WITH EFFORTLESS EFFICIENCY JEHANE got his refugees strapped in by the time Yehoshua and his pair came pelting up the ramp.
Pinto had the shuttle off the ground before Finch could begin retracting the ramp, and above the buildings just as Jehane strapped into the seat behind him, Lily sitting where Jenny had on the trip down.
“Hold on to your seats!” shouted Finch, and then Pinto took them up at an angle and velocity that brought screams from the wounded and gasps from everyone else.
Black engulfed Lily’s vision as a vise gripped her chest, faded to a haze of spots and grey, and then she could see again: the back of Pinto’s head and the stark tattoos visible between his throat and collar; the curving gleam of Bach blocking her view of Finch; Jehane’s profile: golden hair brushing along the sculpted line of his cheek, lips parted slightly under the strain of their climb.
No one spoke for minutes as Pinto, body relaxed and yet entirely focused, guided the shuttle up. From the cabin behind, Lily could hear weeping. She could not tell who it was. Beside her, Yehoshua cursed softly under his breath, mostly imprecations about “damned tattoos.”
Slowly the vise lightened as Pinto slacked off their climb. Lily found she could take real breaths. Yehoshua let out a long sigh.
“Cursed Ridani,” he swore in a good-natured voice. “If you weren’t such a cursed good pilot we could have gotten blown up on the way in and not had to suffer through these damned Gs. I’m too old for this.”
In the clear plastine of the shuttle’s windshield, Lily could see the ghost of Pinto’s reflection, all geometric lines etched in faint traceries, and she thought the corners of his mouth quirked up—although she could not be sure.
“I have a signal from the decoy pilot,” said Finch. “He is downside, and still alive. That’s all I can tell.”
“Good. Monitor the full range of comm—” Lily broke off and glanced at Jehane.
“Interesting,” he murmured. “A Ridani pilot.”
Lily watched him watch Pinto. He blinked once, twice, as if there was a clue here that he was missing, and wished to find.
“Ah,” he said suddenly. “Senator Isaiah’s son.”
Nothing in Pinto’s body betrayed his reaction to that statement. Lily glanced at the windshield, but the angle of light had erased his reflection.
“Where are we going?” asked Finch.
Jehane turned his head to look at Lily—not at all as if he were deferring to her, but rather as if he were wondering why Finch needed to ask that question. He noted each occupant of the forward cabin: Pinto, Finch, Bach, and Yehoshua, and then, of course, he understood.
Lily wondered, suddenly, if he was angry at her appropriation of her former crew from the Forlorn Hope. She could tell nothing from his expression.
“To the Boukephalos,” he said. Then he unstrapped himself and went into the main cabin to check on the wounded.
Jehane kept Lily and Bach with him when they left the shuttle bay. His first words, coming onto the bridge, were to Kuan-yin.
“Have you positioned the fleet as I directed?”
For a fleeting moment she looked irritated. “Yes.”
“Then.” He sat in the captain’s chair and swiveled it around to face Lily. Tapped the com on his console. “Send shuttle and crew back to the Forlorn Hope,” he ordered, watching her. She did her best to keep her face and stance expressionless. “The Hierakis Formula,” he said. “What is it?”
Surprise betrayed her. She simply stared at him, unable to answer, or not to answer convincingly.
He lifted his hands, palm to palm, and rested his lips on his thumbs as he studied her. She was aware of Kuan-yin staring at them until a slight movement of Jehane’s head sent that woman back to her duties. At the other stations, the crew remained intent on their work.
Tapped the com again. “Contact Captain Machiko on the Forlorn Hope. Have him send his physician here. I have casualties I want him to look at.”
He resumed his study of Lily.
She had recovered herself, somewhat. Bach winked silently at her, neutral yellow.
“Request permission to change out of battle dress,” she said formally.
He smiled. His brown tunic and trousers were soiled with grime and stained with dried blood, but he looked perfectly at ease in them. “Granted. Although I will want you back on the bridge once you have—”
“Comrade!” The woman at comm, her tone urgent. “Savedra reports two ships not ours entering low and fast in sept quadrant—no—and two more in terce, reported by—wait”—she frowned as reports began to flood the comm—“Another three—” Broke off again.
