“So you’re, what? System Liaison Chief?” Sal asked over his shoulder as they were trundled under a door into a sizeable airlock.
“Yes, well, it’s pretty much all ceremonial,” she told him. The door behind them closed, the lights in the lock dimmed. “Receptions, dinners, tours, addresses, you know the sort of thing.”
“Sounds like you’re just loving every minute.”
“I suppose somebody has to do it. Serves me right for being Ulubine.” Pumps thrummed, a rush of air and a deep hum at first, then after a while just the hum, sounding through the fabric of the cutter. “No real fighting to do, anyway. Just clean-up stuff. I’m not missing much.”
“Any news on Fassin?” Sal asked. “Last I heard they thought he might be alive again. If you know what I mean.”
The outer door opened silently to the stars and a great silvery-fawn slice of ’glantine.
“Just give me a minute or two here, will you?” Taince asked. “Been a little while since I did this…”
“Hey, take as long as you need.”
The cutter edged its way out of the lock, stowed its gear, rolled very slowly and drifted away on little whisper bursts of gas, heading towards the atmosphere.
“Yes. Fassin,” Taince said. “Well, they’re still looking for him.”
“I heard he’d been lost in Nasqueron and then reappeared.”
“There have been rumours. There were always rumours. If you believed them, he’s been all over Nasqueron for the last half-year, never left, or been in the Oort cloud for the last few months and just returned, or even wilder stuff. Plus he’s been declared definitely dead at least three times. Whatever the truth is, he’s still not here to tell it himself.” Taince rotated the cutter, lining it up for entry.
“You think he is dead?” Sal asked.
“Let’s just say it’s odd that he hasn’t made himself known by now, if he is still around.”
They met the atmosphere a little later, pressed against the seat restraints, a pink glow building then fading around the canopy, the small ship whistling in across a sequence of thin clouds, deserts and shallow seas, hills, scarps, lakes and low mountains.
“Taking the scenic route, Taince?”
She gave a small laugh. “Suppose I’m just a sentimentalist at heart, Sal.”
“Good to see the old place again,” Sal said. She watched him lean to one side, looking down. “Is that Pirri down there?” — She looked, checked the nav. “Yes, that’s Pirrintipiti.”
“Looks like it always did. Thought it might have grown a bit more.”
“While since you’ve been home, Sal?”
“Oh, too long, too long. Kept meaning to, but, you know. Must be ten or twelve years. Maybe more. Feels more.”
They were high over the edges of the thin polar-plateau ice cap, crossing into darkness, falling all the time. They could see stars again.
She saw him looking up and around. “You forget how beautiful it is, eh?” Sal asked.
“Sometimes,” Taince said. “Easy enough thing to do.”
The glow in the sky faded around them. She watched the canopy up the brightness, exaggerating the incoming light until they could see the starlight on the North Waste Land, the great long streaks of coloured sands and outcrop rocks, silvery ghosts, coming closer all the time.
“Ah, right,” Sal said quietly.
She tapped a few display icons, dimming the screens.
“Thought we’d take a pass,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“Old times’ sake.” He sounded thoughtful, even resigned. “Well, why not?”
Taince checked the nav again, lined the craft up and cut its speed a little. A light was blinking urgently on one of the displays. She turned that one off too.
“I certainly haven’t been back here since that night,” Sal said. She thought he sounded sad now. Perhaps regretful. Perhaps not.
The ruined ship showed up ahead, a little off to the right. Taince started the cutter on a long starboard curve, levelling out as she did so.
Sal looked side-down at the desert, rushing past seventy-metres below as they banked. “Wow,” he said. “Quicker than that flier I borrowed from Dad.”
“One of your own ships, Sal,” she told him.
“This little thing?” He laughed. “Didn’t realise we made anything this small.”
“It’s old.”
“Ah. One of Dad’s. More money in the big stuff.”
They zapped past the great dark hulk. Its exposed ribs clawed at the sky.
“Woo-hoo!” Sal shouted as the black wall of hull slid past twenty metres away.
Taince zoomed, looped and rolled, levelling out again, approaching the wrecked alien ship once more for an even nearer approach.
“Who-hoh-hoh!” Sal said, seeing how low and close Taince was taking the cutter this time. Taince rolled the craft so that they were upside down. “Sheeit! Wow! Taince! Yee-ha!”
Right to the end she hadn’t known if she’d actually do it or not. She didn’t really know the truth of what had happened, after all. She only had her suspicions. She could, despite everything, just be plain wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time somebody had taken the law into their own hands and been proved to be hopelessly wrong, once all the facts were known. Fuck, that was what justice was supposed to be all about, that was why you had laws and everything that went with them, that was one of the things that made a society a society.
But still. She did know. She was quite sure. It was his time. And if she was wrong, well, Sal had had his share. It wasn’t like killing a child, or a young woman with her life before her. It was still killing, still wrong, but there were gradations in all things, even circles in hell. And, frankly — right or wrong — at least she’d never know.
It was her time. She knew that.
She’d really thought there would be tears, but they stayed away. How strange not to know oneself, after so long, at such an extremity, and so close to the end.
What else? Well, she’d thought of telling him, of confronting him, of bringing it all back up again, of listening to him rage at or plead with or scream at her. That had been something she’d rehearsed a lot, that had been something she’d thought through time after time after time as she’d played and replayed this scene in her head over the years and decades and centuries, taking both her part and his, trying to imagine what he’d say, how he’d try to explain it, how he’d imply she was mad or mistaken.
Ultimately Taince had just got bored with it. She’d heard it all before. There was nothing more to say.
She was taking a man’s life on circumstantial evidence, on a hunch. She ought to give him the chance to appeal. She ought at least to allow him to know it was about to happen.
But then, why?
The cold sheen of desert and the vast impenetrability of the dark, ruined ship rushed up to meet them.
“Shit, Tain—!”
Sal might have tried to use the eject — it was one system she couldn’t disable from her controls — but then, that was why she’d flown the last bit upside down.
In the end all it took was a single quick flick of the wrists.
The cutter slammed into the side of the ship, just ten metres off the desert floor, at about half the speed of sound.
EPILOGUE
There is, along the higher latitudes of the Northern Tropical Uplands of the planet-moon ’glantine, in the system of Ulubis, a bird which, thanks to its call, people call a Hey-fella-hey.
The bird is a migrant, a passer; that is, a bird that does not dwell in the given region but only ever passes through. The Hey-fella-hey passes through these latitudes in the early spring, heading north.
It was a cool day, mid-morning. Nasqueron, half full, cast a ruddy-brown light over the soft shadows of the day. Once, one might have seen sky mirrors away to one side or the other, bringing sunlight to us even when Nasqueron filled most of the sky above. However, many of these devices were destroyed in the war, and so our little planet-moon is a literally gloomier place now than it once was, returned, until new mirrors are emplaced, to its primitive state.