Rumor has it, p.1
Rumor Has It, page 1
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For Anne McCaffrey, who also sailed among the stars
THE STORY THUS FAR
In book one, You Sexy Thing, Niko Larsen and a handful of the soldiers she once commanded have escaped the ranks of the Holy Hive Mind and retired to start a restaurant, the Last Chance, aboard the space station TwiceFar. The restaurant proves unexpectedly successful, to the point where a famous food critic, Lolola Montaigne d’Arcy deBurgh, reserves a table. Niko and the others are excited about the prospect of earning a coveted Nikkelin Orb, but the day of the meal a mysterious package arrives, containing Atlanta, an heir to the Paxian throne, with no knowledge of why she’s been sent in cryo-freeze to Niko. Just as Lolola is seated with visiting wealthy dilettante Arpat Takraven, things start exploding on the station and it’s torn apart by unknown forces.
The group, along with the critic and the package containing Atlanta, flee the station on You Sexy Thing, an intelligent bioship. Thinking itself stolen, the ship is headed to the nearest authorities in order to turn its captors in when Lolola circumvents its programming for her own purpose, taking the ship to a haven for space pirates, IAPH.
There, Niko encounters two figures from her past: her former lover Petalia and the pirate leader Tubal Last, who kidnapped Petalia long ago and has been poisoning them against Niko ever since. When one of the crew, pastry chef Milly, attempts to betray the group to win her own freedom, circumstances conspire to let her actions free them all, destroying the pirate haven, but not before Last has killed one of the crew, Thorn, a young were-lion whose loss devastates his twin brother, Talon.
Petalia chooses not to stay with the group. Angry and embittered at Niko, they leave the ship at Montmurray Station. The rest return the ship to its original owner, Takraven, who allows them to keep it for now, with the stricture that each year they’ll return to cook him a meal and tell him of their adventures.
All seems well until Niko receives a message. Tubal Last is alive. And he’s planning revenge.
* * *
In book two, Devil’s Gun, Niko and her crew find themselves at a malfunctioning Gate, a rare and potentially disastrous failure. They make the most of their time stranded there by creating a pop-up restaurant named the Second Last Chance.
Among the others stranded there are the ship and crew sous chef Gio had formerly been part of, belonging to Gnarl Grusson. Gnarl meets Talon seemingly by chance in the marketplace, and after taking the grieving boy out to a bar and commiserating over his murdered twin, Thorn, Gnarl persuades him to think about illegally cloning his lost sibling and later, secretly sends the technology for doing so to Talon.
An archaeologist named Jezli Farren turns up, claiming to be able to fix the Gate—for a price. She’s accompanied by Roxana Cinis, a paladin. When both disappear immediately after the repair, Niko assumes Jezli is gone, not realizing that the ship has taken them aboard as part of its new hobby, hourisigah, the architecting of dramatic events.
Meanwhile, Talon has given in to the urge to replicate his brother, even though he knows the attempt is both illegal and improbable. He hides the clone sac deep within the ship.
Discovered, Jezli convinces Niko that she knows the location of a weapon that can destroy Tubal Last. She takes them to its location, the perilous confines of the carcass of an enormous space moth. There they are intercepted by Gnarl, bent on revenge on both Jezli and Niko. He insists on accompanying them into the moth. Inside the moth, Atlanta is transformed and takes Roxana’s place while the other perishes.
Thorn’s clone is decanted and Talon realizes he has not recreated his brother, but brought an angry and resentful stranger into existence.
They secure the weapon and leave Gnarl marooned on the moth, only to find that the gun can only be fired by a Florian. They go in search of the sole surviving Florian, Petalia, and persuade her to fire the gun. But the effort fails—the gun can only seek a single target, and there seems to be more than one Last now.
THE CREW
NIKO LARSEN’s highly volatile military career has led to her nickname, “The Ten-Hour Admiral.” Rather than be absorbed into the Holy Hive Mind, she pretended to have a calling toward artistry in food and thus managed to muster out, along with the others. Human, she was raised among the Free Traders but left them when they refused to ransom Petalia from the pirates.
DABRY JEN is Niko’s second-in-command. He’s also the culinary genius behind the Last Chance’s success. An Ettilite, his four arms allow him considerable dexterity in the kitchen. Competent and loyal, Dabry provides his captain with his all, as he has ever since they enlisted at the same time in the ranks of the Holy Hive Mind.
GIO is an augmented chimpanzee from Old Terra and Dabry’s sous chef. He has chosen not to get vocal augmentation, preferring sign language for communication. When in the Holy Hive Mind, he was a skilled quartermaster, and even now is adept at wheedling supplies for the restaurant and making things do double, sometimes triple service.
SKIDOO is a Tlellan, a composite entity resembling a brightly colored terrestrial squid. Once the group’s communications officer, Skidoo remains the one who handles bookings, reservations, and similar matters. Pleasure-loving and sensual, Skidoo is usually a peacemaker in the group.
