Inherit the Stars Page 3

  “Prepare the holo display. I think Sar Redryll will accept my proposition. Bring Zhara, and get the other Savants ready. Feed them a little. Here’s her meal.” Dunaar grimaced at Bredine and tossed the half-eaten roll to the floor. What a travesty that the Vim had selected trash like her to decipher their secrets.

  3

  Sar reclined in Frevyx’s pilot chair as the trawler orbited Haldon Prime. The pink, yellow, and turquoise emanations from the Sanctuary Nebula dusted the bridge in similar hues. If only everything could be so enchanting. His gray bodyglove bore mud stains from Fifth Heaven’s spaceport, and he still smelled those nasty mollusk vapors. Though he’d sold most of his salvage to the Inheritors, a few rare items remained for his allies. It gnawed at him to support a regime he despised, even if just for cover.

  Cheseia entered the bridge and rubbed his shoulder. “Cease the pouting. It certainly mars your face.”

  “Thanks.” Sar swiveled the chair around. Short brown fur covered Cheseia’s tall Ascali frame. Dark, silky tresses, held in place with a jiir headband, spilled over her shoulders. The blue glasslike leaves contrasted with her russet gaze.

  “The Thede cell in this system wasn’t completely destroyed. It will assuredly rise again.” Cheseia touched his cheek and smiled.

  “This might be easier if the kinetic pistols we’d stashed on Haldon Six hadn’t been found,” Sar said. “If the insurgency keeps getting beaten down in this system—”

  A beep from the computer console interrupted him. He frowned at the text crossing the screen. “Looks like the Inheritors want to hire me again. You make contact with our agents planetside before we left?”

  Before she could answer, the console’s holo display flickered. A figure in glittering robes appeared. Beautiful Ascali women in skimpy gowns and veils sat at the person’s feet. Sar rubbed his jaw to hide his grimace.

  “May the Vim bless you, Sar Redryll,” Dunaar Thev’s hologram said. “Please forgive my intrusion, Sar Redryll, but since you operate under the Inheritor Charter, my message is warranted. I see you appreciate beauty around you, as well.”

  Cheseia crossed her arms and stiffened. Guess she hated slavery as much as he did.

  “What services do you require, Rector?” Sar kept his face neutral, though he gripped the chair’s armrests.

  “I have received word that one of your rivals, Kivita Vondir, has taken an Aldaakian contract. Those albino meddlers have asked her to find the Juxj Star on Vstrunn. Records show that you have ventured to that planet. I ask you to do so again, my child.”

  Kivita working for the Aldaakians sounded far-fetched; she’d always been an Inheritor salvager. Going after what most regarded as a spacer’s legend made the idea even stranger. Crazy girl was in over her head, as usual.

  Dunaar’s robe made Sar squint. “You want me to find it first.”

  “Of course, my child.”

  “Frevyx isn’t armed.” He maintained eye contact with Dunaar and leaned back in the chair. Let the bastard beg.

  “You will not be required to engage humanity’s shared enemies.”

  Sar said nothing. Cheseia’s hurried breathing became audible.

  Dunaar’s brow creased. “I realize the danger you will be facing, but the Aldaakians must not—”

  “Ten polysuits, three energy dumps, and two gravity fluxers,” Sar said, though he needed none of the items. The Thedes did.

  Dunaar’s hologram smiled. “I will add an extra energy dump, should you bring Vondir back, as well. I fear she must be tried for heresy, aiding the Vim’s enemies like this. So, you accept my offer?”

  Sar nodded once. “You have a contract, Rector Thev. Setting coordinates for Wraith Star now.”

  “May the Vim guide you, Sar Redryll. I shall await your return.” The holo display deactivated as Dunaar smiled wider. What an asshole.

  A cold ball formed in Sar’s stomach. Anybody but Kivita. Her hurt, hazel stare still greeted him every time he entered cryostasis. There was no way she could survive Vstrunn. The fool girl had gotten into something larger than herself.

  “You agreed quickly, Sar. Very quickly.” Cheseia gripped his shoulder. “But you certainly made the right choice.”

  Sar gazed out Frevyx’s viewport. Kivita would resist his intrusion, maybe even fight. He’d spared Kivita the hard, secretive life he now led. In doing so, he’d cheated them both.

