The attack still hadn’t come. Corso paced the nav room on the Asphodel, staring down at the peaceful planet turning toward night. Evessa had already charted a patrol pattern, the best protection one ship could provide. Which wasn’t saying much.
Although maybe he was wrong about the raiders’ plans. Maybe he was so scrambled by l’auraly temptations, he had miscalculated and would get everyone killed.
Maybe he should just retrieve his planetside people and run for the outer reaches of the sheerways where no one could reach them.
Benedetta had said the old l’auralyo had voided the decommissioning edict. She’d also said she would be on the hunt for a true companion. She’d said a lot.
And, he reminded himself, she hadn’t lied yet. In fact, in a universe as black as the deadly paths between stars, she shone with truth, integrity, and courage despite the names he’d called her.
While he hid up here in his ship. Alone.
He cursed.
Evessa lifted her head from the nav board. As far as he could tell, she just liked to stare into the void. “Is there something I can help you with, Captain?”
“Are you trying to say I should get my tangled ass out of here?”
“Certainly not. You are the captain. The Asphodel is yours.” She paused. “But if you wanted to get your tangled ass out of here...”
He gave a sharp laugh. “And where would I go?”
“Back to the l’auralya. Where you want to be.”
“She is with her people, where she is supposed to be. I am here, which is my place.”
Evessa inclined her head. “As you say, sir.”
He tightened his jaw. “You think something else?”
“Sir, I only point the ship where you tell me.”
He snorted. “And you always tell me when you think I’m headed in the wrong direction.”
She lifted her starfield eyes—the black-on-black stare speckled with pinprick lights that marked a gene-modified sheerways navigator—and gave him a meaningful look.
“You think I’m headed in the wrong direction,” he interpreted.
She loosed a long-suffering sigh and pushed to her feet. “Our course is laid in, Captain. Do let me know if anything needs to be changed.” She let herself out of the room and the door eased shut, locking him in with his thoughts and the spinning planet beneath and the stars beyond.
How had his world spun out of control so quickly? He’d fought with everything he had—he had fought with more than he’d been given—to become master of his own destiny, commander of his own fortune. Being captain of the Asphodel was the outward manifestation of all he had wanted. She’d taken him where he wanted to go. She was his home, his refuge, his escape, his everything.
But was the Asphodel still his everything?
When had he lost that certainty?
His gaze dropped from the dizzying view to the bare bench. He’d gone back to his quarters, but Benedetta had left her veil tied to his bed. The memory made him shift as his loins tightened. And though he knew it was impossible—the ship’s life support system would have processed the air a half a million times since the night previous—a whiff of her scent teased him.
The cold purity of his space had been changed into an intimate boudoir. The claustrophobia chased him out.
He cursed again, more softly though no one would hear him this time. Wasn’t that what he wanted; no one to hear him?
He sat on the bench, but the seat felt unreasonably cold, even though, once again, he knew life support kept the ship at optimal temperature. What was wrong with him?
As if he didn’t know the answer to that.
But how had she gotten so far under his skin? She was the one marked with the crystal lines, not him.
He pushed to his feet again and leaned into the curved viewport until he was surrounded by the illusion of hanging in space.
When he’d been trapped down on L-Sept, the pix fields flaming around him, he’d been willing to sacrifice the whole Lasa system to get his ass off that rock and back to the stars where he belonged. In the end, the price had been only one planet and the vast majority of its inhabitants, but still the survivors had proclaimed him a hero because all they’d wanted was their freedom too.
He allowed no innocents on his crew, precisely so there would be no more guilty blood on his hands. He needed that freedom. That solace. That loneliness. It was the only thing that kept him alive and sane.
But tangle and shred it, what if he’d been wrong?
What if the stars weren’t enough?
He pressed himself closer to the black, as if it could seep into his bones—a dark crystalline perfection of nothingness.
The comm crackled to life with Patter’s frowning face. “Captain, are you still there?”
Corso straightened abruptly and strode to the comm panel. “Incoming?”
“No, sir. At least not ships. And not incoming.”
“I’m on my way.”
Despite his focus, Benedetta’s shadow seemed to follow him to the bridge. She would be so curious, her keen intellect and open mind challenging him at every turn. And yet she had that quality that he’d never had: the ability to cede with grace and yet never be defeated, to carry the marks of an unchosen fate and yet not be scarred.
He pushed past the door to the bridge before it could finish opening. “What did you find?”
