The Dragon Variation (58 page)

"Plenty of time to inventory your emergency equipment," he returned briskly, "and to be certain your suits are functional."

She looked at him in patent dismay. "I—forgive me. I am afraid I don't even know where the suits are."

"I thought as much," Daav said, with an odd side-to-side movement of his head. He rose and beckoned with one long-fingered hand. "Come along, Pilot."

MASTER DAAV
pronounced the emergency equipment adequate, though he frowned a long moment over the neat rack of four oxy-tanks, forefinger tapping the status dials.

"Keep close watch on these," he said, and Aelliana heard a tremor of something chill down near the root of his warm deep voice. "You don't want to run out of air. It might be wise to add another can or two, in case of malfunction."

"Is it likely," Aelliana wondered, "that life support will malfunction?"

"I had been on a ship that lost life support," he said, frowning down at the canisters. "While such a failure does not often occur, I submit that once is more than sufficient, should you carry inadequate air, an inferior emergency kit or a defective suit." He took a deep breath then and seemed to shake himself—flashed her a brief smile.

"There, I don't mean to alarm you. Merely be vigilant and watchful of your equipment, as any good captain must be. Extra cans will come a necessity, should you add a copilot. For the moment—" He turned a hand palm up. "Pilot's choice."

She blinked, inclined her head. "Thank you. I shall recall your advice."

"Well enough," he said briskly and turned to lay a hand on the suit rack. "Tell me, have you ever worn one of these?"

"GOOD EVENING, CAPTAIN, darling!"
Clonak moved his arm sharply as Daav walked by, releasing a red ball about the size of Aelliana's two fists together.

The ball zagged a crazy course, dipping and wobbling until the eyes ached trying to track it.

Daav extended a negligent hand, barely checking his stride, snagged the ball and skated it back in one smooth, unhurried motion.

"Hello, Clonak."

The pudgy Scout skipped one step forward and two aside, captured the ball and threw again.

"Your servant, Goddess."

Aelliana blinked, panic rising—and saw her hand flick and snatch, felt the weird weight of the thing and threw, instinctively calculating a trajectory that would take it—

Clonak leapt up with a laugh, cradling the ball against his chest. His boot-toes barely brushed the floor before he threw again.

"Well tossed! I hereby issue challenge, the loser to drink a mug of Jon's tea!"

"Challenge?" Aelliana choked. "I can't—" But there was the ball hurtling not exactly toward her and before she had properly attended her body's doings she had danced into the place where it
would be
, scooped it out of the air and hurled it back with a will.

"Aha, she means to hurt me, Daav!" Clonak dove, rolled and tossed from the floor.

"No more than you've asked for," Daav returned, hoisting himself atop a tool-chest and crossing his long legs under him.

The ball's erratic course took it floorward and into an unlikely arc. Aelliana spun to catch it as it swerved behind her, reached—and stumbled, blinded by the swirl of hair across her eyes.

"A clear miss!" Clonak cried, bounding down-bay after the escaped toy. "I claim the win!"

On one knee, half-blinded by hair, Aelliana felt a bite of fury at her own incompetence, an acid wash of failure in the base of her gut. Slowly, she climbed to her feet, shoulders sagging even as she scraped the clinging strands out of her eyes.

"A win by default," Daav was saying in his deep voice; "Pilot Caylon was disadvantaged."

"A win, nonetheless," Clonak argued, coming back, tossing the ball from hand to hand.

"Always the lazy course," Daav said, then, slightly sharper. "Pilot."

Aelliana glanced up, eyes pulled by his tone. He smiled and reached behind his head, twisted—and threw.

"Don't let him win," he said. "Make him fight for it."

Aelliana's hand flashed out, snatching a plain silver hair-ring out of the air. She glanced back at Daav, sitting crosslegged atop the tool cart, his hair falling loose along his shoulder, one eyebrow up and his smile with an edge of—challenge?

Once again, her hands moved of their own will, sweeping her mass of hair back, twisting and clipping it tight. She turned to face Clonak and inclined her head. "I am ready to accept your challenge, sir."

"Right-o," he said. And threw.

It was more difficult this time. The universe narrowed to the ball and its antics, to the absolute necessity of catching and throwing and catching and—

There was no ball.

