Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (16 page)

"That's right. There's the base camp, here, and then the actual dig site. It's sub-surface, down about a hundred feet." Kemmer's tone became suddenly guarded. His eyes took on a glacial coldness that Maeve was all too familiar with.

The Prians are a hard people, as stony as their homeworld.

"Protecting two fronts will be difficult, but if one of them is underground, it will make the task perhaps achievable." Maeve counted off on her fingers. "We have to our benefit three combat-ready members of our crew."

"Three?"

"You, Duaal and myself."

Tiberius frowned and cast a sidelong glance at the Hyzaari boy. So did Kemmer, confusion written plainly across his face. Duaal straightened.

"Fine, but I want us to handle most of it," Tiberius told Maeve. His tone brooked no argument. "Duaal, you're backup."

"Then you'll stay?" Xen asked intently.

"For…" Duaal thought for a moment, twisting one of the golden buttons on his cuffs. "For another four thousand cenmarks."

Xen and Kemmer exchanged a look. "That would exhaust my budget and then some," the Ixthian said.

"I have even less of an operating fund than you do," Kemmer replied bitterly. "I can cover five hundred colour, and even that is going to come out of
my
pocket."

"We can pay three thousand cen, then," Xen said.

"That's fine," Tiberius agreed.

"Once I've verified his identity, we can coordinate our efforts through Captain Myles. Can I get your badge number?" Cerro asked. He took a small datadex from a side pocket and scribbled down the number that Tiberius gave him. "I'll call back as soon as we've got anything on your thieves."

The blocky com on his belt buzzed insistently. Captain Cerro excused himself and went outside to take the call.

Kemmer looked around the tent. "Welcome to the team. We've got a lot of work to do. Let's get started by bringing in your equipment."

"We're going to have to tell Gripper that we're staying," Duaal said. "No trees and we don't have a coat that fits him. Maeve, I nominate you to break the bad news."

"I hope that you are braver if thieves return to this camp," she replied. But as they stepped out into the cold once more, Maeve called out to Gripper.

"One who lies to himself cannot speak the truth."

- Allonar Cavainna, Arcadian monarch (5,104 MA)

On any civilized world, it probably would have been called torture. The flight from Sipho to Prianus was weeks long and Coldhand could not move during any of it. Not much, at least. Not enough. A combination of vitamins, nutrients and muscle stimulants kept his body from suffering the sort of withering that crippled and even killed early spacefarers.

But his mind wandered. A cocktail of sedatives could have stopped that and were popular among long-range fighter pilots. Coldhand never took them.

He stared out into the scattered rainbows of superluminal flight without seeing them. In the six years since he became a bounty hunter, Logan had never gone home. He barely thought about Prianus. He was not ashamed of his homeworld. He did not hate it. Prianus was just a planet, like any other.

But now he found himself… What? Reminiscing? Daydreaming? There were memories waiting for him on Prianus.

It was easier, somehow, to think of them as memories instead of people. Jess Ephrya, the woman he was going to marry. His mother, Lynn Centra, who struggled alone to raise her son on a grocery clerk's meager paychip. Arctan Vorus, the old palaestrum master who taught a dirty-faced little boy how to be a man.

He did not care what they thought of him now, Coldhand reminded himself, of the traitor who turned tail and vanished. It only mattered that they might become problems if they learned that Logan Centra had returned.

These are pointless concerns,
he thought. He ran metal fingers through hair heavy with sweat and grime from far too long in the Raptor.
Prianus isn't the largest world of the Alliance, but even it has billions of people living on it. There's no reason to believe that I would encounter anyone… anything that might cause a problem.

Still, he could not stop thinking about them. Not for the first time since beginning the journey, Logan found himself clenching his cybernetic hand and tapping his feet restlessly against the Raptor's deckplates.

All of this to hunt down the Nihilists. For a good chase. For something… exciting.

This had better be worth it.

________

A warning beep from the navigational computer roused Coldhand from a half-doze. He had been dreaming… something about searching through a store full of caged birds for a white owl. The owl's sharp, sad gray eyes were the only thing Logan could remember when he sat up, but even those faded quickly.

He was entering the Prian system. Coldhand checked over his astrogation charts. All mapped comets, asteroids and moons were clear of his entry point. The whole cockpit smelled of recycled sweat. Coldhand waited until the countdown hit zero, then shut off the superluminal engines. The sounds of the Long Wings pod was sucked away into the emptiness of space, but the down-cycling engines made the Raptor shiver.

Stars and moons leapt into focus outside, floating in the deep black of space. Prianus' far side faced the sun and the planet was a barely-visible crescent, a thin silver thread arcing through the heavens. Satellites blinked in orbit like indecisive miniature stars.

Coldhand steered a wide course around the sensor stations located on Prianus' three moons. If they picked up his ship, it would end up in a database somewhere and Coldhand wanted no record of his visit. There were blind, hidden routes, used by the smugglers he had hunted in this very ship back when he had two good hands.

Logan pulled into low orbit and then dropped down into the atmosphere at a shallow, oblique angle. Storm clouds streamed past the wings and beaded into streaking droplets along the Raptor's hull. A bolt of bright lightning lit the sky a sudden, blinding white and then the deafening crash of thunder buffeted the fighter. Logan banked with the tugging wind, letting gravity pull him down, and then he was free of the clouds.

He was flying over a dark tarn. The long, flat lake lay high in the mountains, flanked by steep shores covered in coarse white snow. Coldhand checked his instruments. He was about ninety-three miles from his destination, the city of Blue Oak.