Patter had already vacated the captain’s chair, but he leaned over the arm to summon a heads-up display. “Here.”
Corso absorbed the implications in a heartbeat. “Not a ship. You caught a message.”
“And not incoming,” Patter concluded. “Outgoing, on the same frequency as the remote mortar drop.”
“That’s why they haven’t attacked,” Corso murmured.
Patter nodded. “Someone on Qv’arratz is making a deal.”
Corso mentally shuffled his options. “I’m going down.”
Patter reached for the comm panel. “Yes sir. I’ll tell Evessa to change course—”
“No. The Asphodel isn’t going. Just me.”
Patter frowned. “Captain?”
“Everyone down there knows the plan we made to lay in wait for the raiders, but we can’t get the ship planetside in time without giving away that we heard the message. I want the Asphodel on a new attack course. And keep tracking that message.”
“But how—?”
“Come up with something. We’ve worked together long enough. I’m taking a pod down. I’ll find out who’s talking to our invisible friends and why.”
Leaving his first to stare after him in consternation, Corso raced off the bridge.
Since the Asphodel was rated for atmospheric landings, they rarely used the shuttle pods. All four pods were rigged for emergency escape, traveling as light and as anonymous as possible. Qv’arratz didn’t have the sensors to track the landing pod, but someone else might be watching too.
Despite his words to Patter, Corso kept his ear comm tuned to the crew. Their bursts of planning chatter reassured him. Benedetta was right; they were a good crew. He had known that, of course, had chosen them to be exactly that, but he hadn’t appreciated them enough until this moment.
The pod skimmed atmo as little more than a burning meteor, nothing worth noting and too quick to catch, even if noted. He put down in a small clearing well away from the village and the temple and separate from the open space they’d been using for the Asphodel.
He took a moment to mark the location well in his memory. They might need to make a quick getaway.
With the hazer in one hand, he moved quickly through the jungle, following his scanner’s map until the smells of the temple—woodsmoke, incense, and flowers—guided him in. The temple buildings were dark, as he’d suggested before he left; no sense lighting a beacon for the dropping mortars. The attackers would no doubt be using coordinates they would have established on their initial mapping run, so they wouldn’t be fooled, at least not for long. Unless they’d been lazy, as the automated drop indicated, and not done their battle survey. In his militia days, Corso would have court-martialed the lot of them. The false beacon he’d had his crew set up just a few degrees off the temple and village might buy them some time.
Although, with helpful information from whoever was communicating with the raiders, maybe this could all be over by morning. In no time, Benedetta would be headed into the welcoming arms of some eager patron, and he’d be back on the Asphodel…
In silence, he circled behind the blacked-out temple to Benedetta’s rooms.
The curtains were drawn. Not even the faintest line of a lume stick glimmered under the door. He pushed through and quietly called her name. Nothing. Where was she?
A hint of alarm prickled through him.
She wouldn’t have…
He reconnoitered the rest of the temple. The old man Yecho was praying, on his knees in front of a single stick of incense, its glowing tip smaller than a star. Corso left him to it; couldn’t hurt their cause any.
But he scanned the building first, looking for electronics that might be sending the message.
Not every message going up was in their favor.
The two girls were asleep in the room behind the devout Yecho. They curled around each other, their heads bowed inward to reveal the backs of their fragile necks. The silver lines of the qva’avaq glimmered, as if recognizing him. He grimaced.
When he withdrew, the old man was standing outside the doorway. “What are you looking for, Captain?”
Corso pitched his voice low. “A liar. A traitor. A thief who wants to take everything I have left.”
Yecho raised one eyebrow. “I thought you might be looking for Benedetta. But she is none of those things.”
No, she wasn’t. Maybe it would be easier if she were, since then a mercenary sheership captain might have a chance…
Corso cursed under his breath, and one of the girls lifted her head. “L’auralyo?”
“Hush,” Yecho murmured. “Empty your hands, Torash, and go back to sleep.” His gnarled fingers traced a silvery sign through the darkness.
She gave him a drowsy smile. “Qv’auro lo, l’auralyo.”
“A qv’auro lo eso, child.”
As the old man led the way back to the temple, Corso kept scanning. “What does that mean?”
“The ritual gestures?” Yecho turned his hands over in front of him. “A blessing, and a reminder that if we are too grasping, too afraid to let go, we have no way to touch.” His smile was not as sweet as the girl’s—was more suggestive. “Has Benedetta not explained to you the l’auraly power of feeling?”
