Trickster
TRICKSTER
A NOVEL OF THE SILENT EMPIRE
by Steven Harper
Trickster
Copyright © 2003 By Steven Harper. All rights reserved.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks, as always, to the Untitled Writers Group (Karen Everson, Anne Harris, Jonathan Jarrard, Lisa Leutheuser, Erica Schippers, Catherine Shaffer, Shannon White, and Sarah Zettel) for an unlimited supply of critiques, hilarity, and support.
Thanks also to Jim Morrow, Adam Hardy, Deirdre Soairse Moen, and Marcie Tentchoff for critiques of the early chapters.
The quote that Ben half-remembers in chapter six is from Robert Heinlein.
CHAPTER ONE
"There is no greater fear than the possibility of losing a child."
--
Renna Dell, First Bellerophon Landing Party
Harenn's chair crashed to the floor. Ben Rymar jumped, spilling most of his water glass down his front.
"God!" Harenn said from behind her veil. "We have left slipspace."
"How did--" Ben began, but Harenn had already left the galley. Ben scrambled to his feet to hurry after her, shedding bits of ice and swearing under his breath. His tunic clung cold and wet to his stomach.
"Hold on," he protested, catching up. "How do you know we left slip?"
"The
Poltergeist
is a brand new ship and it still has minor bugs in the slipdrive," Harenn said without slackening her pace. "A good engineer can feel the difference when it shuts down. I am an
excellent
engineer."
"There's still no big hurry. We have to negotiate landing privileges before we can even enter orbit. Five minutes won't make a difference."
"Perhaps not to you." Harenn tapped her earpiece without breaking stride. "Father Kendi, I see we have left slipspace. Have we arrived at Klimkinnar or has something gone wrong?"
Ben quickly activated his own earpiece and checked the communication display on his ocular implant. A flick of his eye highlighted the proper channel and tuned him into the conversation.
"
--
lutely nothing has gone wrong, Harenn,"
came Kendi's familiar voice.
"We're about a thirty thousand kilometers out from Klimkinnar, right on schedule."
"Half an hour to get there, then," Harenn said to the empty air.
They reached the lift and hustled inside before the doors snapped shut. Although Ben couldn't see anything of Harenn's face except brown eyes above a blue veil, her entire body radiated impatience. A faint smell of bath powder hung about her. With a grimace, Ben pulled the front of his damp tunic away from his body and flapped it, trying to speed the evaporation as the lift rose.
"Apologies," Harenn murmured.
"It's just water," Ben said. "Don't worry, Harenn. We'll get there and we'll find your son."
Harenn made no reply, but rushed onto the bridge the moment the doors opened, leaving Ben behind. He followed more slowly.
The bridge was an oval, with the captain's chair in the center and a large viewscreen at one of the narrow ends. Individual workstations ringed the bulkheads. Two of them--the pilot board and the sensor board--were occupied. Everything was painted in soft blues and greens, and there were no angles anywhere. Even the doors had rounded corners. The place smelled of fresh paint. As Harenn had pointed out, the
Poltergeist
was new--large and well-appointed.
Seated in the captain's chair, Father Kendi Weaver glanced up as Ben and Harenn entered. Kendi was Ben's age--not quite thirty--but where Ben was short and stocky, Kendi was tall and thin, with dark skin, a broad nose, and tightly-curled black hair. Despite his relative youth, stress lines had cropped up around his eyes and on his forehead. A gold medallion glittered from a chain around his neck, and a green jade ring gleamed on his right hand. The former indicated that he was a Child of Irfan, the latter that he had reached the rank of Father. Harenn strode to his chair, though her eyes never left the viewscreen and its display of the planet. Like most human-inhabited worlds, Klimkinnar was blue and green with interesting swirls of clouds drifting through the atmosphere. A trio of moonlets danced their way through orbit while stars glittered on a velvety backdrop. The whole scene was very pretty.
It was also very big.
"So this is where my son is hidden," Harenn breathed from behind her veil. "Where my son is a slave."
"If Sejal's information was correct," Kendi said.
"I hope we can narrow things down a little," Gretchen Beyer put in from the sensor boards. She was a tall, raw-boned woman with blue eyes, blond hair, and bland features that would blend easily into a crowd. The gold medallion around her neck matched Kendi's, though her amber ring gave her rank as Sister.
"What do you mean?" Kendi asked.
"Database says Klimkinnar is thirteen thousand, fifty-five kilometers in diameter--a little bigger than Earth," Gretchen said. "Surface area is seventy-odd percent water, but we're still talking about three hundred and eighty million square kilometers." She sniffed theatrically. "Might take a little time to search. More than eight weeks, that's for sure, and that's all we've got."
"It isn't
that
bad," said Lucia dePaolo from the pilot console. "We can find ways to narrow it down. He's got to be in an inhabited area, for one thing."
"Population one point two billion," Gretchen reported.
"But not all of them will be slaves," Kendi countered.
"Slave population three point three million."
