[Short Stories] - [Gamer] by The Crystal (Elaine Cunningham)

Author:The Crystal (Elaine Cunningham) [Crystal, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-03-10T13:36:58+00:00

Chapter

8

Rillao’s strength returned quickly. She sat up in her bed, eating stew as the unnamed one had: picking out the chunks of meat with her fingers, then drinking the sauce when the meat was gone. Beside the wide port, Lelila and Geyyahab sat with her and planned a strategy. Outside the ship, the hijacked ships orbited each other in a complicated dance, against a brilliant backdrop of stars.

Rillao watched the ship of the Firrerreo through the porthole.

“Lelila,” she said, “when you found me, did you find anything else, anything… strange?”

“Besides a web feeding on your body? Besides a shipload of abandoned people? Something strange like what?”

“Like a small machine. You could… hold it in your hand. Perhaps it was on the table, or fallen on the floor?”

“No,” Lelila said. “What was it?”

“Nothing,” Rillao said. “Nothing of any importance.”

Beyond the group of passenger freighters, the ship of the Firrerreo began to accelerate. It moved slowly out of the dance of ships, speeding up so gradually that its motion was nearly imperceptible. The acceleration would accumulate, second by second and year by year, until the ship plunged toward its destination at a measurable fraction of the speed of light. Rillao watched the ship. Starlight shone along its dark flank, picking it out with streaks of silver.

“You and your son should be on that ship,” Lelila said.

“Yes…” Rillao replied.

“Will you join them, when you recover him?”

“I cannot think that far ahead. I can only think of finding him.”

Lelila rose.

“Where are you going?” Rillao asked.

“To the other ships. To wake people, to ask them if they know where we should go. And to free them.”

“That would be a waste of time.”

“Freeing them?” Lelila exclaimed.

“Yes! They know nothing of their abductors. If you wake them now, you’ll have to help them be on their way. It will take days.”

“Do you expect me to leave them here, derelict?” Thinking that she had sounded too sympathetic, Lelila added, “If I free them, they’re likely to be… grateful.”

“They haven’t the resources to be grateful,” Rillao said. “They’re refugees. Exiles. They have nothing you could want—unless you want their seed corn.” She snorted. “And you can always come back and get that.”

“How can you be sure no one here knows where our quarry went?” Lelila asked.

“Sit down, and I will tell you.”

Unwillingly, Lelila sat on the edge of the chair. Her nerves tingled as if they extended beyond her skin. They made her restless and sensitive. If she tried to use the sensitivity, she slipped off into the despair that had gripped her previous identity. As soon as she had reached this wilderness of drifting, dying ships, her sensitivity had not only failed but punished her.

Lelila the bounty hunter craved action, any action, that would keep her from remembering.

Rillao closed her eyes, took a deep long breath, and began to speak.

“An evil man—I will tell you his name—seized the ships drifting here in this desert. He thought he had the right, because he was responsible for their existence. He was responsible for building them, for arresting and convicting the people imprisoned within them.

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