Ann Maxwell - Fire Dancer 2 - Dancer’s luck

VIP免费
2024-12-11 0 0 440.75KB 168 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Maxwell, Ann – Dancer’s luck
DAEMEN—
a forgotten place at the very edge of the galaxy, a dying planet where people lived by
luck alone. This was the number-one stop for Rheba, the; Senyas fire dancer, arid Kirtn,
her Bre’n mentor, as they sought to fulfill their promise to return a whole shipload of ex-
slaves to the widely scattered . worlds they called hdone.
Twice Rheba and Kirtn had achieved the impossible—first surviving tneir own home
system’s fiery doom, then escaping the lair of the evil Loo-chim bringing with them the
odd assortment of beings who were now their shipmates. Having blasted free of the Loo-
chim, Rheba and Kirtn assumed the worst was over. Then they landed on Daemen—
I
The ship came out ofreplacement in a soundless explosion of energy. Rheba checked the
colored status lights, peeled away the pilot mesh, and stood stiffly. She wanted nothing
more than sleep, but that was impossible. All around her in the control room were former
slaves whom she had promised to take home. Behind them a city and a culture lay in
ruins, burned to ash by a fire dancer’s rage and slaves’ revenge.
It would not be smart to stir such hatred again. The sooner the ex-slaves were off
theDevalon ,the sooner she would feel safe.
A questing whistle rose above the babble of languages around her. She whistled in
return, looking over the heads of strangers for the familiar face of her Bre’n. Kirtn’s
whistle came again. His tall, muscular body pushed through the crowd of people. Around
his neck, bright against the very short copper plush that covered his body, there was a
snakelike being known as Fssa. Shy, vain, and astonishing, Fssa was both friend and
translator.
“We can keep everyone alive and nothing more,” said Kirtn, bending over her. He spoke
in Senyas now, an uncompromising language known for its bluntness and precision. It
was his native tongue, as it was Rheba’s. The second half of their language was Bre’n,
known for its subtlety and beauty. “The power core is good for tworeplacements and
maybe four days of maintaining this many people.”
Rheba looked at the slanted gold eyes so close to hers. Absently she rubbed her palm
over the soothing suede texture of Kirtn’s arm. “What does the navtrix show within
tworeplacements ?”
“Onan.” His voice was carefully neutral.
“Onan,” she said bleakly. A place she had every reason not to return to, having left
behind there a gaggle of enraged Yhelle Equality Rangers, a burning casino called the
Black Whole, and a sizable amount of money. She would not mind getting her hands on
the latter, but the former she would gladly avoid. She looked at the people around her,
overflowing the control room and tubular hail, packing the tiny galley and crew quarters,
stacked breast to back in the exercise room until only tiredness kept them from turning on
each other with snarls of outraged privacy. “Onan.” She sighed and began to climb back
into the pilot’s mesh.
“Wait,” said Kirtn.
Rheba’s cinnamon eyes searched his. “More bad news.” It was not a question.
Kirtn whistled a Bre’n curse. “Our navtrix.”
“Yes?”
“It didn’t recognize any of the planet names we tried on it.”
“What? But—” She stopped, then turned her attention to the silver snake draped around
Kirtn’s neck. “Did you try languages besides Universal?”
Fssa flexed, taking time to create the proper internal arrangements to speak Senyas. It
would have been less trouble to whistle Bre’n, but when Rheba’s eyes sparked gold in
their depths, Fssa knew that precision was preferable to poetry. “Where planet names
could be translated into other languages, I did. The navtrix,” he said primly, “was
completely unresponsive. Onan is the only Yhelle Equality planet it acknowledges. Kirtn
told me you programmed in Onan yourself, long after you left Deva.”
Rheba whistled a sour Bre’n comment. Their navtrix had been made by her own people.
It reflected the extent—and limitations—of their knowledge. On her home world of
Deva, the Equality had not even been a myth. In order to take the slaves packed aboard
the ship to their far-flung homes, she would have to get her hands on a Yhelle Equality
navtrix.
Fssa darkened as he mentally translated Rheba’s whistle into its Universal equivalent.
