When the Cheka suite doors locked behind him, Vaughn checked his chronometer. Less than ten minutes. He’d always been a man who knew what he wanted—why waste time tilting at windmills? Bowers looked disappointed when he saw the commander emerge unscathed, having looked forward to a showdown at the O.K. Corral. Vaughn slapped him on the back, assuring him that he was fairly certain the bad guys hadn’t yet left town and that he still might get his chance.
Not wanting to risk an encounter with any of L’Gon’s henchmen who might be lurking in the Core, Vaughn called Nog and requested a beam-out.
How the hell did he know about the cloaking device?The question ran round and round in Vaughn’s mind. Few of Defiant’s crew had left the Avarilsince they’d arrived at the Consortium and knowing them as he did, Vaughn believed all to be the soul of discretion. Once again his mind was pulled back to their first day on the journey here. Someone is watching us. The question is, who?
By his calculations, Shar and Keren had been hiking along the cliffs for almost an hour. Whether they’d made any progress was another issue entirely: every time the trail turned, Shar expected to look down and discover they’d reached the top. Instead, he faced trudging through yet another stretch of rocks and mud, sending pebbles skittering through the grasses with every step. Rainstorms had brought down weathered branches, gravel and debris from the above hillside onto the footpath. One way, Shar would have to scramble up a collapsing slope; the other required secure footing on water-slick lava rock. His muddy uniform testified to how much success he’d had the last time he’d gone off the path. How he wished they were traversing the wonderfully flat stretch of black beach below. He’d happily walk from here to where the beach vanished into the horizon if it meant he left the mud behind.
It hadn’t looked this difficult when he’d agreed to hike in lieu of using transporters. He enjoyed hiking—having grown up in Andor’s western hill country, he spent a good deal of his youth scrambling up and down the slopes around Threlfar Province. But the terrain hadn’t been anywhere near as treacherous as this.
Before they left Luthia, Keren had shown Shar a regional map of the Hebshu Peninsula, one of Vanìmel’s few land-based farming provinces. The two-dimensional version of the peninsula showed the trail as leading from the landing strip, cutting switchbacks across the steep mountain foothills, curving sharply near the summit, and dropping into the valley gap where they would make a swift descent into the peninsula’s chief agricultural region. Simple enough. For a nimble-footed tathrac,perhaps.
“I have the remote transporters activated, Keren,” Shar panted. “We could use them.”
Keren spun around and walked backward, never making a misstep. “Consider this part of your research. Firsthand understanding of the environmental conditions.” Laughing, she turned and skipped up the trail.
“And the farmers and herders have to bring their goods down this track to ship them?” Shar called. He couldn’t fathom any vehicle successfully navigating these ruts.
Keren, deftly picking her way around mud puddles in the path, laughed. “Our transporters don’t have the range yours do and weather conditions aren’t always ideal—atmospheric interference and all that. When the volcanoes go off there’s further interference—”
“And the most valuable resources you’re transporting are dairy products and animal hair, correct?” Food made sense. The value of the hair puzzled him, but Thriss had always accused him of being obtuse about fashion.
“Excuse me, Thirishar ch’Thane, you of many locks, could it be that the quantity of hair on your head impairs your brain function? Why do you think hair is such a status symbol among my people? If it were easy to come by, why would it be so prized?” She tossed her long braids to make her point.
“I apologize. Questions of commerce are lost on me. My friend Nog has a much better grasp of such subtleties than I do.” Drained, Shar paused and leaned back against a boulder. “I’m sorry, but I’m not used to this gravity—or the thin air at this elevation.”
Keren backtracked and joined him. She closed her eyes, threw back her head and soaked in the sunlight. “It’s always lovely after a storm. The skies are so brilliantly green they almost hurt to look at. And the smoke-wisps of clouds…I love it here.”
Ocean breezes blew steadily, tossing his hair, chilling his antennae. He, too, turned his face toward the sun, seeking warmth. “So why not live planetside?”
“Choices for Wanderers are sorely limited. I could have learned aquaculture or raised livestock. I could have tried to work my way up the ranks of the serving staff in a House or tried to find a noble lady to be my patron. None of those things appealed to me. As soon as I came of age, I left the House where I was raised and went to school on Luthia.”
“But you chose your life’s work. You didn’t have someone standing over you telling you what you could and could not do.” Shar cringed inwardly, remembering the series of arguments he’d had with Charivretha about going to the Academy before the shelthreth.Dizhei and her put-out sighs, Thriss pretending that she hadn’t been crying, Anichent spending longer hours in the observatory. Pleasing any one of them was difficult; pleasing all four was impossible.
“I want you to see something, Thirishar.” Throwing her cloak to the side, she untied her blouse cord and pushed the fabric down her arm, revealing her bare shoulder. She turned her back to Shar so he could have a clear view. Above her protruding shoulder blade, her gray-brown skin was rough with three scars each outlined in black dye. “When I was five years out of the water, they strapped me, facedown, on a board and burned those markings into my back with a surgical laser. To make sure the meaning was clear, they injected black dye into the scars. Every Wanderer female is so branded. It’s the Houseborn way of assuring that we are marked, set apart. That way, Houseborn males have no excuse. They can’t take a fertile Wanderer female as a consort and be deceived.” Keren pulled her blouse back over her shoulder and replaced her cloak.
“You see, Shar, my choices about what I can do with my life are limited. Could I ever do what you’re doing? Explore the universe? Travel far from my homeworld and find a different life somewhere else? Unlikely. Even here, I can’t take a consort. Not really, anyway.” She pointed out a moss-covered monolith in the distance, rising out of the surf, residual morning fogs not yet fully burned off. “Close by those rock formations is an entrance to a series of grottos. They’re only accessible by sea—and half the year, they’re submerged when the glacial runoff from the Pyoyong River comes from the mountains, but for centuries, Wanderers have used those caverns as spawning grounds.”
“I thought that—”
“Yes, Wanderer males are sterilized as younglings, but Wanderer females can’t be sterilized without sustaining permanent physiological damage. Too many Houseborn females want us as servants to risk killing us off. We’re compassionatelyforce-fed hormones from our youth, supposedly preventing our reproductive systems from maturing. But the supplements don’t always work, like in my case, and so we submit ourselves to injections once we reach adulthood. But there are those of my sisters who don’t comply with the law and sneak away to mate with Houseborn males.”
“That’s not legal, either,” Shar observed. “The taboos for crossing castes are as old as your recorded history.”
“True. Houseborn males breaking the law are executed. Some pairs, however, are willing to take the risk. They can’t have an official union so they take a chance and share the one thing they can.”
Shar exhaled deeply. “This I understand.”