hers, and we fought our way out of that swamp.
We climbed through a cool forest of tall dark trees, wreathed with mist, and walked along a freezing stream. Eventually, we found a secret road of stone and climbed some more and dropped, exhausted, halfway up the hill to a grove of softly swaying trees. A light rain started and we huddled together for warmth. Her eyes were like a wild beast. She had blood on her hands and she left scratches all over my back and tooth marks on my neck. From then on I was her Thinker, and she was my Valkyrie, and it was Thinker and Valkyrie, forever.
Forever. I was pledged to another, and she was a prisoner of the System. But it changed nothing.
I triggered a minicard, and her image appeared before my eyes, glowing with life, floating in the air. How could I have ever been lucky enough to meet this girl? A miracle, a gift of the Gods. An angel, carved from sunshine and moonlight. Hair of molten gold and glittering emerald eyes, focused on some other world. I never understood her-never. But that did not matter. Not now.
I entered the lounge, cold and lonely. I knew I had been rather withdrawn lately; nobody wanted to bother me. Powerful, spooky music wailed in the background, Empire stuff. Beta was normally not so introspective; we preferred noise and feeling. Somebody else must have put it on. I spotted a few troopers from Gamma, and many others I did not know. Beta huddled in a corner on the floor around a low table covered with charts and readouts and minicards and d-screens.
“Thinker here,” I said.
“Welcome back,” Snow Leopard responded. “We were just talking about Coldmark. Have a seat.”
I found a place on the floor. Snow Leopard looked good, his long blond hair brushed carefully back revealing his prominent widow’s peak. He appeared rested and alert as his piercing pink eyes roamed over the readouts. He was a great planner, and in his element here. We faced a very tricky situation on Coldmark.
Priestess had curled up in a chair. She wore minishorts and her legs appeared to be distracting Psycho who sat on the floor nearby, ogling her. Coolhand and Merlin and Warhound and Dragon huddled around the table. Ironman would not be with us on this op; he was back in Atom’s body shop, growing a new arm.
“This is not going to be easy, girls.” Snow Leopard was always a realist. We knew his plan to accomplish the mission would also maximize our chances for survival. Some leaders focused on the mission exclusively and viewed their assets as expendable. Snow Leopard wasn’t like that. “You heard the man. Coldmark is in the Neutral Zone. Officially it’s an independent world, and the inhabitants do have their own government. Unofficially, the System has been more active in this sector than we have, and the locals have been cooperating, not having any choice.”
“So let’s give ‘em a choice,” Coolhand suggested. He gazed thoughtfully at an aerial shot of Port Coldmark.
“It’s not that easy,” Snow Leopard responded. “We’re here for some very specific reasons, and starting another war with the System is not one of them. You all heard the briefing. Mission One is to discover why the System has been extracting unitium from Andrion 2. Mission Two is to recover Valkyrie. Mission Three is to discover why the Systies are kidnapping Taka and where they are taking them. And Mission Four is to negotiate with the System on the future of the System’s unitium mine, or what’s left of it.”
“Our unitium mine, you mean,” Coolhand said.
“Well, the negotiation proposal came from the System direct to ConFree. Starcom ordered us to negotiate. I don’t know if we’re going to negotiate seriously or not. Maybe it’s only a tactic to allow us to accomplish the other tasks. Anyway, that’s not Beta’s worry. Beta’s part in all this is to assist Gamma in recovering Valkyrie. That’s all we have to do.”
Unitium. The System was mining unitium. That had been clearly established. We had busted a unitium mine, and according to Command, the exosegs had been imported to Andrion 2 from Andrion 3 by the System, most likely to protect the secret of the mines from the Sunrealmers. It had worked, for a hundred years.
