Ancient Light

Book 441: Gateway Essentials

by Mary Gentle

Genres: Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

This gracefully written sequel to Golden Witchbreed powerfully depicts the impact of a high-technology civilization on a decaying planet. Ten years after having served as Earth's first envoy to Orthe, which is struggling to survive after a planetwide holocaust millennia ago, Lynne de Lisle Christie returns there as an advisor to PanOceania, one of Earth's giant multinational companies, which is seeking to discover the technological secrets of the Goldens, the ruling race that had destroyed itself while almost obliterating Orthe. Christie seeks to help the native people, some of whom have been her friends, some her enemies, but all closely bound in her memories and loyalties. Instigated by the last of the Golden, a madwoman seeking domination, war between the poor and starving hiyeks of the Desert Coast and the land-loving telestres of the north is aggravated by smuggled high-tech weapons. Christie, while holding a dreadful secret from the Orthe's past, attempts to mediate. Gentle creates moving, different, yet recognizable societies and people that catch the reader's emotions as they struggle to save themselves.

Release date: November 28, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 707

Sample

The alien settlement merged with the desolate earth on which it stood, half a mile away. As I stepped down from the shuttle’s ramp, I couldn’t help thinking: Is this the great discovery?

Nothing but cleft and gully and hillock surrounding me; rock and stone and dust. To the south were cliffs, and a hint of mountains in the haze. And to the north, the Inner Sea.

The hot, bright winter light washed over me, shattering into dazzles on the sea. Too sharp and subtle, this white sun, Carrick’s Star – and the pressure of the world underfoot, gravity slightly different … All but imperceptible in these equatorial regions, Orthe’s daystars shone. Orthe: Carrick V, whose sky is full of the Heart Stars, that cluster at the galaxy’s core.

Then the smell hit me: an odour of heat and rock and rank water. That is the most ancient sense, and it bypasses rationality. For one second I felt hollow in the chest, as if I had been punched under the ribs, and I thought, Orthe, this is Orthe, I remember –

And then, like seeing a face once so familiar, that now you can’t name, ten long years reasserted themselves and I thought, I don’t know this world at all.

Which is unfortunate, girl, because that’s what they’ve brought you back here for.

As if she were a mind-reader, the representative of the PanOceania multicorporate Company said, ‘You were never on this southern continent, were you, Lynne?’

‘Once,’ I said. ‘Briefly. But that was a good few hundred miles west along the Coast from here. At least there they could scratch a living out of the dirt.’ And, looking round, I thought, No species should be able to survive here, this land is sterile as a moon –!

On other continents of this world, things are different.

The Pacifican woman left the shuttle-ramp and walked over to join me. The scrape of her boots on rock was louder than the lapping waves.

‘The Earth-station on the northern continent must have more extensive records.’ She glanced across at me. ‘Do you want to stay in the ship? You look as if the heat’s too much for you.’

I glared at her. Molly Rachel’s total lack of tact is something I find disconcerting and pleasing in about equal measures. Only the young can be so honest.

‘Molly, you think this is bad? You want to be here in the hot season. And shall we assume that a few years’ difference in our ages doesn’t make me either decrepit or mentally deficient?’

‘Or even bad-tempered?’

‘Oh, very witty.’

I don’t know why I like this woman when she irritates me so much. No, that’s a lie. What I do know is that I have to dislike her, because I dislike what her people are going to do. And – God help me, being special advisor to her Company – her people are my people too.

Molly Rachel craned her neck, looking at the nearest settlement-structures. ‘I still find it difficult to believe we’ve found any kind of alien technology here. Either relics, or functional.’

‘I don’t believe it’s functional –’

Orthe’s technological past is dead. The Golden Witch-breed are a dead race, perhaps as alien to this world then as we are now … and the high-level technology they had was destroyed, millennia past. Not without consequences: witness this desolate land.