"Shut up, Gretchen," Lucia said.
"We will find him," Harenn said with quiet finality. The dark eyes above her veil were filled with fierce determination. "And we will set him free."
Ben, meanwhile, slid into his customary seat at the communication board beside Lucia's pilot console. Communications had remained dead while the
Poltergeist
was slipping--only the Silent could communicate with ships in slipspace--but now the board leaped with activity. Ben automatically sifted through channels and frequencies to find out which ones carried what kind of information.
"I've already contacted the transportation authority," Lucia told him. She was halfway between thirty and forty and had olive skin, shoulder-length black hair, and a lush body. Her fingers, however, were long and quick, marked by ragged nails and a fair number of white scars. She pronounced her name with a "ch" sound in the middle.
"Permission to orbit?" Ben asked.
"Granted, no problem," Lucia said. "We'll be there in twenty-four minutes."
Ben glanced up. Klimkinnar continued to float on the viewscreen, attended by its three tiny moons. Ben wondered if the moonlets were colonized and if the group would have to search them for Bedj-ka as well. He hoped not. The
Poltergeist
, like all ships commanded by the Children, was only on loan from the monastery. Kendi had managed to get her for just nine weeks. It had taken four days of that time to reach Klimkinnar.
"All right, troops," Kendi said, "we have to find one nine-year-old slave boy whose name has probably been changed to who-knows-what, and we need to do it in as little time as possible."
"Sure," Gretchen said. "Won't take but a minute. After all, we have Bedj-ka's age and gender, the name of the planet where he lives, and the fact that his father kidnapped him away from his mother when he was a baby--" Harenn stiffened visibly beside Kendi's chair "--and sold him into slavery. With all that information, how can we help but find him?"
"Gretchen," Kendi warned. "Thin ice. Skating. You."
"Yeah, all right," Gretchen said, relenting. "Look, we don't know if he's ever changed owners, or if Klimkinnar's the only place where he's lived, or anything else about him. Slave sales records are usually privileged information, so tracking him that way is going to be problematic at best."
"Bedj-ka is Silent," Harenn added firmly. "That will have an impact on where and when he was sold."
Gretchen's blue eyes glittered and Ben tensed for an explosion. "Yeah, well I'm supposed to be Silent, too," she said. "What's that prove? I haven't touched the Dream in six months."
"No, wait," Lucia said. "It does have an impact. After the Despair, a lot of Silent--"
"Most Silent," Gretchen interrupted.
"Most Silent," Lucia amended, "lost their ability to enter the Dream. If Bedj-ka was being raised and trained as a Silent slave but then suddenly lost his Silence, his value would have dropped. At minimum he wouldn't be able to do his primary job, right?"
"What are you getting at?" Kendi asked, leaning forward.
"I think there's a good chance Bedj-ka was sold after the Despair," Lucia finished. "He would still be a perfectly good slave--sorry, Harenn--he just wouldn't be Silent anymore. We should probably start with recent sales records, check for nine-year-old males. It's a good . . . I mean it might be a good a place to start. Father."
Kendi nodded and turned his attention toward Ben. "You're the computer genius, Ben. What do you think? Is the information hackable?"
"We can probably get some data through social engineering," Ben said. "Tricking people into telling us what we need to know, peering over shoulders to get passwords, that sort of thing. I can hack the networks directly too, but I won't know how long that'll take until I actually start working on it and find out how tight their security is."
"Ballpark," Kendi said. "We're under a time limit, here."
"Uh, a week to figure out who to hack?" Ben hazarded. "Probably another week to sneak in without getting caught and another two or three to search. That's assuming Bedj-ka isn't too hard to find in the first place."
"All life," Kendi muttered. "That's three weeks, maybe four. We have to narrow it down. Otherwise we may not have enough time to find--" He cut himself off.
Harenn touched his shoulder. "Father Kendi," she said hesitantly, "if finding Bedj-ka will cost you the chance to find your own family, perhaps we should--"
"No," Kendi said. "Our mission is to find Bedj-ka."
~Ben? Kendi?~
Ben stiffened at the voice in his head. Kendi's eyes glazed over. The voice sounded familiar, but Ben, still new to the concept of Silent communication, didn't immediately recognize it.
~We need to talk, guys,~
the voice said.
~In the Dream.~
"What's up?" Gretchen demanded.
"It's Sejal." Kendi rose from his chair. "We'll be in the Dream for a while, troops. Ben?"
Recognition clicked. The speaker was Sejal. A tang of anticipation burst into Ben as if he had bitten an unexpected orange. He bounced to his feet and followed Kendi from the bridge. Sejal was a Silent street kid Kendi had rescued and brought to Bellerophon just before the Despair ripped the Dream to pieces. Sejal had not only survived the Despair with his Silence intact, he had also sensed the general location of Harenn's son Bedj-ka and of two members of Kendi's missing family. If he needed to talk with Ben and Kendi, it was probably because he had narrowed something down. That could shorten their mission considerably.