Peering through the fangs of the snowbeast mask, Huntress Skyfire regarded her young companion with reproof, is that how you're going to greet Two-Spear, when he arrives here with his war party?'
Sapling sat up, snow dusting her eyebrows and her merry, upturned nose. 'At least I look like an elf. If you keep standing there in that silly-looking mask, Graywolf will likely spear you for dinner.'
At which point the jaws of the snowbeast clicked shut, and a tangle of wolf, and elf, and a mess of jury-rigged storm furs swooped and jumped Sapling in the snowdrift.
The Crash
We saw it up in the sky. Then it was gone. At least Jamsey agrees with me. He saw it, too. Ask him, he's eight, and he lives on my street. I'm only six, but soon I'll be seven and eight comes after that.
Anyway, it was night, and we were sitting on the railing looking up at the stars. The railing goes around the porch, and Mom says it keeps people from falling off, and I told her that somebody would have to be stupid to fall off. The porch, I mean.
I wasn't supposed to be outside. Janice was babysitting. She's fifteen, and she always watches TV and forgets to call me in. I was sitting with Jamsey when Tommy began to cry. He's my brother. He's only two.
I said, 'Shut up.' I know that's not nice, but I was mad, so I said it anyway. Tommy always cries, and then Janice remembers that we aren't in bed yet.
That was when we saw it. The thing, I mean. I saw it first, and then Jamsey saw it, too. Then it was gone, and it looked sort of like a shooting star, but it was green.
'Annie, did you see that?' Jamsey whispered.
I nodded, and we saw it again. It was bright green and blue, and it was getting closer. There were lights on it. Jamsey was so excited he was wiggling, and he never wiggles. Not even at the circus.
The thing got really near, and we could see that it was burning. Tommy was howling, and Janice was shouting at him to be quiet.
The thing kept falling, and it got greener and greener, and I said maybe it was a fairy that ran out of fairy dust and couldn't fly, but Jamsey says there's no such thing as fairies, and he knows cause he's eight.
The green thing was so close we could hear it crackle like fire, and it was bright as a sky rocket on fourth of July. Then, smash, it hit the ground near the back fence, and it sizzled like when Mommy puts hot pans in the sink.
Tommy had stopped crying, and Janice stuck her head out the door, and she was madder 'n Dad when a dog stole his glove once.
'What are you doing out there?' she said. I stuck out my tongue and pretended she wasn't there.
She yelled at me some more, so I said, 'Wait, there's a green thing that fell in the yard, and it's near the fence, and Jamsey and I want to see what it is.'
'Annie! Get in here this minute. Tell Jamsey to go home.'
'I'm not going, stupid, until I can look at the green thing.'
Jamsey and I jumped off the porch and ran so Janice couldn't catch me and make me go to bed. She always makes me go to bed.
Where the green thing had smashed up, there was a pile of shiny stuff and something was moving near it. It was hard to see in the dark. It looked like the weasel I saw in the zoo, kind of, but it had big, big eyes. Bigger than my silver dollar and its skin was smooth like the cloth the sofa is made of.
And it was hurting. I knew it was hurting and I asked Jamsey and he said he knew it too, and we both felt it was hurting, but we didn't know why. We wanted to help it very much, but it felt to us that we couldn't, but we wanted to anyway.
Then Janice came up. She was mad because I had disobeyed her by not going to bed. When she saw the weasel-thing that was hurting, she got real scared. She told me and Jamsey to take a stick and hit it.
We didn't want to, because it wasn't bad, and besides, it felt to us that we had better not. Janice said that she would make me go to bed without a drink of water if I didn't hit the thing with a stick, and I told her I didn't care.
Then Janice came closer, and she said she would step on it herself. I told her that the thing didn't like her. She was making it mad. It felt that to me, and I told her but she said I was fibbing.
The thing felt to me to tell her to stop, and I did, but she wouldn't. She went to step on it, and suddenly she was gone. Honest.
Jamsey and I were scared. We started to run, but the weasel-thing felt to us to stop. It wasn't mean. It wasn't feeling to us very strong anymore, and we thought maybe it would die.
