Rahel found herself wondering, much against her will, where exactly he had come from, and what had drawn him to Noah’s Ark. “Well, call up some of my old stuff, then. It’ll save me from having to lecture you.”
“I did that before I came.” Paval angled a polite but meaningful look up at her. “There wasn’t much of that, either.”
Rahel allowed the boy a thin smile. “Is that a coward’s way of asking why I haven’t published my research?”
She was surprised by the chase of color up his pale cheeks. “It was an observation.”
“Well, damn fine observation.” She clapped him smartly on the back and earned a startled jerk of his shoulders in response. “Keep up the good work.” The next time Saiah Innis assigned her an apprentice, she was going to kill someone.
“Jynn.” Distracted briefly by the wall of darkness rising up from the approaching horizon, Rahel took one blind step backward before turning to face the balloon’s pilot. “When we get back to the hotel, can you set us down near our pachyderm so we can off-load our gear?”
She heard the shushing of the gondola’s ropes more than saw the pilot shake his head. “No, ma’am. I can set down on my assigned landing pad on top the hotel, but nowhere else. Them’s the rules.”
And, Rahel had to admit, Feles Sadena was laudably anal about enforcing his resort’s many rules. It was the only thing that had impressed her about him so far.
“The staff will have transferred your things to your suites by now, anyway, ma’am,” Jynn continued. A roar of flame and light suddenly painted his figure in shades of stark mahogany as he gassed the balloon upward a few more meters. Then he vanished again as mysteriously as he’d appeared. “With a full season staff and no guests to look after, it’s all any of us can do to keep busy. You’ll probably be getting top drawer service while you’re here.”
“We’re here because Uriel’s suffering a marine die-off Jynn. We won’t be doing much relaxing.”
“No, ma’am.” He sounded subdued, and sadder than she expected. “I guess not.”
A fragile thread of breeze met them at an angle, and Rahel turned to taste the salty freshness of its passage as Jynn tacked expertly across the wind’s light current. The second balloon, with Nils’s thin silhouette propped against the rail of its gondola like a leaned-over stick, slipped through the strait just ahead of theirs. Rahel watched it drift oceanward as silently as a dandelion puff before a tiny jet of light nudged it ever so slightly about and pointed it back in toward shore.
The walls of the strait draped shadow over Rahel’s swinging gondola when Jynn ducked them just as neatly between the coarsely wooded slopes. Clean, moving air replaced the stagnant bite of the margin sloughs, and the kiss of three dim, distant moons stitched trails of broken silver across the rippled surface of the open ocean. Rahel reminisced wistfully about the cries of diving ocean birds, the crash and sigh of tidal currents. Uriel’s tiny moons and greenhouse atmosphere had its disadvantages, as well as its pleasures, though—the people who came here paid for the temperate climates by giving up natural wildness and power. Which was perhaps just how they wanted it. Rahel found the end result charming, but rather dull.
The beach separating ocean from shore was narrow and mud-draped, as befitted a planet with no tropical storms or wave erosion to speak of. A long expanse of pale carbonate rock peeped out from a weep of gauzy fronds, following the shoreline as smoothly as a line drawn in the sand, while a glossy drizzle of seep water painted the outcrop’s face in trickling crystal. It wasn’t until Rahel glimpsed the unshielded white of their pachyderm on a high, wide ledge that she recognized this rock face as the frontispiece of the Startide Hotel. Then a weird mixture of guilt and anger coiled together inside her, and she scowled against the unwelcome taste..
Just like all of Sadena’s resorts, the Startide seemed to have grown out of the environment by its own volition. There were seven others just like it scattered all around Uriel’s surface —among the hushing grasses of the great northern plains, suspended from the tree trunks in the equatorial woodlands, clinging to the slopes of youthful mountains so tall that the snow on their creased brows created its own mini-climates. Rahel remembered reading all about Feles Sadena’s brilliant plans for this place when he first bought the planet. How he was going to minimize impact. How people would be able to come experience nature at its purest and best. How the planet’s unique environment would itself be the attraction, and therefore more precious than any manmade commodity Sadena could introduce.
Rahel had thought the man a schlockmeister from the very beginning. She hated it that Sadena’s only appreciation for what he had here was based on how much money it could bring him—hated it even more that no altruistic organization had ever succeeded in preserving an environment so thoroughly or so well. When Feles Sadena finally closed up his enterprise a hundred or so years from now, nothing on Uriel would be different for him having been here.
Well, almost nothing. Rahel thought about the stellar jellyfish, and couldn’t silence a brusque, ironic sigh. It seemed both fitting and somehow hopelessly tragic that the first casualty of Sadena’s hubris should be the very species of coelenterate that kept the Startide Hotel full of tourists.
Hot wind roared out their balloon’s out-gassing vent, and their gondola dropped with a barely perceptible lurch. Rahel clenched her hands, panic tight, around the rail. It wasn’t the height, she decided grumpily, it was the goddamned unsteady flight patterns she hated so much about these balloons. Maybe something resembling outdoor lighting on the roof of the hotel would prop up her confidence about landing, at least. She suspected nothing would alleviate the roiling in her stomach whenever a gust rocked the gondola and showed her ocean when she should have been looking at sky. If only because of the modes of transportation, this was going to be one very long safari.
“What the—?”
Jynn’s startled shout was his only warning before a blast of light lashed and curled through the humid darkness around them. Rahel ducked away from the flame, throwing out one arm to corral Paval against the railing when he turned to do the same. Below them, movement seethed across the hotel’s flat stone roof, an amorphous creature of shadows and angry voices. Then the gas driven upward by Jynn’s flame swelled the sinking balloon and stopped its descent as surely as if the craft had hit the end of some invisible tether. Rahel pushed herself upright and leaned to look over the railing.
“They’re all over my landing pad!” Jynn complained, fighting with the balloon’s controls. His straps and harnesses squeaked and jangled.
Rahel blinked hard through the renewed darkness. Shapes refused to define and let themselves be identified, but the braided stream of questions and netlink IDs sketched out clearly enough what was going on below. “Ah, shit…”
“What?” Paval appeared beside her, leaning so far out of the gondola that she had to quell an urge to grab him by the belt and haul him back in. Even from her more judicious position, Rahel saw the earnest frown that knotted his dark brows. “Who are they?”
As if Nils had heard them from a whole other balloon away, the phone in Rahel’s pocket chirped. She dug it out with an irritable sigh.
“Oh, please,” Nils groaned the moment she opened the contact. “Please tell me those aren’t what I think they are.”
Rahel scowled down at the mass of shouting people. The first waspish whiz of remote antigravs joined the babbling voices. “Well, they aren’t bellhops.”