Jehane dismissed Lily with a wave of his hand as he settled a headset over his golden hair. “All fleet on red. We have contact. Open fire.”
Lily left the bridge, but she felt it wise under the circumstances not to change out of battle dress. Having no cabin, she went to Medical. Duri let her clean up and had one of her assistants go to Armory for a full refit and reload of her rifle and oxygen package.
Bach monitored the battle on screen over the next hours.
The Boukephalos did not even fire a shot.
“Void bless,” murmured Lily as Central’s incoming fleet took scathing fire and shattered under its concentration. “He must have planned this out from the beginning: the entire Blessings revolt must have been the decoy to lure the fleet in here piecemeal, in a hurry.”
Duri regarded her, puzzled. “What did you expect? He is Jehane. By the way, would you mind if I took a new sample of your blood? I still have no idea what that illness was. Although I did get a suggestion to—”
She looked up as the door to Medical sighed open. Stood up, startled.
Lily turned and rose as well.
Jehane had entered, followed by Hawk.
Kyosti took in the room with a comprehensive glance, not giving Lily an instant’s longer glance than Duri or the bank of medical equipment. And yet Lily knew that he somehow savored her presence, carefully and completely, in some way that the others could not detect—not even Jehane, who kept his watchful gaze on Hawk and seemed ever-so-slightly displeased that the blue-haired man had no stronger reaction to Lily.
“Comrade Doctor,” Jehane said to Duri, imbuing the tide with a wealth of praise. “Would you leave us a moment?”
She nodded and retreated into the adjacent ward.
Jehane looked first at Lily, and then at Hawk. “I’d like to repeat something to you,” he said, not a request.
“Good gracious,” drawled Kyosti in his most aggravatingly foppish tone, “then I hope you’ll let me sit down.”
Lily gave the barest shake of her head, warning him, but Jehane merely waved at a nearby chair. Kyosti sighed and brought it forward and seated himself in it with ostentatious fussiness.
Lily stood, still, hands clasped behind her back. For the first time in her life she tried consciously to efface herself, just as, she realized, Heredes had long ago learned to make himself inconspicuous or unthreatening, if circumstances warranted.
Jehane kept his face carefully neutral, and yet the brilliant intelligence that animated his charisma could never be disguised or hidden.
“‘Oh, he did, did he?’” Jehane said without inflection. “‘But how could he know—’ ‘The Hierakis Formula?’ ‘I don’t believe it.’ ‘No, Bach. Of course not. But—’ ‘That’s all he said?’ ‘Leaving me stuck here for the present, of course. All right. I’ll play his game a little longer.’ ‘Let’s hope so.’”
Lily said nothing.
“Lily, my dear woman,” Kyosti drawled, deliberately provoking. “You ought to remember that on a ship like this your every word will be taped and played back.”
“What is the Hierakis Formula?” Jehane asked smoothly, not rising to the bait. “What game are you playing, comrade Hawk?”
Kyosti hooked his hands behind his hair and leaned back into the cushions of his chair. He smiled. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it?”
“My thought, exactly,” replied Jehane. Although his voice was gentle, the threat was clear.
Jehane’s wrist-com beeped, and a breathless woman’s voice spoke.
“Comrade Jehane! Please return to the bridge!”
He lifted his wrist. “Is there some trouble? I thought at last tally that all was in hand.”
“We have a new ship, comrade. It came in at oct quadrant, where there isn’t even a charted window. And she’s—Void bless us, comrade”—even over the thin speaker, the tremor in her voice was obvious—“she’s huge. I’ve never seen a hull that size. She doesn’t answer to comm. So far cautious fire has made no penetration whatsoever.”
“Has the cavalry arrived at last?” Kyosti murmured obscurely.
“What the Void is ‘cavalry’?” Lily demanded, shaken out of her stance by the sudden instinct that she knew who had just arrived.
Jehane lowered his wrist and raked them with his glance. “Come with me to the bridge,” he ordered.