‘– but I know what you mean, Molly. This is a post-technological world, and pre-tech and post-tech societies don’t look that different on the surface. Primitive. The difference –’

‘Maybe there isn’t much difference anyway. If the Ortheans allowed the necessary infrastructure for technology to decay, it’s no wonder they’re reduced to this.’

I winced. She didn’t notice. Orthe is more than this, I silently protested. Much more. But do I want the Company to realize that?

‘Maybe things have gone too far,’ I said, ‘and then it won’t matter if we do find a few artifacts that still function. Unless we’re very lucky, that won’t tell us the nature of the alien technology that built them.’

And what if the artifacts that the xeno-archeology team found, so recently, tell you no more than the shells of ancient Orthean cities, that Earth has had ten years now to study? Or the ruins of the Rasrhe-y-Meluur, dead these three thousand years? What then?

‘Maybe the Company needn’t have come here,’ I suggested, but she shook her head, negating that.

She stood silhouetted against Orthe’s pale blue sky: Molly Rachel, tall, angular and black, with a mass of fine-curled hair, and the flattened features of her Aborigine mother. Like most people from Earth’s Pacific Basin area – Asia, India, South America, Australasia – she is possessed of a certain impenetrable self-confidence. It comes from knowing that history is on your side. And since Earth’s economic centre shifted there, we all take good care to be on the Pacifican side.

Dear God, I thought, was I ever that young? But come to think of it, she’s thirty, and I was four years younger than that when I first set foot on Orthe.

A world must be vast, one thinks, taking in cities and mountains, ancient civilizations, strange skies and suns. But it shrinks. The whole bright gaudy carnival shrinks to a coloured dot in the night sky. And feels to me now like an achievement of youth, recognized and remembered, but put aside for other things.

A warm wind blew off the sea: sparky, salty, electric. Carrick’s Star dazzled. The world touched me, alien and unfathomable, too real to be safely locked in a memory.

‘One of us should stay here with the shuttle,’ Molly said. ‘David Osaka, or you?’

‘David. The multicorporate’s seconded me here to be advisor. Let’s say I need a refresher on some points of alien culture.’

The woman gave me a shrewd look. ‘I’ve studied your old reports. Let’s say wild horses couldn’t keep you out of that settlement.’

I laughed, but it was wry humour. Here, in the early light of the sun, the native settlement towered above us.

It is a settlement without streets or city walls.

Flat-roofed stone buildings clung together. Five- and six-sided, like the cells of a beehive; three storeys tall. All faced us at ground level with blank white walls; windows were fifty feet above us, black slots. Squinting up, I could see where wooden steps led from one roof level to another, and from there two or three different stairways led to different roofs, and in turn from them to others …

Long shadows fell towards the west. I saw no movement on those roofs. Multiple layers of a celled alien city, a city like a scatter of sun-bleached dice.

The first exultation of arrival faded. This is not the same world and I am not the same person – and the reason I’m here is not the reason for which I would have chosen to return.

‘Shall we go?’ Molly Rachel said.

‘Sure.’

The morning sun glittered on the sea, and the white buildings shone, embedded in the rocky coast, and I took a sudden sharp breath.

Once I might, just might, have believed I would come to Orthe again. But I should never have believed this – that I would come to this backwater settlement on the shores of the Inner Sea, to the rumoured and disputed last stronghold on Orthe of the race called Golden Witchbreed … to the city of Kel Harantish.

A metallic note rang out. Flying rock-splinters stung my ankle.

I exclaimed sharply; simultaneously Molly said, ‘Wait –’

Nothing but silence and sun.

‘That’s close enough,’ she observed. ‘We’ll consider ourselves warned.’

A white chip scarred a boulder just ahead, and the sun picked out a metal dart that lay in the rubble. My heart hammered. I felt foolish, tricked. And at the same time irritated by the young woman’s confidence.

‘Some of the xeno-archeological teams have had this problem,’ she said.

‘I’ve read the same reports that you have.’

