Guardsmen of Tomorrow (22 page)

And then went into a coughing fit, because the air really wasn’t thick enough to breathe.

That didn’t seem to bother the Silver Flame. She was up and out of
The Dart
before I could unfasten my harness. By the time I caught up with her, she was dancing about easily in the light gravity, her face a white mask but her eyes blazing.

Let her play a little
, I told myself.
Calm herself down
.

It was only play. Just a young thing letting off tension. Only play.

Then why was I suddenly so unnerved? Why was I thinking that very little I’d seen her do so far had been, when you came right down to it, rational?

Let her play
, I amended,
then tranquilize the… fire out of her
.

I alternated between frantically checking the readings on my medkit and just as frantically scanning the nearly black sky, looking for a moving dot. Our pursuers, even if they caught up with us, couldn’t land here, not with that big warship of theirs, but I prayed they didn’t have something powerful enough to scorch this whole little planetoid.

Evidently not. Unfortunately, what they did have was a shuttle.

“Visitors,” I snapped to the Silver Flame.

But she danced lightly out of my reach.

“Damn it,” cough, “this isn’t a time for,” cough, “games! Don’t you,” cough, cough, “want to get home?”

The shuttle was landing. Cursing under my breath and fighting down further coughing, I drew my sidearm. If she wasn’t going to come back, I was going to shoot her and pray the force only stunned her.

At this stage, I wasn’t going to be praying too hard, either.

Damn! There was the enemy, ten… no, fifteen of them, led by that glittery-necklaced fellow. Suddenly the Silver Flame was back at my side, her eyes still bright.

“They shall die.”

It was said so cheerfully that a cold shiver raced up my spine. “I thought you said you couldn’t do that, not a fire that size!”

“I can. Will.”

“But-no! Wait!”

God of Worlds, she meant it. And seeing that too-tranquil face and those wide, bright eyes, I knew the truth: The Silver Flame was nowhere near sanity.

The Uwar-tai had drawn their weapons, too, stalking warily forward. They didn’t know; they weren’t close enough to feel the heat radiating from the Silver Flame. In another second they were going to be a fireball, fifteen beings destroyed without a chance-

“Damn it, no!”

Maybe it wasn’t the brightest thing I’ve done. I mean, I’ve never been the Willing Sacrifice. But the thought of watching fifteen murders-no! I threw myself between the Silver Flame and the Uwar-tai.

And she hurled fire at me. I dropped, rolled, and came up shooting. Yes, my weapon was still set only to stunning force, and for a moment I was sure that wouldn’t be enough.

But with a sigh almost of disappointment, the Silver Flame crumpled.

The Uwar-tai came hurrying forward.
Now
, I thought,
I’m going to die
.

But what happened was that their leader beat out the flames in my clothing that I hadn’t even felt.

Shaken, I looked up at him. “Thanks.”

“I am Haimarg, pack-leader.”

“I am Sharra Kinsarin, uh, of my own pack.”

•‘Why do what you just did?“ he asked, nose wrinkled in what I guessed was confusion. ”Life-risking for an enemy?“

I got to my feet, standing between him and the Silver Flame just in case, not sure where this was going. “I don’t like murder. Yes, and for the record,” a phrase that didn’t really work in his language, “I also don’t like kidnapping.”

That word didn’t quite work in his language either, but it was close enough.

Haimarg’s lips drew back in a silent snarl. “You place honor-debt on me.”

“Do I? Then tell me what this was all about, and call that a settlement.”

He hissed at that, as did his fellows, and it took me an alarmed few seconds to realize the sound was an Uwar-tai laugh. “Courage as well as honor,” Haimarg commented to the others. “Interesting.” He turned back to me with the faintest lift of a lip. “It was not I who stole that creature.”

Daringly, I suggested, “Your pack-brother.”

“It is so. We are a warrior race; we fight with honor. But…”

“Killing from afar isn’t honorable, is it? Your pack-brother wanted a weapon that would do just that.”

Oh, smart move! He was at my side in a second, weapon against my neck, predator’s breath hot on my cheek, and I froze, not even daring to breathe.

But then Haimarg released me with a grunt. “Courage.” he repeated. “Yes. Muraik made that mistake, for the good of the people. That creature… killed him.”

