“All right.”
The Mouse cocked his head. “Huh?”
“It’s only five hours to the Pleiades. If he’s at the ship when we leave and stays in your projection chamber, it’s fine with me.”
The Mouse’s head went back the other way; he decided to scratch it. “Oh. Gee. Well.” Then he laughed. “Thanks, Captain!” He turned and ran up the steps. “Hey, Leo!” He took the last ones double. “Katin, Leo! Captain says it’s all right.” And called back, “Thanks again!”
Lorq walked a few steps down.
After a while he sat against the rough wall.
He counted waves.
When the number got to four figures, he stopped.
The polar sun circled the horizon; less gilt, more blue.
When he saw the net, his hands slid his thighs, stopped on the bone knots of his knees.
Links clinked on the bottom steps. Then the rider stood up, waist-high in the rolling white. Fog-floats carried the nets up. Quartz caught blue sparks.
Lorq had been leaning against the wall. He raised his head.
The dark-haired rider walked up the steps, webs of metal waving above and behind. Nets struck the walls and rattled. A half dozen steps below him, she pulled off her mist-mask. “Lorq?”
His hands unclasped. “How did you find me, Ruby? I knew you would. Tell me how?”
She breathed hard, unused to the weight she wielded.
Laces tightened, loosened, tightened between her breasts. “When Prince found that you’d left Triton, he sent tapes to six dozen places that you might have gone. Cyana was only one. Then he left it to me to get the report on which one was received. I was on Chobe’s World; so when you played that tape at the Alkane, I came running.” Nets folded on the steps. “Once I found out you were on Vorpis, in Phoenix … well, it took a lot of work. Believe me, I wouldn’t do it again.” She rested her hand on the rock. Nets rustled.
“I’m taking chances this game, Ruby. I tried to play it through once with a computer plotting the moves.” He shook his head. “Now I’m playing by hand, eye, and ear. So far I’ve come out no worse. And it’s moving a lot faster. I’ve always liked speed. That’s perhaps the one thing that makes me the same person I was when we first met.”
“Prince said something very much like that to me, once.” She looked up. “Your face.” Pain flickered in hers. She was close enough to him to touch the scar. Her hand moved, then fell back. “Why didn’t you ever have it …?” She didn’t finish,
“It’s useful. It allows each polished surface in all these brave, new worlds to serve me.”
“What sort of service is that?”
“It reminds me what I’m here for.”
“Lorq”—and exasperation grew in her voice—“what are you doing? What do you, or your family, think they can accomplish?”
“I hope that neither you nor Prince knows yet. I haven’t tried to hide it. But I’m getting my message to you by a rather archaic method. How long do you think it will take a rumor to bridge the space between you and me?” He sat back. “At least a thousand people know what Prince is trying to do. I played them his message this morning. No secrecy any more, Ruby. There are many places to hide; there is one where I can stand in the light.”
“We know you’re trying to do something that will destroy the Reds. That’s the only thing that you would have put so much time and effort into.”
“I wish I could say you were wrong.” He meshed his fingers. “But you still don’t know what it is.”
“We know it has something to do with a star.”
He nodded.
“Lorq, I want to shout at you, scream—who do you think you are?”
“Who am I to defy Prince, and the beautiful Ruby Red? You are beautiful, Ruby, and I stand before your beauty very much alone, suddenly cursed with a purpose. You and I, Ruby, the worlds we’ve been through haven’t really fit us for meanings. If I survive, then a world, a hundred worlds, a way of life survives. If Prince survives …” He shrugged. “Still, perhaps it is a game. They keep telling us we live in a meaningless society, that there is no solidity to our lives. Worlds are tottering about us now, and still I only want to play. The one thing I have been prepared to do is play, play hard, hard as I can; and with style.”
“You mystify me, Lorq. Prince is so predictable—“ She raised her eyebrows. “That surprises you? Prince and I have grown up together. But you present me with an unknown. At that party, years ago, when you wanted me, was that part of the game too?”
“No—yes—I know I hadn’t learned the rules.”
“Now?”
“I know the way through is to make your own; Ruby, I want what Prince has—no. I want to win what Prince has. Once I have it, I might turn around and throw it away. But I want to gain it. We battle, and the course of how many lives and how many worlds swings? Yes, I do know all that. You said it then: we are special people, if only by power. But if I tried to keep that knowledge forward in my mind, I’d be paralyzed. Here I am, at this moment, in this situation, with all this to do. What I’ve learned, Ruby, is how I can play. Whatever I do—I, the person I am and have been made—I have to do it that way to win. Remember that. You’ve done me another favor now. I owe it to you to warn you. It’s why I waited.”
“What is it you want to do that you have to give such an inflated apology for?”
“I don’t know, yet,” Lorq laughed. “It does sound pretty stuffy, doesn’t it. But it’s true.”
She breathed in deeply. Her high forehead wrinkled as the wind pushed her hair forward across her shoulder. Her eyes were in shadow. “I suppose I owe you the same warning.” He nodded. “Consider it given.” She stood up from the wall.
“I do.”
“Good.” Then she drew back her arm; flung it forward!
And three hundred square feet of chain webbing swung over her head and rattled down on him.
The links caught on his raised hands and bruised them. He staggered under their weight.
“Ruby—“
She flung her other arm; another layer fell.
She leaned back, and the nets pulled, striking his ankles so that he slipped.
“No! Let me …”
Through shifting links he saw she was masked again: glittering glass, her eyes; her mouth and nostrils, grilled. All expression was in her slim shoulders, the small muscles suddenly defined. She bent; her stomach creased. The adapter circuits magnified the strength in her arms some five hundred to one. Lorq was wrenched forward down the steps. He fell, caught at the wall. Rock and metal hurt his arms and knees.
What the links gave in strength, they sacrificed in precision of movement. A swell swept the web, but he was able to duck beneath and gain two steps. But Ruby kicked back; he was yanked down four more. He took two on his back, then one on his hip. She was reeling him down. Fog lapped her calves; she backed further into the suffocating mists, stooped till her black mask was at the fog’s surface.
He threw himself away from her, and fell five more steps. Lying on his side, he caught at the links and heaved. Ruby staggered, but he felt another stone edge scrape his shoulder.
Lorq let go of the nets, of his held breath. Again he tried to duck what fell at him.
But he heard a gasp from Ruby.
He beat links from his face and opened his eyes. Something outside …
It darted, dark and flapping, between the walls.
Ruby flung up an arm to ward it off. And a sheet of netting exploded up from Lorq. It rose, avoiding the links.
Fifty pounds of metal fell back into the fog. Ruby staggered, disappeared.
Lorq went down more steps. The mist lapped his thighs. The astringent arsenic fog clogged his head. He coughed and clutched rock.