Disoriented, Aelliana spun, found Clonak, his hands hanging empty and a sheepish look on his round, mustached face. To the right Daav still sat atop the tool cart, his hair neatly braided. To the left was Jon dea'Cort, red ball held high in a hand.

"
I
win," Jon announced, fixing Clonak in his eye. "How long has this been going on?"

"About half-an-hour," Daav spoke up. "Indeed, Master Jon, I was about to call time, as Pilot Caylon must make the twilight ferry."

Jon moved his glare to Aelliana, who became aware that her heart was pumping hurriedly and she was warm and rather damp.

"If you have to catch the ferry, math teacher, now's the time to jet. Good evening."

She bowed, trying to bring her rapid breathing under control. "Good evening, Master dea'Cort. Clonak—"

"I'll deal with Clonak," Jon said awfully. "Move."

Aelliana blinked and flicked a glance to Daav. His fingers moved atop one knee, shaping a word in Scout finger-talk:
jet.

In the back of the bay, the clock that kept official Port time sang the quarter hour.

Aelliana ran.

It wasn't until she left the ferry in Chonselta Port and was walking quickly toward the train station that she recalled the hair-ring and reached up to pull it free.

Her hair flowed forward, shielding her from the world. Slowly, almost reluctantly, she slipped the ring into her pocket.

Tomorrow, in the first hour after dawn,
she thought and smiled within the fortress of her hair. Whatever pain Ran Eld might mete this evening, tomorrow she would fly.

Preserve your life, preserve your folk, preserve the Tree, no matter what the means. Grovel, if your enemy demands it; beg; swallow any insult. Stay alive, preserve you and yours.
Watch close, stay alert. And when your enemy turns his back, kill him and run free.

—Excerpted from Cantra yos'Phelium's Log Book
 

THE CREW DOOR CLOSED
and Jon spun back to Clonak, red ball held out like a judgment.

"I shall be very interested to hear," he stated in a height of tone one very rarely had from Jon, "your reasons for engaging in a round of bowli ball with Pilot Caylon."

Clonak very nearly gaped. He did shoot a glance over his shoulder at Daav, but gained nothing from that quarter save a grave inclination of the head.

"Why not?" he asked, returning his full attention to Jon. "She gave good game."

"Good game!" Jon's glare grew blacker. He took a step forward, shaking the bowli ball until its internal gyro squealed. "Good game! Do you have any notion how long I stood there, watching you?"

"Well," Clonak allowed, leaning slightly back from the older man's approach, "there was the game to be concerned with, Master Jon, and my goddess out to knock my head off, if she could but manage it." He grinned. "I'm fond of my head, after all, so it seemed prudent to keep both eyes on the ball."

"You never had a prudent thought in your life, you heedless—" Jon cut himself off abruptly. "Fifteen minutes I stood there, watching as you—you, who visit the gym every day and follow a full exercise routine!—barely held your own against a desk-bound, half-starved scholar with her second-class license shiny-new in her hand! I've a good notion to tell your trainer that—"

"Second class!" Clonak yelped, going back a step and flinging a look of wild amazement over his shoulder. "Daav!"

"Second class provisional," that gentleman said calmly, "awarded barely ten days gone."

"What meat-brain granted her a provisional? She's as fast as any first class I've ever seen—faster than most!"

"Flight time, Master Clonak," Daav chided gently. "The regs are quite clear."

Clonak said something rude regarding the regs.

"Yes, dear. I showed her where her suits were stowed today, and helped her inventory the emergency kit."

"She's never so green as that!"

"She's every bit as green as that!" Jon shouted. "And if she had succeeded in knocking your useless block into the center of next twelve-day—which I swear is no more than she should have!—she'd have stuttered and stammered and blamed herself and we'd have never seen Aelliana Caylon at this yard again!" He took a mighty breath, and released it in a roar.

"Gods abound, I
will
tell your trainer!"

"It never happened!" Clonak cried. "Jon, for pity's—"

"And you!" Jon hurled the ball forcefully to the right and down. It twisted, hummed, skated and charted a rising course for the tool chest, speed increasing. Daav put out a long arm, captured the thing in a swoop and set it upon his knee, stroking it with firm fingers, as if it were a particularly frolicsome kitten.