Time for another bout of courage. Or was that foolhar-diness? “Seems to me the debts and wrongs are equaling out here. She wouldn’t have had the chance to kill your pack-brother if he hadn’t kidnapped her to use as a weapon.”

Haimarg snarled, and his warriors echoed him. But in a flurry of motion, he was back among them, calling to me, “Get that creature back in your ship. We will follow, to be sure it reaches its home world.”

Right. The Silver Flame was still breathing, and I think I was relieved at that. I tugged her back into
The Dart
, got her strapped in like a cocoon, just in case she did wake up before we reached Kuuraet. And off we went, with our… military escort.

It was a blessedly uneventful voyage until we actually reached Kuuraet. Then, all my instincts uneasy, I sent a message to Haimarg, “Stand ready.”

“Understood.”

His ship vanished into the planetary shadow.

Oh, my instincts weren’t playing me false! As I’d suspected back on Stataka, when I’d first found myself facing a live being, not a stone artifact, I’d been set up. The Ku-urae knew their holy being, their Silver Flame, wasn’t exactly sane, and they didn’t want the news publicized. Who would care if one small ship and one Human met with a tragic accident? Maybe the Kuurae didn’t like deep space, but that didn’t stop them from launching what might have been the only warship in their fleet.

That, of course, was when Haimarg brought his own ship out of hiding.

And joy of joys, there I was, caught between them.

I quickly opened channels to both ships. “Looks like I’m the translator here,” I said in both languages. Switching to the Kuurae tongue, I told them, “You know who I’ve got here. And I know what you tried to do. Meet the Uwar-tai. Want to fight them?”

To the Uwar-tai, I said, “They’re dishonorable, I agree. But I’m afraid they
are
members of the Alliance.” Provisional only, but this wasn’t the time to argue fine points. “That’s one hundred and forty-two planets. Want a war with all them?”

“If we leave,” Haimarg said, and a hiss of Uwar-tai laughter was in his voice, “then the Kuurae destroy you.”

Yes. I’d thought of that problem. “Anyone out there?” I called over another channel, using Alliance Standard.

And to my utter relief, a voice answered, “Got your message. Here we are.”

Three warships, three languages, and an awkward situation defused. Oh, and yes, I delivered the Silver Flame, through the Alliance, to the Kuurae, and the Kuurae delivered, through the Alliance, the total amount due me. The Uwar-tai, curious about the Alliance, agreed to preliminary discussions about membership.

Who knows? I might even get some new clients out of this. But right now, I’m heading for a brief vacation on Pentaüa. You may have heard of it. It’s an all-water world.

No chance of… stray flames.

THE END

by Jean Rabe

When not writing, Jean Rabe feeds her goldfish, visits museums, and attends gaming conventions. A former newspaper reporter, she is the author of nine fantasy novels, including the
Dragonlance
Fifth Age Trilogy. Her latest novel is
Dhamon: The
Downfall
. She has written numerous fantasy and science fiction short stories which appear in such anthologies as
Merlin
and
Tales from the Eternal Archives: Legends
, and she edits a BattleTech magazine for the FASA Corporation.

“In a lot of ways, they’re just like us.” A Luis gave her a curious look, clearly not understand-ing what she was talking about.

“The stars,” Reah explained. “The stars’re just like us.” She was slender and dainty, not quite reaching five feet, her voice soft and seemingly appropriate.

Skinny, Luis had decided the day he met her in the spaceport, almost too skinny.

She was wearing a tight chic outfit then, wrists and elbows and hipbones protruding, flesh taut against her jaw, teeth tiny and flawless. Her diminutive stature made it easy for her to curl up in the pilot’s chair, despite her bulky flight suit, right leg tucked beneath her, left hugged to her body, the way a teenager might sit. She pointed at the view screen, her arm looking child-small despite the insulated fabric.

Luis’ eyes followed her gloved finger. Displayed against the blackness of space was a glowing white ball the size of a plum. Haloed by red wisps, it looked eerily ghostlike, yet at the same time dramatic.

“They’re born, they live, and they die. The stars.” She pushed a strand of honey-colored hair from her eyes. Even her hair seemed thin, lying close to her head and cropped short like a cap, silky strands all in place and shimmering softly in the glow of the console lights. She released a sigh that sounded like fall leaves shushing together, cocked her head, and indicated the chair beside her. “They just happen to live ten billion or so years longer than we do.”