It felt to us that it was dying because it couldn't breathe air, and I didn't understand, but it felt to me that that was all right.
Soon it was dead. We buried it somewhere like it wanted us to. I can't tell where, because I promised I wouldn't. It's a secret, and I don't want to disappear like Janice.
The Firefall
The gauges on the instrument console lit Ataine's hand like stagelights as she reached for the switch which locked the Quest III probe on autopilot.
'I'm not going to be manipulated,' she said through clenched teeth, though the spacecraft was a single-hander, now irrevocably severed from outside contact. The transmitter was a tangled ruin. Ataine had sabotaged the unit herself when an angry superior had beam-arced a recall command: the Quest's launch from Station was unauthorized.
'That's right, you sonuvabitch.' Ataine shoved a fist full of uprooted circuitry at the astonished face on the screen, thereby sparing herself the fury of the man's response. Since the visual monitor still functioned, his balding, purpled image mimed anger by her left elbow, but she gave it scant notice, the toggle a small point of cold at her fingertip.
'And I'm a damned good astrogator, thanks to your turkey of a second lieutenant.' She tripped the switch from 'autopilot' to 'manual.'
As though on cue, red lights crowded the screens, and a buzzer shrilled. Ataine wished she could silence it. She certainly didn't need fail-safe sensors to recognize threat to the Quest's frail shell. The planet engulfed the portside screens like a hideous bruise, and its gravity field dragged against the probe's thrust insatiably as a nightmare lover. The smallest mistake would hurl the Quest to a meteor's incandescent death. Ataine grinned. The electronics didn't trust her.
'You shouldn't either,' she said to the small, white dash which was the aft screen's rendition of her pursuit; a late model Sabre, Ataine guessed, with a very determined man at the controls. He had used weapons, tried repeatedly to cripple her. The Quest's shell carried scorchmarks from a leak in the deflection shields. But Ataine made a difficult target, and the drive engines still functioned to designer specifications.
With damp fingers, she pressed the basket-weave frame of the headset over her ears. Electrodes prickled her scalp, and signals merged with neurological impulses, uniting her mind with her spacecraft. Though direct-link control systems were still highly experimental, Ataine absorbed the influx of electronically induced sensations with no side effects. Other astrogators became paralyzed with vertigo, nausea, and headaches without drugs to balance the artificial impulses generated by the ship's system. Yet Ataine used no drugs.
'Anomaly,' the Station physician had said with a shrug, when he learned how many hours Ataine had logged under manual control in the Quest without a single request at the dispensary. Tired of an infirmary filled with puking test pilots, he'd dismissed the subject out of laziness.
Ataine never corrected him, never explained that she had used the vertigo, nausea, and headache like a drug to shadow a different kind of pain; and when her body's natural resistance had finally, reluctantly, acclimated to the Quest's sensory hardware, she went on using the ship's electronics to bury her own humanity. Her passion was obsessively simple: when she flew, she was spared the emotion which prisoned her thoughts like a shroud.
Now, impulses from the Quest's sensors ruled her thoughts, blanketing awareness of
her woman's body and the tormented memories it contained. Her existence became that of the ship, hurtling through space at speeds impossible for flesh alone to achieve. But this time the joy of release was marred. Attuned to the ship itself, she felt the drag of the orange gas-giant like a fish hook in her guts, tearing. Pictured by electronic circuits, the planet's monstrous mass eclipsed her left hand vision, perilously close. Never intended for such stresses, the Quest's light, high-impact shell came equipped for reconnaissance of asteroids. Government mining operations had no interest in gas-giants. The craft resonated under abuse enough to make her designers weep to a man.
Ataine's mouth twitched in amusement. She'd made off with an exceptionally sophisticated chunk of technology. The brass at Station would roast in hell sooner than pardon her. But she had no intention of returning, which meant shedding the man in the Sabre as soon as possible. And for that, the bloated orange planet would become her ally.
