The Summer Queen (22 page)

“Commander PalaThion! What are you doing here?” Constable
Fairhaven straightened away from the grayed wooden railing of the pier, with
surprise obvious on her long, weathered face.

“Just doing my job, constable; the same as you.” Jerusha returned
her salute. Fairhaven’s salute was sloppy to the point of being almost
unrecognizable, like most of the Summers’ salutes were; but she was a calm,
shrewd woman, and those were p qualities Jerusha had come to realize were far
more important than discipline, in a local constabulary where the police and
the people they watched over were frequently neighbors and kin. Jerusha leaned
against the rail next to Fairhaven, breathing in the heavy, pungent odor of the
docks, the smell of wood and pitch, seaweed and fish and , the sea. The maze of
floating piers was lined with fishing boats and transport craft |from all along
the coast.

“But so soon—?” Fairhaven said. Her frank curiosity clouded
over with concern, at the look Jerusha felt come over her own face.

“I’m fine,” Jerusha said mechanically, looking away, down at
the pattern of , ropes and chains, of shifting light and shadow on the water’s
surface. She looked up again, at the ships. Miroe had sailed from here
yesterday, going back to the plantation, leaving behind the city he hated, and
the pain of their shared loss, her pain. Leaving behind the frustration, the
recriminations they had shared too, as they had turned anger at the random
indifference of an uncaring universe into anger at each other. Avoiding all
that: their dead child, their dying dream. Her ...

“Forgive me, Jerusha.” Fairhaven put out a hand, touching Jerusha’s
arm, a gesture that was somehow both apology and the comfort of one woman
reaching out to another. Fairhaven had never addressed her as anything but “Commander”
before; the combination took her doubly by surprise. “But I suffered my share
of stillborn babes ... three I lost, out of seven I bore with my pledged. It
was hard, hard ....” Her mouth tightened, although Jerusha knew her children
were all grown; the memories of her losses must be old ones now. She looked up
again, sighing. “The Lady gives, and She takes away .... We had a say ing in
the islands, you know, that you should let nine days pass before you took to
your work again. Three for the baby’s sake, three for the mother’s sake, three
for the Lady’s sake.”

Jerusha smiled, faintly. Her head was still buzzing from the
native painkillers she had been chewing the past few days. They had used up
their own small stock of offworlder drugs, on her previous miscarriages and
other small disasters. “But I don’t worship the Lady. And as for me, I’d rather
work than brood. So I’ve taken time enough off.”

Fairhaven shook her head. Her graying, sand-colored braids
rolled against her tunic with the motion. “It’s still good advice, you know. To
take time to grieve is only right. Otherwise you suffer more, in the long run.”

Jerusha forced herself to control the sudden annoyance that
filled her. And she remembered, unexpectedly, the face of one of the men under
her old command—her assistant, Gundhalinu, on the day he had received news of
his father’s death. She remembered his stubborn Kharemoughi pride; his refusal
even to acknowledge his loss, until finally she had ordered him to take the
rest of the day off to grieve .... She rubbed her eyes, turning away.

She was saved from having to make a further response by a
sound like thunder that echoed through the underworld of the docks. She turned
back to Fairhaven, meeting her stare. “A ship’s fallen—” Fairhaven said, as the
sound of voices shouting filled the stunned silence that followed the crash.
They turned together, not needing words; started to run, as others were running
now, toward the site of the accident. As they approached she heard pain-cries,
before she could even make out what had happened through the wall of milling
bodies.

She pushed through the crowd until she had a clear view, taking
it all in at a glance: the ship that had been winched up for repairs, the chain
that had snapped and let it fall sideways onto the dock, the two men pinned beneath
it. As many workers as could press their backs against the hull were already
straining to lift it; but one of the catamaran’s large floats was wedged
beneath the pier, and they could get no leverage.

Jerusha looked from the broken length of chain lying on the
dock to the pulley high up beneath the city’s underbelly. She looked down
again. One of the workers lay unconscious or dead in a pool of blood; the other
one, his legs pinned, was still moaning. She tightened her jaw, trying not to
listen to the sound, trying to keep her mind clear for thought.