When he spoke again, his voice was coaxing rather than arch. “I’ll keep trying, fire
dancer. Maybe one of the new languages I’ve learned will help.” Then he added,
brightening visibly, “Twenty-three of the slaves want to get off on Onan.”
“How many does that leave, Kirtn?”
His torso moved in a muscular Bre’n shrug. “I gave up trying to count at sixty.”
“On a ship built for twenty and modified for two.” She stretched, brushing against Kirtn.
“Take us into orbit around Onan. I’ll see if Ilfn needs help with the lottery.” She scooped
Fssa off Kirtn’s shoulders. With a delighted wriggle, the Fssireeme vanished into her
hair. Next to a live volcano or ground zero in a lightning storm, Rheba’s energetic hair
was the snake’s favorite place to be.
As Rheba began to work through the people toward the tube way, two compact brown
forms appeared. M/dere and M/dur quickly cleared a path for Rheba. No one, not even
the fierce survivors of the Loo slave revolt, wanted to antagonize J/taal mercenaries.
“Where are their clepts?” Rheba asked Fssa softly, referring to the J/taals’ war dogs.
The snake’s whistle was pure and startlingly sweet against her ear. “Guarding Ilfn and
her storm dancer.”
“Are they all right?” she whistled, concern clear in each note.
“Yes, but when I told M/dere how much the female Bre’n and the male dancer meant to
you, she insisted on putting a guard over them. She’s not at all happy with the slaves we
took on. They’re a murderous lot.”
“They had to be to survive Loo,” pointed out Rheba.
“And we’ll have to be to survive them,” the Fssireeme added sourly.
She said nothing. She had given her promise to get those slaves home, and get them
home she would. She did not need any carping from a snake to tell her that she might
have cooked more than she could eat.
With a human sigh, Fssa subsided. He liked the energy that crackled through Rheba’s
hair when she was angry, but he most emphatically did not like to be the focus of that
anger.
Ilfn and Lheket were packed into what would normally have served as a single bunk.
The Bre’n woman, like all of her race, was tall and strong. Where Kirtn’s body was
covered with a copper plush, Ilfn’s had a dense chestnut fur that was slightly longer than
his. Like him, she had a mask of fine, metallic gold fur surrounding her eyes. Like him,
she was totally devoted to the Senyas dancer who was her protégé.
As Rheba pushed against the bunk, Lheket’s blind emerald eyes turned unerringly
toward her. She touched his cheek, allowing some of the energy that was her heritage to
flow into him. For an instant her hands brightened as akhenet lines of power flared.
Lheket smiled dreamily, a child’s smile of contentment.
Although he could not see, she smiled in return. He was the only Senyas besides her that
she knew to have survived their planet’s fiery end. Someday he would be her mate. But
until then he was a blind, untrained dancer, one more burden on her shoulders.
As though she read Rheba’s tired thoughts, Ilfn’s hand protectively smoothed the boy’s
fine hair.
“Did the computer respond for you?” asked Rheba, looking up from the boy to his Bre’n
mentor.
“Once I got the accent right,” said Ilfn wryly. She was from the far side of Deva; her
inflections were not precisely those that the computer had been programmed to respond
to. “I gave each of the thirty-eight planets a number, stored them in the computer under a
code word, and gave orders for the computer to be continually choosing among those
numbers. When you say the word, the computer’s choice will go on the ceiling display.
Whoever belongs to that number goes home first. All right?”
“As good as any and better than most,” Then, realizing how grudging that sounded,
Rheba added, “Thank you.” She leaned against the bunk. “We have to go to Onan first.
Power core and navtrix.”
Ilfn touched Rheba in quiet sympathy. Although the Bre’n had never been to the Yhelle
Equality’s most licentious planet, she had heard about it from Kirtn. Rheba could expect
nothing but trouble there.
Rheba pushed away from the bunk. As she did, she noticed a man watching her. He was
her height, about the Equality norm for a man. He smiled at her, a smile of startling
beauty. He twisted deftly through the press of people beyond the bunk until he was
standing close enough to speak to her. He would have come even closer, but a grim-faced
J/taal prevented him.