  “Kiv probably has the same engines on that old trawler,” Sar said. “We’ll reach Vstrunn right after she does. Navon might get angry with us, going after the Juxj Star, but this is something the Thedes need to investigate. Dunaar’s been sending too many ships that way the past few years.”

  He shut the viewport, which protected the eyes of passengers during light jumps. Sar had met more than one old spacer who’d gone blind from staring out an open viewport while making a jump. On the console screen, the planet’s coordinates glowed in purple-blue lettering. His last visit there had been a nightmare of high-gravity, sharp crystals, and the awful sense of being watched.

  Cheseia whistled a low note and smoothed his hair. “Navon would definitely want us to investigate. What really troubles your heart?”

  “Nothing. Been a while since I’ve been to Vstrunn—that’s all.” Sar selected the coordinates and rose. “Cryopods are waiting.” He stripped from his bodyglove.

  Cheseia frowned. “This woman surely cannot endanger what I have built with you, Sar. All that the Thedes have worked relentlessly for, all we have shared—”

  “I’m fine. My fling with her was two years ago. Out here, that might as well be an eternity.” Sar exited the bridge and walked down Frevyx’s central corridor. A galley, toilet room, storage lockers, and two airlocks waited on either side of him. Navy blue bulkheads enclosed him as memories drifted through his mind.

  The taste of Kivita’s lips when they’d met in her airlock over Gontalo. Her mischievous hazel eyes. Those shocks of straight red-blond hair. Sar had told Kivita to do something else with her life rather than salvage. To do something different from what he’d done for so many years. He’d warned her he served a higher cause.

  On the wall, Caitrynn’s placard drew his attention like a magnet to his heart. The gaze of his dead sister, killed during the Inheritor conquest of Freen, their homeworld. Her husband and children had been massacred along with her. The cold ball in Sar’s gut ground into icy hatred.

  He’d abandoned Kivita to dedicate himself to the Thede cause: dispersing knowledge to the uneducated, and aiding insurgents against Inheritor aggression. That wasn’t enough anymore. Sar wanted a rebellion, a reckoning. Knowledge meant little if humanity remained a slave to those prophets.

  Once, he’d gone after the Juxj Star, too, but for profit. If the Thedes could access the gem, the secrets they could learn . . . and the advantage it might give them against the Inheritors.

  “You both definitely had the same eyes,” Cheseia murmured, looking at Caitrynn’s image.

  He’d not informed Kivita of his mutation. Growing up in Freen’s toxic mines had left green speckles in his brown eyes, plus occasional lesions on his feet and hands. Any children fathered by him would share these abnormalities, maybe worse. Sar had told Kivita space radiation had sterilized him. The bottle of green spermicide pills in the medicine cabinet revealed his lie.

  “Sar?” Cheseia fingered one of his black curls. He turned away and continued through the ship.

  En route to the cryopods, Sar passed through his clean-swept quarters. A linen hammock hung over a heating vent. Pots bolted to the floor contained white and maroon hibiscus flowers. Sugar reeds from Bellerion rested in a square vat, and a jiir sapling grew from a spherical wall dish. More and more he took pieces from each world with him, to beautify the cold one he lived in.

  He’d kept no reminders of her.

  Sar entered the cryopod chamber and eased himself into one o
f three pods. Cheseia hesitated before his pod.

  “You have mostly forgotten her?” Unblinking, she stripped naked.

  Sar opened his mouth, but the words refused to come out. Cheseia had been his lover since her assignment to him as a field agent. A bond born of space travel, through a lifestyle of perpetual caution. Not love.

  “You have especially forgotten her?” Cheseia whispered, removing her headband. Her raw physical beauty should turn him on. Instead it chilled him further, like he already lay in cryo.

  “What?” His voice sounded harsher than he’d meant, and he held up a hand as she frowned. “Sorry. This isn’t easy for me.”

  Cheseia leaned into his pod and kissed his lips. “Eventually it will be. You will definitely forget about her after this mission. Yes, thankfully so.” She stepped back, and the cryopod hatch closed.

  Sar cursed himself as the familiar cryo chill flooded his extremities. Though Sar didn’t want to hurt Cheseia, he also didn’t want old feelings for Kivita swamping his emotions for the coming mission.