LASSITE, a reptilian Sessile, is a former priest who follows Niko because of his conviction that she is the one who will follow the Golden Path, a prophecy whose enactment he has been preparing for all his life.
MILLY is relatively new to the group, once a soldier and now a pastry chef who has replaced a former member who vanished. She is a Nneti, a birdlike race renowned for their deadly grace.
TALON’s mother entrusted him and his twin brother THORN into Niko’s care while in the Holy Hive Mind’s service. The twins were sunny, enthusiastic, and devoted to the sport of warball, something that Talon has abandoned in his despondency at his twin’s loss.
REBBE is the clone of the lost Talon, unsure who or what he is, but knowing one thing deeply: He hates the person responsible for bringing him into the world.
ATLANTA thought she was an Imperial heir, but she’s discovered she’s nothing of the sort, just a clone of the actual heir. Now she’s a paladin—but what does it mean?
JEZLI FARREN is a former con woman traveling with the crew for her own unknown purposes.
PETALIA is Niko’s former lover, turned against her by Tubal Last, but reluctantly traveling with Niko while trying to escape Last themself.
YOU SEXY THING is enjoying itself for the first time in a long existence and is learning about the concept of emotions in the process. Opinionated, loquacious, and self-centered, the ship is getting acquainted not just with its new crew but itself as well.
1
Chaos brews in the space between the stars, where one might expect a vacuum and chill wastes. However, plunging through Q-space, plowing through a section of the distance hidden from most voyagers, you see the loops and snarls in reality, the unnecessary curlicues and furbelows and gimcracks that the universe has chosen to add—weirdly and bizarrely, here and here alone—which is why most people find it unsettling.
Q-space is where probabilities slide and skew like missiles skidding on ice, where logic steps out the door to pause for a smoke break, briefly replaced by its much less sane cousin wearing torn fishnets and an inverted beret that might have once been raspberry velvet. Q-space is where strange discoveries are made, unlikely coincidences are forged, and the unimaginable shows up on every side.
You Sexy Thing loved Q-space. It moved with a grace that it really wished someone had noticed but had resigned itself to no one doing so. It eased through it like a watermelon seed squirted between thumb and forefinger, moving unimaginable distances, and at such a speed that the ship had little time to examine its surroundings, catching only glimpses as it hurtled on.
In Q-space, mathematics can do odd things, can balloon and shrink in unexpected ways. Numbers are more whimsical there, or at least more prone to strange, inexplicable convulsions.
But in the here and now, math behaved more predictably. And sometimes disappointingly.
Captain Niko Larsen added up the figures by hand, and then had the ship double-check them. They remained the same. She leaned back in her chair and knuckled at the back of her neck, trying to smooth out the knotted tension there.
On the asset side: the handful of credits left from their last pop-up venture, most of that profit gone to refueling costs and Gate charges.
On the debit side: the fact
The debit side was so much larger than the asset side. She leaned forward to stare at it for a long moment before pushing the datapad away.
There was a touch of hope. If she could get at the money from their insurance claim, the money for the destruction of their first restaurant, the Last Chance, back on TwiceFar Station. But doing that meant going someplace expensive. Very expensive.
So expensive that if they went there, they might end up stranded. With only that handful of credits to satisfy a host of necessities.
But that chance was their only one, as far as she could see. So the only other question was, in telling the rest of the crew about her plans, how much she would reveal of the direness of their resources. It would encourage a small measure of conservation of those resources, but at the cost of a drop in morale and rise in anxiety. No, that wasn’t worth it.
* * *
“Coralind,” Dabry breathed in a reverential tone that delighted Niko’s heart in a way it hadn’t been delighted for a while. In front of him was a bowl of spiced bits of protein, smelling of cumin and iron, beside another of soupy yellow sauce. He was filling rounds of dough with both, pinching them closed with expert ease before arranging them on a nearby platter.
The others in the kitchen had mixed reactions. Lassite simply nodded as though in confirmation. Atlanta blinked and made a mental note to look up the destination as soon as possible. Talon shrugged while Rebbe, leaning against the wall, continued to watch the room as though it was full of dangers, without paying much attention to what Niko actually said.
Skidoo squealed. “Is being a garden there from Tlella and some of its people.” She undulated in delight. “Is being places to swim, is being places that is being only water.”
Gio, sorting through peppery corms and picking off the odd scaly leaf or two, gave a soft hoot of appreciation, eyes bright. Trade, he thought. Good trade at Coralind, some of the best in the Known Universe. And Festival time! Who wouldn’t want to be on Coralind at Festival time? This was an excellent choice.
