Steven Harper - Trickster

Harenn's chair crashed to the floor. Ben Rymar jumped, spilling most of his water glass down his front.

"God!" Harenn said from behind her veil. "We have left slipspace."

"How did-" Ben began, but Harenn had already left the galley. Ben scrambled to his feet to hurry after her, shedding bits of ice and swearing under his breath. His tunic clung cold and wet to his stomach.

"Hold on," he protested, catching up. "How do you know we left slip?"

"The Poltergeist is a brand new ship and it still has minor bugs in the slipdrive," Harenn said without slackening her pace. "A good engineer can feel the difference when it shuts down. I am an excellent engineer."

"There's still no big hurry. We have to negotiate landing privileges before we can even enter orbit. Five minutes won't make a difference."

"Perhaps not to you." Harenn tapped her earpiece without breaking stride. "Father Kendi, I see we have left slipspace. Have we arrived at Klimkinnar or has something gone wrong?"

Ben quickly activated his own earpiece and checked the communication display on his ocular implant. A flick of his eye highlighted the proper channel and tuned him into the conversation.

"Half an hour to get there, then," Harenn said to the empty air.

They reached the lift and hustled inside before the doors snapped shut. Although Ben couldn't see anything of Harenn's face except brown eyes above a blue veil, her entire body radiated impatience. A faint smell of bath powder hung about her. With a grimace, Ben pulled the front of his damp tunic away from his body and flapped it, trying to speed the evaporation as the lift rose.

"Apologies," Harenn murmured.

"It's just water," Ben said. "Don't worry, Harenn. We'll get there and we'll find your son."

Harenn made no reply, but rushed onto the bridge the moment the doors opened, leaving Ben behind. He followed more slowly.

The bridge was an oval, with the captain's chair in the center and a large viewscreen at one of the narrow ends. Individual workstations ringed the bulkheads. Two of them-the pilot board and the sensor board-were occupied. Everything was painted in soft blues and greens, and there were no angles anywhere. Even the doors had rounded corners. The place smelled of fresh paint. As Harenn had pointed out, the Poltergeist was new-large and well-appointed.

Seated in the captain's chair, Father Kendi Weaver glanced up as Ben and Harenn entered. Kendi was Ben's age-not quite thirty-but where Ben was short and stocky, Kendi was tall and thin, with dark skin, a broad nose, and tightly-curled black hair. Despite his relative youth, stress lines had cropped up around his eyes and on his forehead. A gold medallion glittered from a chain around his neck, and a green jade ring gleamed on his right hand. The former indicated that he was a Child of Irfan, the latter that he had reached the rank of Father. Harenn strode to his chair, though her eyes never left the viewscreen and its display of the planet. Like most human-inhabited worlds, Klimkinnar was blue and green with interesting swirls of clouds drifting through the atmosphere. A trio of moonlets danced their way through orbit while stars glittered on a velvety backdrop. The whole scene was very pretty.

It was also very big.

"So this is where my son is hidden," Harenn breathed from behind her veil. "Where my son is a slave."

"If Sejal's information was correct," Kendi said.

"I hope we can narrow things down a little," Gretchen Beyer put in from the sensor boards. She was a tall, raw-boned woman with blue eyes, blond hair, and bland features that would blend easily into a crowd. The gold medallion around her neck matched Kendi's, though her amber ring gave her rank as Sister.

"What do you mean?" Kendi asked.

"Database says Klimkinnar is thirteen thousand, fifty-five kilometers in diameter-a little bigger than Earth," Gretchen said. "Surface area is seventy-odd percent water, but we're still talking about three hundred and eighty million square kilometers." She sniffed theatrically. "Might take a little time to search. More than eight weeks, that's for sure, and that's all we've got."

"It isn't that bad," said Lucia dePaolo from the pilot console. "We can find ways to narrow it down. He's got to be in an inhabited area, for one thing."

"Population one point two billion," Gretchen reported.

"But not all of them will be slaves," Kendi countered.

"Slave population three point three million."

"Shut up, Gretchen," Lucia said.

"We will find him," Harenn said with quiet finality. The dark eyes above her veil were filled with fierce determination. "And we will set him free."

Ben, meanwhile, slid into his customary seat at the communication board beside Lucia's pilot console. Communications had remained dead while the Poltergeist was slipping-only the Silent could communicate with ships in slipspace-but now the board leaped with activity. Ben automatically sifted through channels and frequencies to find out which ones carried what kind of information.

"I've already contacted the transportation authority," Lucia told him. She was halfway between thirty and forty and had olive skin, shoulder-length black hair, and a lush body. Her fingers, however, were long and quick, marked by ragged nails and a fair number of white scars. She pronounced her name with a "ch" sound in the middle.

"Permission to orbit?" Ben asked.

"Granted, no problem," Lucia said. "We'll be there in twenty-four minutes."

Ben glanced up. Klimkinnar continued to float on the viewscreen, attended by its three tiny moons. Ben wondered if the moonlets were colonized and if the group would have to search them for Bedj-ka as well. He hoped not. The Poltergeist, like all ships commanded by the Children, was only on loan from the monastery. Kendi had managed to get her for just nine weeks. It had taken four days of that time to reach Klimkinnar.

"All right, troops," Kendi said, "we have to find one nine-year-old slave boy whose name has probably been changed to who-knows-what, and we need to do it in as little time as possible."

"Sure," Gretchen said. "Won't take but a minute. After all, we have Bedj-ka's age and gender, the name of the planet where he lives, and the fact that his father kidnapped him away from his mother when he was a baby-" Harenn stiffened visibly beside Kendi's chair "-and sold him into slavery. With all that information, how can we help but find him?"

"Gretchen," Kendi warned. "Thin ice. Skating. You."

"Yeah, all right," Gretchen said, relenting. "Look, we don't know if he's ever changed owners, or if Klimkinnar's the only place where he's lived, or anything else about him. Slave sales records are usually privileged information, so tracking him that way is going to be problematic at best."

"Bedj-ka is Silent," Harenn added firmly. "That will have an impact on where and when he was sold."

Gretchen's blue eyes glittered and Ben tensed for an explosion. "Yeah, well I'm supposed to be Silent, too," she said. "What's that prove? I haven't touched the Dream in six months."

"No, wait," Lucia said. "It does have an impact. After the Despair, a lot of Silent-"

"Most Silent," Gretchen interrupted.

"Most Silent," Lucia amended, "lost their ability to enter the Dream. If Bedj-ka was being raised and trained as a Silent slave but then suddenly lost his Silence, his value would have dropped. At minimum he wouldn't be able to do his primary job, right?"

"What are you getting at?" Kendi asked, leaning forward.

"I think there's a good chance Bedj-ka was sold after the Despair," Lucia finished. "He would still be a perfectly good slave-sorry, Harenn-he just wouldn't be Silent anymore. We should probably start with recent sales records, check for nine-year-old males. It's a good I mean it might be a good a place to start. Father."