She pulled loose the coiled length of monofilament line she
had carried at her belt, ever since her Police-issue binders ceased to
function. She knotted one end of the line through the last solid link of broken
chain, while the workers looked on, uncomprehending.

She flung the coil of line upward, feeling something
half-healed pull painfully inside her; watched with relief and some surprise as
it passed through the pulley overhead on her first try. The rope spiraled down
to the dock and lay waiting, but nobody moved forward to pick it up. “Come on!”
Jerusha shouted. She picked up the rope’s end. “Wind it up!” They stared at
her, muttering and shaking their heads.

“Commander,” Fairhaven murmured. “It won’t hold. They know
it will snap, it’s too thin—” She nodded at the broken chain, as thick around
as Jerusha’s wrist.

“It’ll hold!” Jerusha called sharply, with the sound of the
trapped worker’s moans grating inside her like a broken bone. “It will! Winch
it up!”

Two deckhands moved forward, looking at her as if she were
insane, but having no other alternative. She watched them fasten the line to
the winch and begin to crank it. Their motions slowed abruptly, their muscles
strained, as the line suddenly grew taut. They went on turning the winch; the
line sang briefly as every last millimeter of play was drawn out of it and it
began to take the full weight of the ship.

Jerusha held her breath, knowing the line would hold, but
still instinctively afraid of disaster. The ship began to crack and groan in
turn as its immovable mass surrendered to the irresistible force of the winch’s
power—and finally it began to rise.

Deckhands leaped forward to drag the two trapped workers
free as the ship began to lift clear. But the two men at the winch kept
cranking, and as the rest of the crowd watched in murmuring awe, the ship rose
farther. The float that was wedged under the pier’s edge snapped and broke in
two, ripping free with a spray of splintered wood. The ship lunged and bucked against
the line; gradually stabilized again as the relentless pull lifted it even
higher, until it was back in position overhead—and still the line held.

Jerusha tore her own gaze from the ship, to watch the
injured workers carried away toward the ramp that rose into the city, toward
the hospital. She looked back again as someone embraced her suddenly,
awkwardly, before hurrying on past, going after the injured workers.

“Littleharbor’s kinsman,” Fairhaven said, indicating one of
the victims, and the man who had just hugged her. Jerusha nodded mutely,
wondering with a familiar, morbid weariness whether the two workers could be
healed or even helped in any meaningful way by the primitive medical treatment
they had now. Miroe had done his best to share what medical training he had
with the locals; but without sophisticated equipment and diagnosticators to
back it up, his modern methods were hardly more effective than the
herbal-remedies-mixed-with-common-sense the Tiamatans had evolved on their own.

“Commander—?” Someone’s voice caught at her hesitantly.

She turned back, finding a crowd of Summers gathered around
her. “What is it?” she said.

“How is it possible?” the woman who had spoken asked; asking,
Jerusha realized, for them all. “What sort of string is this you carry, that
can bear the weight that snapped a chain?”

“It’s called monomolecular line,” she answered. “It’s extremely
strong. They say it could lift the entire city of Carbuncle without snapping.
It’s from offworld.” She watched their faces, expecting their eyes to glaze
over with disinterest as she said those final words ... just as they always
had, and probably always would. She had come to believe that masochism must be
an inherited trait among the Summers; that they were somehow instinctively opposed
to making their lives any easier.

But they only came closer, touching the line hesitantly,
speculatively, murmuring among themselves about the strength, the lightness,
the countless possible uses for netting, bindings, rigging ... on a farm ... in
a cottage. That this was better All the things that the Queen and her College
of Sibyls and the Winter entrepreneurs had been trying to tell them, show them,
force on them—forcing it down their throats, when all that had done was make
the Summers retch. When they should have been letting those things speak for
themselves ... letting the Summers think for themselves. Showing, and not
telling ...

“Is this something the Winters have learned to make?” a
large, red-bearded man asked, almost grudgingly.

