“The air is burning,” Amanda said. “And being ionized.”
The smoke gray outside the windows gave way to charcoal, and lashings of rain. Then steady drumming, like a hundred thousand fingertips palpating the aircraft’s skin.
Perceval giggled. She bit her lip, glanced at Danilaw, and forced herself not to giggle again. Or tried, but it slipped out anyway.
He turned to her, dark face curving around a grin. How strange, that these alien humans grinned just like anybody.
Tristen craned his neck to look back at them, eyebrows rising.
“Rain,” Perceval said. “Rain on a real live planet.”
Whatever he was about to say was arrested when they broke through the underside of the clouds. Favorlight—Planetrise or planetset? Perceval had no idea. Did they look different? How did you tell?—slanted up from the edge of the world and smeared across the underside of the clouds.
The rain still hammered down, blurring the port. The
What weird things planets were.
Something about the quality of the rush of air along the skin of the lighter changed, a new note brightening the white noise toward pink. “Landing gear,” Danilaw said, when Perceval turned her head against the crushing strength of gravity to glance her question at him. His voice showed strain—the discomfort of a Mean under physical duress. What was uncomfortable for a Conn was acute distress for Danilaw and Amanda. And yet they bore it well, functioning and cheerful, Amanda in particular intent on her work.
Means. Their courage and resourcefulness. They would never quite cease to amaze her.
A moment passed before she realized that she’d just thought of Rien without pain, and that realization brought the pain instead. A few short decades, and was she already forgetting?
“Healing,” said Nova inside her. And had the sense not to say further.
When the landing gear—wheels, Perceval guessed—touched the
Lightning cracked again as they rolled to a stop, this time without an accompanying rumble of thunder. That came moments later, and Perceval found herself calculating in her head. “That was a mile and a half off,” she said.
“Difference in flash and bang?” Amanda asked, turning in her seat to unhook the shoulder belts.
Perceval nodded, suddenly shy. “Is the storm moving away from us?”
“This wave,” Amanda said. “There might be more. The rain is a friend, though. It’ll cool our shell faster so we can disembark.”
“And drench us on the runway,” Danilaw said, but Perceval thought he was performing his crabbiness more than experiencing it. He was stretching in his seat, looking around, an air of excitement hovering over him.
Perceval decided to find it contagious. Maybe it would put an end to the apprehension and anxiety that wanted to rise up her throat like an anaconda and throw ropes of unease around her airway and lungs. When Danilaw rose, she rose beside him.
At that moment, she thought indeed she might do anything to stay.
Tristen was already picking his way, hunchbacked, around the copilot’s chair and toward the rear of the lighter. Some few minutes later, the doors opened and a stairway rolled up outside.
With Tristen at her shoulder, Perceval clutched the handrail. Woozy under heavy gravity, she stepped out into the rain. “Doesn’t this conduct electricity?” she asked, head craned back to the clouds so that falling water— magical, explicable, incomprehensible water falling from
“The stair is insulated,” Amanda said, as Danilaw pulled up behind her, “as is the lighter. Still, it can’t hurt to get down it quickly. And out of the rain. Our greeters are waiting under that awning.”
When she pointed it out, Perceval noticed it. She’d registered it before, but having no knowledge of what an airfield—a spaceport?—looked like, she hadn’t realized the red-and-white-striped tent was unusual for this place and time.
“Oh, boy,” she said. “A reception committee.”
Hair plastered to his face and neck, drops of beaded water running across the high cantilevered planes of his cheekbones, Tristen laughed. “Come on,” he said. “I can already see how this is going to get cold.”
They squeaked down the stairs in wet shoes, carefully, and stepped out a moment later onto puddle-dressed something-black. Behind them, Amanda’s and Danilaw’s footwear clicked and slapped and splashed. Now that they were lower, no longer obscured by the tent, Perceval could see the dark shapes of greeters through the slanting rain. She turned to make sure Amanda and Danilaw were at her heels—Danilaw offered a comforting nod—and, squaring her shoulders, started forward.
The puddles splashed underfoot; the black substance she walked over was hard and inabsorbent—and rippleless in its smoothness, because the puddles joined and flowed into one perfect, shallow sheet of water rather than collecting in the low spots.
Water stung Perceval’s eyes, plastered her hair across her face, and trickled into the corners of her mouth.
People were walking out from under the tents now. Perceval saw a woman and a man in the forefront, and behind them two sets of others. A little more than half of the group—six, exactly—were obviously security. Self- effacing, arranged around the border, watching in opposite directions in pairs. The other five were mixed men and women.
The whole crew wore coats of some tight-woven cloth the rain beaded up on. They had hats and tiny portable fabric tents on sticks, and the thing that fascinated Perceval most was the earthen rainbow of colors their faces came in, from ivory-gold to one almost as dark as Danilaw.
Danilaw, who leaned over and whispered “Gonna make it?” as two of the security types detached themselves from the advance and came to flank him. The other four, it seemed, were tasked with keeping the first man and the woman safe, and possibly Tristen and Perceval, based on the way they enforced a perimeter and took up positions.
The woman came forward. She angled her tent-on-a-stick so the rain drummed against it rather than against Perceval’s skull and extended the opposite hand. “I’m Gain Kangjeon,” she said. “Welcome to Fortune, Captain Perceval.”
Perceval read her stance, her expectations, and stepped forward to return the clasp. But whatever Perceval might have said next was lost in the flash of lightning, and the punch of something against her ribs that at first she thought was thunder.
22
wounds
If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword: and his offspring shall not
be satisfied with bread.
—Job 27:14, King James Version
Under the roof of a pavilion in a Go-Back Heaven, before an audience of cobras and Go-Backs, Dust’s patron prepared to conquer the world.
She had arrived hours before, slipping away from Engine in the confusion of Perceval and Tristen