Kyosti shrugged, and rose as if it would be too much trouble to resist, but the gesture was lost on Jehane because he had already turned to walk to the door, expecting their compliance. Lily followed him silently, Kyosti at her heels.
The atmosphere on Boukephalos’s bridge was taut with uncertainty. As they entered, the man on scan looked up.
“Comrade.” His face was creased with worry. “I’ve had tac running through all our records. Central’s battle fleet has nothing this big listed in our files.”
“Status?” asked Jehane as he sat down in captain’s chair, slipping on his headset and levering out the chair’s console and screen to display over his lap.
“The ship has halted at the following coordinates.” Scan reeled off a list of numbers. “She’s currently making no movement whatsoever, hostile or friendly.”
“No response to our overtures on any channel,” said the woman at comm.
“We’re scattershooting fire from three ships, close enough to warn but not to hit. There has been no reply or action of any kind,” added the officer at weapons.
“I don’t think,” said scan abruptly, “that ship cares one whit about us. We could just as well be flak on entry: something just to fly through.”
Jehane’s face was a study in disapproval crossed by the intense interest with which he studied the specs unfolding on the screen before him.
Beside Lily, Kyosti sighed and shifted his weight from one leg to the other.
Jehane glanced up. “Do you know anything about this?” he asked mildly.
“Is there some reason I ought to?” Kyosti retorted lazily.
Jehane sighed, as ostentatious a gesture as any Kyosti ever used, but toned down for all that into an expression of long-suffering patience. “I won’t bother to insult your intelligence by replying directly to that question, comrade. I somehow doubt that you are unaware that we met, albeit not personally, at Nevermore Station some time ago. I haven’t time to fence as I’m in the middle of a rather large and important engagement.”
As if on cue, comm spoke up. “Aberwyn reports that the cruiser Singh has taken a disabling hit and officially withdrawn from the action. Suffrage reports that the cutters Manticore and Gryphon are in retreat, heading for a quince quadrant window, and Forlorn Hope reports the cruiser Lion’s Share dead in space, and its attendant Zima Station is in full pursuit of an unidentified cutter-class ship. Nova Roma reports it has sustained irreparable damage to its weapons systems. Bitter Tidings reports it is evacuating the merchanter Disenchantment, whose hull has blown.” She paused. “Shall I go on?”
“No. Let comrade Kuan-yin coordinate the data for now.” He returned his attention to Kyosti. “Now, do you?”
Scan swore, a long, obscene oath. ‘Another ship just appeared in oct quadrant. It’ll take time to analyze its spec, but we’ve got no immediate match on our long-range—”
“Comrade!” Comm broke in. “I have com traffic on a narrow beam between the incoming and the resting vessel. Transmitting both ways.”
“Can you break in?”
She shook her head. “It’s too tight a channel. We’re too far away in any case. I’ve got—I’ll put Nova Roma on it. They’re closest.”
Lily took a step forward. “Comrade Jehane. Let me try. I think I can get a reply from the first ship.”
Jehane cocked his head to one side to examine her. The careful line of his mouth lent his stare a preciseness that seemed piercing. “Ah.” One side of his mouth quirked up. “You’ve finished observing our little sparring match and have decided to act, I see. Thank you.”
“Lily,” said Kyosti in an undertone that spoke volumes.
“Someone has to tell her about Heredes,” replied Lily. “I intend to do it—in person, if comrade Jehane will let me.”
Jehane smiled and waved her toward comm. His eyes sparked with interest as she walked across to the station and, after waiting for the woman to set her channel, leaned closer to the mike and spoke.
“I am calling from the—the—” She hesitated, trying to recall Heredes’s words on the tiny bridge of the Easy Virtue, caught in an isolated backwater of space facing an imposing ship which they could not possibly outrun. “The region of the summer stars. I am calling for La Belle Dame.”
For a long moment only the hiss of the channel answered her.
Then, her voice.
“Who is this?”
Jehane’s eyes narrowed as he took in the brevity and unself-conscious authority of the question.
