Things had come to a pretty pass indeed.
The two ships raced across the Gulf, arguing. On board, heated discussions were taking place between members of their crews.
It took twenty-one days for the Clear Air Turbulence to make the journey from Vavatch to Schar’s World.
Wubslin had spent the time carrying out what repairs he could to the craft, but what the ship needed was another thorough overhaul. While structurally it was still sound, and life support functioned nearly normally, it had suffered a general degradation of its systems, though no catastrophic failures. The warp units ran a little more raggedly than before, the fusion motors were not up to sustained use in an atmosphere — they would get them down to and up from Schar’s World, but not provide much more in-airflying time — and the vessel’s sensors had been reduced in numbers and efficiency to a level not far above operational minimum.
They had still escaped lightly, Horza thought.
With the CAT under his control, Horza was able to switch off the computer’s identity circuits. He didn’t have to fool the Free Company, either; so, as the days passed, he Changed slowly to resemble his old self a little more. That was for Yalson and the other members of the Free Company. He was really striking two thirds of a compromise between Kraiklyn and the self he had been on the CAT before it had reached Vavatch. There was another third in there which he let grow and show itself on his face for nobody on board, but for a red-haired Changer girl called Kierachell. He hoped she would recognise that part of his appearance when they met again, on Schar’s World.
“Why did you think we’d be angry?” Yalson asked him in the CAT’s hangar one day. They had set up a target screen at one end and put their lasers onto practice. The screen’s built-in projector flashed images for them to shoot at. Horza looked at the woman.
“He was your leader.”
Yalson laughed. “He was a manager; how many of them are liked by their staff? This is a business, Horza, and not even a successful one. Kraiklyn managed to get most of us retired prematurely. Shit! The only person you needed to fool was the ship.”
“There was that,” Horza said, aiming at a human figure darting across the distant screen. The laser spot was invisible, but the screen sensed it and flashed white light where it hit. The human figure, hit in the leg, stumbled but did not falclass="underline" half marks. “I did need to fool the ship. But I didn’t want to risk somebody being loyal to Kraiklyn.”
It was Yalson’s turn, but she was looking at Horza, not the screen.
The ship’s fidelities had been bypassed, and now all that was needed to command it was a numeric code, which only Horza knew, and the small ring he wore, which had been Kraiklyn’s. He had promised that when they got to Schar’s World, if there was no other way off the planet, he would set the CAT’s computer to free itself of all fidelity limitations after a given time, so that if he didn’t come back out of the tunnels of the Command System the Free Company would not be stranded. “You would have told us,” Yalson said, “wouldn’t you, Horza? I mean you would have let us know eventually.”
Horza knew she meant, would he have told her? He put his gun down and looked her in the eyes. “Once I was sure,” he said, “sure about the people, sure about the ship.”
It was the honest answer, but he wasn’t certain it was the best one. He wanted Yalson, wanted not just her warmth in the ship’s red night, but her trust, her care. But she was still distant.
Balveda lived; perhaps she wouldn’t still be alive if Horza hadn’t wanted Yalson’s regard. He knew that, and it was a bitter thought, making him feel cheap and cruel. Even knowing that it was a definite thing would have been better than being uncertain. He couldn’t say for sure whether the cold logic of this game dictated that the Culture woman should die or be left alive, or even if, the former being comfortably obvious, he could have killed her in cold blood. He had thought it through and still he didn’t know. He only hoped that neither woman had guessed that any of this had gone through his mind.
Kierachell was another worry. It was absurd, he knew, to be concerned about his own affairs at such a time, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the Changer woman; the closer they came to Schar’s World, the more he remembered of her, the more real his memories became. He tried not to build it up too much, tried to recall the boredom of the Changers’ lonely outpost on the planet and the restlessness he had felt there even with Kierachell’s company, but he dreamt about her slow smile and recalled her low voice in all its fluid grace with some of the heartache of a youth’s first love. Occasionally he thought Yalson might sense that, too, and something inside him seemed to shrink with shame.
Yalson shrugged, hoisted her gun to her shoulder and fired at a four-legged shadow on the practice screen. It stopped in its tracks and dropped, seeming to dissolve into the line of shady ground at the bottom of the screen.
Horza gave talks.
It made him feel like some visiting lecturer at a college, but that’s what he did. He felt he had to explain to the others why he was doing what he was, why the Changers supported the Idirans, why he believed in what they were fighting for. He called them briefings, and ostensibly they were about Schar’s World and the Command System, its history, geography and so on, but he always (quite intentionally) ended up talking about the war in general, or about totally different aspects of it unrelated to the planet they were approaching.
The briefing cover gave him a good excuse to keep Balveda confined to her cabin while he paced up and down on the deck of the mess talking to the members of the Free Company; he didn’t want his talks turning into a debate.
Perosteck Balveda had been no trouble. Her suit and a few items of harmless-looking jewellery and other bits and pieces had been jettisoned from a vactube. She had been scanned with every item the CAT’s limited sick-bay equipment could provide and had come up clean, and she seemed quite happy to be a well-behaved prisoner, confined to the ship as they all were and, apart from at night, locked in her cabin only occasionally. Horza didn’t let her near the bridge, just in case, but Balveda showed no signs of trying to get to know the ship especially well — the way he had done when he came on board. She didn’t even try to argue any of the mercenaries round to her way of thinking about the war and the Culture.
Horza wondered how secure she felt. Balveda was pleasant and seemed unworried; but he looked at her sometimes and thought he saw, briefly, a glimpse of inner tension, even despair. It relieved him in one way, but in another it gave him that same bad, cruel feeling he experienced when he thought about exactly why the Culture agent was still alive. Sometimes he was simply afraid of getting to Schar’s World, but increasingly as the voyage dragged on he came to relish the prospect of some action and an end to thought.
He called Balveda to his cabin one day, after they had all eaten in the mess. The woman came in and sat down on the same small seat he had sat in when Kraiklyn had summoned him just after he had joined the ship.
Balveda’s face was calm. She sat elegantly in the small seat, her long frame at once relaxed and poised. Her deep dark eyes gazed out at Horza from the thin, smoothly shaped head, and her red hair — now turning black — shone in the lights of the cabin.
“Captain Horza?” she smiled, crossing her long-fingered hands on her lap. She wore a long blue gown, the plainest thing she had been able to find on the ship: something that had once belonged to the woman Gow.