“Can I do something for you?” he asked in Universal. “You’ve done so much for us.”
“Do you have a Yhelle Equality navtrix in your pocket?” asked Rheba dryly.
The man fished in his gray slave robe, then turned his hands palm up in apology.
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t even have the Equality coordinates to my own home world.”
“You and every other ex-slave aboard,” she muttered. She looked again at the young
man with the engaging smile. He appeared closer to Lheket’s twelve years than to her
twenty-one, but it was hard to tell with some races, “Do you have a name?”
“Daemen.” His smile widened, inviting her to share his good nature. “Actually it’sThe
Daemen, but on Loo no one seemed interested in a slave’s former rank. Daemen is what
I’m used to now.”
“Were you on Loo long?”
“Yes.” His smile changed, cooler, like his voice and his rain-colored eyes. “And you?”
“No. It just seemed like it.”
Daemen laughed, a sound too adult for his appearance. “My family—there were ten of
us when we were kidnapped—kept talking about home, how beautiful it was under its
single sun.” His left hand moved in a dismissing motion. “Maybe it is. I barely remember
its looks, much less its location.”
Rheba felt a rush of sympathy. She, too, had lost her planet, had felt what it was like to
stare at a night sky and know that not one of the billion massed stars was home. “We’ll
find it, Daemen. I promise you.”
His smile returned, full of possibilities and silent laughter, “That’s what he said.”
“He?”
“The man who looks like her,” said Daemen, indicating Ilfn. “Huge and fierce.”
Rheba’s smile was as much for her Bre’n as it was for the stranger in front of her. “Yes,
he’s all of that. He was one of the finest poets on Deva, as well ... when there was a Deva
and when he still believed in poetry.”
She scratched the top of her arms absently. The new lines of power that had appeared
when she fought her way off Loo itched unmercifully. She would have to get some more
salve from Ilfn. But first, the lottery. Thirty-eight names, thirty-eight planets. Only one
could be first. She wondered aloud who the lucky one would be.
“Me.”
Daemen’s voice was confident, yet not arrogant. She looked at him closely, trying to see
beyond the charming smile and gray eyes. “You sound very sure.”
“I was born lucky. That’s the only way I survived Loo.”
She smiled perfunctorily. He was neither obviously strong nor obviously gifted. Perhaps
he believed that luck was responsible for his survival of Loo’s various hells. “What’s
your planet’s name?”
“Daemen.”
She blinked—“Daemen? Just Like you?”
“Yes. The oldest member of my family is always called The Daemen.” His’ face
changed, looking older than it had, almost bitter. “I’m the only one left. Whatever name I
was born with, I’m The Daemen now.”
The ship chimed like a giant crystal, warning its passengers thatreplacement was
imminent. The masses of people shifted subtly, seeking secure positions. In the absence
of nearby gravity wells, it was unlikely to be a rough translation.
Chimes vibrated up and down the scale of hearing until no known race could have
missed the warning. There was a heartbeat of silence, then the ship quivered
microscopically andreplaced itself. It was a brief maneuver, accomplished with Kirtn’s
usual skill. TheDevalon ran on silently, gathering speed in another direction, bringing
itself into alignment for a finalreplacement in a far orbit around Onan.
Rheba whistled soft instructions to Fssa. The snake moved beneath her hair, changing
shape to accommodate the needs of translation. Almost all of the former slaves
understood the language of Loo. Many understood Universal. Those who understood
neither usually did not survive. The Loos had not distinguished between ignorance and
disobedience.
“While we maneuver for the nextreplacement ,we’ll have a lottery to decide which
planet we’ll stop at after we pick up supplies on Onan. The ship’s computer is randomly
scrambling the planets by number. At my command, the computer will display the
number that is under its scanner at that instant.”
Rheba spoke in Universal. Fssa’s simultaneous translation into Loo was accomplished
with a minimum of distraction. The snake could control its endless voices with such skill
that words seemed to come out of the air above the crowd.