"I?" He lifted an elegant eyebrow.

"Don't you come all High House with me! What the devil did you mean by letting that go on? Timing it, were you? I suppose it never occurred to you to interfere? It was easier to sit up there like a
melant'i
-choked dirt-scruffer—"

"Certainly not," Daav said, his calm voice cutting effortlessly across the other's tirade. "I hope I know my obligations, as trainer, as comrade and as copilot. In any of those faces I'd be blind not to see she needs to learn how to fight—quickly."

It could not be said that Jon's mouth actually hung open. However, there was a long moment of silence before a grudging, "Well, that's the first sensible thing I've heard said in the last ten minutes, all considered. Still, lad, she might have took damage. Clonak's got the edge."

"It's what I've been telling you!" Clonak cried plaintively. "My so-called edge was enough to keep the pace." He moved his shoulders. "I don't say I couldn't have worn her down, if it came to an endurance test. But the unvarnished truth is, Master Jon, she might very well have pegged me before it came to stamina—and I'd be in the 'doc even now, growing me a new head!" He set his hands on his hips and gave Jon back his glare. "Tell my trainer, then!"

"Hah." Jon flicked his glance aside. "Daav?"

"Not entirely unlike my own judgment, though I believe Clonak over-tender in regard to his head. I rather thought she was homing in on his nose."

"Smashed to a purple pulp," Clonak mourned. "Blood all sticky in my mustache."

"Brace up, darling, the 'doc would have put everything right."

"Yes, but you know," Clonak said earnestly, "it still hurts."

"One of life's inequities," Jon said, and sighed. "Why I ever let the pair of you pass piloting is a puzzle for my old age. How came you to be our math teacher's copilot, young Captain?"

"She asked me to accompany her on a thorough testing of the new navcomp and backups," Daav said, sliding silently to his feet. He tossed the bowli ball lightly to Clonak, who scooped it up in the instant before it touched his belt buckle.

"We're to lift in the first hour after dawn, tomorrow."

"If she keeps this pace, she'll lose provisional well ahead of spec," Jon said. "Good lift to you, then." He turned back toward his office.

"Fair flying, Master Jon," Daav returned softly, and cocked a meaningful eyebrow at Clonak.

"End of shift, old friend?"

The pudgy Scout sighed and used the tips of three fingers to smooth his mustache. "I suppose you're right," he said, walking at Daav's side toward the crew door. "Why are you always right, Captain?"

"Now, do you know, my perspective is that I'm often wrong."

"A terrifying statement! Do not, I pray, say it to anyone else! As for myself, consider my lips sealed—I shall carry your secret to the grave."

The crew door cycled and they stepped out into the twilight. Clonak drew in a noisy lungful of free air and grinned up at Daav. "Come 'round to Apel's and let me buy you a glass of wine."

A glass of wine with Clonak had a woeful tendency to become many glasses of wine, and a night so late it might just as easily be called tomorrow. Daav moved his shoulders and returned his friend's grin.

"Another time. I've an early lift."

"So you do! I'm reminded that I'm jealous." Clonak lifted a hand and moved away. "Until soon, darling."

"Take good care, Clonak." Daav stretched, drinking in the evening air, then turned toward Mechanic Street and his landcar.
An early lift
, he thought, and smiled.

RAN ELD STROLLED INTO her room
without the courtesy of a ring to announce his presence. He had long ago possessed himself of an override to Aelliana's door-code and used it as his right. She suspected that he also kept an ear on her so-called private comm line, and thus routed all calls to her office at the college.

Aelliana blanked the reader and spun, coming quickly to her feet. She had as little desire for Ran Eld to discover her perusing a volume on Terran culture as she had for being trapped in her chair against the desk, her brother looming close above her.

As it was, her position was less than perfect, with her back to the L-shaped desk and a bookshelf cutting off escape to the right. Still, she was on her feet and that was something, she told herself as her brother came close—and then closer—a sheaf of printout in his ring-heavy hand.

"Good evening, Aelliana, how delightful to find you yet awake." His voice held its usual note of sweet malice, though with a certain undertone that said he would have been better pleased, if it been necessary for him to roust her from bed.

He moved the sheaf of papers carelessly, fanning her face with a cold, tiny breeze. Aelliana shivered.