Ataine tightened her grip on the control yoke, bent the Quest's course closer to the planet. Alarm bells screamed. But linked as she was to the anguished increase in resonance in the Quest's shell, she needed no warning.
'Come on, baby.' Her voice shook, though she'd spent hours of computer time over the equations. Delicately, she inched the lever forward, increased thrust. The hull shivered in protest. Her tiny cockpit glittered with lights like an arcade. Ataine licked sweat from her lips as her spacecraft plunged toward the gas-giant's surface. Though impulsive by nature, she had rehearsed her escape through seven weeks of misery. She hadn't miscalculated. She couldn't have. Too much lay at stake.
Ataine steepened the pitch of the Quest's trajectory once more. The hull shuddered, trembled under her like an overextended race horse. She nudged the lever again, fractionally, and checked the aft sensor. Everything, wholly everything depended upon the man who chased being reckless enough to follow. He would know she had reached the absolute limit of the Quest's capabilities. Certain of his victory, he might follow and descend inside her arc, awaiting the moment when hull failure would leave her at the mercy of gravity. She looked back.
A fleck of light hovered off her tail vane, solitary as a star. The Sabre still pursued.
'Foolish,' said Ataine, and laughed aloud. She had him. Though he didn't know it yet, rescue was not part of her plan. She took a bearing on his position. The computer matched vectors, and the results made her laugh again, triumphantly. Trusting the higher tolerances of the Sabre's hull, he too had steepened his dive, and used the pull of the giant planet to increase speed. His thrusters flamed as he corrected course.
'Clockwork,' said Ataine, and her hand quivered feverishly on the controls. Why did you have to behave so damned predictably?
Anxiously, she waited. At length, the Sabre dropped below, flashy as a child's model against the muddled surface of the planet. The moment had arrived. Ataine whipped the Quest into a banking curve, increased thrust, and kicked in the repulsion field designed to protect the spacecraft from collision with rogue asteroids. Like a small, flat rock pitched spinning across the calm water, the Quest would skip free of the gas-giant's field. But the heavier Sabre, belted by the force of her field, would sink like a stone.
Ataine ripped off the headset, punched the craft into autopilot, and ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. She had murdered a man. She'd planned to. A voice inside her head calmly affirmed her action as right; the man must die, for justice, that others might survive. She sat, and shook, and after a long minute, realized that someone was speaking, outside, and it was the man she had sent to his death. Separate from the main transmitter, the emergency distress monitors could never be shut off.
'I won't listen,' she whispered.
But the voice called her name, and the inflection was wrenchingly, horribly familiar.
'No!' Ataine banged her palms against the console. A new glow from the screen tinged her knuckles blue, and with an ugly shock, she saw the emergency code signal had also invaded the video portion of the transmitter. She wished, desperately, she'd smashed it with the rest. Dorren's face confronted her.
'Ataine, you were wrong about me.' He spoke calmly, as though he sat safe in Station's lounge. But the look on his pale, tense features cut her like steel.
Anger claimed Ataine, vengeful and hot as desert wind. Naturally, the Commander would have sent Dorren after her. Who better? All of Station believed she had a weakness for him.
As though he'd read her mind, Dorren gestured impatiently. 'I came myself. The Commander had nothing to do with this.'
Grimly, Ataine wrenched off the access panel. So he'd volunteered. Not even Second Lieutenant Dorren Carlton would get her to return to Station.
'Ataine, will you listen?'
But the desperate, imploring note in his voice rang dissonant in her ears. She found the wire she sought, and pinched it viciously from its contact. The screen went blank. And bitter tears flooded her eyes. Hunched in the Quest's cockpit, with her elbows crammed miserably against the arms of the pilot's seat, Ataine found that she couldn't let him die. Anyone but Dorren ... anyone ... her luck was rotten. Hours of emotional anesthesia in the Quest's fancy astrogational systems had enabled her to live without him. But no escape existed which could negate responsibility for his death.
'Coward,' she sobbed, and jammed herself back into the headset. Tears dripped off her chin as she banked the Quest around, this time without equations, calculations; this time with nothing but her wits and the knowledge that if she saved him, others less deserving would die.