  He needed that gem. Not her.

  • • •

  Dunaar’s soldiers waited while Kivita’s autoloader lifted the bonus food crates into her ship. Its six steel arms slid on a rail along the cargo hold’s ceiling. None of the soldiers spoke. Not that she wanted them to. One stared at her breasts too much, and another checked the magazine in his rifle too often.

  Turning away, Kivita watched Haldon Prime’s sunset. Soon the sky would be filled with stars and far-off nebulae. As a child she’d tried pointing out the systems she planned to visit. No matter what happened to her, an undying wonder of the stars would always keep her young inside.

  The autoloader creaked, its task complete. Without a word, the soldiers left.

  “Yeah, same to you.” Kivita shut the doors and locked down Terredyn Narbas. She removed her clothing and shoved it all into a storage locker.

  Damn it. Vstrunn would test her. Maybe even kill her. But she could never see enough new planets, even the cratered, desolate ones. Worse, each new discovery left her hungry for more. And she’d been starving for a long time.

  After stripping to her two-piece underwear, she pulled a jump rope and dumbbells from a locker. If she didn’t exercise regularly, Kivita’s muscles would atrophy due to gravity fluctuations. Worse, she’d menstruated only once while on Gontalo, and feared she might be succumbing to a cryomalady.

  Lifting the dumbbells, Kivita pumped her biceps, triceps, and deltoids with perfect form. Muscles clenched and relaxed, each repetition searing her body. After squatting until her quadriceps and calves burned, Kivita snatched the jump rope. Soon her forearms quivered as she twirled the rope and jumped from the balls of her feet.

  Covered in sweat, she headed for the shower pod. With the new mist ionizer from Marsque, the device scrubbed her pores deeper, wasting less water.

  Kivita put on fresh underwear and entered the bridge as night stole over Haldon Prime. Thousands of pinpoints still beckoned to her. Red and yellow effulgence radiated from the Vim Wall, a massive nebula bordering the Cetturo Arm. The blue sliver of Haldon Three and the brilliant orange crescent of Haldon Two lit up the darkness in plum shades.

  Gripping the manuals, she initialized Terredyn Narbas’s engines. The nav computer offered guidance aids, but Kivita ignored them and lifted the craft from the landing pad. She preferred to control the ship as much as possible, holding fate in her own hands.

  As the ship ascended through the atmosphere, the bridge’s flashing running lights reminded her of the dreams. The brief moment she’d touched a datacore from Xeh’s Crown had filled her mind with star coordinates. Glimpses of those odd creatures in stark white exoskeletons, or visions of spectacular nebula not existing inside the Cetturo Arm.

  Once in orbit, Kivita keyed in the coordinates for the Wraith Star system. Twelve light years. She’d never traveled farther than six in one jump.

  With space’s vacuum chill evaporating heat from the ship, Kivita hurried to her cryopod. Her steps lightened as Terredyn Narbas eased into zero-G for the journey. The ship vibrated slightly for a moment, then gave off a regular hum above its normal operating sounds.

  She now traveled at three times the speed of light.

  Sliding into the cryopod, Kivita wondered how many people she’d seen on Haldon Prime would still be alive when she returned. A salvager’s life amounted to spaceport flings and salvaging runs, then dreamlike epochs in cryostasis.

  Again, Kivita was alone.

  Jaw tight, she mashed the pod’s stasis button. The transparent cover hissed as it sealed. The usual cold sensations numbed her toes, fingers, and back. As the spreading cold eased her into wintry darkness, Kivita knew she’d find something out there to make it all worthwhile.

  4

  Inside the main chamber of Arcuri’s Glory, Dunaar studied a hologram of mutated children on Freen. Bloated foreheads; boil-covered flesh. Until Inheritor control had been established, abysmal mining conditions had contaminated generations of pitiful offspring. Scowling, he changed the image. Gaunt Tahe citizens lay on lice-ridden cots. The population had been near starvation when the Inheritors liberated their world.

  “May the Vim grant me the means to show them mercy.” A coil tightened around Dunaar’s heart. Mercy often had to be brutal, since tenderness invited sloth and sin. Only the righteous could show them the way.

  After Kivita played her role.