She gave me a very straight look.

Heat made movement an effort, slowed thought. The half-mile walk from the shuttle exhausted me. Now I looked up from the broken ground to the blank walls of the city that rose up like cliffs. I tasted dust on my lips. Walls and rock seemed all one colour, as if the sun had bleached them together for uncounted thousands of years; vertical slabs that leaned over us.

A foot scuffed rock.

‘Lynne –’

Movement drew my eye: a humanoid figure that bent to pick up the fallen dart. Swift and economical action – but disorientating: the human eye reads alien musculature as wrong. As the figure turned, I saw the crest-like mane growing long on the narrow head and down the spine. Skylined, the proportions of his limbs subtly different from the human. I saw bleached skin with an almost imperceptible scale-pattern, as six-fingered hands gripped a crossbow-like weapon.

For a moment his glance caught mine, an almost triangular face, wide at the brow, narrow at the chin. His whiteless eyes blurred now with the movement of the nictitating membrane, that third eyelid of the Orthean race. A glance unfathomable and clear: ophidian.

Without the slightest forethought, I said, ‘Kethrial-shamaz shan’tai.’ A greeting and offer of hospitality, in a northern dialect of the language of the Desert Coast. And it was nothing to do with thirty-four days shiptime spent revising Orthean culture, but with that overpowering shock of familiarity.

The Orthean male didn’t speak, but wound and reloaded the bow. A small group of Orthean natives appeared from the deceptive gullies. Molly Rachel walked forward until she could talk without raising her voice, and in a southern Coast dialect said, ‘Give you greeting. You need not fire on us, we’re not armed. Our weapons are in our ship.’

That’s a nice blend of conciliation and threat, I thought. Now why not try the Orthean for ‘take me to your leader’?

Despite the heat, I felt cold. In the northern continent’s settlements, I might know what to expect. But even there, time has passed. Here …

Orthean faces turned first towards the harbour, and then to the shore where the shuttle was visible, regarding it without detectable change of expression. There was a silence that made my mouth dry. They stood each a little distance from the next, and, as far as it is possible to read the signs, were both alert and afraid.

‘There are just the two of us, at present,’ Molly Rachel added.

I saw two Orthean males and three females, with dyed-white manes that lay lank over tunics, and what looked to be a brown metal scale-mail. These carried winchbows. A fair-maned female leaned on a thin spear, her exposed lower torso showing the paired nipples of vestigial second breasts.

If I could read their faces, I would be terrified, I thought.

‘Give you greeting, shan’tai.’ A sleek, plump male stepped forward. Light glinted from his brown skin. His mane was braided elaborately, and chains and belts wound round his tunic-robe, but for all that, there was something indefinably seedy about him. Like the others, he stood a good handspan shorter than Earth-standard.

More comfortable now, I stepped up beside Molly. ‘Shan’tai, this is the representative of the Earth multinational corporate Company PanOceania –’ at least half of that had to be in Sino-Anglic and not Coast dialect ‘– who is called Molly Rachel. Our people have visited your city, a half-year ago.’

The Orthean male seemed confused. I put it down to my imperfect memory of tenses.

‘Our people came to study the ruins of the ancient Witchbreed civilization,’ Molly Rachel said. ‘Shan’tai, I believe we have business with the authorities in your settlement. We have come entirely without threat, and dependent on your goodwill. When will it be possible to discuss these matters?’

I mentally crossed “assistant interpreter” off my list of duties. While the plump Harantish male spoke to his companions, I said: ‘You’re fluent enough, aren’t you? Hypno-tapes?’

‘No. Hard work,’ the young woman said, without taking her eyes off the Ortheans. ‘Hypno-tapes scramble the brains.’

There are times when I wish they’d known that ten years ago; it would have saved a lot of us time, trouble, and subsequent analysis. But I forbore to mention that. What she didn’t say was, Am I doing this right? and what I didn’t say was Jesus Christ I hope so.

