“How long was I out?” I yelled over the rattling and banging of the ship.
“Better’n two days.” Warcry wrapped his fists around the straps of his X-harness, scarred-up knuckles going white. “The whole trip so far. Sanya-ketsu had me load you into the shuttle so we wouldn’t miss our date with the artifact team.”
The shaking intensified then, and we both had to shut up and just concentrate on not biting our tongues in half or throwing up. Just when I thought I was going to lose the battle, the shuttle leveled out and we dropped down to the surface of Sarca. With one final heave, the pilot set us down.
I relaxed and let Sushi out of my pocket. She instantly went invisible.
At the front of the cabin, the bulkhead door creaked open and Sanya-ketsu stepped in.
“I see you managed the Proving Forge, Death cultivator. The Emperor will be pleased.”
“Just following the directions, Sanya-ketsu,” I said, giving her a seated half-bow as I unbuckled. “Drink. Survive. Prevail.”
The Sown Dream cultivator’s flat shoulders shook. It took me a second to realize she was laughing. Her laughs didn’t make any sound.
At the back of the shuttle, a ramp wheezed open, letting in blinding yellow Shinotochi sunlight and a rush of hot air.
“This way to the meet and greet, gentlemen,” she said, heading out. “I’ll be making your introductions with the artifact team and clearing up some business that recently came to light.”
Warcry and I followed her out onto the tarmac. Heat waves radiated off the blacktop. I shaded my eyes. My pupils hadn’t been exposed to light in at least two days, and they didn’t seem like they were in any big hurry to adjust.
“Kinda lowly job for a 002-rank, isn’t it?” Warcry asked. “Escorting us single-digit ranks around.”
“The Dragons are in high caution mode until we learn what the Technols are after,” Sanya said. “Anyone could be a spy, and our teams on the ground are discouraged from trusting anyone coming to them without a known liaison from the Emperor.”
The roar of a spaceship passing overhead blocked out conversation for a minute. All around us, ships were landing and taking off.
“Welcome to Tikrong, the busiest port on the planet,” Sanya-ketsu said wryly. “It’s a bit of a hassle coming and going with all this traffic, but as it is our territory, the Dragons must maintain a visible presence.”
A shuttle marked Confederated Planetary Authority passed overhead, coming in for a landing. The universe’s police force.
Warcry got real interested in a building on the opposite side of the port from the CPA shuttle, reminding me that he still had most of three years left on his sentence. Even I felt like I should keep my head down, and I hadn’t technically done anything wrong. Not before I was already on Van Diemann, anyway. I didn’t know how mass murders were prosecuted once you were on the prison planet, and I wasn’t in a hurry to find out.
Sanya-ketsu did that silent-laugh thing again when she saw us acting cagey.
“Don’t worry, boys, I won’t let the big bad CPA officers take you,” she said. “The Shinotochi division knows better than to touch anyone escorted by a double-aught ranked Dragon.”
We made it off the tarmac and to a line of idling vehicles waiting for new arrivals who needed a ride. There were brightly colored rickshaws hitched to rusty bikes, tuk-tuks puffing black exhaust, wide hovering dollies the drivers ran along behind, and junky thrown-together vehicles with and without wheels.
Sanya-ketsu whistled at a tuk-tuk. The driver’s eyes just about bugged out when he saw who was flagging him down. Either Sanya was famous around here, or all the Emperor’s closest ranks were just that well known.
Warcry and I crammed into the bench seat while the driver was busy bowing and scraping and telling Sanya he lived to serve the Eight-Legged Dragons. Once he finished genuflecting and climbed back behind the wheel, Sanya gave him the address, then squeezed in back next to me.
It was an awkward ride. The seat wasn’t made for three people, especially not when two of them were me and Warcry. I didn’t want to smash Sanya, but I also didn’t want to sit in Warcry’s lap, so eventually I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees.
“Not the most comfortable ride,” Sanya admitted, “but it does wonders for local morale seeing the Dragons use their transport.”
At first, I wasn’t too convinced anybody could see us at the speed we were going. But as we shot through the city at a high whine, locals stepped back to the edges of the narrow cobblestone streets and bowed. A little group of kids jogged along behind us, laughing and waving. Sanya pretended not to notice, but her eyes crinkled above her mask.
Low buildings sprawled out around us, two or three stories high at most, interspersed with open plazas and shallow canals. Every street had one of the waterways. Alien kids splashed and played in them, and people washed their laundry or took baths out in the open. Old, wrinkly guys seemed especially unconcerned about who might see them.
Warcry watched a beautiful six-armed woman hefting a basket of laundry onto her head.
He sucked his teeth. “It’s never the ones you wish were out for a bath, is it?”
The tuk-tuk pulled up outside a rickety bamboo building with the words Tikrong Saloon & Luxury Suites scrawled in paint across the front. A few aliens in cowboy hats and yukatas lounged on the porch, chewing and spitting into the canal that ran just in front of it. A blue saloon gal with a white-painted face fawned over one
