‘Mm-hmm. You’re sure?’
‘Yes, we’re sure.’
He looked out over the waves after that, and suddenly felt that they were no longer bringing things to him, no longer messengers from the distant storms offering their bounty, but instead had become a pathway; a route, another distant sort of opportunity, beckoning.
That simple? he thought to himself. A word – a single name – from Sma and I’m all ready to go, take off, and take up their arms again? Because of her?
He let a few more waves roll up and down. The seabirds wailed. Then he sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. He pushed one hand up through his tangled, matted hair. ‘Tell me about it.’
* * *
Four
‘The fact remains,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw insisted, ‘that the last time we went through this rigmarole, Zakalwe fucked up. They froze his ass in that Winter Palace.’
‘All right,’ Sma said. ‘But it wasn’t like him. Okay, so one time he gets it wrong… we don’t know why. So maybe now he’s had time to get over it, he’ll actually want a chance to show he can still do the business. Maybe he can’t wait for us to find him.’
‘Good grief,’ sighed the drone. ‘Wishful thinking from Sma the Cynical. Maybe you’re starting to lose your touch too.’
‘Oh shut up.’
She watched the planet swing towards them on the module screen.
Twenty-nine days had passed on the Xenophobe.
As an ice breaker, the fancy-dress party had been a crushing success. Sma had woken up in a cushion-filled alcove of the rec area, birth-naked and in a tangle of assorted equally nude limbs and torsos. She had extricated one arm carefully from under the voluptuous sleeping form of Jetart Hrine, stood shakily, and gazed round the softly breathing bodies, appraising the men in particular, and then – treading very carefully, nearly over-balancing several times on the plump cushions, her muscles all complaining and trembly – tip-toed her way between the slumbering crew to the welcome solidity of the red-wood floor. The rest of the area had already been tidied. The ship must have sorted out everybody’s clothes, for they lay in neat piles on a couple of large tables, just outside the alcove.
Sma massaged her slightly tingling genitals, grimacing. Bending over, they looked quite pink and raw; things looked slippery, and she decided she needed a bath.
The drone met her at the entrance to the corridor. Its red glowing field looked at least partially like a comment. ‘Good night’s sleep?’ it inquired. ‘Don’t start that again.’
The drone floated at her shoulder as she headed for the elevator.
‘You’ve made friends with the crew, then.’
She nodded. ‘Very good friends with all of them, by the feel of it. Where’s the ship’s pool?’
‘Floor above the hangar,’ the machine said, following her into the elevator.
‘Record anything exciting last night?’ Sma asked, leaning back against the elevator wall as they dropped.
‘Sma,’ exclaimed the drone. ‘I would not be so ungallant!’
‘Hmm.’ She raised one eyebrow. The elevator stopped, door opening. ‘What memories, though,’ the drone said, breathily. ‘Your appetite and stamina are a credit to your species. I think.’
Sma dived into the smaller whirlpool, and, on surfacing, spat a jet of water at the machine, which dodged and backed into the elevator. ‘I’ll just leave you to it, then. Judging from last night, even an innocent offensive-model drone isn’t safe from you once you get the bit between your teeth. So to speak.’
Sma splashed at it. ‘Get out of here, you prurient pisspot.’
‘And sweet-talking won’t work ei…’ the drone said, as the elevator door closed.
She would not have been surprised if the atmosphere in the ship had been a little embarrassed for a day or two thereafter, but the crew seemed quite cool about it all, and she decided that, basically, they were good sports. Happily, the fad for having colds passed quickly. She settled down to studying Voerenhutz, trying to guess where in the interlinked civilisations they were heading for Zakalwe might be… and enjoying herself, though – in the case of the latter activity – not on anything like the same scale or with quite the same frenetic abandon as she obviously had on her first night aboard.
Ten days out, the Just Testing sent news that Gainly had been delivered of twins; mother and pups doing well. Sma prepared a signal that her stand-in was to give the hralz a big kiss, from her, then hesitated, realising that the machine that was impersonating her would doubtless already have done so. She felt bad, and in the end just sent a formal acknowledgement.