“Not yet,” Jerusha said. “Someday they will.” She looked
down, trying to conceal the sudden inspiration that struck her. “But—there’s a
supply of it left in the old government warehouses. If you want it, maybe I
could arrange to make it available ....” She shrugged, trying not to sound too
eager, not to look as though it mattered to her.

The Summers glanced at each other, their expressions mixed,
as if they were trying to gauge one another’s response: whether the person next
to them would somehow be the first to get a quantity of the new line, and an advantage
over them, all at the same time.

“What would you ask for it?” someone murmured.

She almost said, “Nothing”; stopped, thinking fast. The Summers
made most of their own equipment, and preferred barter to the city’s offworlder-based
credit system. “We can talk a trade,” she said, and saw their faces begin to
come alive as she answered them in their own way. “Come up to the warehouse
whenever you finish your work. One of my Summer constables will be there to
speak with you.” She saw them nodding, saw their eyes, and knew that sooner or
later, some of them would come. And then, with any luck, more would. Shown, not
told ... There were other things in the warehouses, things that she could have
put to casual use in the Summers’ presence, letting them see for themselves
that their way of doing things was not the only way, not even necessarily the
best. Lost in thought, she scarcely felt the pain of her overtaxed body as she
started back up the ramp toward the city.

“Wake up, you stinking hero. This is no time for sleep—”

Police Commander BZ Gundhalinu gasped and came awake in
utter darkness, the sourceless words echoing in his head like a dream. “Wha—?”
Dreaming , .. he had been dreaming. But it was a woman’s face he had been
dreaming of, as pale as moonlight, echoed in blue, her arms reaching out to him
....

He rolled toward the edge of the bed, groping for the light,
the time, the message function on his bedside table; groping for whatever had
wakened him so rudely from the sodden sleep of exhaustion. He had not gotten
back to the apartment from the latest in the seemingly endless series of fetes
and celebrations honoring him until well after local midnight. He could not
possibly have been asleep for more than two or three hours. Who in the name of
a thousand gods—?

He found the lamp base, slapped it with his hand—but no
light came up. He realized then that he could see nothing at all, not even
shadows against the night, the hidden form of a window. His hands flew to his
face—rebounded without touching it from the polarized security shield locked in
place over his head.

He swore, scrambling out from under the covers on his hands
and knees; felt strong arms—more than one set of them—lock around him, jerking
him back. He heard the unmistakable crack of a stunner shot in the same instant
that the hit impacted against his chest, and shut off his voluntary nervous
system. He collapsed in the bedding, paralyzed but completely conscious,
furiously aware that he was stark naked, because he had been too exhausted to
throw on a sleep shirt before falling into bed. The hands rolled him roughly
onto his back; he heard muttered speech distorted by the shield’s energy field.
What do you want—? His slack lips would not form the words that he needed to
say—needing desperately to have that much effect on his body, or his fate. He
could not swear, could not even moan.

He felt their hands on him again, manhandling him with ruthless
efficiency; realized with a sense of gratitude that was almost pathetic that
they were wrapping his nerveless body in a robe. They lifted him off the bed,
dragging him across the room and toward the door.

Gods, kidnapped—he was being kidnapped. He struggled to
control his panic, the only thing left over which he had any control at all;
trying to keep his mind working, trying to think. What did they want? “You
stinking hero,” they’d called him. Ransom then, terrorism, information about
the stardrive, Fire Lake—? Stop “

No way to guess that, he’d probably find out soon enough.
Concentrate. What do you already know? He didn’t know how many of them there
were, where they were taking him—he grunted as he was dumped unceremoniously
into the cramped floorspace of some kind of vehicle, and felt his captors climb
in around him. He felt the vehicle rise, carrying them all to gods-only-knew
what destination.

Trying to use the only sensory feedback he had left to him,
he realized that the vehicle had an oddly familiar smell. He recognized the
distinctive odor of bandro, a stimulant drink imported from Tsieh-pun. Most of
the Hegemonic Police force stationed here were from Tsieh-pun. Police. Could it
be Police involvement? That would explain the equipment, the vehicle, the
ruthless efficiency of the way they had made him their prisoner, even the effortless
way they had walked in on him through the invisible walls of his security system
....