Which made her fondness for Louis Nenda even harder to explain. Nenda was Atvar H’sial’s business partner. He had told Darya, in so many words, that he was a man with an awful and criminal past. He was a native of Karelia , in the far-off reaches of the Zardalu Communion, and others had hinted to Darya of monstrous acts which meant he could never return there. He even possessed his own Hymenopt slave, Kallik, and unlike Atvar H’sial he could not offer the excuse that he needed an interpreter.
Kallik sat at Louis Nenda’s feet, on the other side of Atvar H’sial. The Hymenopt was short and barrel-shaped, her meter-long body covered with short black fur. With her small round head, set with a ring of bright black eye pairs, she looked mild and defenseless.
Darya knew better. Invisible was the yellow sting, retracted into the end of the rounded abdomen. That hollow needle could deliver squirts of neurotoxin with no known antidote. At will, Kallik could vary the composition from mild anesthetic to instant kill. Also invisible was the Hymenopt nervous system. It provided Kallik with a reaction speed ten times as fast as a human’s. The eight thin legs would carry her a hundred meters in two seconds, or let her leap fifteen meters into the air under a standard gravity.
The miracle was that Kallik regarded Louis Nenda as her absolute master and allowed herself to be led around with a collar and leash. Nenda bullied and blustered. Sometimes he even carried a whip. However, Darya had direct proof that the master/slave relationship was more complex than it seemed. She had been on board Nenda’s ship, the Have-It-All. Nenda’s private quarters were opulent, even by the standards of a rich world like Sentinel Gate. But Kallik’s were just as large, and just as well-furnished. The little Hymenopt even had her own additional private area, equipped with powerful computers and scientific instruments.
Kallik squeezed past Atvar H’sial, whose great body was blocking Louis Nenda, and came scuttling over to Darya. The Hymenopt and J’merlia exchanged a brief burst of clicks and whistles, then Kallik said, “Greetings. With your arrival we will perhaps begin to receive some explanation for our presence.”
It was an embarrassment to Darya that J’merlia and Kallik, whom she had thought mindless pets when she first met them, could pick up languages with such ease. In the time that it had taken Darya to comprehend a few basic Hymenopt clicks, Kallik had achieved fluency in half a dozen human languages.
Darya shook her head. “You won’t get explanations from me. I have no idea why I was summoned.”
“Master Nenda says that it is a meeting which involves the Builders, and Builder artifacts.”
“So I was told. But the Builders vanished from the spiral arm more than three million years ago, and now all their artifacts are gone, too.”
“You sure of that?” Louis Nenda must have done an end run on Atvar H’sial, moving round the back of the row of seats. He had appeared now on Darya’s right-hand side.
“Sure as anyone can be.” Darya quietly pushed his hand away from her shoulder. “The Artifact Research Institute is the clearinghouse for all activities or information concerning the Builders or Builder artifacts. I examine the data bases every day, personally. Absolutely nothing new has come in for the past few months—not for years, in fact.”
“But they put the heat on you to come here?”
“I suppose they did. I felt that I was given no choice.”
“Same for me, same for At. Makes no sense at all. I mean, she’s an expert on the Builders, and so is Kallik. So are you. But me, if you bet on what I know about the Builders, you’d lose your ass and hat.”
“You were involved in the disappearance of the artifacts, starting with Summertide on Dobelle and ending at Labyrinth, out by Jerome’s World.”
“Sure I was, but that’s all history. I don’t remember more than half of what happened, even though I was right in the middle of it. I’m tellin’ you, something big has to be brewing.”
“Based on a gut feeling, or do you have evidence?”
“Mostly gut. But when your guts have rumbled with danger as often as mine have, you get to trust ’em. And yeah, I do have one bit of evidence. When the word came to us, me an’ At an’ Kallik an’ J’merlia an’ . . . another person, we were on Xerarchos, in what you might call the Lesser Armpit of Zardalu Communion territory. It’s a long way from there to here, so I called Miranda and said we’d need financial help to pay for the cost of the Bose transitions.”
As usual, Louis Nenda’s clothes were crumpled and his eyes were bloodshot and his battered face needed a shave. And as usual, there was an intensity in the way he looked at Darya that both pleased and disturbed her.
She glanced away from him and said, “It was reasonable to ask for help if you were short of funds. I assume that they gave some to you?”
“Yeah. But that’s not the point. As it happens, me an’ Atvar have had a good year or two an’ we’re rolling in money. We sort of try to disguise that, of course, but you can’t hide everything. A simple credit check would have shown we didn’t need no help. And when I made my request, I deliberately sky-highed what I said we’d need. I do mean sky-highed, too, because I wanted to see if I could learn anything from their reply.”
Darya found she was looking back at him in spite of herself. “And?”
“Not a murmur. Instant approval of everything I asked for.”
“What do you think it all means?”
“Haven’t a clue. Except that somebody thinks this meeting is real super-important. But since we’re supposed to find out tomorrow from Julian Graves, I’m not goin’ to worry about it ’til then.” Nenda leaned closer to Darya, ignoring the angry hiss that came from the giant Cecropian on her other side. “Nothin’ else on the agenda for today. So how about you an’ me havin’ dinner an’ catchin’ up on things?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Sleepless in MirandaPort
When you have something to do, do it. When you have nothing to do, sleep.
Hans Rebka had learned that rule on Teufel before he was six years old. It had served him well through two decades as a troubleshooter in the Phemus Circle , and even better during the nerve-racking two years while he tried to overthrow the Phemus Circle’s corrupt central government.
That effort had not been a success—he had come within twelve hours of his own execution—but once he was on the ship leaving Candela he put all such thoughts out of his mind. The trip to Miranda would require careful piloting through a number of Bose transitions points, but that was not his responsibility.
Hans ate until his skinny belly bulged, went to his cabin, and fell asleep within thirty seconds. The weeks in prison had pushed his body to its limits of endurance. For the next five days he intended to do nothing but gorge, snooze, and wonder occasionally why the inter-clade council might think it worthwhile to drag him out of gaol and all the way to Miranda.
A dozen close calls had given him a lot of respect for his own abilities. He had survived the fearsome Remouleur dawn wind on Teufel, saved a whole colony on Pelican’s Wake, and flown an expedition on Quake to safety at the height of Summertide. But every one of those had been a marginal world, a place on the threshold for human existence. Miranda was rich, safe, and self-satisfied. It had been settled for millennia.
Hans yawned, turned over, and snuggled deeper under his blanket. So why Miranda? Well, when somebody told him why they wanted him there, he would know. Until then . . .