The Orthean male turned back to us and said, ‘I believe you should speak with the Voice of the Emperor-in-Exile. These guards will see that you truly have no weapons. Then you may enter the lower city.’

Molly Rachel let out a breath, momentarily relaxing; then she craned her neck to look up at the pale walls. The tension returned. Half of me thought, We’ve got closer than even the xeno-archeology team, they didn’t get into the city itself. And the other half thought, This is Kel Harantish and I don’t want any part of it! But that was the half that could remember the rumours and superstitions of an alien race.

‘Do you want to go back to the ship?’ the Pacifican woman asked.

It seems to me – though no doubt it’s an illusion – that kids her age get through because they don’t know enough to fear. And because they don’t believe in luck.

‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘The sooner this is proved a wild-goose chase, the sooner I can go home.’

‘You’ve seen the artifacts the team brought back. I don’t believe the Company is wasting its time trying to analyse this technology – there must be some profit –’ she broke off the long-standing argument, frustrated, as two of the Ortheans came to body-search for weapons.

Orthean skin is fine-textured, dry, warm; the beat of a different pulse beneath the surface. That brief touch brought back, shockingly abruptly, how it feels to dig fingers into the depths of a rooted mane …

Dislocation of reality paralysed me for a moment. Air pressure and sunlight: wrong. The air rasped drily in my lungs. Daystars were pinpricks in the arch of the sky. But more – this heatstricken moonscape is not the Orthe of my memories, not this barren rock and sterile sea, without even the sound of an insect. I felt twice-exiled from expectation.

‘This is a weapon,’ the plump brown-skinned male said, holding Molly’s belt-communicator in his delicate hands.

‘It’s not a weapon, it enables me to speak with my ship.’

The nictitating membrane slid over his dark eyes, and flicked back. He said, ‘I could imagine circumstances, shan’tai, in which that would prove as deadly as a winchbow. But keep it, if you will.’

I had walked perhaps fifty yards closer to the city before I identified that gesture and tone as amusement.

Here the ground was smoother. I looked up, dazed with heat, to see the outcrops of buildings recede away and back, like chalk headlands. At the base of the nearest sheer wall, wooden platforms were being winched down on ropes.

Molly said, ‘There isn’t any native vegetation or forestry. God, you don’t realize what that means … didn’t you say in your old reports that this place survives entirely on imported goods? What’s funny?’

‘You remind me of me,’ I said. ‘It’s the sort of thing I used to notice. Generally when about to embark on something horrifically dangerous … At the moment I’m just worrying about whether those rope and pulley contraptions are as unsafe as they look.’

The young woman sighed, a little self-consciously long-suffering.

I saw how the nearest buildings stood separate, roofs on a lower level than the main mass. Rope-bridges, just visible, were slung across the narrow crevasse between this cluster and the city proper.

With a scrape of rock, the wooden platform grounded. We stepped on. The ropes creaked, and I caught Molly’s arm to steady myself. The dark Orthean male got on with us. I reached out to touch the sheer city wall, and it was smooth under my palm, not yet fully warmed by the morning sun. Then the platform lifted and swung free.

‘Pardon?’ Molly Rachel said.

‘Don’t mind me – I can throw up quietly.’

As we inched higher, I saw how ancient bedrock cropped out on this coast, worn down to this Harantish peninsula and a crescent scatter of islands that the sea could not erode. Far out on the water were sails, lost in the molten white glare.

‘You come in trade-season,’ the dark male said. ‘Ships commonly come in Wintersun – if not commonly such ships as yours.’

‘Shan’tai …’ Molly left a demanding gap.

‘Pathrey Shanataru,’ he supplied.

‘Shan’tai Pathrey, our archeological team didn’t report any contact with the city authorities here.’

‘The Emperor-in-Exile has no love for your people,’ Pathrey Shanataru said. ‘He did not see them. He will not see you. You will meet his Voice.’