Lily glanced at Jehane, returned to the mike. “This is Taliesin’s daughter. I have a personal message for you, if I have your permission to come aboard.”
“Wait,” commanded Jehane. “I want to know who you are speaking to, and what intentions they have here.”
“Who I am does not concern you, Alexander Jehane,” said La Belle, across the channel, as if Jehane had spoken directly to her and not to Lily. “My intentions have nothing to do with your revolution. You need not fear that I intend to interfere in any way. I am merely here looking for someone.”
Lily felt with sudden numbing certitude that she knew who La Belle was looking for: Heredes.
“That is all very nice,” said Jehane conversationally, “but what assurances can you give me that it is true?”
La Belle laughed, shattering the crackle of static. “I don’t give assurances. But neither do I expect my word to be questioned.”
If Lily had not been glancing that way at that moment, she would not have seen the look of absolute, utter fury that transformed Jehane’s face for an instant. Then she blinked, and it was gone, obliterated into his usual bright, controlled intensity.
“Go, then,” he said calmly. “Give her what information she seeks, and return. Your robot will remain safely with me, here, while you go.”
“I don’t think—” objected Lily, and stopped. After all of her protestations of not knowing League space, she had just given him ample reason to disbelieve her—and to distrust her. There was no room in his revolution for a La Belle Dame. Lily still had responsibilities to the people on the Forlorn Hope. So if Jehane chose to hold Bach as hostage for her safe return—
Signing off comm, she gave Bach brief instructions to remain behind and, with a salute to Jehane, left the bridge. Kyosti followed her.
“What are you doing?” she asked as she waited for the elevator.
“Going with you.”
“Did Jehane give you permission?”
“I wasn’t aware I had to ask for it,” he said languidly. “Ought I to?”
“Well, he didn’t stop you,” she muttered, “so he must know what he’s doing.”
Kyosti laughed. It was not a complimentary sound. “Jehane is seething with rage in there, my heart. If he hates me because I am nothing he can control, then what do you suppose he feels about La Belle, who could blast his revolution out of the sky with her single ship?”
“But La Belle isn’t interested in the revolution.”
“Very true,” he agreed. “But La Belle is a link back to the League, and if the League rediscovers Reft space officially, and arrives here in all of its advanced technological glory to welcome the Reft back into the community of humankind, then where is Jehane?”.
“Maybe he’s exactly where he wants to be.” Lily frowned at Kyosti, too angered by his presence to admit that she had had the same thought herself. They stepped inside the elevator and she keyed in the sequence for the shuttle bay. “If the government of the League is as representative and equal as you claim it is.”
“Oh, yes,” said Kyosti with a tone much like sarcasm in his voice. “Oh, it is. That’s why they hunted down people like me and Heredes and Wingtuck. They dislike being reminded of what humanity once was, before the golden age: ‘villains, vipers, damn’d without redemption. Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man.’”
“And murderers.” Lily closed one hand into a fist and set it with deliberate weight on the wall beside the elevator keypad, turning her head away from Kyosti. The thought of what that miner’s body must have looked like, after death, impinged with awful clarity on her mind. She shut her eyes. Evan. Evan something. Still—still—she could not remember his entire name. That only made it worse.
“Lily.” The word seemed forced from him. “Lily?” The door opened and he followed her out of the elevator. “At least let me try to explain.”
She kept walking, did not turn even as she spoke: “You should have explained a long time ago.”
Kyosti said nothing. Continued to say nothing the rest of the way to the shuttle bay, on the boarding, the detach, the long trip to La Belle’s ship. Lily whistled under her breath, wishing Bach were here to talk to—but he was not.
Kyosti shifted, with an almost inaudible sigh, in the seat behind her. She realized that although she could not hear his breathing, she could feel it, like the pulse of her own heart and breath. She had not spent so long a time in such close proximity to him since Unruli Station, and she cursed herself for letting him come along now, when there was no reason for it.
Duty impelled her to tell La Belle face-to-face about Heredes’s fate. Duty, and her instinct that Heredes would not want his Bella to discover this truth in any cold and impersonal manner. But there was no reason for Hawk to attend her, except to pretend that he was finally going to explain what he had all along avoided explaining, in order to dissolve her adamancy.
