"They're going to fire!"
The shout seemed to come from everywhere.
Dane Thorson tried to run, but his legs churned without propelling him forward. Terrified, he looked behind, saw sinister black shapes, like bombs, floating through the air. There were thousands of them. In the garish light around him ghosts drifted. Some of the faces were familiar. Childhood faces, half-remembered. From the Pool? No...
"Eeeeeee -- yaaagh!"
The scream ripped through Dane's head, pulling him violently into consciousness.
He sat up in his bunk, blinking against the soft, steady bulkhead night-light as shreds and tatters of the dream drifted across his vision, and vanished. He was not running from impending attack, he was safely in his bunk aboard the North Star, where he was the cargo master.
He took a deep breath, and made more connections: the dream, the memories, were not his.
"Ali," he said. They were Ali Kamil's dreams, and memories -- again.
He pulled on his clothes and hit the door control.
Out in the corridor he saw Ali leaning against the wall, motionless. Ali was also barefoot, his customarily suave, controlled face almost unrecognizable. Dane glanced at the engineer's tense forehead, where beads of sweat gleamed in his tangled dark hair, and wondered how much worse the dream had been for him.
There was no time for words; a moment later two small black-and-white blurs rocketed through the passageway, followed by Dane's new apprentice, Tooe, a Rigelian hybrid they'd found on the vast habitat called the Garden of Harmonious Exchange. Barely child-size, her bluish skin shining with exertion, she moved with a peculiar flat-footed grace in the pseudo-gravity of hyper, now set to the .85 standard of their destination.
Dane looked down at Alpha and Omega, the ship's cats, and then into Tooe's huge yellow eyes, waiting for her to catch her breath. And, he admitted ruefully, avoiding Ali's accusatory gaze.
Tooe and the cats obviously had been playing some kind of game. The little hybrid seemed to deal well with the adaptive gee shifts; better than the rest of the crew with the microgravity adaptation shift mandated by Craig Tau after their experiences on Exchange. Tooe was well adapted to the variable gravity of that vast construct, which was a home to humans, the insectlike Kanddoyd, and the heavy-world Shver.
The rest of the crew wasn't -- Terran-descent humans preferred planets, like Hesprid IV, now less than a day away. But they were far beyond the Terran sphere of influence now, and much of their trading would be on the cylindrical habitats of Kanddoyd space. Hence both ships observed a complex cycle of gravity -- actually the pseudo-gravity of hyper -- to accustom the rest of the crew to a range of weight-mass ratios.
"Hear screech, me," Tooe said.
"Sorry." Ali smiled wryly. "I'll have to ask Rip what he's been slipping into our rations --"
"I resent that! No one seems to think my cookery is all that great, but no one has been poisoned yet." Rip Shannon and Jasper Weeks appeared side by side, a tall, handsome, dark figure and a short, pale one, both dressed for duty in their brown Free Trader uniforms. Despite Rip's joking tone his expression was concerned, as was Jasper's.
Ali said, "You couldn't have heard me yelling in my sleep all the way from the control deck."
Rip shook his head.
"Heard you here." Jasper tapped his forehead.
"Tooe hear you, in hydrolab." Tooe's crest flattened out as she pointed round the corner. She touched her ear. "Bad dream, Ali Kamil?"
"Bad dream, Tooe," Ali said with a faint smile.
"Second one," Tooe replied, her pupils slitting suddenly. "You yell two shifts ago. Tooe hears. Dr. Tau says, 'Tooe, do work.' You think dream is from bad food?"
"No." The voice came from the other end of the corridor: Dr. Craig Tau, senior member of the newly formed crew.
"I'm sorry," Ali said, his handsome face tight with strain. Dane could almost feel how much his crewmate hated the situation. Ali was not one to share emotions, much less data about his personal life. "I seem to have acquired the knack of making childhood nightmares into some kind of dream vid," Ali went on. Dane could feel his crewmate's effort to keep his tone light. "I wonder if I can collect an entertainment fee for general broadcast?"
Tau smiled slightly, then said, "I invite you four to meet me in the mess in... ten minutes? It's time, I believe, for a talk I probably should have had with you long ago. Tooe, why don't you hold down the control deck for now? We can brief you afterward."
The little Rigelian hybrid nodded, grinning.
"What's funny?" Dane asked.
Tooe gave a little hop, her blue, faintly scaled skin glossy with good health. "Hold down deck? Control deck holds me down!" Her crest flicked up in the shape that indicated a joke. "Space-leak holds me down." She hissed laughter through her teeth -- Dane's explanation of how Ali could tune the engines to let hyperspace "leak through" to create varying amounts of pseudo-gravity had not been very successful.
Her crest snapped to a flatter angle as she added, "Snapout soon! Then real free fall before go into gravity well."
In, Dane thought. She still said "In," not "Down." He was afraid she still didn't have the concept of planetary gravity; intellectually she understood it well, but not physically, despite her fantastic adaptability. Dane didn't say anything. Time would tell, and he wasn't sure how much to say, and how much to leave to experience.