Nothing on the scanner. Corso grunted. “She explains what she feels like, when she feels like it. Which isn’t much or often enough.” What other secrets was she holding back besides the location of the crystal mine that was going to poison them all? “That phrase you said… Qvo lo...”
“Qv’auro lo, yes.”
“That was in the song she sang...” Corso trailed off when the old man gave him a sideways look. “She said it was too hard to translate.”
“Not at all. It means I love you.”
Corso couldn’t hide his inadvertent jerk of surprise.
Yecho pointed at the scanner and hazer. “Perhaps she did not want to burden you with too many explanations since your hands are already so full.”
Stalking away without a response, Corso finally found Benedetta in the central garden; he would have stumbled over her earlier if he hadn’t been creeping around behind the buildings. She knelt in the middle of the tiled path, the lines of qva’avaq tracing her spine exposed by the low drape of her gown, her face turned skyward.
He didn’t think she was praying, not if the tear tracks on her cheeks—glimmering in the starlight—were any indication.
Her sorrow pierced him, and he called her name softly though he’d only meant to find her, make sure she was safe, before continuing his search for the outbound signal.
She came to her feet in a rush, swiping at her cheeks. She made even that hurried, surreptitious gesture such a study in beauty that his chest ached; his broken ribs, perhaps, reminding him not all damage could be healed with a hypo spray.
“What are you doing down here?”
He hushed her. “We have a problem.”
“Which is why you’re supposed to be up there,” she reminded him in a whisper.
Quickly and quietly, he explained the signal.
She shook her head. “The first mortar drop that took out our landing pad destroyed all our outgoing capabilities, sensors, message sending, everything. We were cut off.”
“You got a message to me,” he reminded her.
She frowned. “Barely. And only because...”
He took her arm. “Because?”
“Icere was able to amplify his tablet.” She grabbed Corso’s arm when he started to whirl away. “But he could only reach you because we had security codes for the Asphodel through Yecho’s connections.”
“He could have the same codes for the raiders if he has betrayed you to them.”
“He wouldn’t.” But Benedetta’s protest trailed off.
Corso shot her a glance. “Wouldn’t? Or you don’t want to think it? You’re too kind, princess.”
She scowled. “No, if Icere sold us out, I’d kill him myself. But I know him; he wouldn’t lower himself to that.”
“You would be surprised how low people will sell out,” he said darkly. “The l’auraly say the qva’avaq makes you sensitive to others’ thoughts and…desires and feelings, but do you trust that now?”
Without hesitation, she said, “Yes.”
“You’re sure? Our lives are on the line here.”
She bit her lip and wrapped her arms around herself. Her shoulders—bared by the low back of her gown—hunched a little as she shivered. He knew that feeling of exposure, and it wasn’t about the clothing.
“Yes,” she whispered. “The same empathy that primes us for love will serve in war.”
Corso nodded once. “I want to believe you, but I’d rather know where everyone is tonight.”
She turned toward the darkened buildings, as if she could see through the walls. “He was angry when he left,” she mused. “He would have gone to the...”
Corso waited a moment and, when she didn’t continue, guessed, “The qva’avaq mine?”
But she shook her head. “The Hall of Mute Crystals.”
He grimaced. “That sounds ominous.”
“Not ominous, more…poignant. The qva’avaq, fused with l’auraly bodies, is tuned solely to the a’lurily key, and the crystals resonate only with the bearers. When a’lurily die, their keys are returned to us to be entombed in the hall.”
“If that hall is here at the temple, I’m surprised the raiders didn’t just take that easy source of crystal.”
“They couldn’t. The crystals are disconnected, essentially dead.”
They hurried across the temple grounds to a small building behind the prayer hall. They paused while Corso scanned for the signal.
“I’d heard that the l’auraly bond was for life,” he murmured. “But I thought it was just a legend.”
“There’s a phrase in the keying ceremony when l’auraly are presented to their a’lurily: The brightest moon is but a reflection of the sun. The l’auraly don’t die when their patrons and the key crystals do, but neither can they take other patrons. They return here with the muted crystals to teach and mentor.”
“Why don’t they...” He shrugged helplessly. “Do whatever they want.”
She stared past him. “Want? L’auraly reflect the deepest of desires. What is want compared to that?”
Her glib dismissal made him bristle. “Maybe they just don’t know what else they desire.”