Milly’s shoulders stiffened for a moment, then relaxed as she watched the others. They’d be happier, at least, and happier meant more ready to respond to her advances. She’d been trying to win back their trust for a while now, but the ship’s atmosphere hadn’t really been conducive. She put down the pastry knife she’d been polishing and asked, “That’s where the gardens are, eh?”
Gio nodded, signing, “Hundreds of them. Almost as good as planet-grown. Sometimes better, they say. They’ve been growing for centuries now, inside that planetoid. Food you can get there that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Dabry gave off shaping dumplings, putting a lower hand to the counter as if to catch his balance at the thought.
“I’ll have to tell Skidoo to put together a list of the restaurants there,” he said thoughtfully. “So we can go over it, look for gaps.”
“That is certainly one way of looking at it,” Niko said dryly.
He raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong with that approach?”
“You will be in a place with ingredients that you may never find in their prime again,” she explained. “Cook the meal of your heart, cook something that you love.”
She had thought him motionless already, but at her words, he became utterly still, as though holding his breath. Then he let it out and said, his voice tight, “I’ll have to think about that.”
She had not thought to touch old wounds, but she had. And realized, just as quickly, that to say anything drawing attention to her blunder would be to offend even further. She cast about for words, glancing around the kitchen, and was grateful when Milly rescued her. “Will you tell everyone the full details at the meal? Neither Jezli or Petalia is here.”
“I could tell them right now,” the ship offered.
“No, that’s my job,” Niko said.
“Technically, I am the communications systems.”
“Technically, you should wait to be ordered before acting on that order,” she snapped.
“Very well.” The ship was currently thinking about ways to express irritation, and everyone jumped when eyes suddenly manifested in the upper walls and ceiling, rolling in their sockets. They were then absorbed in a process that took considerably longer than their appearance, which everyone watched with horrified fascination, including the imperturbable Lassite.
“I grasp your meaning,” Niko said when the process seemed complete and no further eyes were in evidence, “and would prefer you not express yourself in that way again.”
“In what way?” the ship said suspiciously, worried about the boundaries of this particular order. “With eyes?”
Niko paused, working through the wording, and decided upon, “By manifesting organs specifically for the sake of a gesture.”
“Mmm.” The ship filed the definition away to examine later for possible loopholes, including the precise definition of “organs,” but refrained from more “gestures.” There were plenty of other possibilities. What, for example, if it created a servitor and then had the servitor perform the gestures? It would attempt that experiment later.
Niko found Jezli in the lounge, reading. Jezli set down her reader and gave Niko her unfailing, maddeningly courteous attention.
“We are bound for Coralind next,” Niko informed her. “That will be a suitable place for you to leave the ship and find some other berth.”
“Admit it, Captain,” Jezli Farren said with an easy grin that might have had an edge of mockery to it. It was a tone familiar to everyone on the days when Jezli was feeling particularly brittle and missing her former companion, Roxana, and seeking to divert herself. “Rumor has it you’d miss me if I were gone.”
“You are a scoundrel and a con artist and the only reason you are still on this ship is because you are the sole person who understands how to operate that thing,” Niko snapped. Jezli had, as ever, managed to get under her skin with only a few words. “But how complicated can it be, telling Petalia to pull the trigger?”
Around them, the ship listened without commentary. It had found that the conversations between Jezli and Niko were highly entertaining, and even more so when they forgot that it was listening.
The “thing” in question was, for once, not the ship itself, You Sexy Thing, but the ancient alien artifact currently resting in one of the aforementioned ship’s holds. Nicknamed the “Devil’s Gun,” it was an implement of assassination.
Unfortunately, not one that could assassinate the only person they needed to kill before he could kill them.
Jezli poked at her pad. “Three days to Coralind,” Jezli said, looking at it. She was about to say something else, but there was a rustle at the doorway. She looked up; Niko turned, uncrossing her arms.
Petalia, the Florian who was both Niko’s ex-lover and current constant antagonist, as well as the only person who could fire the Devil’s Gun, stood there. They were tall and female in form, their skin and hair white and fine, the latter strewn with tiny blossoms. They smelled of ice with an edge of sweetness, and as always, their eyes were fixed only on Niko.
“Coralind?” they demanded, stepping into the room. “Why there?”
“You mentioned yourself that it’s tied into Last’s net of contacts. We may be able to backtrace from there. And I’m going to visit an old friend who may have other thoughts on how to find word of Tubal Last,” Niko said.
She returned Petalia’s stare. The notion flickered through Jezli’s head that they looked like an artistic tableau embodying complexities of emotion, and she framed it from several angles to amuse herself. She had stood as though to leave, but had failed to exit. She thought they had forgotten her presence, which they had.
“Coralind.” Petalia loaded the word with scorn. “Who do you know in that tawdry place?”
Niko refrained from taking offense, leaving her tone mild and emotionless as pudding. “Someone I knew during some of my final years with the Holy Hive Mind.”
