“All right. Crew, places please.” Ozzie sat down on one side, Tochee claimed the middle, and Orion sat on the other side. They all got their oars out, and started rowing. Progress was fairly pitiful at first, then Ozzie started calling out a rhythm, and they learned how to coordinate their strokes. When they were a hundred ten yards from the shore, Ozzie could feel the breeze against his face. “Enough,” he said. “Let’s see if the sail works.”
He and Orion pulled on the ropes, raising the rough square of woven fronds on the four-and-a-half yard mast, which had once been the tallest tree on the island. There was a lot of creaking as the ropes took the strain. The swell had grown considerably as they left the lee of the island.
Orion was giving the beach a wistful look. “Are we moving?”
Tochee’s manipulator flesh extended a tentacle, and it poked the tip into the water. “We move.”
“Yay!” Orion clapped his hands happily. He immediately looked ahead, where there were several of the small dark smudges that were other islands in the archipelago. “Which one are we heading for?”
“Good question,” Ozzie said. “Tochee, can you try steering us to the second from the left? I thought that was the closest.”
“I will endeavor that,” Tochee said. It lowered the rudder into the water at the back of the raft, a broad wooden paddle on a crude pivot that they’d rigged up.
Now they were farther from the shore, Ozzie was aware of a definite wind pushing them along. He sat on the side, with his feet dangling in the water, and watched the island slowly shrink away behind them.
…
Civilization was a blessing you never truly appreciated until it threatened to collapse around you. That long, long day on Elan had shown Mellanie how precariously close a collapse could be. Fear brought out a very strong survival trait in people, one that overwhelmed all the usual rules of behavior. She was never going to forget those last hours standing beside the small wormhole in the Turquino Valley. The way the crowd had started to panic, everyone pushing forward, their desperation and ferocity building. And that was with a strong character like Simon Rand holding things together.
Yet now, barely a week later, it all seemed so remote. She was standing at the window wall in Alessandra’s penthouse on the skyscraper’s sixty-fifth floor, looking out over Salamanca. Cities at night always looked more vibrant, somehow, and New Iberia’s capital was no exception. This was a rich world, among the first of phase one space to be settled, with a population now closing on two billion. Salamanca alone was home to twelve million souls. Its lights sparkled all the way out to the horizon; here in the center, where the height of the metal and crystal skyscrapers was a real estate value prospectus, the streets were arranged in a standard grid, beyond that the patterns became more random until they merged into the general light pollution that hazed the outlying districts. Cutting through the precise lambent lines was the inevitable radial web of silver rails, threading straight through the grid blocks and bridging roads, always given preference so that the trains could shunt their valuable goods between districts and the CST planetary station. It might have been her imagination, but she didn’t think there were as many trains as usual rolling along the rails tonight. But then just about every activity in the Commonwealth had come to a halt during the invasion; things were only just starting to return to an approximation of the old normality.
When she raised her gaze, she could just make out the ephemeral shimmer of the force field above and around the city. It seemed strange to see it there, fuzzing the stars above. Even though most major cities had them, they’d never been switched on except to ward off the most vigorous hurricanes and tornadoes. Now they were all on permanently.
“It’s still the same, isn’t it,” Alessandra said, coming up to stand behind Mellanie. “Somehow I was expecting changes when I got back. But it’s wonderfully reassuring to see. I’ve stood here for hours myself just watching.”
It had taken several days before CST resumed its standard passenger service between planets. Millions of refugees from the invaded worlds were given priority as they sought accommodation throughout the rest of the Commonwealth. Wessex still hadn’t returned to full operational capacity. CST was busy repairing the wormhole generators that had been damaged during Nigel Sheldon’s battle of exotic energy above the planet. Services to that whole section of phase two space remained patchy, though its worlds were still connected to the unisphere. But the express train between Augusta and New Iberia had resumed, allowing Alessandra to return home three days after the Desperado’s final flight.
This was the first time Mellanie had come back to Alessandra’s penthouse. She and the last of the Randtown refugees had finally left Ozzie’s bizarre asteroid two days ago, walking through the wormhole that had been realigned on Augusta. The intervening time had been spent with Dudley, reassuring him and taking a break to compose herself. With all the SI’s inserts now quiscent, her newfound confidence had receded somewhat. She wasn’t sure what kind of shape her investigation into Myo and the Starflyer would take. Dudley probably had more information lurking amid his confused memories. It would take a while to be sure she’d gotten everything she needed from him. For now, he was safely stashed away in a cheap coastal holiday resort chalet on Oaktier, a place where she’d spent many early childhood vacations. Nobody would be able to trace him there, at least not straightaway.
Alessandra’s hands slid over Mellanie’s shoulders. “We’ve been hearing some strange stories from the Randtown refugees. Some of them say they were in an alien starship.”
“They’re lying. It was an old dormitory station for a deep-space industrial facility that CST is decommissioning. The wormhole was still working, luckily.”
“Interesting.” Alessandra’s grip tightened, giving a small massage. “That’s the only part of the whole invasion that senior management prevented us from carrying. None of the other media companies carried it, either. Somebody’s been putting pressure on. And that’s a hell of a lot of pressure.”
Mellanie turned to face her, looking intently at the statuesque woman’s perfect classic features. “Not guilty.”
“Humm.” Alessandra stroked a finger lightly along Mellanie’s cheek. “You’ve changed.”
“I was there on the ground when we got invaded by aliens. It kind of makes you focus, you know.”
“I’m sure it does, darling.” She leaned forward for a kiss. Mellanie put a hand out. “Not yet.”
“Oh, really?” One of Alessandra’s elegantly plucked and shaped eyebrows rose slightly. “Well, you’d better get yourself in the mood pretty quickly. I’ve got Robin Dalsol coming over later for dinner, he’s Goldreich’s senior aide. I need to know how much money the executive is planning on pumping into the navy for our retaliatory strike. The two of you should be good together; he’s only ten years out of rejuve.”
“Fuck him yourself,” Mellanie growled.
“Mellanie, darling, I don’t do that anymore. I don’t need to, I have you to do it for me; you and fifty others.”
“Fine, call one of them.”
“We’ve had this discussion before. It’s starting to get boring.”
“I don’t care about the navy budget. It’s hardly going to be a secret, they’ll tell us as soon as it goes to the Senate.”
“God help us! Darling, it’s not that we will know, it’s when we know. I’m the best because I can break news first.”
“But what about my story?” Mellanie almost shouted. “That’s the only one that counts. For God’s sake, we’ve just been invaded, and we can track down the cause. There is nothing bigger than that. I came here to find out who my research team is, when we can start, not to suck some asswiper’s dick for you.”