‘Who is Emperor-in-Exile now?’ That alien title comes to me with no hiatus of memory: K’Ai Kezrian-kezriakor, the supposed lineal descendant of the rulers of the Golden Witchbreed.

Pathrey Shanataru said formally, ‘The present heir of the bloodline of Santhendor’lin-sandru is Dannor bel-Kurick.’

‘I think – I’ve met him?’

Pale sea and sky blotted out: for a second I felt dizzy and half blind –

some subterranean room, a chamber lit by candles set on rough iron stands. Candlelight and … the ruins of technology? He is bending over a panel or cube of some material. And then he lifts his head …

That face that is half child and half old male: Dannor bel-Kurick. Wide-set eyes veiled by nictitating membrane, white mane rooting down his spine; and faded skin whose reptilian texture has in it a hint of dusty gold …

‘How could you meet him?’ Molly asked me in Sino-Anglic. ‘The archeological team said the local ruler doesn’t leave this settlement.’

The Emperor-in-Exile leave this paranoid fortress? No. But –

‘I … may have seen a picture, I suppose.’

She nodded, minimal curiosity satisfied.

I was suddenly uncomfortable, and pushed the thought away. That is ten years ago. Still, such a clear mental image of that face, and something almost there –

The wooden platform lurched to a halt, level with the flat roof. I stepped unsteadily on to plaster-roughened stone.

Surrounded again by guards, we were ushered across one roof and up a flight of wooden steps. Square penthouse-structures stood on each roof. As I stepped inside, under the low arch of the nearest, the sudden shadow blinded me. When I could see again, the plump male was already descending a rope-web that led down through a great open trap door. Molly Rachel followed him. I paused.

Ropes are easily cut, trap doors easily barred.

But I hesitated because of a much more mundane fear. I may have grown less agile than I once was; I have grown no greater liking for looking a fool.

Those Ortheans that carried winchbows remained on the roof. I climbed cautiously down, and found myself in a spacious room. Pale light slotted in through narrow windows. With some relief, I saw that a further trap door opened on descending stone steps. By the time our party had gone down two more floors, I realized something else: there were no interconnecting doors between individual buildings.

‘Given the level of technology here,’ Molly Rachel observed, ‘this place must be impregnable.’

Paranoia, I thought. To take Kel Harantish, you would have to take each building, individually, and from the top down. That partly solved a question long on my mind: how a settlement so hated and feared could remain undestroyed.

The male, Pathrey Shanataru, paused at the foot of the next steps. ‘Shan’tai, here you will meet the Voice of the Emperor-in-Exile.’

Molly nodded, walking in front of me as we entered. This room was windowless, a silvery light reflected in by concealed mirrors; the air was hot and still. I heard someone move.

An Orthean woman rose from where she sat cross-legged on a mat by a low stone table. She was tall for a Coast Orthean: some five foot and an inch.

‘Kethrial-shamaz shan’tai,’ she said, her voice oddly accented.

I could only stare.

This world’s rumour says that the Kel Harantish Ortheans claim Golden Witchbreed blood. My memory, prompted by shiptime study, said, But that race is extinct – surely? And Kel Harantish’s claim, propaganda?

Small, thin, electric: her skin was pale as stone-dust, in the room’s dim light holding a faint glimmer of gold. Her white mane seemed so fine as to float on air, a breath of fire. I looked into her narrow-chinned face. Her eyes were yellow – buttercup-yellow, capriped-yellow, unnatural as flowers. She wore a white tunic girdled with thin gold chains, the tunic badly stained at the hem with spilt herb-arniac.

– stone arches that open upon depths, and that narrow face with coin-gold eyes, and the scent of charnel-halls –

With an effort, I shut the mental image out. Hypno-tape data thrown up by the chance firing of synapses, that’s all; fragmented and confused by hypno-erasure and the passing often years. Maybe after a while I’ll get used to it.

Molly Rachel said, ‘Thank you for consenting to see us, shan’tai.’

