Heaven Chronicles

aged eyes in a young man's face. “Who—what are you doin' here?”

“Askin' the questions. First, is anybody in charge here, and if so, can you take us to 'em?”

Wind Kitavu nodded, staring distractedly into the muzzles of half a dozen rifles. “The prime minister, the Assembly. I know where the chambers are. I'll take you ….” His fingers searched the tear in his shirt again, drew the edges together nervously. “You aren't the—” Raul watched the question form on his lips, saw him swallow it. “You want me to take you?”

Raul gestured his men aside; letting Wind Kitavu pass, he followed, and the crewmen fell in behind him. He noticed that one of the prisoner's legs was shorter than the other and twisted. The gates of hell; the capital of Heaven.

They were not led out onto the surface as he had expected. Wind Kitavu kept to the subterranean hallways, where dull-eyed men and women with stringy hair watched them pass, showing mingled fear and wonder, but mostly confusion. No threat. He felt his wariness settle into a bleak feeling of depression. A woman pushed out from the wall, moving with Wind Kitavu, “… starship …?” Wind Kitavu shook his head, and she drifted free, her face tightening. Raul saw despair in her eyes as he passed, and his spirits rose.

On his orders Wind Kitavu pointed the way to the communications center, and he sent Sandoval with two men to investigate. With the others he continued on, wondering what they would find when they reached the assembly chambers.

Whatever he had been expecting could not have prepared him for what he found. Someone had sent word of their arrival ahead: seven figures stood waiting, tiny in a vast rough-walled chamber that he somehow instinctively knew must have been intended for storage and not as a meeting hall. And like gem crystals in a matrix of barren rock, the five men and two women shone, resplendent in robes of state. One man, Raul noticed, was still adjusting the folds of a sleeve tangled by haste. The nearest of them started forward, his drifting progress a ceremony, his face set in expressionless formality. Raul studied the intricacies of layer on layer of brocade as the official approached: the fibers absorbed and enhanced light, sent it back at his eyes in a shower of scintillating fire. He began to see, as he probed the wash of gemlight, the patches where it dimmed and faltered. The garments were stained and frayed, eaten by time. The man wore a soft, turbaned head covering of the same material; his seamed face and gnarled hands, fading darkly against the brilliance, were clean.

Raul waited silently until the official reached him. The six assembly members, their own threadbare splendor muted, clustered slowly behind him. Their group stare rested on Raul's weapon rather than his face. At last the man lifted his gaze, searching Raul's helmet glass to meet his eyes. “I am Silver Tyr,”—the voice surprised him with its unwitting arrogance—“President of the Lansing Assembly, Prime Minister of the Heaven Belt—”

The man broke off, as laughter rattled in Raul's helmet; for a long second he didn't realize that it was not his own bitten-off laugh, that it had come from one of his crewmen. He raised a hand to stop it, hearing mentally the clattering mockery the chamber would make of the sound.

“And you are—?” The prime minister forced the words with rigid dignity—demanding respect not for an aging shadow man, ludicrous in the rags of lost richness, but for the undeniable fact of the lost dream-time, of what they had all been, once, before their fall from grace.

“Raul Nakamore, Hand of Harmony.” And almost unthinkingly he held out a hand, gloved against contamination but open in friendship, in recognition. “We mean you people no harm; we only want your cooperation while we're here.”

The prime minister extended a hand, with the hesitancy of a man who expected to have it lopped off. “And what have you come here for, sir?”

Raul shook the hand, let it go, before he answered. “We've come huntin' pirates, Your Excellency.” He dredged the unaccustomed title up from a half-forgotten history lesson. He noted the ill-concealed start of guilty knowledge on more than one face.

Seeing him observe it, the prime minister said, almost protesting, “But that happened almost a gigasec ago, Hand Nakamore—and it was an act of need, as you must know. Surely you haven't come all this way, after all this time, to punish—”

“I'm not speakin' of your last raid on the Rings, Your Excellency—I think you know that. I'm speakin' of a starship from outside the Heaven system, that destroyed one of our Navy craft and raided our main distillery—and is passin' by Lansing on its way out of the system—”

“Sir—” Raul heard Sandoval's voice, turned at the sound of more men entering the room.

Sandoval and the two crewmen joined his group, escorting an angry, thin-faced woman. Brown skin, brown eyes, brown hair graying at the temples: Raul assessed her as she assessed him. He felt her anger flick out in a lash of wordless contempt as she glanced at the robed figures of the assembly. Her gaze returned to him, the anger cooling; he thought of a fire banked, controlled, still burning underneath.

“Sir, we found this woman in the radio room. She claims their comm's out of order.”

He nodded; turned back as the prime minister said, “We know nothin' about a starship. You saw the only ships we've got. They can't reach Discus anymore—”

“Face reality. Silver Tyr!” The sharp edge of the woman's voice slashed his words. “He can see you're lyin'; all of you, you couldn't cover the truth any more than those robes cover your rags. If he didn't know the truth before, he knows it now. The best we can do is cooperate, the way he says, and hope maybe he'll be willin' to bargain—”

“Flame Siva! Would you betray the only people in the universe who care enough to help us? And your own daughter—”

“No cripple, no defective, is a child of mine.” Her voice betrayed her. Raul felt the heat of bitter disappointment in the ashes of her words. The sagging figure of crippled Wind Kitavu tightened in a flinch. “But that's irrelevant, anyway, under the circumstances.”

A frown settled into the lines of the prime minister's face. “Two of our people are on board the starship. They say the Grand Harmony attacked the starship first. It had a reason and a right to retaliate against you, and you have no legal claim on it, in our judgment. We have no intention of cooperatin' with any attempt to seize it.”

“I see.” Raul matched the frown, realizing that there was nothing he could really do to these people, because he had already destroyed their only hope. “Fortunately for you, we don't really need your cooperation … but we won't tolerate any interference. We intend to wait here until that ship arrives.” He studied their responses; knew, with certainty and a kind of callous joy, that it would. “One of my ships is remainin' in orbit above Lansing; if we encounter any resistance, the captain has orders to hole your tent. If you want what time you've got left to you, don't get in our way.”

“Even on Lansing we don't run to meet Death, Hand Nakamore.” The prime minister looked down at his gun.

“Especially on Lansing,” Flame Siva said. “We're Materialists, Hand Nakamore, realists. At least we're supposed to be.” She paused. “Just what are you plannin' to do to that ship and its crew? Will you seize it intact?”

Raul laughed shortly. “That's what we'll try to do. But I'd disable it permanently before I'd let it get away from us again. And we want the crew alive, to show us how to run it. But if they refuse to let us board—piracy is a high crime by anybody's law, punishable by death.” He saw the assembly members shift, glittering.

“She's lost most of her crew to you already,” the woman murmured, almost to the floor.

“She?” Raul said, surprised. “That's right”—remembering a detail of alienness and the detection of human remains—“she: a woman pilot. So her crew is shorthanded?”

“Two of our own people are with them,” she repeated. He realized that it was more than a simple statement of fact: her daughter, the prime minister had said. Her hand rose, agitated; she brushed her neck, her matted hair, controlling a gesture he recognized as threatening. “The captain promised us the hydrogen we need to survive, if they helped her get it for her own ship … the hydrogen you wouldn't share with either of us, unless we took it from you by force.”

He waited, not responding because she hadn't made it a challenge.

“What would you give us if I helped you secure the ship intact?”

Surprised again, he asked, “What could you do to guarantee that?”

Thin hands crossed before her, locked around her thin arms; sleeves that were too long and too wide slid back. “Allow me to finish repairs on the radio … give me parts for it if you have them.” She glanced up, her eyes