A buzz of speculation in many languages greeted the announcement as it was carried
throughout the ship by theDevalon ’sintercom. Fssa changed from a snake to a bizarre
listening device of quills, spines, dishes and tiny spheres in every shade of metal from
copper to blue steel. It was one of his more astonishing performances, but then he had
rarely had the chance to hear so many new languages at once.
Rheba felt the snake sliding out of her hair, too intent on his listening modes to keep a
secure position. She caught him before he hit the floor, then held him up to facilitate his
reception of the various sounds. Out of the energy field of her hair, his weight
quadrupled.
Whether it was the appearance of the glittering, changing shape over her head or the
simple fact that the lottery needed no further discussion, people stopped talking and
stared at the snake.
No longer consumed by the Fssireeme imperative to learn new languages, Fssa realized
that he was the focus of attention. He darkened with embarrassment, cooling palpably in
Rheba’s hands. Being on display frightened the shy snake. He was convinced he was
repulsive because he did not have legs.
“You’re beautiful,” fluted Rheba, using all the complex shadings of Bre’n to reassure
Fssa.
Glints of metallic silver ran in ripples over his arm-length black shape. When a few gold
traceries joined the silver, Rheba smiled and lifted Fssa back to her head. Immediately, he
became so light that she did not notice his presence in her hair. She tilted her head and
whistled an intricate Bre’n trill.
The computer responded with a single short tone that indicated that she had established
access. Her lips shaped another Bre’n sound, a single command: Choose.
In the air over her head a number glowed, then the corresponding planet’s name
appeared.
Daemen.
Rheba felt a chill move over her neck. She whirled to face the charming stranger. He was
gone, swallowed up in the seething disappointment of the former slaves.
II
Kirtn stared glumly at the hologram of the port city ofNontondondo. The view shifted as
theDevalon’s sensors responded to his curt Senyas instructions.
“Any Rangers?” asked Rheba.
“Not yet. Maybe they believed the name we gave them.”
Her lips twisted skeptically, but she said only, “What’s our OVA?”
He frowned. The Onan Value Account was established for each ship before it was
allowed to touch down on the planet. It was one of Onan’s less endearing customs.
“Subject to physical verification of the gems, our OVA is eighty-thousand credits.”
Rheba looked at the multicolored, brilliantly faceted jewels winking on the ship’s sensor
plate. She frowned. “On Onan, that’s not much.”
His whistle was eloquent of pained agreement. “A power core, four days’ dock fees and
some odd change.”
“That’s all?” she demanded. Her whistle flattened into a curse. “How much does a
navtrix cost?”
He did not answer. She looked at him and felt her breath catch. His eyes were narrow,
hot gold, and his lips were so tight that his faintly serrated teeth gleamed. It was the face
of a Bre’n sliding into rage, and from rage intorez ,the Bre’n berserker state that was
almost always fatal to the Bre’n and whoever else was within reach.
She stroked his arm slowly, trying to call him back from anger. For a moment he
resisted, then he sighed and stroked her hair until it crackled beneath his big hand.
“I can play Chaos again,” she offered hesitantly.
His hand closed tightly on her restless hair, “No. If you’re recognized they’ll lynch you.”
Rheba did not disagree. She had cheated at Chaos the last time she was in Nontondondo;
in Chaos, cheating was not only expected, it was required. But for a stranger to cheat so
successfully that she bankrupted half the players in the casino ... She shuddered,,
remembering the riot that had ensued. She had been forced to burn down the casino in
order to escape. Even if the Black Whole had been rebuilt, she had no desire to play
Chaos in it again.
Together, Rheba and Kirtn watched the hologram of the seething city. In Nontondondo,
everything had its price. It was the only place in the Yhelle Equality where everything
was licensed and nothing was illegal. With money you could do anything.
But they had no money.
Absently, Kirtn fiddled the controls, zooming in on astreet where people of all shapes,
colors and races mingled. The scene enlarged until it filled the curved ceiling of the
control room and merged crazily with the heads of the taller slaves. Suddenly, one of the
depicted citizens screamed and began clawing at her neck. Just behind her, someone
darted into the crowd, a stolen bauble glittering in his hands the instant that he vanished.