Orthean ages are difficult to judge: this woman seemed younger even than Molly, but that might be deceptive.

‘Pathrey told me that an offworlder ship had come. And that you would speak of what your people found in the Elansiir mountains.’ She seated herself again, and gestured for us to do the same. There was a stone table beside her that stood only a few inches above the floor, and on it were ceramic bowls containing a hot liquid. Droplets of steam coiled in the air, and there was a sharp strong scent: arniac-herb tea.

‘The Company’s archeological team brought several interesting artifacts to light in this area.’ Molly cupped one of the bowls in her pale palms. ‘Unfortunately it was at the end of their projected stay, so they couldn’t complete their work.’

‘Complete?’ queried the young Harantish woman.

‘Establish if the artifacts were from the old technological culture, the Witchbreed.’

I saw Pathrey Shanataru, who was kneeling down beside the Voice of the Emperor-in-Exile, hesitate momentarily at that word.

The woman linked claw-nailed hands. ‘Pardon, shan’tai, but that is the name that superstitious barbarians give us. We are the Golden.’

Molly Rachel passed a ceramic bowl over to me. I was vaguely aware of her covert scan, and her nod that it was not poisoned. Crimson liquid steamed: the bitter arniac-herb tea of the Desert Coast. Taste and odour were utterly familiar. That hot drink scalded my mouth, brought back names and faces – memories of what this Harantish woman would designate the ‘superstitious barbarian’ northern continent, and that long year when Kel Harantish and the Emperor-in-Exile had seemed as much Earth’s enemy as enemy of the Hundred Thousand.

‘Earth may at some time in the future be interested in Golden science –’

The Orthean woman interrupted Molly: ‘More “archeology”?’

‘A more complete investigation.’

The nictitating membrane veiled those chrome-yellow eyes. ‘Well now, shan’tai, do you know what that might mean?’

‘I’m aware that certain cultures on this world are technophobic. Earth has no intention of importing technological knowledge. This is still classified as a Restricted world.’

‘What I meant, shan’tai Rachel, is that there have always been those who, since the Golden Empire fell, desired to build it anew. If they could not find the key to the lost science of those “artifacts”, how will you do so?’

‘Artifact’ is an interesting word. It doesn’t have the implications of dysfunction that ‘relic’ does. I thought it time to interrupt, and disabuse the Voice of the Emperor-in-Exile of her ideas of ignorant offworlders.

‘I understand that not all knowledge of Witchbreed technology is lost. Doesn’t Kel Harantish maintain the canal system on the Desert Coast, keep it functioning?’

Molly Rachel said, ‘The Company is also very interested in the canals. We understand their construction dates from the time of the Golden Empire.’

The Harantish woman shrugged. The humanoid frame admits of many variations. I watched the movements of alien musculature: the sharp-hulled ribs, thin limbs, the long-fingered hands and high-arched feet. Those signals that stance and gesture send are oddly muffled, uninterpretable. She looked at me: ‘You are not new to this world, shan’tai. What is your hiyek – your name?’

‘Lynne de Lisle Christie,’ I said. ‘New to the Coast, shan’tai.’

Molly leaned forward. As she spoke, she unconsciously hunched down, and I realized that with her height – she topped the two Ortheans by a good ten inches – she must feel giant-like.

‘Naturally there would be the necessity for discussing trade privileges.’ She slightly stressed the final word.

The brown-skinned male, Pathrey, leaned over and muttered something inaudible to all but the Harantish woman; she, for the first time, smiled, and briefly touched his arm.

‘Why, yes,’ she said; and then to Molly: ‘It seems you offworlders have new ways of negotiating. You’ve quarantined us for ten years, and now this?’

Molly smiled. ‘What I say is of course subject to an Earth government’s approval.’

No kidding? They will be pleased to hear that …

And then I thought, Sarcasm would become you better, Lynne, if you weren’t Company-employed yourself.

