“And we need to travel,” Gravelight said sleepily. “We need to move around…” Her voice faded. “I’ll find her…I’ll find unitium…we need more…more…”
Gravelight fell asleep. Val gently took the empty cup from her grasp. She did not wake. He took a blanket from the drawer under the bunk and covered her. Such beautiful legs, I thought, such a sweet, innocent girl. Awake, she was trapped in a never-ending nightmare. I wondered what psychers dreamed about. Strange dreams, from alternate worlds. We quietly left the room and Val palmed the door shut behind him. In the corridor, he leaned against the wall and sighed. He ran one hand through his curly, reddish hair. Light from the overhead lit up his features.
“A shame,” he said.
“That’s a ten,” I replied.
“She’s just a kid.”
“Yeah.” Gravelight was doomed, like all psychers. But she’d find Valkyrie for us, I was convinced. She had not even met Valkyrie, but it wouldn’t make any difference. If Gravelight could not find her, nobody could.
“You’ve got a starlink call,” I said. The link glowed red. There was to be no peace for Val or me. The nights here were too short. We had a lot to do before tomorrow.
“Val here,” he said wearily into the link.
“She’s not there. I’m sorry.” Merlin turned away from the datascreen, discouraged.
“You don’t know she’s not there! Spawn doesn’t know! Nobody knows!” Boudicca insisted, her face flushing.
“Right, we don’t know. But it’s ninety-nine percent that she’s not there. You can’t get better readings than this. And Spawn says the Preference is clean.” Merlin was calm and logical. He knew how to handle Boudicca. The Legion scout had flashed past the Preference so close there had almost been a collision, and it had set off an immediate spastic run of red alerts throughout the System fleet. The Preference had been dosed with enough biotech to identify every life form on board. And Spawn told us Valkyrie was not there.
“And what about that one percent?” I asked.
“The only way we’ll know is to board her,” Boudicca insisted.
“Right,” Merlin replied. “Tenners. You ask Cubes, I’ll suit up.” Boudicca could try the patience of an Inner. She knew an attack on the Preference was one of our final options. At any rate, it appeared very doubtful Valkyrie would still be there. We were in the lounge of the assault craft, downside, docked in Coldmark Port, sitting at a table overflowing with datascreens. It was very late. We all should have been asleep, renewing our strength for the next day. But we were munching on mags and I knew there would be no sleep for Beta, or Gamma, that night. We had too much to do.
“Take a look at these anomalies, gals.” Snow Leopard dumped a fresh load of datacards on the table. They spilled over onto the floor. Spawn had cranked it out. Her sensors and probes mapped all of Coldmark, and anything that did not compute was highlighted for human attention. There were a whole lot of things that did not compute.
“Thanks, Snow Leopard. I was wondering what to do this evening.”
“Anybody want any dox?”
I slipped another card into the screen and went back to work, mechanically, hardly thinking about it.
“Look at this.” Priestess slid her screen over to me. A view from above, a rocky field, a half-naked girl lying on her belly, stones scattered all around her. A ragged circle of Coldmarkers surrounded her. One of them had an arm back, ready to hurl another stone.
“It’s not her,” I replied. “The hair color is wrong, the…”
“I know it’s not her,” Priestess insisted. “But look at those people! Stoning! What kind of subhumans are they? How can people act like this?”
I did not answer her. I slid her screen back to her, and continued scanning my own. If they tried to do that to us, I thought, we’d burn them alive. Much more civilized than stoning.
“In my world,” Priestess said, “the strong protect the weak. In my world, you can walk in the night without fear. In my world, we worship life, and protect it. And if you’re a ConFree citizen, you need fear only the Gods. And if you’re with the Legion, you don’t even need to fear the Gods.” Priestess scanned her screen, talking as she worked. Nobody else said anything. The faint clicking of fingers on control tabs continued, and the flickering of light from the screens, and Priestess’s voice, almost hypnotic, wove a spell around us all.
I knew she came from a Legion world. People like that were different. I never set my standards that high.
“In my world, we enforce justice, not laws. In my world, people care for each other. And if you call for help, everyone comes. Everyone!” She punched another image onto her screen, her face pale, her eyes blazing.
“It all flows from the past,” Priestess said quietly. “I could shoot before I could read. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now. First things first, my father said. We had an arsenal full of weapons. Every family had an arsenal like that. We didn’t need it, but it was there. If the situation ever changed back again, to the way it used to be, somebody would have to deal with a lot of armed and angry citizens.”
“Was that a Legion world?” Warhound asked.
“Yes. It didn’t used to be. We had an elected government, once, that decided they didn’t want to step down from power. They had made our world a paradise for criminals and lawyers. Finally they tried to disarm the citizenry that had elected them. My father told me about it.”
“What happened?”
“The people stormed the capitol and the Government called out the troops. That’s what it came to in the end. The citizens against the army, on the steps of the capitol. But it was a people’s army. They refused to fire on the people, and the people stormed the capitol, and killed every last one of those treacherous political rats. Then they went after the lawyers and the judges. They killed them all. All of them. Now we’re a Legion world. Criminals and lawyers know better than to target us.” Priestess was definitely Legion. I began to realize why she had left her quiet, safe, perfect little Legion world. She would have looked up to the stars, breathing cold air, and made a vow.
“So why’d you leave?” Psycho had to ask.
Priestess hesitated. It was almost like asking why she had joined the Legion. Finally she replied. “I wanted to help. I just wanted to help.”
Psycho did not pursue it. Even he could tell that she was sincere. But Boudicca spoke up. “You are helping, Priestess. We all are. It won’t make much difference to this trash world, but it will make a difference to Valkyrie, when we find her. And we will!” She said it with such absolute, fierce conviction that she almost had me convinced.
We went back to our screens.
Chapter 15: Something Evil
“Anybody know where we are?” Nobody answered Warhound. The temperature was plummeting as night fell. Glacial winds whistled through the vast slums of Coldmark City and plastic and paper trash drifted lazily in the air. The natives shivered in threadbare cloaks and huddled around fires of burning garbage. It would snow soon, and the suffering of the people would increase.
We had no time to worry about them; we had our own problems. Four of us, bundled up in USICOM coldcoats, trotted through the back alleys of Old City, the nastiest part of Coldmark. Massive, crumbling prefabs towered all around us, peeling from age, caked in generations of accumulated dirt. The Old City was the original Coldmark. It had long ago disintegrated, and now served as the home of the most desperate elements of Coldmark’s increasingly desperate society.
“Here!” Coolhand led us. We darted into the next alley. I could barely see, and we did not dare use any lights or night vision gear. I followed Coolhand’s tall, unmistakable figure, with Warhound and Priestess just behind me. Before dropping us off, our aircar had darted through alleys so narrow, we left a trail of destruction in our wake. Overhead another Legion aircar lit up the Old Town with a sky full of deceptor bursts. We wanted to pass as
