Tactical Error

preferable to show than to attempt to tell. She really did not blame them for being so reluctant to part with any secret that they found frightening. For one thing, if trouble came of it, they would be caught in the middle.

Jon Addesin was a different matter entirely, and she liked him far more than she trusted him. He was frightened about something, facing a point of no return, and it had something to do with both her and what he was bringing her to see. He was playing a game, and she was both the problem and the prize. She suspected that it was just his very sincere interest in her, balanced by a healthy fear of Starwolves. Her natural telepathy was not enough to give her a clear answer, but she believed that he was trying to decide whether to try to seduce her before it was too late — before the reason for their journey together was lost — or whether he should just leave well enough alone. He was certain that she had enjoyed an affair with Derrighan and, for some reason that she could not completely understand, that had stung his pride rather severely. Perhaps he understood that her interests concerning him were only those of curiosity, while her deeper feelings were given to Derrighan.

She asked herself what she wanted to do. Could she make love to a human without hurting him? It was a very real danger for most Kelvessan, but she was a very gentle lover. Did she want to try? All that she knew about humans argued that they were rather bland, and yet she had always thought that Commander Tregloran and Lenna Makayen made a very odd but generally satisfied pair.

“How old are you?” she asked suddenly.

“Older than I look,” Addesin replied without looking away from the skyvan’s controls. “I’m actually 57 standard years. Of course, Traders generally live to be 160 or so.”

“Oh.” Keflyn could not hide all traces of her dismay… not at his true age but that reminder of his mortality. Standard Kelvessan lived about four centuries. No one knew for certain just how long the High Kelvessan lived, although the best bet was that, like the Aldessan, they would live four to six thousand years.

He glanced at her. “How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“Oh!” Addesin mocked her with exaggerated dismay.

“I was just wondering how you came to be the commander of a ship like the Thermopylae,” she said, watching the forest out the side window of the van.

“A tottering wreck, you mean?” he asked, amused. “I had done very well for myself as the cargo master on board one of the larger family ships. The Thermopylae is exactly the ship she appears to be. Not so old as you might guess, but she fell on hard times because of mismanagement, went broke, and was finally impounded for failing to pay her port fees. The Traders Affiliate bailed her out and asked around for someone willing to take a chance on a bad bet. I could have had a better ship of my own by waiting a couple of more years, but I thought that I might enjoy the challenge.”

“How does it go?” she asked, noting his obvious love for that old ship.

“Oh, we’re on top of things!” he declared, tremendously pleased. “That overhaul you gave her engines and generators will make a big difference. Now we have just about enough saved up to put the Thermopylae into one of our own refitting docks for a complete overhaul, and that old ship will be as good as new.”

He turned to her with an intent stare. “That’s something that you have to understand about Free Traders. The only thing that any one of us wants is a ship of our own. And nothing and no one ever comes between us, from the captain to the newest crewmember, and our ship. I don’t suppose that it can be quite the same with Starwolves and your big warships.”

“Are you kidding? Our ships can talk back.”

Night was already beginning to fall when they arrived, and Keflyn had only a brief glimpse of the immense white cliff face of the glacier, glowing like burnished gold in the fading light. Jon Addesin settled the skyvan into a sheltered depression in the woods a couple of miles away from the edge of the glacier itself, where they would be protected from the worst of frigid air coming directly off the ice. The retreat of the glacier had left this a rough, broken land, full of snaking ridges and sudden depressions littered with sand and rounded boulders.

A ring of blackened stone marked the fires of a previous camp, a sight that helped to reassure Keflyn that they had found what they were looking for. With night falling quickly, Addesin begged off taking her to see his great secret until the next morning. The light of day was fading quickly, and he seemed to have no ability to see in the dark. He immediately set about converting the back of the van into his private bedroom. Since Keflyn did not sleep, she would once again have to find some way to entertain herself until morning. She was presently more interested in dinner.

Addesin jumped down from the back of the skyvan and sealed the hatch, then paused a moment to look about at the sky. The sun had only just slipped below the horizon, and the first hints of color were beginning to climb into the night sky.

“Come with me,” he said eagerly, hurrying to draw Keflyn along with him. “There’s something that I want to show you.”

“Your great, mysterious what’s-it?” she asked.

“No, just something pretty and unimportant. Come along.”

She followed him perhaps half a kilometer through the wooded, rugged land, until they came at last to a small, deep dell. The long, slender ribbon of a waterfall dropped over the rounded boulders of sheer cliff at the opposite end of the canyon, raising a cloud of fine mist as the icy meltwater splashed almost musically into the deep oval pool at the base of the cliff. Addesin led her along the edge of the lake to one side of the waterfall, where they could watch the final moments of daylight through the spray.

“The Feldenneh are the most quietly decadent people I know,” he said as he sat on a large boulder, as if waiting for a tram. “They have an almost magical talent for finding things like this.”

“It is nice,” Keflyn agreed. “What does it do, besides give me an overwhelming desire to piss?”

Addesin afforded her a look of disgust. “Starwolves must be wretched romantics.”

“We live our entire lives in starships,” she explained. “What we see of nature is generally on a much larger scale. I find this all very interesting, I promise you. I just wondered what you wanted me to think.”

“I just wanted you to see something quietly unique,” he told her. “Just watch for a moment.”

A sudden shock of sheet lightning leaped across the sky from east to west, tracing a fiery spider’s web across the dark sky. For one long, sustained moment out of time, the land below stood out in brilliant relief as the rippling flash threw flickering shadows. The harsh glare of lightning faded, and twilight again settled heavily over the land.

Then it began, slowly at first, as a single, slender column of golden light leaped up from the western horizon. It seemed to linger for a long second, like a fountain of water that ebbed and pulsed, before it sank back down. The glow across the edge of the western sky continued to grow, spreading slowly north and south, and now three columns of light climbed into the night. Each pulse brought an ever-widening fringe of light, spreading slowly north and south until it consumed fully a third of the horizon. Now it alternated in an increasing variety of colors — red, green, and blue, as well as gold.

And with each pulse of light, the waterfall and its veil of icy mist glowed with the same color that filled the sky behind it. As minutes passed, the changing of color both in the night sky and the waterfall became more rapid and regular. As the evening deepened into darkness, the pulsing of light came faster and faster until it steadied into a ragged curtain of misty illumination that rippled in slowly changing colors.

Keflyn sat, enthralled, hardly aware of the passing minutes as evening deepened into true night. She had watched this display every night since her arrival, but she had looked upon it as a remarkable display of static energy, filtering down through the planet’s upper atmosphere, the tides of the powerful magnetic forces that raged above this world. She had wondered how the total of those forces compared to the power of a starship. She had wondered if this spectacular display was unique to this one world.

For the first time, she saw it as a thing of captivating beauty.

“This is the price we pay, Starwolves and Free Traders, for living always in space,” Jon Addesin said as he slipped away from her side, retreating a few short meters into the forest behind. “We miss the wonders of a worldly life. Even when we see things like this, we tend to see it as we would from the outside. We look out our windows and see whole worlds as small, simple, and largely bland and uniform places. You have to stand here, in a place like this and be surrounded by the immensity of nature, to understand what a vast and complex place a world really is.”

Keflyn sat in silence, watching the waterfall. At that moment, a sudden sound rang out across the deep