'I hate you,' she said, as she once had to his face, but the words changed nothing.
The controls shuddered under her fingers, as though protesting betrayal. And the gas-giant swelled in the starboard screens mocking the futility of every month spent in preparation, wasted effort, now, because of Dorren. Wracked by self-loathing she fought to steady the Quest against the planet's cruel pull, tried not to think, and lost, as she always did, to memory . . .
* * *
'Don't frown so hard,' said a quiet male voice at her elbow. 'Didn't you play Jacks and Aces as a child?'
Startled, Ataine glanced up from the instrument simulator's console to discover a young man of medium height leaning on the armrest beside her. A grin softened the lines of decisively set features, and the wheeze of the overhead ventilator ruffled perfectly trimmed brown hair. The eyes were direct, and very blue.
'Were you deprived?' His grin faded into puzzled inquiry, 'I thought every kid played Jacks and Aces. I'm Dorren, assigned to coach you, and if you hated cards, you're going to make a difficult job for me.'
'I played,' said Ataine. As he crouched beside her seat, she buried a moment of vulnerability by staring stonily at the screen. He's nobody special, she told herself firmly. But the instinctive platitude was useless. Theirs was a rapport so perfectly balanced that nothing she had experienced since was the same.
Using whimsical analogies drawn from card games, Second Lieutenant Carlton taught her to handle the sensitive instrumentation of Station's ore probes faster than any trainee had done in the past. Long after the others had shut down their systems for lunch, she and Dorren had lingered in the trainer, mixing instruction, anecdotes, and tasteless jokes with unparalleled enthusiasm. Time stopped. Neither of them noticed. Finally, the disgruntled technician in charge asked them, please, to leave. He had a date.
Ataine slapped the power switch off, smiled at Dorren. 'Are you busy? We could have a date, too.'
Instantly, his expression lost its vitality. She swallowed. It never occurred to her he might already be mated.
'Not today.' He sounded stricken. 'Another time.'
Ataine shrugged. She guessed he was avoiding her. Yet as he left, she experienced a distinct uneasiness, as though something unnatural had occurred. Her disappointment must have leaked into her expression, because the technician paused in his haste to see the doors locked.
'Dorren's not mated,' he said, his face sympathetic. 'He simply prefers to be alon
e.'
Ataine blinked, icily sobered. 'Then keep him away from me,' she said, because too often in the past she had been attracted to the independent sort of man who 'simply needed no one.' Another was a heartache she'd avoid.
But Station was as small as a closet; inevitably Dorren's superior heard about their supreme compatibility as a team. They were assigned together.
* * *
The morning of her first survey mission, Ataine stood under the ribbed belly of the Prospector she and Dorren were to fly. Landing beacons beyond the airlock ports spilled hellish reflections through the launch tube, increasing her uneasiness. Dorren was late. Ataine waited, buffeted by drafts as the escort teams who would accompany them sealed hatches and fired up systems prior to ignition.
Dorren appeared, finally, in the service passage, still fastening his gloves. His face bore a deep scowl, and as he approached, Ataine saw his chest heave in short, hard jerks. His evident temper smothered her greeting unspoken.
Dorren seemed oblivious. He glanced at the helmet which dangled stupidly from her fingers. 'Put that on. I don't want to look at you.'
Stung past restraint, Ataine looked squarely into his face. 'I didn't ask for this. Why take your frustrations out on me?'
The hurt she tried uselessly to hide made him check abruptly. He paused and studied her, and the unguarded feelings she discovered in return took her breath away. The scowl softened.
'I'm sorry.' He sighed, knuckles locked and white over the seal ring of his own helmet. 'We're stuck for today. I'll speak to the Commander when we get back.'
Prompted by intuition, Ataine said, 'You already did. He refused to change the roster, didn't he?'
Dorren's eyes narrowed. His expression became harried, as though he fully acknowledged her presence only that moment. 'He'll change his mind. Now, get in.'