Tooe watched him for a moment, and then her crest flicked up, and she bounced away down the corridor and disappeared. The two cats followed.
Tau didn't wait for an answer. He returned to his cabin and Dane heard the door hiss closed.
The others exchanged looks and shrugs, then Dane said, "Whatever it's about, it can wait on a shower and something hot to drink."
Ali nodded and disappeared into his cabin.
Jasper watched him go, then said, "I'd better close down my work." He moved off in the direction of the engine compartments.
Free fall soon. Dane retreated to his cabin, wondering if it was Tooe's influence that had them all using the handholds, walls, and decking to propel themselves around in free fall, rather than walking with their boots magnetized as had been their habit for years aboard the Solar Queen.
He pushed his old uniform into the cleaning slot and glanced at the time. Still half a rest period left. He suspected he would not get back to sleep before Rip and Jasper went off-shift and he and Ali were back on duty, but he wasn't worried. Except for Ali's weird dreams, so far the maiden voyage of the North Star had been uneventful enough. A lot of hard work, but they'd anticipated that. Rip had one more day in charge of the galley, then the rotation would put Dane there. At least there he could nap if he needed to.
He took a quick hot shower, got into his clean uniform, and left his cabin to go to the galley-mess.
The other three appeared at about the same time. Ali's dark hair was wet and slicked back, the color high in his handsome face. He dropped into one of the bolted chairs, smiling derisively. "If this is going to be a let's-talk-about-our-past bull session, Craig, I'd rather finish racking up my overdue sack time."
The medic, who had served aboard the Solar Queen longer than Dane had been a Free Trader, looked unperturbed. A plain, neat man who hardly seemed to have aged in the time Dane had known him, Craig Tau spoke in a low, even voice, and his manner was unemotional and straightforward. All the Solar Queen's former apprentices respected him; he was honest, dedicated, and thorough.
Dane stayed silent. Despite Ali's banter, Dane knew his shipmate was tense and uneasy.
"I had hoped," Tau said, lacing his fingers together, "that this conversation could wait for a time. We all have too much to think about already: a new ship, new positions of responsibility for each of the four of you, a contract that may or may not break us out of this cycle of hard luck that has been riding our jets since we left Canuche. Add to that both ships being undercrewed and all the extra work that entails, I thought you had enough to think about."
"All right," Ali said. "I get the image here: it's sufficiently bad. How about giving it to us straight."
Tau looked up enquiringly. Rip nodded, his intelligent dark eyes concerned, and Dane felt himself nodding as well. Only Jasper Weeks -- unfailingly polite and noncommital, as were all Venusian colonists, Dane had learned -- waited patiently for Tau to get to his subject any way he chose.
"Think back," Tau said. "To our adventures on the planet Sargol."
"Hard days to forget," Ali commented wryly. "Dane here smelling like a pleasure house feather-dancer every time he had to go trading with the Salariki --"
"-- That Inter-Solar gang trying their damnedest to make us look like a plague ship," Rip added.
"-- After the four of us did our best to turn ourselves inside out," Dane finished, wincing. "I don't think I've ever been that sick in my life. Well, I know I haven't."
Jasper looked up quickly, and Tau smiled at him. "No, Jasper, it's not a coincidence. You'll remember that the four of you who drank the Salariki warrior's cup were vilely sick, it's true -- but when that pest the I-S gang sneaked aboard the Queen laid the rest of us out, it was you four whose immune systems were able to fight off the toxins."
"And so...?" Ali prompted, his smile tight. "This relates to my nightmares?"
Tau said, "Just so -- but have patience. The next item to recall is our mail run previous to the Canuche contract."
"Xecho --"
"-- and Trewsworld," Dane said. He did not like to remember that one; in his own nightmares he still saw that dead man lying in his bunk, with Dane's own face.
"Remember what was slipped aboard the Queen that time?"
Jasper drew a deep breath. "Esperite."
Tau nodded.
Ali snorted. "Craig, my old friend, I value and esteem you, but if you're going to hop out with the news that we're going to turn into a bunch of psi-powered spacehounds, well, you've been studying that voodoo craziness too long."
Dane grinned, waiting for the medic to deny it. Rip was also smiling, but Jasper just sat, his pale, thin face unreadable as always, his gaze wide and unblinking.
Tau said after a long pause, "I'm very much afraid that's exactly what I am telling you."
Copyright © 1997 by Andre Norton, Ltd.
)
The Solar Queen and its new sister ship, North Star, have embarked on a mission to a planet rich in lucrative ore. Armed with their experience on the galactic rim, the independent traders descend to the surface to discover a bizarre set of dangers. A strange electromagnetic force is killing miners stranded from the former crew of the North Star. Weather is terrible, with enormous disturbances throughout the atmosphere of the entire planet. Dane Thorson and the rest of the embattled crew use all of their traders' ingenuity to untangle the mystery of Hesprid IV's deadly lifeforms. Finally, they take a desperate gamble to communicate with the planet's creatures--their last chance to survive the planet's many perils.
