Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (12 page)

Xen beckoned over his shoulder. "Come along, then."

Enu-Io and Gruth followed Panna as she chased after her teacher, leaving Phillip alone with the Blue Phoenix crew. He noticed everyone looking at him and held up his hands.

"I'm just a geologist," he said. "I made pudding for dessert. Anyone else want some?"

________

"She spends all day with Shorts!"

The engine room was almost as large as the mess, but with far less space to move around. It was full of machinery, canisters, pipes, ducting, dials and controls. In the center loomed the bulky engines themselves, massive cylindrical constructs of fibersteel, copper and ceramic. They thrummed loudly, providing a mechanical backbeat to a symphony of grinding, buzzing, clunking and clanking.

A wide workbench filled the remaining space. Pieces of a half-disassembled device lay scattered across the top. It was about as long as Maeve's arm and twice as wide, full of circuit boards and alternating green and red wires. Maeve looked around for somewhere to sit, but the room was crowded and Gripper was pacing. She stood awkwardly in the doorway.

"Xia has not seen Xen in years," Maeve said. She had to shout to make herself heard over the engines. "They were close friends once, and her desire to spend time with him is easy to understand."

"Panna said that they were… you know… together," Gripper moaned. He clutched a huge wrench to his chest as he paced. "What if… what if he's trying to get Silver to fall for him again?"

"I doubt that."

"But what if he is?"

Gripper stopped pacing and threw his wrench to the floor. It rang off the fibersteel mesh and made them both wince. Maeve picked at an orange stain on the doorframe for a long moment, trying to figure out what to tell her anguished friend.

"Your challenge remains the same in either case," she said at last.

Gripper looked down at her. "My challenge?"

"Xia does not know of your affections. You must win her," Maeve told him. "My Orthain courted me for a year."

"A year?"

"Two hundred and eighty-eight days of gifts and songs, dancing under the pale starlight. We shared our oathsongs under Aes' bright eye."

"Oh… I don't think I can dance," Gripper said unhappily. He looked down at his huge, calloused feet. "I can't sing, either."

"It is the spirit of the thing, the chase. If Xia does not know your heart, then you must show it to her!"

Why had she never thought of it before, every time Gripper watched Xia with huge, love-struck eyes?
The pain of my own losses blinded me to hope.

The Arboran was nodding as he thought about what Maeve said. He picked his wrench back up and cradled it in his claws. "You're right, Smoke. I'm a catch, right? I'm… I don't know… exotic?"

"You are that," Maeve agreed. "Xen will find it difficult to compete."

"Yeah. Yeah!"

Gripper grinned and – contrary to his earlier protestations – spun in a pirouette. The mechanic brandished his wrench and turned his attention back to his messy workbench. He grabbed a large datadex and a bent stylus, talking to himself as he got to work, designing… something.

Despite the clangor and heat of the engine room, Maeve lingered. She had no other pressing duties and it was nice to see Gripper happy. Her friend had not been happy since Professor Xen set foot on the Blue Phoenix.

Maeve wished it was so simple to improve Tiberius' spirits. Nothing had been right with him since Stray. Since Kessa and running from Axis.

I did not see it. I was too involved within myself.
It always came back to that, it seemed.
But then, I do not think that Tiberius did, either. When Kessa first came to us, Tiberius protected her. He was an officer of the Prian police. He would have done anything to help Kessa and her baby. But now Kessa and her family are gone, and Tiberius is alone with his shame.

________

Superluminal flying was boring, but Tiberius was convinced that it was good practice. At the end of the second long week, Duaal sat at the controls in the Blue Phoenix's cockpit, occasionally checking the instruments. The only change was the numbers ticking slowly by on the taximeter.

Duaal leaned back in the copilot's chair, worn by years of just this kind of practice until no one else could sit in it comfortably. But it was not comfortable for Duaal now, either. He closed his eyes and rubbed them uselessly.

It was another headache, the second one this week. The pain was an almost tangible thing – a hard ball of tight, knotted brain matter between his temples. It pressed at the back of his eyes and made his nose burn acidly, like it was bleeding, but there was no trace of red. The pain was almost enough to make Duaal scream, but it never lasted for long. Just a few seconds – maybe a minute – and then it was gone.

Thank God. The last thing I want to do is go shrieking around the Phoenix for everyone to see.

The pain was fading now, leaving as mysteriously as it had come. Duaal supposed he should talk to Xia, but he did not want her or anyone else to think him weak. He could handle it.

The headaches had started about six months ago, only a week or two after Gharib. That first time, the pain had been so sudden, so shocking in its intensity that Duaal had screamed. Screamed until his throat was raw. But he had been alone in the Phoenix that night, while everyone else was off visiting Maeve at the hospital. Only Orphia had heard. She had clawed and screeched behind the door to Tiberius' room for a half hour after it was all over.

Duaal glanced sidelong at the hawk, perched on the back of Tiberius' shredded chair. She glared straight ahead with clouded black eyes, oblivious – or uncaring – of Duaal's suspicion.

"There aren't as many stars in the sky, but the air up in the mountains is so thin and clear that they glow like fire. They look so close that you swear you could reach up and touch them. I've been to twenty-seven worlds and none of them have a sky quite like Prianus."

Tiberius was talking about his homeworld again. It was not the first time Duaal heard about the wonder of the Prian skies. The perfect, endless black. The diamond-glittering stars. Polar auroras like the bridal veils of the old heathen gods.

"Some of the highest mountains in the entire galaxy are on Prianus," Tiberius said. "Mount Vessan is over sixteen miles high. There's so little air up at the top that most atmospheric ships can't make the flight."

"Sounds… big." Duaal listened, but his eyes kept drifting shut.