The Raptor crested a spine of sharp, glacier-carved stone. Blue Oak glowed through the heavy rain. The city stretched through the diamond-shaped valley and out into the nearby passes, looking by night like a huge, well-lit nerve cell.

Logan circled low over the city, alternately looking out the glassteel canopy and at his instruments. He found a small landing field a few miles outside Blue Oak, marked in the stormy night by a single bright yellow spotlight. The hunter called down, requesting clearance. A sleepy-sounding female voice told him to hold his vector while she waved another ship to the ground, then brought Coldhand around and set him down in a gravel-strewn lot. Not an illegal port, exactly, but one of many private, family-owned plots. It was unlikely that their computers were connected to the planetary control stations.

Logan heaved himself out of the Raptor and thumped heavily to the ground. Prian ground. He was actually back on Prianus. Ice-cold rainwater soaked his hair, seeping down the back of his neck.

An adolescent boy – probably the son of the woman he had just spoken to – jogged up to Coldhand. He carried a datadex in a protective sleeve and shielded his face from the driving rain. "I need to get your signature and fees," he said.

The boy wore a lightly armored vest and an NI gun tucked into his waistband. Coldhand took the datadex and had to press hard with the stylus to sign through the plastic cover. He signed his assumed name. The boy was looking at the fighter.

"Wow, is that a Raptor?" he asked, picking out the shape under the bulky Long Wings pod fitted over the hull. "Are you a cop?"

Coldhand thrust the datadex back at the boy, the wet plastic slipping in his cybernetic fingers. "Yes." He did not explain which question that was an answer to. "How much is parking?"

"Just eight cen a day."

That was three times what Logan had paid six years ago. Unless this little field charged a lot more than their neighbors, inflation was on the rise again.

The bounty hunter tossed a white twenty-cenmark chip onto the datadex. "I'll only be here a day, but I don't carry any smaller colour."

The kid's eyes widened a little, but otherwise showed no reaction to the money. "We can't change this, sir."

The boy was lying, but Coldhand shrugged. So was he. "Fine. Have you got showers? I've been flying a long time."

"In there," the boy told him, pointing at the shadowy shape of a small building squatting beside the spotlight. "Showers, latrines and a terminal connected out to the mainstream if you need to catch up. We can call you a car, if you like, but we don't have any rooms."

Coldhand was not tired. "I don't need one. I'll call out for anything else. Go back to bed."

The boy hurried back the way he had come, eager to get out of the rain. Coldhand locked his Raptor and splashed through the muddy puddles toward the showers. His legs felt like old rubber. Rain hissed off the slowly circling spotlight and filled the air with steam.

The showers were plain and far from private, but it was the middle of the night. The pilot of the ship grounded just before the Raptor briefly visited the bathrooms, but then left to pursue her own business. After Logan thoroughly scrubbed himself clean in the tepid shower, he dressed in a fresh pair of pants and a thick, long-sleeved shirt.

He went to the offered terminal and pushed the stool away with one bare foot. He had been sitting for weeks. The computer was a small machine, bolted into a thick plastic case on the wall of the little hospitality house. Coldhand made a quick search through the mainstream, but as expected, found nothing. Gavriel was being subtle and quiet. There was nothing in the news but outdated reprints of the wire stories from Axis and Stray.

Where to begin…? In the morning, he would go into Blue Oak to ask around for anything that had not made it onto the mainstream, but Coldhand's hopes were not high. Even if the Nihilists moved right into the middle of the city, chances were low that anyone would even notice. The cultists were sickly, murderous chem addicts, but that described half of Prianus.

There are two types of Prians: the noble and the desperate.

The desperate might not notice a man murdered on their own doorstep – not unless he had something worth stealing – but the noble might. Watching closely over their cities, the Prian police would have some useful information, even if they did not know it. They had no particular reason to be looking for the Nihilists on their planet.

But getting any kind of information from the police would be tricky. Coldhand had no contacts on the force, no one willing to speak to him. He briefly considered simply calling one of the stations and seeing what he could pry out of the desk officer. His E3 bounty hunter status would be more than enough to get him access to any records he requested, but the moment the police checked his CAID number, they would know who Logan was.

It was a frustratingly circular problem. The very identity that could give him what he needed would get him shot as a traitor.

Coldhand went back to the terminal, called up a transit node and ordered a taxicab. Maybe he would get lucky down in Blue Oak.

Not likely. I've flown across the galaxy on a wish… It was never like this when I was hunting Maeve.

________

A day spent questioning the citizens of Blue Oak proved as fruitless as Coldhand suspected. Most had no idea what the Cult of Nihil was, much less if they might be on Prianus. When he described the black robes or the red garb and stark intensity of the Emberguard, the Prians simply shook their heads. They knew nothing.

Questioning them instead about an influx of Arcadians, Coldhand received a few shrugs. The fairies were always flying back and forth between cities. They never seemed to stay in one place long enough for the Prians to count them very accurately.

Nothing useful.

Coldhand paid the cab driver and walked back up the hill to the landing field. The rain had given way to a fine sleet that dusted his shoulders in glittering ice. He kept his hands in his pockets. The ice would stick to the illonium of his left hand and make the joints stiff.

He could not sort through every single city on Prianus. It would take a lifetime and there was no guarantee that he might happen upon the right people who had seen the right things. He was out of other options.

Logan went into the field's little hospitality house and powered up the terminal. He did another quick search, half hoping to find nothing, but the results came back quickly. Coldhand had his contact.

________

Highwind was on the other side of Prianus from Blue Oak, but it took only four hours to make the flight and land. All too soon, Logan was walking along the cracked roads of his hometown.