For Love and Glory

XL

They slept luxuriously late and enjoyed an extravagant breakfast before they walked over to sickbay. Morning had brought a mild, silvery rain, filled with odors of growth and cheery animal cries. It veiled the ugliness of prospecting operations. The buildings immediately around were for housing, recreation, and the like, almost deserted while the day’s work was under way.

As Lissa and Orichalc rounded one of these, they saw a man coming in the other direction. She jarred to a halt. Sensing tension, the Susaian dropped to a half crouch, taut beneath the heal-patches scattered over his wounds.

The man neared them and stopped too. Raindrops glistened in dark curls. The sharp features drew into a smile. “Good day, milady,” he greeted. “I was hoping we’d meet again.”

“Good day, Romon Kaspersson Seafell,” she replied formally.

He sketched a salute. “And to you, honorable Orichalc,” he said.

“Likewise,” the Susaian answered through the trans, “although we are not acquainted, sir.”

“I’ve heard of you, however, seen your image, admired your deeds. Who on Asborg and now Freydis hasn’t?”

Lissa wondered whether Romon really felt the cordiality he expressed. Probably not much. “I didn’t know you were here,” she said.

“I’m fairly often on the planet, milady,” he told her. “House Seafell has a substantial investment in Venusberg Enterprises, and naturally wants to keep up with what’s going on, beyond what scheduled reports we get.”

She nodded. “And you’re the observer.”

“One of them. Perhaps the main one. I do have a suitable technical background as well as experience on other planets. Besides, Captain Hebo and I have been associated from the beginning. I first introduced him to the financiers who’ve backed his venture. In fact, I’d say I had more than a little to do with persuading them to it.”

“That was good of you.”

Romon made a new smile. “ ‘—a good deed in a naughty world.’ ” It must be one of his quotations, for she barely got the meaning of the antique words. “Actually, I confess to self-interest, as well as the interest of my House. We expect to gain from this. And, yes, the undertaking’s fascinating, often exciting.”

“I daresay the news about our rescue flashed from here, around the globe to headquarters.”

“Of course. I’m glad I was on hand.” Momentarily, his voice shook. “And, and you’ll never know how glad that you came through safe. The greatest poets couldn’t have told—” The bland mask came back down. “I flew over as soon as possible.”

“Thank you… for your kind thought.”

“You have come from seeing our friend?” inquired Orichalc.

“Correct,” Romon said. “He’s doing excellently.” He stood for an instant in the soft rain before he added, “I wanted to see— both—all three of you, and offer my best wishes.” The tone went dry. “Besides, I hadn’t had time to visit Forholt before, it being so new. I’ll take the opportunity to look around; the Seafell sponsors ought to be interested in a first-hand account.” Again the mask cracked. “If only we could talk more.” Hastily: “But there’s a great deal for me to do back at headquarters. I’ll stop by in a few hours and call on Captain Hebo again, briefly, just to reassure myself, then I must return. I hope we can meet with more leisure sometime before too long, milady and… sir. May your stay here be pleasant and your trip home happy.”

“Likewise, sir,” they responded. He strode onward…

Lissa kept herself from staring after him. “Is he really that rushed?” she wondered. “This isn’t quite like him, unless he’s changed in the last several years.”

“I sensed conflicting emotions,” Orichalc said. “They are warm toward you, I think, although with an ambivalence. I believe he would have liked to linger, but feels stressed. Or is ‘eager’ more appropriate? Perhaps he is indeed anxious to get on with his business in the opposite hemisphere.”

“Not necessarily skulduggery,” Lissa conceded.

“You are clearly not cordial toward him.”

“Nor hostile, really. He’s always been polite enough, even made amiable overtures I pretended not to notice. Because I’ve simply never been able to like him. Due mainly to conflicting views of the universe, I suppose. I wouldn’t have expected he’d be this brusque.” Lissa shrugged and grinned. “So I should be relieved he didn’t suggest we share lunch! C’mon, let’s go.”

They found the infirmary nearly vacant. The injured Susaians had been returned to New Halla after getting preliminary care, and Uldor Enarsson was being given preliminary physical therapy prior to making the same trip. The medics would soon decide whether he could finish his recovery there or had better be taken from the spaceport on the island to Asborg for it. The prognosis was favorable in either case.

An attendant conducted Lissa and Orichalc to Hebo’s room. It was small but adequate. A window stood open to the wet wild air, which sent fragrance eddying from a vase of fireblossoms on the bedside table. Pale from blood loss, he nonetheless sat propped up, alert, screening a book. A biopromoter encircled his thigh, humming mutedly as it hastened cellular renewal.

He stopped the screening when they entered. She identified the text. Rachel Irvingsdaughter’s Saga, from pioneer times on Asborg, why, that was a favorite of hers. His hail rang forth. “Milady! Comrade! Welcome!”

She offered her hand. The clasp lingered. “How are you?” she asked.

“Fine, considering. I should be on my feet and out of here in two or three days at most. Meanwhile, the place is programmed for halfway decent food.”

She nodded at the vase. “Nice of them to give you the flowers, too.”