"The Spiral Falls are in the Oak District, where I used to live. Have I told you about them?" Tiberius did not wait for the answer, which was
yes
. "It's the cinder cone from an ancient volcano. One of the glacial melt rivers cuts waterfalls in a spiral all around the mountain."

Duaal's boots thumped to the floorplates as he turned to look at Tiberius. "If you love the wonders of Prianus so much, why aren't you more excited to go back? You've been raw about it ever since Xia told us about it on Axis."

A monotone beeping forestalled Tiberius' answer. He sat up and glared at a round yellow light that blinked on one of the control panels. The discolored label read
vpA pressure
.

"Damn it! I told Gripper to check the carbon filters!"

"Maybe he forgot," said Duaal. "He's been working on something for the last few days. I have no idea what."

"Maeve!" Tiberius shouted. Bellowing, he stomped out of the cockpit in search of his first mate.

Duaal sat alone amidst the controls of the Blue Phoenix, wondering why Tiberius was yelling for Maeve instead of the engineer. Sometimes it was a miracle anything got done on the Blue Phoenix.

________

Maeve made her way aft, toward the engine room. Panna stood in the fibersteel corridor, looking over Phillip's shoulder and pointing to something on his datadex.

"Is that close enough to cause any problems with the densitometers?" she asked.

"Not unless there's a quake," Phillip told her. "But then, you're going to have a lot more to worry about from rockfalls than instrumentation failures."

"That's reassuring," Panna said with a small laugh.

Even in the dim, dingy light of the narrow hallway, her blonde hair shone like polished gold. The girl was irritatingly pretty, with a delicate, heart-shaped face and wide emerald eyes. Panna heard footsteps and turned those green eyes on Maeve's gray ones. The human's jaw clenched and she hurried through the nearest open door. Phillip blinked in surprise, waved shyly and then followed Panna to finish their conversation.

Maeve stood in the abruptly vacated passage for a moment, shaking her head, and then headed down the hall to the engine room.

She held her wings out awkwardly behind her to keep them from dragging over the stained floor or tangling in the bundles of wire hanging from the ceiling. The ship's mechanic sat on a stool at one end of the workbench, perched on the too-small seat like an owl in a treetop. He did not seem to notice Maeve's entrance or hear her calling his name.

"Gripper?"

He started and jumped to his feet. "Smoke! There you are. Come look!"

The Arboran held out what appeared to be a small computer monitor attached to a cone of metal stuffed with a jumble of circuit boards, all wired together. Maeve had no idea what she was looking at.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Isn't it obvious?"

"Not at all."

"This is part of Silver's polytomograph, here," Gripper said, pointing to the conical section of the device. He carefully pulled aside some of the wires so that Maeve could see the disc-shaped battery inside. "I've got a smaller power supply in here and a screen up on top."

"I still do not understand."

"It's portable now!" Gripper announced, brandishing his creation. "I just need to put on backing and a handle on the bottom. Then it's done!"

"Is it a gift for Xia, then?" Maeve asked. "A token?"

"Of course! Do you think she'll like it?"

"I have no idea. But Tiberius requested that I speak to you. Is there time now?"

"Uh, sure. I guess so."

Gripper looked down at the polytomograph in his huge hands. He was eager to get back to work. Maeve gingerly pushed the partially disassembled electronics aside and sat up on the edge of his workbench.

"Is Claws mad at me?" Gripper asked.

"The captain is often angry," Maeve assured him. "Tiberius knows that he is a difficult man, so he asked me to speak to you. He claims to have told you to look after the carbon processing."

"I did!"

"There is a system warning on his controls."

Gripper slapped a huge hand against his forehead. "Right! I didn't load the new filters. The transducting is still empty. Great Green, I'm sorry. I can't believe I forgot about that!"

"You have been distracted lately."

"I have not!"

Maeve arched her dark brows at him.

Gripper sighed. "Maybe a little. But you have to admit, it's going to be worth it!" With a grin, he held up the polytomograph again. "I'll go load the filters, and then finish the backing. I can give it to Silver tomorrow!"

"I hope she likes it as well as you do," Maeve said. It was not the sort of gift she had in mind to court Xia, but who knew what sorts of things coreworlder women enjoyed?

________

Xia leaned over Xen's shoulder. Gripper's redprint was pulled up on the computer screen, filling the monitor with a dense-packed map of code. Xen pointed to one of the sectors. Even after two weeks of looking at the Arboran's genetics, taking advantage of every free moment he could find, Xen was still as excited as a first-year student.

"Look at that!"

"At what? That's not a working sector. It's all just spacer code," said Xia.

Working sectors coded for actual proteins and physical structures, but they made up only part of a genetic strand, and not the largest part. The working sectors were all separated from one another by long segments of dead spacer code, which represented nothing that ever manifested in the organism's growth. Medical doctors had no reason to study the useless junk code, but archeogeneticists did a great deal of their work with it.

"This line here is right out of a human redprint," Xen said. He underlined a short string of characters with a silvery finger. "Amazing!"

Xia frowned. "That's a pretty small section, Xen. We share more in common with bees than Gripper does with humans. It could be random."

"It could," Xen said with a shrug. "But it's worth looking at."

"You spent a year staring at the redprint for the Vanoran wolf. All it told you was what we already knew." Xia looked back at him. "Where did you even get that, anyway? Wolves went extinct on Axis two centuries ago."

"The Axials built up an extensive genebank during their expansionist period, when they colonized Cyrus and Tynerion. Most of the bank is still intact on Tynerion." Xen winked at Xia and touched a sly finger to the side of his nose. "And I'll have you know that I won an impressive grant for that analysis."