Kirtn and Rheba looked at each other for a long, silent moment. Because he was
touching her, she could sense pictures and words from his mind, as he could from hers. It
was a rare thing among Senyasi dancers and their Bre’ns, a thing that neither of them had
found time to adjust to. The odd form of communication had come to them just short of
death, on Loo.
“How many licenses to steal can we afford?” asked Rheba, even as her Bre’n asked the
computer the same thing.
“Three-day licenses?” he muttered.
“That should be long enough. I hope.”
The computer queried its Onan counterpart.
“Twelve,” said Kirtn, deciphering the computer’s response.
Rheba frowned. “I’ll need protection. How much is a three-day license to kill?”
Kirtn whistled a query at the computer. Rheba winced at the amount that was displayed
in answer. It was Onan’s most expensive license. Buying it would leave nothing for lesser
three-day licenses.
“How much is a one-day license to steal?” she asked.
A credit figure blinked into existence above Kirtn’s head. She looked, added quickly,
and decided, “One license to kill, three licenses to steal and two licenses to entertain on
the streets. One day. How much?”
She held her breath. After they bought the power core—absolutely essential—and the
most minimal ship supplies, they would have only 15,000 credits in their OVA. Dock
fees were 1,500 credits per Onan day, and subject to weekly changes. That left only
13,500 for licenses.
The figure 12,750 shimmered in the air above Kirtn’s head.
“Close,” whistled the Bre’n, but the tones of the whistle said, “Too close,” and many less
polite sentiments.
“We don’t have a choice, do we?”
He hesitated, then resumed stroking her hair, smiling as silky gold strands coiled around
his wrist. “Will one day be enough?”
“It will have to be. Fssa, are you awake?”
The Fssireeme hissed softly. “Yessss.”
“Do your guardians’ memories recognize any of our shipmates as coming from races of
thieves? Nothing fancy—strictly swipe and run. Although it would be nice if they were
so light-fingered that the victims didn’t notice anything until they looked in a mirror.”
“The J/taals,” said Fssa simply. “They’re very fast. Or the Yhelle illusionists. In an
emergency, they can go invisible.”
“And the rest of them?” she asked, waving her hand at the multiracial press of people
throughout the ship.
Fssa sighed very humanly. “My guardians’ memories are very old, fire dancer. Most of
these races weren’t fully formed then. They are as strange to me as they are to you.”
She scratched her arms, ignoring Kirtn’s frown at this sign that she had used her fire-
dancer skills too recklessly on Loo. She had not had any choice then. She did not have a
better choice now. She turned to the brown-furred, compact woman who was as
inconspicuous and ubiquitous as her shadow.
As Rheba spoke, Fssa instantly translated her words into the language of J/taal. The
process was so unobtrusive that both parties often forgot it was the Fssireeme who made
communication possible.
“M/dere, we need money. Do you have any objections to turning thief? Licensed, of
course.”
M/dere smiled, “Licensed, unlicensed, no difference. You’re our J/taaleri. What you
command, we do. Although,” she added matter-of-factly, “we’re better killers than
thieves.”
There was little Rheba could say to that. She had seen the J/taals in action on Loo. They
were better at killing than most people were at breathing.
“May I suggest?” said M/dere.
“Yes,” said Rheba quickly. She was uncomfortable in her role as J/taaleri, focus of J/taal
devotion. She did everything possible to shift the relationship to a more even footing. She
failed, of course. J/taals were notoriously single-minded.
“The illusionists. They fight badly. Perhaps they steal well?”
摘要：

Maxwell,Ann–Dancer’sluckDAEMEN—aforgottenplaceattheveryedgeofthegalaxy,adyingplanetwherepeoplelivedbyluckalone.Thiswasthenumber-onestopforRheba,the;Senyasfiredancer,aridKirtn,herBre’nmentor,astheysoughttofulfilltheirpromisetoreturnawholeshiploadofex-slavestothewidelyscattered.worldstheycalledhdone.T...

展开>> 收起<<
Ann Maxwell - Fire Dancer 2 - Dancer’s luck.pdf

共168页,预览34页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：168 页 大小：440.75KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-11

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 168
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注