She kept up on recent developments in Voerenhutz; the latest Contact forecasts were getting gloomier all the time. The brush-fire conflicts on a dozen planets each threatened to ignite a full-scale war, and – while getting a direct answer was proving difficult – she formed the impression that even if they found and convinced Zakalwe almost as soon as they landed, and hauled his ass out on the Xenophobe with the ship pushing its design limits, the chances of getting him to Voerenhutz in time to make any difference were at best fifty-fifty.
‘Holy shit,’ the drone said one day, as she sat in her cabin, reviewing cautiously optimistic reports on the peace conference back home (for so she had started to think of it, she admitted to herself).
‘What?’ She turned to the machine.
It looked at her. ‘They just changed the course schedule for the What Are The Civilian Applications?’
Sma waited.
‘That’s a Continent class GSV,’ the drone said. ‘Sub-class Prompt, one of the limiteds.’
‘You said it was a General; now it’s a Limited; make up your mind.’
‘No, I mean it’s a limited edition; the go-faster model; even nippier than this beast, once it gets going,’ the drone said. It floated closer to her, fields set a weird mixture of olive and purple, which she seemed to remember indicated Awe. She’d certainly never seen that expression on Skaffen-Amtiskaw before. ‘It’s heading for Crastalier,’ it told her.
‘For us? For Zakalwe?’ she frowned.
‘Nobody’ll say, but it looks like it to me. A whole General Systems Vehicle, just for us. Wow!’
‘Wow,’ Sma mimicked sourly, and pressed the screen for the view forward of the Xenophobe, still charging through the star systems for Crastalier. In their false representation on the screen, the stars ahead blazed blue-white, and – at the right magnification – the overall structure of the Open Cluster was easily visible.
She shook her head, went back to the peace conference reports. ‘Zakalwe, you asshole,’ she muttered to herself, ‘you’d better fucking show up soon.’
Five days later, and still five days away, the General Contact Unit Very Little Gravitas Indeed signalled from the depths of the Open Cluster Crastalier that it thought it had picked up Zakalwe’s trail.
The blue-white globe filled the screen; the module dipped its nose, plunging into the atmosphere.
‘I just get the feeling this is going to be a complete debacle,’ the drone said.
‘Yes,’ Sma said, ‘but you’re not in charge.’
‘I’m serious,’ the machine told her. ‘Zakalwe’s lost it. He doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be talked round, and even if by some miracle he can be, he can’t do the same thing with Beychae. The man’s washed up.’
Sma had a sudden, strange flash of memory then, back to the horizon-wide beach, and the man who’d sat at her side for a while, watching the wide ocean roll its waves up and down the glistening slope of sand.
She shook herself out of it. ‘He’s still together enough to junk a knife missile,’ she told the machine, watching the hazy, cloud-shadowed ocean scroll beneath the dropping module. They were approaching the cloud tops.
‘That was for him. For us, it’ll be another Winter Palace job; I can feel it.’
She shook her head, apparently hypnotised by the view of cloud and curving ocean. ‘I don’t know what happened there. He got into that siege and just wouldn’t break out. We warned him; we told him, in the end, but he just wouldn’t… couldn’t do it. I don’t know what happened to him, I really don’t; he just wasn’t himself.’
‘Well, he lost his head on Fohls. Maybe he lost more than that. Perhaps he lost it all on Fohls. Maybe we didn’t quite save him in time.’
‘We got to him in time,’ Sma said, remembering Fohls as well now, as they plunged into a bulging cloud-top and the screen went grey. She didn’t bother to adjust the wavelength, apparently content to look at the glowing, featureless interior of the cumulus.
‘It was still traumatic,’ the drone said.
‘I’m sure, but…’ she shrugged. The view of ocean and clouds burst clear onto the screen again, and the module angled steeper, powering down towards the waves. The sea flashed up towards them; Sma turned the screen off. She looked bashfully at Skaffen-Amtiskaw. ‘I never like watching that,’ she confessed. The drone said nothing. Inside the module, all was peace and quiet. After a moment, she asked, ‘We in yet?’