Pathrey Shanataru said, ‘The northerners have been content with quarantine. What will you say to them, shan’tai Rachel?’

‘That depends on how it concerns them.’ Molly, without a word, implied the addition If it ever does …

Old habits die hard. With the Pacifican woman playing conciliator, it left me the perfect opportunity to ask awkward questions.

‘If the Emperor-in-Exile has no intention of negotiating with us, is there any point to this?’

Pathrey Shanataru leaned forward as if to speak, and a mere gesture of the nameless woman’s hand silenced him. Beginning to interpret Orthean expressions, I thought there was real fear on his face. For an instant it became real to me, this position of power: the Voice of the Emperor-in-Exile.

The young Orthean female rose and for a time walked back and forth, without looking at anyone.

Dropping back into Sino-Anglic I said to Molly, ‘Are you going to push this much further now?’

‘I’ll push as hard as I have to.’

Pathrey Shanataru was kneeling beside the stone table, his gaze fixed on the Orthean woman. I wished desperately that I were reaccustomed to Orthean expressions.

I said to Molly, ‘I don’t think you realize what a destabilizing factor Earth is.’

The Harantish woman stopped, and then turned with a dancer’s grace and balance. She spoke rapidly: ‘I’ll see others close to the Emperor, later today. Pathrey, convey these s’aranthi to a place where they may rest until then –’

Her bare feet scuffed the stone steps, and she was gone.

‘What –?’ Molly stood.

Pathrey Shanataru looked apologetic, almost embarrassed. He rose to his feet. ‘Pardon, shan’tai. I will show you to more comfortable quarters.’

Molly looked at me, and I shrugged.

The dim silver twilight and heat were oppressive; to climb the steps – even if only towards the scorching sun of the Coast in winter – felt like liberation.

As we stepped out on to the flat roof again, Molly said, in Sino-Anglic, ‘Do you think they know we’ve got Witch-breed artifacts that may well turn out to be functional?’

Before I could answer, Pathrey Shanataru spoke. In badly-accented Sino-Anglic he said, ‘Do you know who put them there for you to find?’

Stunned, I made to frame a question, but the Orthean male stepped aside and gestured for us to precede him down rope-webbing, into the entrance of the next building. Molly swung down, I climbed more slowly, and then I turned to Pathrey Shanataru.

We were alone.

The trap door fell shut above us. I heard the click of lockbars sliding into place.

At midday everything stopped except the fighting.

Running footsteps sounded on the roof. The trap door vibrated, but stayed closed. I felt each sound, deep inside; a physical ache. There was a distant clash of metal.

‘What the hell was that?’

Molly Rachel, from where she clung to the rope-webbing, leaned across to the narrow window. Her arms shook with the strain.

‘No,’ she said at last, dropping lightly down. ‘I can’t see anything but the sky.’

The light of Carrick’s Star slotted down from the high windows like bars of white-hot iron. Outside, it would be unbearable for human eyes without protective gear. Inside, the heat robbed any desire for movement.

I sat with the small comlink in my lap, the case open, trying to manipulate the receiver-amplifier. Static crackled in the hot twilight. My fingers were clumsy. The ache of tension settled in my gut.

Molly squatted down on her haunches. ‘I don’t think it’s the comlink. It’s the atmospheric interference. Communications are hell on this world.’

‘After ten years, I’d’ve thought you’d’ve solved that one.’

‘Talk to the Company about my shoestring budget, why don’t you.’

The heat made me dizzy, made all movement exhaustion. I wiped sweat from my face. From outside came a cry that might have been pain or triumph or something quite other.

The comlink’s static resolved into a voice.

‘Here.’

Molly took it. Her tone was sharp. ‘David? What’s the situation there?’

‘… shuttle’s secure. A few … groups from the settlement. You want me to take any action on that?’

‘Negative. Not yet. Stay secure.’

David’s voice suddenly came through loud, Sino-Anglic