According to Command. The part about the exos bothered me a great deal. The instant we spotted an exo on Andrion 2, we knew something was wrong. Why would the Systies do that? The exos were a minor question, however. The major question was unitium. I didn’t know much about it except it was rare. Merlin said unitium had once been of interest in connection with some vexing containment problems associated with early antimat star drives. That, however, was ancient history. The problems had long ago been solved, by other means, and unitium discarded as being of no practical value.
No practical value. The System had invested billions of credits in scarce resources, launched a major secret military mission, and constructed a hardsited base deep in ConFree vac, in blatant violation of treaty. They knew full well that its discovery might lead to another interstellar war. The Confederation and the System had coexisted uneasily for almost a generation, and now every star fleet in the galaxy was surely on the move, prepped for combat. The Systies must have thought long and hard before coming up with this one.
“Nonsense!” Merlin had declared. “The stuff is worthless, and it’s also very rare and expensive to extract. There’s nothing you can do with it that can’t be done better, or cheaper, using other methods and materials, all of which are available to the System.”
“Come on, Merlin,” Coolhand argued. “They were spending billions to mine and transport it out of the local system. What are they doing with it? Eating it? They’re using it for something!”
“I don’t deny all that. But I find the whole concept very puzzling. Look, it’s possible unitium may have applications we don’t know about yet. But it means going down an entirely new road of scientific development, and it means going in blind, for years of research, with no goal in sight. It means billions invested in pure science. That’s fine. I’d love to see it, but it’s not going to happen. ConFree puts a lot into pure science, but there are financial limits. And the System is a lot more selective than we are about what they do.”
“They put a lot of resources into the military, don’t they?”
“Sure. But all the military-related scientific and technical tasks that can be envisaged for unitium have already been accomplished. Acceleration of promat is done with iomags quite nicely, thank you. Unitium is not needed for that.”
“They’re making a major-and dangerous-effort to extract and transport the stuff,” Coolhand said. “Obviously they’ve discovered some use for it that we don’t know about.”
“Well, I’ll say it’s strange. It’s very strange. You know the System steals all their best technology from us. I can’t imagine why they’d want to wrestle with a brand new research effort on their own. And if I could answer this question, I’d drop in on Firefall and tell him. And I assure you, I’ll do that as soon as I figure it out.”
“Well what do you think it is?”
“Don’t know.” Merlin closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “But I’ll bet somebody does.”
And that was all we could get out of Merlin on the subject. Unitium wasn’t our concern, anyway. Our task was to recover Valkyrie.
I glanced over at Priestess. She blinked her big brown eyes and wet her lips with the tip of her tongue.
I forced my eyes away. A miniscreen showed a cutaway of the SS Preference
“Of course she might not even be on the Preference. She might have been transferred to another ship, or maybe even transported downside,” Snow Leopard said. He paused, and sighed. “She won’t still have her c-cell in. They’ll have taken that out. So finding her is not going to be easy. But we’re going to have a little help.”
A little help. I knew Gravelight was with us, locked away in her cube like an evil princess of power, avoiding us all, alone with Valkyrie’s possessions, clothes and equipment and personal effects, everything she’d left behind. There would be some things I had given her, and some things Boudicca had given her. When Gravelight was through, she would know Valkyrie better than either of us. And Valkyrie wasn’t even Gravelight’s primary task. Her primary task was unitium.
We all feared psychers. I pitied her. How could anyone have that much power? She must be twisted with hate and bitterness. A normal life was impossible. How was love possible? I never wanted to see Priestess’s mind, for fear of what I would find.
A little help. It was more than a little help. And Lowdrop had said there would be more help, on Coldmark. He did not say more than that, the people who had to know had already been briefed.
“We’ll be working closely with Gamma,” Snow Leopard said. “It’s our joint responsibility to recover Valkyrie. We’ll only be indirectly involved in the unitium question, and the negotiations. Now I want to go over these contingency plans again. There are numerous possibilities, and I want every Beta trooper to be prepared for every contingency.”
We went to work. At nearby tables, people listened to music and drank bitter. Beta never rested, but I didn’t