“Oh, Romon Kaspersson brought those. From clear across the globe.”

“That hardly sounds like him.”

“Yeah, he’s mentioned knowing you.” Hebo laughed. “Don’t stand there so astounded. He was only the courier. They’re from a lady in my office.”

Lissa discovered she wasn’t quite happy to hear that, even though it explained what might otherwise have been an unsuspected side of Romon’s character. And Torben’s? “She must… think highly of you.”

“Well, we’re pretty good friends. Romon himself didn’t have much else to convey. He’ll look in again later today, then take off.”

“Yes, he told us. We met on the walk.”

“Hey, for God’s sake, why’re we gabbing about that? Sit down, please do. I’ve been waiting and waiting for you.”

And I didn’t bring flowers, Lissa thought. Not that I had a chance to get any. She took a chair beside him. Orichalc coiled on the floor, head raised.

An unwonted awkwardness came upon Hebo. His voice stumbled a bit. “It seems I owe you two my life.”

“As I owe mine to both of you,” Orichalc replied. “Yours would not have been imperilled had you not come after me.”

Lissa made a flinging gesture. “Spung the sentiments! We all three clowned our way through a string of bollixes that should never have happened in the first place. Because we were ignorant, right?”

“I wouldn’t call you that, ever,” Hebo said. “And this makes twice you’ve saved me, milady Windholm. I haven’t forgotten the time on Jonna. I never will.”

Orichalc gazed at him before briefly bowing his head and whistling three low notes of melody. Lissa recognized the sound and the gesture; they had been given her in the past, a sign of sympathy and respect. It struck her like a wave that the Susaian felt directly what she could merely guess at, how much it signified that this man thus opened his heart.

“I’m Lissa, Torben,” she blurted. “After everything we’ve been through together.”

He was silent for a few heartbeats, until, very softly: “Thanks. Thank you.”

Orichalc’s look upon him seemed to intensify, almost to glow.

“Maybe we can see more of each other, oftener?” Hebo proposed. “Peaceful-like, I mean.”

Lissa half wished the Susaian weren’t here. It complicated fibbing. “I’m afraid we’ll both be awfully busy.”

“Not that much. If we don’t let ourselves be.”

“Take time off?” He nodded. She decided on blunt honesty. “I’d like that if the situation were different. I could try to arrange it without disrupting my work. But— I’m sorry, Torben, I truly am, but I doubt I could ever quite get out of my mind that it’s work to oppose what you’re aiming at, and my side is the underdog.”

“That’s not right!” he protested. “You agreed Freydis needs some regular industries.”

“Yes. A minimum, and the goal should be to phase them out as far as possible once the colony learns new, better ways. Which it has to start doing soon, or Venusberg will have taken the planet over.”

“A somewhat exaggerated dread, my dear,” Orichalc said.

Lissa scowled. “You both know what I’m getting at.”

“But do you know what Captain—Torben is talking about?”

She stared.

Hebo turned his own look on the Susaian. “How much do you sense?” he demanded.

“I cannot read your mind, sir.”

“What can you read, then?” Hebo asked roughly.

“Good will. Hesitation. An inner loneliness.”

“Him, lonely?” exclaimed Lissa.

“Perhaps I should say nothing further. I have no wish to give offense.”

Lissa wasn’t used to being abashed. “Well, I—I don’t want to intrude—on your privacy, either—Torben. Maybe I’d better say goodbye.” She started to rise.

He reached a hand toward her. “No. Wait. Please, damn it.”

She sat back and could not escape smiling.

He pondered for half a minute, then slapped his sound leg and laughed aloud. “All right!” he nearly roared. “You win. And I’m glad.”

Lissa’s pulse jumped. “Do you want to tell us something? We want to hear.”

His voice dropped, his face tautened. “If you’ll both first swear secrecy. I mean secrecy. Not a breath or a hint before I give you leave, which I don’t expect will be for several years.” He looked at the Susaian. “Your mates will know you’re keeping something from them, Orichalc, but I’m betting they won’t pry.”

“That perception will of itself motivate them not to,” replied the other. “This is a basic ethic.”

Hebo’s gaze returned to Lissa. “And—I think we’ve learned quite a bit about each other, we three,” he said.

“Enough for trust,” Lissa answered low. “More than enough. Yes, you have my promise, Torben. My oath, by the honor of my House.”

She hoped with sudden passion that she wouldn’t regret giving it. Well, if so, maybe she could talk him out of whatever he intended.

“I have nothing to offer but my bare word,” said Orichalc. His people didn’t need spoken pledges.

“Plenty for me,” Hebo sighed. “I must admit it’s been lonely. Oh, I’ve got friends here, fun, the kind of ties that shared work makes. But always I’m hiding the thing that really matters, from everybody but Dzesi.” And she isn’t human, Lissa thought. “It’s a kind of permanent lie. Now—”

He leaned back, pausing again, before he went on, his tone gone decisive: “You’d have learned anyway, in due course. Everybody would have. Supposing anything comes of my notion. Today I can share it with you.”

“Who knows but what we may be able to help a little?” said Orichalc.