Luis edged forward, groaning when he brushed his head against the ceiling of the cramped compartment. He wasn’t a tall man. Indeed, he thought of himself as short at five-nine, but he had broad shoulders and a slight paunch, both of which were accentuated by the suit. He squeezed by Reah and sat in the only other chair on what passed for the bridge. It wasn’t a good fit, knees pressed up against a control panel, shoulders rounded and shaved head making him look a bit like a crab scrunched up in a silvery shell. He pulled his head close to his chest and tilted it so he could see both the star and the pilot.

There was a hint of gentility to her heart-shaped face, which was smooth and unblemished and oh-so-pale. She’d seen plenty of suns, he knew that from the ship’s flight log, but he suspected she rarely walked on some planet beneath one, never let its rays tan that perfect milky skin. Pity, he thought. She could do with some color. Still, the paleness seemed to suit her, making her look like an antique China doll, fragile and hiding her years. She appeared twenty, but he knew she was a little more than twice that, nearly his own age.

“N-G-C seven-oh-seven-eight,” Reah stated, still pointing at the star. “What we came so damn far out here for.”

“It’s beautiful,” he managed.

“Ah, and that’s where stars’re different from us,” she continued, leaning forward and somehow looking graceful and catlike doing so. She nudged a lever, coaxing the ship in closer, but much slower now than it had been traveling. She flipped another switch. “Dad?”

There was a crackle of static.

“Dad, better get ready. It’ll be another thirty-five, forty minutes and we’ll be in position.”

Another crackle.

“No. There’s no sign of your pirates or any other company for that matter. We’re blessedly all alone this time.” She thumbed the switch off and reached down to her side, retrieving a helmet and balancing it on her knee.

“You were saying…” her visitor prompted.

Her turn to look confused.

“The difference…” Luis prompted.

“Oh. The difference between us an‘ them. When people get old, Luis, they shrivel.

Stars do, too, in a sense. But people just dry up, fall ill. They get so… ugly. Their breath stinks, an’ their teeth rot. Their flesh sags, an‘ they’re shoved away in homes waiting for the day their hearts’ll stop an’ they’ll quit being a burden to society. Not stars. Watch.” Still balancing the helmet, Reah stretched to a panel on her right, arm intentionally brushing across Luis’ leg. She pushed a series of buttons and the screen shimmered for an instant. She pushed several more and sat back.

“Beautiful,” he repeated.

“The screen combines visible and infrared light, sorta like the lens of a telescope, showing you what your eyes can’t otherwise see.”

The red wisps were joined by a pink mist, slightly darker close to the sun, diaphanous and fading to nothing farther away, where it touched a glistening blue haze that seemed to swell and recede, as if the star was breathing.

“All the colors, they’re layers of gas and dust, the red is the dissipating molecular shell of the star.” Reah’s voice was detached, clinical, sounding like a professor lecturing to an apt pupil. “There is a thin transition between the ionized region of the star and the otherwise invisible atmosphere. Most of the stars we’ve visited are more impressive. The butterfly of the bipolar planetary nebula M-two-nine, the Cats Eye, the Hourglass, the central stars of the Cotton Candy Nebula and the Silkworm Nebula, stellar pinwheels, globes within globes. This one is rather mundane. Once a star starts to die, it takes about thirty thousand years. And the closer a star is to death, the more amazing it becomes.” The last was said with a tinge of reverence, the first real emotion Luis noted in her voice. “All their lives stars wage a war against gravity, the crushing weight of their outer layers struggling against the core. When they start to lose the war, the outer layers press against the inner ones, and in the process the stars exhaust their supply of hydrogen. Their cores contract, becoming denser and hotter, becoming first red giants, then white dwarfs. Then they go supernova, exploding with a light a million times brighter than they were in life. And in dying, they breathe life into space.”

Reah fitted the helmet on her suit, but flipped up the faceplate so she could still regard Luis. “Decaying stars, the ones that go supernova, throw off iron and oxygen. The small ones spit out carbon, like this one is starting to do. So in essence, humans and animals, plants, much of what is on Earth and other habitable worlds is made of dying stars. We are Stardust.” She laughed lightly. “But then you already know all of that, don’t you, Luis? That’s what you’re here for. That’s why you paid so much for this ride.”