No reason for him to sit so close and with every slight movement remind her of his presence, his soft breath, the feel of his skin and the light, clean scent of his hair, and the satisfied shuttering of his eyes while—
“Damn it,” she swore. Behind her, Kyosti chuckled, the way he did when he—
She clenched her hands on the chair rests and held on tight for the remainder of the flight.
Adam met them at the docking bay. He welcomed them graciously, even gave Lily a brotherly hug, but a suggestion of a frown tightened the lines at his eyes and mouth, and he seemed preoccupied.
“Just in time,” he said obliquely, glancing at Kyosti, as he led them to an elevator that took them somehow straight to the bridge. Lily remembered how far they had had to walk the first time, and she wondered if La Belle’s business was in fact not what she had initially expected it to be: not news of Heredes, but someone else—and this hurried shortcut to the bridge an indication of a preoccupation that extended beyond Adam to the entire ship. Whose ship had come in behind her? And she remembered that Yi had been looking for La Belle, on his “hunt.”
As the doors sighed open onto the bridge, Kyosti took a step out after Adam, stopped, and took an audible breath in, as if he were scenting the air. “Just in time for what?” he asked sharply.
To their right, a second elevator door opened and a man tumbled out and rushed forward to fling himself at the foot of La Belle’s dais. “I’ve worked for you—good service!—for seven years!” he cried. “It’s your sworn duty to protect me!”
The man’s stark fear permeated the bridge like a rank smell as La Belle’s chair swiveled slowly around, revealing her: face set as in stone, black hair braided tight and lapping in its fall her knees. She regarded the man at her feet in awful silence.
“What did he do?” whispered Lily.
Adam shrugged, answering her in a low voice. “It’s the typical story: asteroid miner comes in to some station on leave, runs across a sweet adolescent je’jiri girl in full raging heat who’d slipped her clan for a night on the prowl. And of course all intelligent people are avoiding her like the plague, and trying to get calls through to whatever ship has hired out her clan. But people like him usually figure that as long as the je’jiri isn’t already mated, they’re safe. Brainless idiot. And then of course once he realized he was marked, he ran—and tried to cover his trail by pretending it had never happened.”
At last La Belle spoke. “You lied to me.” Her anger was bone deep and implacable.
“Oh god, oh god,” the man wept. “What else could I do? I had to leave. They were on my trail already.”
“You knew the law.” Her voice hardened with each word she spoke. “‘No human will mate or have intercourse in any sexual or sensual fashion with je’jiri.’ Code ex-eleven-oh-four of the Codified Law of League space. Which even a privateer acknowledges.”
He stammered something incoherent, lifted a hand to his hair. His forehead bore a brilliant red scar, like a brand, puckered across his dark skin.
“‘In dreams you hunt your prey,’” murmured Kyosti in an expressionless voice, “‘baying like hounds whose thought will never rest.’”
But Lily, glancing at him, saw that he was strung so tight that the merest touch might shatter him. The usual bronze of his skin had washed out to a ghostly pallor, accentuated by the unearthly color of his hair.
“But she was still an adolescent—and she consented—” the man gasped. His gaze darted to the elevator doors, halted for a frozen heartbeat on Kyosti’s still, taut form, and skipped back to La Belle.
“Then you are either uncontrollably libidinous or simply stupid. The je’jiri are not human, man. Their ways are not our ways.”
“They’re savages,” muttered Adam under his breath. “Little better than animals.”
“You have violated every tenet, the very foundation, of their culture, as admittedly alien and atavistic as it may seem to us. Yi took the hunt on, and now they have caught up with you. I cannot stop it.”
He lay in crumpled anguish at her feet, weeping with noisy and awful terror. The bridge crew stood utterly silent, watching him without compassion. “But you are La Belle Dame,” he sobbed. “You could stop them.”
She stood up. “I am La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” she said with the bite of diamond, “and I do not suffer fools gladly.”
To Lily’s left, the third set of elevator doors opened.