He kens honest intentions, Lissa realized. Warmth flowed through her.

Hebo drew breath and plunged into his explanation in the headlong way she had come to know.

“I’ve thought about the Forerunners quite a lot, off and on, because of what happened on Jonna. When I heard about the black hole collision, and how you were there for it, maybe that’s what made the notion click together. A grazing crash, of a sort probably unique in the history of the galaxy, almighty rare in the whole universe. Did the Forerunners predict it, way back when they or their machines were scouting this neighborhood? Wouldn’t they have wanted observation from close by?”

“Do you believe they could have calculated the event?” asked Orichalc, incredulous. “The latest traces we have of them are some three million years old.”

“Not terribly long ago, when you remember that an orbit around the galactic center takes close to 200 million years at our distance from it. Besides, their oldest things we’ve found seem to go back at least five million years. Which gives ’em maybe two million to collect astronomical data and run the calculations with computing power I imagine makes our best look puny. Yes, I know about chaos theory, but my own amateur figuring convinces me that times and distances weren’t so great that exact prediction was impossible. After all, those were two pretty damn massive bodies. Not easily perturbed.”

“We detected no probes or anything else foreign when we were there,” Lissa said.

Hebo grinned. “You were kind of busy.”

“But neither have later expeditions.”

“Would you expect them to? We’re talking a volume of something like a cubic light-year. Hell, we today can build probes that’re bug size and radiate practically nothing.”

“But things coming the whole way from wherever the Forerunners now are—”

“Oh, they’d’ve established a local base before they left these parts. At a nearby star, seems obvious to me.”

“That could mean any of thousands,” Orichalc objected.

“As a matter of fact, several of the nearer ones have been looked at since I was there,” Lissa added. “Negative, at least as far as Forerunner spoor is concerned.”

“I know,” Hebo retorted. “Think I haven’t been following every scrap of such news that comes in? What those crews wanted to see was whether there’re planets with biospheres to be affected when the radiation gets there. Which means they went to likely stars—and, sure, found three that scientists will want to keep an eye on. But those are small stars, more or less like Sol or Sunniva. It would be hard, maybe out of the question, to forecast their exact trajectories that far in advance.

“A fairly massive one, however, that’s something else. And the observations—starting with those your Dagmar took as a matter of routine—show a type B5 giant only about fifteen light-years off.”

Amazement gaped at him.

“My guess,” he said. “That kind generally has planets, or at least asteroidal junk for von Neumann machines to reproduce off of. Why haven’t I already gone for a look? Well, those are mighty fierce environments. My little Tramp does okay around smaller, cooler suns, but at that, she’d better steer clear even of big planets, subjovian and up. Whoever goes yonder will need top-of-the-line powerplant, radiation screening, and whatnot else. A complete retrofit for me, or better, a whole new ship. Expensive.”

He nodded. “Yes, I’m keeping this to myself because I mean to get there first. If I find what I’m hoping for, all that information—an entire, working Forerunner base—will make my fortune. Not that I’d want to monopolize the place, or could if I did want to. But just the fact that it exists, plus whatever knowledge I can pick up on the first trip—remember, Lissa, how I said once on Jonna, the only, real interstellar currency is information? In spite of being interrupted, Dzesi and I did fairly well on discoverers’ awards and so on. This one would let us retire, to live however we jolly well please till the universe burns out.

“I came to Sunniva from Earth—oh, sure, thinking you’d be on Asborg, but also because I’d gotten wind of an opportunity to make the money I’d need. Which turned out to be true, and is why I’m here, doing what I am, Lissa. Till I’ve made my stake. A few more years, I estimate. Meanwhile, you’ve admitted that Venusberg’s work is useful. Maybe we could’ve gone at it a tad more heedfully, but the investors wouldn’t’ve sat still for that, and the damage to the planet isn’t so terrible or unrepairable, is it? When I’m ready to sell out, I’ll ask you to help me make the terms and arrangements.”

She could only think to mumble, “Seafell won’t like this one bit.”

Hebo grinned. “Seafell will be stuck with a, what d’you call it, a fait accompli. Not that they’ll be cheated. Everything will be within the contract, and they’ll have gotten a fair return.”

“They might not think it is—” But this is the dreariest detail stuff, she thought. He’s talking of adventure and glory. Maybe of everybody’s future.

“Has no one else thought as you have?” Orichalc wondered.

Hebo shrugged. “Evidently not, or we’d’ve heard. Unless whoever it is has more reasons than getting rich. In which case, I suspect we’d do a public service by finding out. The gear I want on my ship includes weapons.”

“I see. I see,” Lissa said in slight shock and rising exhilaration. “I don’t know yet if I quite agree with your plan, but— Oh, Torben!”

She sprang to her feet, leaned over, and kissed him. He responded. Positive feedback set in until they remembered Orichalc. He had kept tactfully still; nonetheless, they broke off, he somewhat rueful, she coloring.

“Oh, yes,” she breathed, “we will be seeing each other again, Torben.”

It happened sooner after she left Forholt than she had expected, and was less joyous.