  Dunaar turned away from more holos of people the Inheritors had saved from their own ignorance. The Thedes enlightened peasants, consequences be damned. One insurgent enclave on Tahe had constructed a fusion reactor without fully understanding its operation. Dunaar had been forced to cleanse the area. The irradiated victims would have infected the rest of the inhabitants.

  Moisture rolled down his cheek. Dunaar wiped it away, wishing it were tears instead of perspiration. His sweating malady and thyroid disorder had been inflicted in his youth—exposure to a radioactive Thede bomb on Haldon Six. Years spent in Fifth Heaven’s Golden Seminary as a neophyte, then a prophet, had taught Dunaar that only the Vim could deliver harmony.

  But now the Aldaakians threatened that stability, demanding the Inheritors hand over Vim technology so they might find the ancients. Dunaar would never let that happen.

  Everything was pressing against him. Populations were growing, and all habitable planets with arable land had been developed. All the unexplored stars within reach were red-giant systems containing dead worlds, and, like he’d told Kivita, the stars were aging far too quickly. Xeh’s Crown, just seven light years away, had been predicted to supernova in twenty years. The Cetturo Arm held no future for humanity.

  He had to find the Vim soon, before everything his people had striven and died for was gone.

  Dunaar walked into the adjacent chamber. The adjoining hall’s sandstone tiles, quartz lamps, and topaz trim all signified the Vim’s yellow stars of promise. He smiled. So much weight aboard a ship indicated power: the power to generate enough force to lift such a craft from a planet, then send it across the cosmos. Power granted by the Vim, through the technology they’d left behind for the faithful.

  In the next chamber, dim yellow lamps lit a circular area a hundred feet in circumference. A few dozen cryopods lined the walls. Each held the preserved body of a previous Rector. Dunaar paused before one pod in particular. Through its semitransparent hatch, a thin face stared back at him, the eyelids closed.

  “Guide me, Arcuri. Your vision may yet save us all.” Dunaar touched his head and gesticulated. The sainted Arcuri had founded the Inheritors—the humans in the Cetturo Arm who would inherit what the Vim had left for them.

  The ship’s intercom rattled a speaker in the corridor outside. “Rector, they have arrived.”

  Dunaar entered the antechamber, where Zhara waited with his other female servants. Because of his Oath of Propagation
, he enjoyed the company of the finest slave girls; his holy genes would flower on future worlds.

  His children had possessed the same disorders he’d been cursed with. So far, three dozen monstrosities had been euthanized before seeing their first month. The clones, which he kept aboard, frozen from public view, hadn’t fared much better.

  “You were fed well, my child?” Dunaar caressed Zhara’s furred cheek.

  “Yes, Rector.” Her melodious voice stole the air from the room. So beautiful, even if she was little more than a beast. Though Ascali and human unions produced no issue, Dunaar needed Zhara in his collection. The payoff would be immense.

  What he also needed were more Savants. Bredine had never produced a child. That willful tramp hampered the creation of children that might possess her talent. And every time, the half-witted bitch had to be beaten just to spread her legs.

  Minutes later, Dunaar entered the bridge. Captain Ilurred Stiego snapped to attention. The pilot, navigator, and security officers straightened at their stations. The nav computer displayed holographic simulations of Arcuri’s Glory and another craft. The other loomed four times larger than Dunaar’s flagship. Through the viewport, the gray-green hull of a Sarrhdtuu vessel blotted out the stars.

  “Docking is complete, Rector,” Stiego said. A tall, thin man, he wore red Inheritor naval livery. A holo monocle rested in his left eye.

  “Inform our allies we are ready to board, Captain.” Dunaar exited the bridge and descended a short flight of steps onto the supply deck. Few had ever seen a Sarrhdtuu, let alone entered their ships. The Sarrhdtuu claimed no worlds or systems in the Arm; many believed they resided only aboard their starships.

  Eight Proselytes armed with blades and kinetic pistols waited at the secondary airlock. After a few moments, the safety light switched from red to green, and the airlock slid open. The momentary churning in his stomach from gravity fluctuation passed.

  Dunaar stepped into a dimly illuminated chamber. Moist, leathery coils sat in several piles. Knobs and curled protrusions stuck from the bulkheads. The mildewed stench typical of all Sarrhdtuu craft made Dunaar take shallow breaths.